Absurdist Performance Art: The television reviewer, Diana Wichtel, attempting to make sense of the "surely ironically titled" Newsworthy, found only absurdity in the spectacle of the show's co-host, David Farrier, slowly stripping in front of Conservative Party leader, Colin Craig, in a sauna. It's not that New Zealand can't produce top-quality news and current affairs, it's more a matter of a growing number of viewers preferring that it didn't.
It is difficult to get a man
to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
– Upton
Sinclair (1878–1968) Muckraking American
journalist and author.
TELEVISION CRITIC, Diana Wichtel, advises her readers to
look upon the latest free-to-air current affairs offerings as “a sort of
absurdist performance art”. It’s an arresting notion: the idea that television journalists,
in attempting to make sense of contemporary New Zealand, can produce only nonsense.
Either, the current affairs programmes on free-to-air television are accurate
journalistic depictions of an increasingly absurd society, or, depicting New
Zealand society accurately has become too troublesome for mainstream TV journalism.
This is a grim pair of options. They raise the question of
whether or not the demise of serious current affairs journalism is peculiar to
New Zealand television, or, whether it ours is merely the local reflection of a
worldwide decline in the genre?
Sadly, the answer is that the decline is a peculiarly New
Zealand phenomenon.
Just last week, an hour-long episode of the BBC documentary series,
Panorama, exposed the most shocking
misdeeds of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch, MI5 and the UK
Defence Force. Laid bare was the protection afforded to murderers and
terrorists by agents of the British state. It was television journalism at its
best: fearless, thorough and absolutely gripping. The powerful were held to
account; the voices of the powerless rang out loud and clear; and the interests
of democratic accountability were well and truly served.
Genuine television current-affairs journalism is, quite
clearly, still possible in other parts of the world – so why not here? Has our
society truly reached a level of absurdity such that it makes more sense to
turn out a product in which the “surely ironically titled” Newsworthy show’s co-host, David Farrier, “slowly stripped in front
of [Conservative Party leader] Colin Craig in a sauna.” The answer, I’m afraid,
is: “Yes, that is the level of absurdity that we have reached.”
Thirty years of neoliberal extremism has produced a society
in which, for nearly half the population, life has become a bitter struggle for
survival. What’s more, the reality of that struggle is becoming increasingly
difficult to ignore. Tragedies, like the little girl who died of an illness
that was complicated and intensified by the shocking quality of her family’s
state-provided accommodation, cry out for action – but no serious governmental
response is forthcoming.
It is the function of the news media in a properly
functioning democracy to rouse public opinion against such political and
bureaucratic delinquency. An aggrieved public, it is assumed, being all that is
required to secure a redress of wrongs. This is what the BBC’s Panorama programme sets out to do, and
it is what the now discontinued Campbell
Live show more often than not achieved. (What John Campbell and his team
would have made of the little girl’s tragic death is easily imagined!)
And yet, even when it was still being broadcast, Campbell Live always came across as
representing the exception, rather than the rule, when it came to free-to-air
current affairs in prime time. Indeed, I strongly suspect that every time the
show’s producers and journalists broadcast another item critical of the status quo, they were all acutely aware
of the massive viewer resistance through which it had to pass. They knew that
out there – even among the show’s habitual viewers – there was a vast number of
people who simply did not want to know.
Who are these people? They are the New Zealanders for whom
neoliberalism is working. The citizens who own their own home, who are holding
down a well-paying job, whose children attend a high-decile school, and who
would rather not have their noses rubbed in the grim realities experienced by
those who have none of these things.
Programmes like Newsworthy
and Seven Sharp are what results when
the network bosses decide that it is both more profitable and less troublesome
to produce programmes for the men and women whose salaries depend on not
understanding too much about the sort of society that makes them rich and
others poor.
In a land of plenty – like New Zealand – such a situation is
not only very wrong, it is also utterly absurd. But, when exposing the former is
considered too troublesome, then “a sort of absurdist performance art” is all
that remains.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Saturday, 12 June 2015.
