Doesn’t matter what side of politics you’re on, we should all be able to cope having the piss taken. Unfortunately we don’t seem to do it much anymore on TV. What’s happened to all our great comedians? And all our great shows? They’ve gone or given up I reckon.
John Clarke please come home
I want to believe in our media. I believe the craft of journalism to be an extraordinarily important thing.
It is a critical part of our democracy. And it distresses me that I am so critical and that it has so deteriorated.
I believe that most journalists believe in their craft. And many are good. The institutions they work for have morphed and twisted so much to adapt to a changing world without being able to catch up, that the quest for market share has become so much more important than reflecting back and challenging our society, our culture and the issues that beset it.
So I am heartened tonight to discover this piece, a speech written by Mark Scott, the managing director of Australia’s ABC TV and radio. He is reflecting on the Australian election and the role played by media. By social media. How it could change. For the better.
It gives me hope.
Though we have to focus on our media.
Here’s an excerpt. I urge you to read the piece
The ABC hosted Jay Rosen for a day while he was recently in Australia. He is always good value on the role of social media and the nature of politicaljournalism – in some ways quite a contrarian – and full of encouragement about things we could do better.
He had two suggestions for the ABC, which we are exploring and will likely pursue.
The first is to provide more background, detail and context for members of our audience who are coming fresh to complex stories: like an ETS, or the NBN, or the operations of a hung parliament. The ABC has a role as a patient explainer of these complexities, to help people catch up with the conversation, understand what is being said and to make a contribution if they wish. It plays nicely to our Charter role to provide an educational service to the community. It makes policy more accessible and can bring important issues into the mainstream.
And Rosen said we should plan more thoroughly and consult more widely around what national issues are at play in an election campaign. Long before the campaign starts, talk with the community, engage with experts, undertake polling, think about national challenges: the immediate and the far-reaching.
Charter? What’s that? Planning? Backgrounding, education? Explaining complex issues? making policy accessible? Conversation? Golly. Doesn’t really feel like our media.
Hat tip @abcmarkscott (twitter)
Last week’s events in Canberra changing the leadership of the Australian Labor Party were huge from a media perspective. Janet Albrechtsen writes in The Australian how Sky TV News covered the story like no other broadcaster, with agility and flexibility. Unlike the lumbering ABC, the public broadcaster.
Read this excerpt and reflect:
After Wednesday, is the ABC asking itself whether it has the energy and team spirit that kicks in so readily at its poor cable cousin at Sky? Does it understand the urgency of 24-hour news, where mistakes will be made and quickly corrected? Or will the monolithic ABC, even with a 24-hour news channel, fall victim to its culture of bureaucratic paralysis and infighting between fiefdoms?
Last weekend on SBS, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was asked what he did on Wednesday night. He recalled “getting all these phone calls from journalists asking ‘What’s happening? What are you doing?’.” He replied: “Well, I’m sitting in my office all alone watching Sky News like you are.” What a disgrace that the federal minister who funds the ABC could not get the story from our national broadcaster.
It might surprise you to know that I agree with her. Though I’d add that much of the breaking news came via Twitter, which is leading the way for how breaking news events are starting to be delivered in real time.
I, like many of my colleagues, watched Australian Sky TV via the Sky news service in Parliament.
We don’t have an equivalent Sky TV News service in NZ. We don’t have an equivalent news service, really. I’d like to see a modern, adaptive, flexible news service. I’d also like it to be a public news service, or at least partly. But we’ve got some real thinking to do about how to make that happen.
But read the piece and tell me what you think.
As the knife is sharpened for second round cuts to TVNZ, including $5m off the news budget, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott has given a speech how his organisation maintains a news operation of 1000 journalists, why that is important and why it continues to be funded.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/20/2877979.htm?site=thedrum
Here’s a snapshot…In an Australian context, the demise of most of the long-time media barons and family ownership structures around media organisations has inevitably led commercial broadcasters to first reduce the priority given to, and then reduce investment in, serious news and current affairs.
The evidence is strongest in radio and in regional areas, but also in the major television networks.
If the product doesn’t deliver profits, commercial investors must first slash costs, then investment, then simply walk away. They carry no overarching commitment to journalism as a public good, as something inherently necessary in a society with responsible government and accountable public and private institutions. Their brief is to maximise the return to shareholders. That is their responsibility and our systems of corporate governance and accountability would not have it any other way.
But now, after years of commercial market cuts to investment in news and current affairs, we’re in a good position to appreciate the wisdom of a continuing public investment in the ABC’s news service.
Meanwhile, the TVNZ ‘Charter Gutting” Bill was due to complete its first reading today but the tobacco excise hike has delayed that.
Here’s something we could truly aspire to. Just announced:
The ABC will launch Australia’s first free-to-air 24-hour television news channel in 2010.
The ABC’s Managing Director, Mark Scott, said the ABC’s commitment to quality news and current affairs would enter a new era with the creation of the new digital channel.
The channel will provide live continuous news coverage of major breaking stories from Australia and around the world. Broadcasting around the clock will enable the ABC to increase its in-depth coverage of local, national and international affairs through background features and analysis, combined with the ABC’s unrivalled long-form current affairs reporting.
We do have our own version, TVNZ 7, but it needs a boost and to be taken really seriously rather than be an add on.
TVNZ 7 is a commercial-free New Zealand 24-hour news and information channel on Freeview digital television platform and on SKY Television Digital from 1 July 2009.
Just imagine if we could consistently produce news around New Zealand drawn from New Zealand and overseas across a digital platform that encompassed radio, television and online mediums that was driven by news values and not ratings.
That’s the New Zealand I want to live in.
My colleague Brendon Burns is doing some work in this area and will have mroe to say on this subject.
Hat tip: Mark Scott, ABC Managing Director on Twitter (abcmarkscott)
