Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Case Studied | Apr 24, 2008 11:04

I'm very pleased with this week's Media7, in which the panel discussion focuses on the news media's handling of the Mangatepopo canyoning tragedy, which seems likely to become a case study because the of Elim Christian School's extraordinary openness in the wake of the drownings.

Herald on Sunday editor Shayne Currie and or own Graham Reid made useful observations and I was particularly grateful for the energy of the Sainzer.

For reasons I'm too weary to go into, there was quite a lot that isn't in Simon Pound's report on The Listener's legal run-in with Hot Topic, but it's still an interesting piece.

The show is already up on TVNZ ondemand, as Windows Media clips on the main TVNZ site, and in the MP4 podcast.

If you're looking to embed any of it, the clips are also up on our YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, students of the form will doubtless have been enjoying Ian Wishart's press releases about his awesome new book, Absolute Power: The Helen Clark Years. Although he seemed to leave the word "please" out of the title of the one headed Go ahead...sue me.

The comments under that broadside include a classic exchange between the tireless Danyl Mclauchlan and Wishart over the author's justification for his obsession with the Prime Minister's sexuality on the basis that she had "repeatedly" raised it in her own biographies. It starts here. (Warning: thread contains dad4justice.)

Meanwhile, The Standard published a literary review of Absolute Power based on the excerpt published by the noted philosopher Cameron Slater:

In the much better exposition of madness that is Nabokov's Pale Fire the insanity is introduced gradually through ever expanding annotations to a fictional long poem made by its crazy protagonist until finally the reader is overwhelmed by the madness and it's done beautifully. In The Sound and the Fury the main narrator is a man/child named Benjy who is, through some form of intellectual disability, unable to distinguish between past and present. The narratives of his passages are entirely associative and yet they can be mapped out and with the contributions of other narrators can be made sense of. Sadly although Wishart's narrator is clearly mad we are not brought into it gradually and so cannot appreciate a Nabokovian "knight-shift of the mind" and his logic, which also seems to be associative, offers no decodable sense or meaning as Faulkner's does.

Poneke also covered Wishart's "tawdry" new book, noting that Wishart's endless predictions that the book would be suppressed under the Electoral Finance Act have come to nought, and drawing this potted review from Danyl in the comments that followed:

I speed-read through Ian's book in Borders yesterday - my first impression is that it reveals a lot more about Wishart than it does about Clark. The Acton quote, his conviction that his book is a 'spiritual successor' to Unbridled Power, the (certainly fabricated) opening story about Clark drowning kittens and his lengthy, confused and elaborate explanations of why he is so obsessed with the sexuality of Clark and her husband . . . All of this sheds little light on Clark but throws the author into fairly stark relief.

Public Address readers who fancy a turn at reviewing the book should feel free to do so. In fact, I'll come up with some manner of prize for a particularly good effort.

Meanwhile, via Grant McDougall, someone on Trade Me is being a bit too ambitious in his pricing of a used copy of Sneaky Feelings' Send You. Yes, it's a classic, but …

Simon Grigg gives Gray Bartlett a bit of a serve. It's about time someone did.

And, finally: have a good Anzac Day, however you mean to observe it, and a fine long weekend. My darling and I are heading to Wellington to see friends and attend Vodafone Homegrown (big thanks to Camilla for the tickets!), which I will blog -- I even have the famous deadpossum in on photographic duties. Should be way cool.

And if you're not doing that, you might want to check out Public Address Radio, 5pm Saturday on Radio Live: we have an interview with Jeef and Lisa from Mukuna, a chat with comedian Joslie Long, Craig venting over the Kiwibank ad campaign -- and the first of Damian's reports for us from Pakistan. I'll have them up on the podcast (which I'm really trying to get better at stoking) early next week too.

(51 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Fibre Coming Soon! Ish ... | Apr 23, 2008 10:33

National's new $1.5 billion broadband spending proposal -- it's a bit soon to be calling it a "plan" -- is nothing if not ambitious: 75% of homes with fibre connectivity in by 2014 is not a goal that has been envisaged as realistic before.

And frankly, I don't think 2014 is a realistic time-frame. Assuming this new cable is to be undergrounded, this is a massive works project. Just scoping it could take a year or two. I'm not sure you could do that before you've established a new regulatory structure (see how long that took for Labour's reforms) and, more importantly, found third parties willing to invest at least some of the marching private funding, for a long-term return. And then you build it.

Even the New Zealand Institute's relatively detailed FibreCo concept envisages that the goal of 75% residential coverage will take 10 years, if investments start now, at a cost of between four and five billion dollars.

But this does represent a startling change of direction for National, one for which I suspect David Farrar deserves some credit, for tireless advocacy at least. He described it yesterday as "a public/private partnership with the public capital allowing the private sector to invest more."

That might raise a few concerns: conventional PPP structures don't always work out well for the public.

There's not a lot of firm detail in John Key's speech, even after he's done with the obligatory 1000 words of what The Standard has characterised as the "New Zealand sucks" message. The initial step is a doubled of the Broadband Challenge Fund to $48 million, and there's a very welcome commitment to "open access" (whether that means dark fibre or open access on the operator's terms isn't clear). There's no indication as to whether National is talking about a monolithic FibreCo-style operator, or multiple providers whose interconnection is subject to regulation.

What benefits would this massive investment bring over new DSL technologies via the existing residential copper network? For a start, it would work as advertised: 24Mbit/s DSL is more a theory than a reality for most users (although Telecom's programme to bring the fibre closer via cabinetisation will help) and it's extremely asymmetric -- much fast down than back up. The problem of long cable runs basically disappears when you install fibre. You'd be doing it eventually anyway: when the existing copper expires, there's no point in replacing it with more copper.

What would we do with this huge new bandwidth? Having entered the screen production business, I can think of what I'd do. There's a hell of a lot of sneakernet still going on now. Being able to edit video and send it to and from a production location instantly would work for me. There's the inevitable, but real, invocation of telecommuting. The health and education sectors would readily find applications. I don't think anyone's begun to explore the potential of distributed computing. Basically, if you build it they will come.

What wasn't said yesterday is that filling the last mile with fibre won't mean much unless National also takes up Labour's commitment to contribute to the cost of new, and competitive, international fibre links. Kordia might want to start doing its sums now, whoever wins the general election.

PS: I'm sure One News didn't mean to be mean, but its video of yesterday's announcement, showing Maurice Williamson looking like he had in fact swallowed a dead rat, and Key struggling through his speech (send the man to Toastmasters, for goodness sake) wasn't terribly complimentary.

(81 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Campbell comes back | Apr 22, 2008 11:20

Our friends at Scoop have announced their Election 08 section, which will be edited (and largely written) by Gordon Campbell. I think this is a great development, and one likely to enhance understanding of the campaign for all sides of the political battle.

Indeed, that's Gordon's intent:

The aim is to provide a well grounded and provocative take on politics, in line with Scoop's reputation for independence, quality and lateral thinking. My own feeling is that you can't engage with readers, or earn their trust, unless the research is right there on the page. Equally, those facts are mute, unless some analysis and sense of purpose – as in, who benefits from this policy? – are also there as well.

His first major piece is a serious and intriguing interview with Tariana Turia.

We have a commercial relationship with Scoop (they sell our agency advertising) and I expect we'll forge links over campaign coverage too. Just give me a week or two to work out what we can do.

Meanwhile, Labour Party president Mike Williams has managed to turn a nothing story into a cringing embarrassment by simply not being straight about what he said last week. It appears that he'd told Helen Clark the truth about his "damned good idea" comment -- so why try and construct an alternative version when he talked to Agenda?

There is no sign of an intention to follow up the suggestion from the floor of the Labour congress strategy meeting about using public information pamphlets as campaign material, and it doesn't seem that anyone left the strategy meeting believing that it was actually strategy. The fact that Ruth Dyson's husband voiced the idea is mildly embarrassing, but no more than that.

I assumed that Bill English's staff would have cracked open a good bottle of wine after coming up with "culture of deceit" to characterise the affair this week -- like "slippery" it only works because there's a perceptual truth to it -- but it turns out it's more a revival than a new pop hit.

English used it in the wording of a no-confidence motion in response to the 2002 Budget:

The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Bill English be agreed to:

that all the words after "That" be omitted and the following words substituted: this House has no confidence in the Labour minority Government because it has abandoned the task of lifting New Zealand's long-term growth prospects, because it is smothering our economic vitality in regulation and unworkable policy on energy and transport infrastructure, because it is overtaxing families and businesses to pay for welfare dependency, political correctness and educational failure, and because it has developed a culture of deceit around public accountability.

And again the next year:

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Leader of the Opposition): I move, That all the words after "That" be omitted and the following inserted: "this House has no confidence in the Labour minority Government because it has abandoned the task of lifting New Zealand's long-term growth prospects, because it is smothering our economic vitality in regulation and unworkable policy on energy and transport infrastructure, because it is overtaxing families and businesses to pay for welfare dependency, political correctness, and educational failure, and because it has developed a culture of deceit around public accountability."

So can we add "who recorded the meeting and how did One News get it?" to "who leaked the Hollow men emails?"?

(54 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Not all victims are equal | Apr 21, 2008 10:48

I'm not surprised that audience members walked out during Annette King's speech to the Sensible Sentencing Trust's conference. Not that I think there was anything wrong with the speech itself -- but telling a hall full of people gathered around their belief that crime is spiralling out of control that crime is in fact falling is never going to go down well.

Indeed, Garth McVicar explained to Newstalk ZB that "what they wanted to hear was what the Minister is doing about rising crime, and they were very unhappy with her speech."

One of the walkouts was a woman whose daughter was the victim of a gang murder in 1997: she's got a pass to say and think what she likes.

But McVicar has a bit of a nerve declaring the only statistic the people who left the room cared about was "the fact their loved ones have been murdered" when he recently excused murder charges brought over the death of someone else's child as the mere consequence of the "frustration" of "a decent hard working citizen". Clearly not all victims are equal.

John Key, on the other hand, gave the crowd what they wanted: a roll-call of victims and some get-tough rhetoric. No one seemed to mind that there was no mention of the 2005 National policy to "abolish parole for repeat and violent offenders".

But the SST had a policy of its own: a three strikes law that would see repeat violent offenders given the mandatory maximum available for the offence and third offenders jailed for 25 years without parole. Their proposal isn't quite as crazy as California's law (it cites a limited number of qualifying offences) but it would be a mile down the road of the gimmick sentencing that has twisted the American justice system out of shape.

Meanwhile, a story that's not getting as much mileage as it should: Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt'. To say that it blames Rumsfeld is putting it mildly.

And, finally, we have afternoon records for Media7 for the next three Tuesdays (to make way for the Comedy Festival). If you can make it to The Classic on Queen Street at 2.15 tomorrow to see what we do, hit the reply button and get back to me asap. We can probably accommodate 10 doubles.

The panel for tomorrow is Mark Sainsbury, Shayne Currie and Graham Reid, and we'll be reviewing media coverage of the Mangatepopo tragedy, among other things.

(90 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!