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TVNZ: The Sub's Pencil Strikes | Jul 06, 2007 11:06

One thing that can confidently be said about TVNZ's provisional redraft of its own Charter is that it's considerably better written than the current document.

The sub's pencil has been taken to the flabby committee prose of the original, and the effect is somewhat revelatory. So, to take an excerpt from the section on diversity:

(a) (i)feature programming across all genres that informs, entertains and educates New Zealand audiences.

(a) (v)feature programming that serves the varied interests and informational needs and age groups within New Zealand society, including tastes and interests not generally catered for by other national television broadcasters.

(a) (vi)maintain a balance between programmes of general appeal and programmes of interest to smaller audiences.

(b) (iv)feature programmes that reflect the regions to the nation as a whole.

Becomes:

(a)Feature programming across all genres;

(b)Feature programming that caters for tastes not normally taken care of by other national television broadcasters;

(c)Balance the programming needs of general and smaller audiences;

(d)Feature programming that reflects the different cultures and regions of New Zealand;

The new economy extends even to the official media release, in which Rick Ellis is rather more concise than Ian Fraser was in officially launching the Charter in 2004. Interestingly, this week's release contains something else new: an implicit comparison between TVNZ and Radio New Zealand.

The optimistic view is that the more practical language of the new draft (which has been released as a prompt for public submissions) represents a more practical attitude to the obligations of public broadcasting; as opposed to something conceived at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

I've been in there to talk several times lately, and I think some optimism is justified. The chip-on-the-shoulder attitude towards the Charter doesn't seem to be present any more, and there is a more positive embrace of public broadcasting obligations. In large part, of course, that is because the new delivery platforms emerging this year allow for the warm, fuzzy feeling of delivering public value, without the cold reality of shedding viewers on the two core channels.

I also don't think I'm alone in detecting a change of emphasis in news and current affairs. I have had the vaguely disorientating experience of switching on Close Up and feeling informed, rather than irritated.

But as the Charter is being re-drafted, it would be nice to see something else change: the accounting of TVNZ's Charter funding. We know what goes in: we don't know much at all about how it's spent, and that's just not adequate.

Meanwhile, TVNZ, Sky, TV3 and Maori Television make a joint vow to defy the new rules on the use of Parliamentary TV pictures.

I'm continuing to like Colin Espiner's blog. His day-with-the-Prime-Minister post contains this interesting observation:

The PM is a master at working a room. Clark's press secretaries say they can always tell when she's ready to move on because she looks across at them, which is their signal to get her away from whatever loony (or press gallery journalist) has cornered her. If she doesn't look up, it means she doesn't want to be interrupted.

He's getting the inevitable angry wingnut commenters and, to his credit, is actually responding (which is surprisingly rare for journalists who blog as part of their day jobs).

Speaking of wingnuts, the lovely Instaputz has the Funniest wingnut book contest, which he has kicked off by nominating five works - including The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush - which, he notes, "almost all look like Onion-esque parodies."

While every has a chuckle about Al Gore's son getting busted for drugs while driving a Prius (who knew hybrid cars could even go that fast?), there's Rudy Giuliani's South Carolina campaign chair and facing ethics questions.

The Fundy Post reads Ian Wishart's blog so you don't have to.

And, finally, I can see why Kate Moss still likes Pete Doherty. In his interview on Friday night with Jonathan Ross last week he was funny and charming - and also a very good mimic. Part 1, including a performance of a new Babyshambles song, is here, and Part 2 is here.

PS: Our friends at Spare Room now have an email update service. Which is probably a good excuse to remind you that you can also sign up for the daily email heads-up from Public Address.

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Taking the rise | Jul 04, 2007 07:30

Having noted Fairfax's foray into political blogging, we should turn to the Herald's effort. Audrey Young's political blog doesn't look as bloggy as Colin Espiner's - no links and, as yet, no comments - but it does nicely clear up something that's been bugging me since the weekend.

I presume your house, like ours, got the 'Healthy, wealthy and wise' flier bragging about Labour's new subsidy on doctors' fees, the KiwiSaver launch and the "20 hours a week free early childhood education". Now, I happen to think these are all good things, and I would expect any government to present them to the public as such.

But I presume I wasn't the only one who looked at the leaflet, with Labour's branding all over it -- and a small House of Representatives crest to make it clear that we're paying for it -- and wondered, um, is this legal these days?

Well yes, but as Young explains, only via the window opened by the validating legislation on the 2005 spending by various parties deemed unlawful by the auditor-general:

But surely, you might think, that is what the Auditor General ruled to be unlawful in his report last year and why parties have had to repay the money to Treasury. Yes, but that was then. Parliament has since passed special legislation that not only covered their butts for the previous unlawful spending but changed the rules for future spending.

The ban on using Parliament's money for "electioneering" does not apply only during the three months before an election, as some parties might think, but for the whole term. If the special law had not been passed, there would a case to argue that what is going on now is unlawful.

But the fact is that this binge of spending is lawful, even if it appears to be blatant electioneering. The validating legislation changed the definition of "electioneering" to the end of 2007. The upshot is that anything that does not explicitly seek support for a party or person is lawful.

I can't believe they've done this. A leaflet from the government would have hit the mark; it would hardly have been a mystery who was in charge. But a leaflet slathered in red with Labour's own website address on it? Come on.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased to see that that the trademark suit taken by Trelise Cooper against her namesake Tamsin Cooper has been settled - because it should should never have been launched in the first place. Tamsin Cooper trades under her own name, but that's about where the similarity ends. She's in Arrowtown; Trelise Cooper is in Auckland. She makes accessories; Trelise Cooper makes frilly frocks for middle-aged women. The two businesses are very different in scale, and, as far as I can tell, there was to be no direct similarity in the trademarks. It looked like nothing so much as a big, wealthy businesswoman trying to bully a small one, and I'm glad that it didn't pay off.

And, as polls show again, that Al Gore would sweep the Democratic nomination if he chose to run, the Republican press gets in some advance fire. Fox News declared that Gore "hasn't stopped believing he can get special favors for being a political figure" (ie: Gore blagged a copy of the Sopranos finale because he was going to be on a long-haul flight when it aired); and the Heritage Foundation's James Taylor scorns his climate science in a Chicago Sun-Times column. Then Deltoid at ScienceBlogs deals to Taylor and others, noting, among other things, that Taylor completely fabricated a quote from The Journal of Climate that he used to damn Gore. These people really are crazy.

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New Rules | Jul 03, 2007 12:16

I hope Colin Espiner can keep up his daily political blog on Stuff, because it has swiftly become a useful addition to the local debate. Notable recently: his commentary on the new rules for visual coverage of Parliament's debating chamber, both before, then again and after the new provisions were passed with only the Greens objecting.

From the first link above, a useful explanation of what was about to happen:

Parliament's Standing Orders committee is proposing to change the rules around broadcasting the goings-on inside our House of Representatives.

To some extent these rules simply codify existing practice. Technically, TV networks are not currently allowed to show any reaction shots from the chamber or indeed anything or anyone besides an MP on their feet, the Speaker, or a wide shot of the whole chamber.

As you'll see on the news most nights, those rules are not followed. The Speaker grumbles every now and again – most recently when TV3 showed New Zealand First's Ron Mark giving the fingers to National's Tau Henare. TV3's cameras got a week in the sin-bin for that.

It's a moot point whether giving the fingers would be allowed to be shown under the new rules, but certainly they are a relaxation over what's the case at present. (Interestingly, newspapers have not been ticked off for running a still version of this picture off the television. It's up on the Stuff website again today and I'm posting it again with impunity again here.

But rather than leave it at that, the committee wants to chuck in a new rule forbidding TV networks to lampoon politicians in the chamber through "satirising or denigrating'' their behaviour. Now frequently of course MPs satirise and denigrate themselves and each other - and that's fine, according to the committee. Just so long as the media don't do it.

They're also proposing bringing in a new punishment for those who transgress: contempt of Parliament. This is a very serious charge, with open-ended sanctions. Parliament could throw a journalist in jail, for example, or slap them with an enormous fine.

No, I am not without sympathy for our MPs. The New Zealand news media's coverage of Parliament is often superficial. A sleeping-MP gotcha will lead the news while important legislative events go unexplained. And I also felt that when they attempted to depict the presence of public cameras in the chamber as some sort of creeping social, the TV companies were basically defending their monopoly on the pictures.

But this just doesn't make sense. The ability to "satirise or denigrate" our elected leaders - a purpose to which TV pictures from the House now cannot be put - is one of the marks of a democracy. If MPs don't like that - and I know they are sometimes genuinely hurt by the way they are portrayed - then they shouldn't be in politics.

Here's the official account of the new rules:

The House has adopted new rules for filming and still photography in the House. They are aimed at ensuring fair and accurate reporting of parliamentary proceedings.

Previous rules which limited filming to the member speaking or the Speaker are considered restrictive. The new rules allow limited reaction shots, questions and interjections and general background shots to illustrate the mood of the House and to introduce variety. The change coincides with the introduction of remote-controlled cameras in the House, which will film all proceedings. In addition to web-casting, a broadcast-quality feed of the images will be made available to television broadcasters, who will decide if they wish to use the material.

The House has also adopted rules relating to the use of television images from the House. Images will not be able to be used for political advertising or electoral campaigning (unless all members pictured have given permission); satire, ridicule or denigration; or commercial sponsorship and advertising.

And, in conclusion, it says this:

Preparations are on schedule for the webcasting of Parliament to begin in mid July. In all, approximately 17.5 hours will be streamed live on this site, http://www.parliament.nz , every week the House sits.

Ah. The webcast. The Standing Orders committee report says this:

Live coverage of the proceedings of the House of Representatives is made available for television broadcast, webcast, and recording in other mediums to provide greater public access to the legislature. The coverage is made available on the following conditions:

1 Any broadcast or rebroadcast of coverage must comply with Broadcasting Standards Authority rules.

2 Coverage of proceedings must not be used in any medium for:

- political advertising or election campaigning (except with the permission of all members shown)
- satire, ridicule or denigration
- commercial sponsorship or commercial advertising.

3 Reports that use extracts of coverage of proceeding sand purport to be summaries must be fair and accurate.

Breach of these conditions may result in a loss of access to coverage, and may be treated as a contempt and proceeded against accordingly.

Or not. Michael Cullen has already said that any old mash-up on YouTube won't be pursued under the rules (and the BSA has no jurisdiction on the internet anyway). But the availability of raw public footage of debate is something of a boon - or it would be, if it was clearer what we can do with it. Can we capture and make separately available parts of the webcast? Will there be any features to help us do that? Archiving? Annotation? Bookmarking of the money quotes? It would be nice to know.

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Don't Panic | Jul 02, 2007 11:19

The apparently resolute British desire not to panic after the weekend's close shaves with murder and mayhem is to be admired. I went through several discussion forums on Saturday and Sunday and it seemed that the respondents were not about to have the British way of life - including the right to get trollied into the early hours at West End nightclubs - hampered.

There is quite a range of views advanced in this BBC website thread, and this discussion of an Observer editorial, but most correspondents seem determined not to panic. It's left to an American reader to fret wildly about Britain becoming "a nation under Sharia law".

The Observer also has a fascinating column by former British jihadist Hassan Butt, who says that the motivation for him and his kind was not, in a direct sense, the West's foreign policy adventures in the Middle East, but "a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world." He concludes:

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism. (The Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from this state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.) However, demystification will not be achieved if the only bridges of engagement that are formed are between the BJN and the security services.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence. And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

Yet if the jihad cannot be explained solely through geopolitics, it's only decent to consider this story, noting the death of 80 civilians in a single American attack in Afghanistan, alongside the weekend's incidents in Britain, in which, thankfully, no one was even injured. While we are frightened by the callousness and evil intent of the homegrown British plots, it's as well to bear in mind the other innocents who died these past few days.

Oddly, the attempted London car bombings echo not only the terror attacks of Iraq, but an even more British bombing campaign, directed against homosexuals and ethnic minorities in 1999. That campaign was the work of an individual, but it was endorsed by Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, which stands in British elections:

The TV footage of dozens of 'gay' demonstrators flaunting their perversions in front of the world's journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures so repulsive.

Tragically, one of the survivors of the Soho bombing was subsequently beaten to death in a homophobic attack.

So hate takes many forms and is not without precedent. I might add that, like many of the correspondents linked above, I have considerable faith in modernism. We've won so far; we'll win again.

PS: I wasn't able to get to William (Bill) Direen's Auckland performances over the weekend (although I hear the Wine Cellar show on Friday was magic - he took requests!), but he's performing music and poetry with a lineup of others, including poets and Power Tool Records artists, at the King's Arms tonight, and I'll be there.

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