Hard News by Russell Brown

re: msn.co.nz

Noizy noted yesterday how woeful their sports coverage was for a "New Zealand" news site.

re: The Point $$$

What happened to all of the sit-com proposals that went into TVNZ limbo last year?

Stone the flamin' crows, TVNZ must be toeier than a roman sandal at the news about Home & Away but to give them a fair suck of the sav, they never really had a chance once they lost__The Simpsons__.

What happened to all of the sit-com proposals that went into TVNZ limbo last year?

Being dusted off right now, I'd wager ...

Am I alone in associating the words 'violent' and 'lurches' with tvnz?

I'd just like to take this opportunity to weigh in with the remotely related comment that Rude Awakenings is great, and The Hothouse is drivel.

The first episode of Rude Awakenings was pretty bad. I think just awkward character introductions, but it's warmed up. I haven't seen a full episode of The Hothouse yet, but so far I don't think it's up to Insiders

The first episode of Rude Awakenings was pretty bad. I think just awkward character introductions, but it's warmed up

I quite enjoyed the first episode, but I suspected the show could swing either way. Agreed, awkward character introductions. & now I like it.

The Hothouse: opening scene = police girl walks into her flat & accosts stranger, he explains that he's a friend of her brother, so she has a puff of his joint, and then has sex with him. After that it got worse.

I was kinda disappointed with Rude Awakenings, and having seen a couple of the proposals I asked about above, I was hoping for more from it.

Bad character intros and characters that seemed to have no depth past 5mins. Grumblegrumble

The first episode of Rude Awakenings was pretty bad.

Yes, it was. I thought the same thing about critic's daling The Insider's Guide to Happiness and checked out - and having finally watched the rest of it on DVD, it still stinks but found it's feet pretty quickly. The problem with television drama/comedy in New Zealand is that you don't have the freedom (like in the US or UK) to start learning your craft on a load of shit that lasts six episodes then gets cancelled, move on to years of the merely mediocre than pull together a brain-melting classic. Nope, you've got to be brilliant and a smash critical/ratings success before the first ad break, or you're stuffed.

Ha! That is so true. We will sit through hours of American made garbage but if our own stuff isn't up to the absolute best we dismiss it as crap.

Then again, Shortland St...

Wowie, TVNZ3? Which colon did that fall out of?

Was the problem with having "Free" in the name? (If so, allow me to suggest TView. Even 3VNZ sounds nicer, though it still looks about as poetic as their nom de turd.)

If you're sitting at your desk all day thinking up new names for the company instead of sorting out PVRs for launch? Well, I humbly submit that perhaps you should quit and do something you have an aptitude for. Perhaps you could be a policeman? You wouldn't believe the perks!

Ihug, between parties, managed to build a terrestrial digital TV network 7 years ago. (Or is it 8 now?)

Even Foodtown stocks cheap-ass PVRs. They're not exotic technology!

Smoosh the two together and you're done.

(Oh, and the Ihug set top boxes? Yeah, they had modems in them when they were still current technology - instead of giveaways you could expect to find in the bottom of a box of cereal like today.)

I thought the timing of the launch of Hothouse was unfortunate. The first scene I saw was a police man pulling a woman into an alley and feeling her up. Bit too close to the bone for me on the day Rickards, Shipton and Schollum were found not guilty.

yeah i thought that too. i often marvel at how accidents of coincidence can sometimes preciptate, or at least push along, social and political changes. there have been a number of them.

Here's something for statisticians out there being the results of a survey on morality.

Interestingly for me that when the data is sliced and diced,(& generalising wildly) being in any of the following demographic groups tend to exhibit similar outcomes in decision making when it comes to answering this survey about morality.

65+ years old
The lowest income category for the survey
Not educated beyond high school
Religous
Conservative
Republican
From the southern states

Jon:

Yes, I believe Ann Coulter's made a whole career out of sruverys like that. I don't think that's the kind of company you want to be keeping in these parts - hell, after her recent mouth-fart at the C-Pac convention last week, she's even getting the bum's rush from some pretty high profile Religious Conservative Republicans from the southern states.

Who would have guessed that the Michael Moore of the far-right would finally be useful for something?

And let's not try too hard to draw any kind of causual relationship tertiary education and moral/ethical probity. I believe there are some former employees of Enron, Mattell and Martha Stewart Omnimedia who might want to dispute your evidence.

Who would have guessed that the Michael Moore of the far-right would finally be useful for something?

I have my own problems with Moore but I think it's a wee bit unfair to lump him in with with someone whose quotes include:

"we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

when discussing the Muslim world, even if its said (or especially if it's said primarily) to sell books

Craig the organisation that conducted the survey didn't look flakey, infact quite legit ...my interpretation of the results is another thing entirely....but nonetheless I found it kinda amusing........that's just what lept out to me.

Time to rest my weary head after a cracking night of SJD at the Kings Arms!

yes most Pew research is fairly valid IMHO, although looking at that one it seems religiousity, Republicanism and 65+ appear the stronger correlates (geographic location, SES and education are much weaker and probably not worth inferring too much from on those data at least).
from my little background in nz psephology it doesn't appear to be so different here either, although old age is a weaker indication of conservatism as older voters have longer political memories and haven't forgotten how many times National have shafted superannuitants. tragically the strongest age correlate in nz voting is youth and not voting. ho hum.

Simon:

Sorry? Perhaps I'm really politically incorrect, but I do like books being marketed as non-fiction to undergo some basic fact-checking before they hit the shelves - a good start is making sure footnoted quotes and references bear some relationship to their source material. Otherwise, you might as well sign up David Irving and give him the spurious respectability of appearing under the imprint of Random House or the Penguin.

I know this offends their respective fan clubs, both on the loony left and the rabid right, but one carefully elided quote or fudged chain of events you can put down to human error. One crack like the one you quoted from Coulter, or Moore frothing that the 9/11 attackers should have remembered nobody in Manhattan voted for Bush, you can write off as "well, we've all said stupid things and moved on."

But when we're talking about a long history of OTT rhetoric, careless disregard for easily checked matters of fact, distortion of their own cited sources, evasion and smears against critics and (let's face it) FLAT OUT LIES, when does the Moore-Coulter Axis of Stupid stop getting a pass because it's ideologically congenial.. and enormously profitable?

Some folks, I'm sure think I've OTT myself in bringing a Holocaust denier like David Irving into this discussion. Well, I don't think so. If anything positive came out of Irving v. Lipstadt & Penguin Books, it was to reassert the notion that 'Truth' isn't just a hegemonic construct of the dominant power paradigm. It exists, and it matters - especially when, like David Irving, you're presenting yourself as an intellectually credible speaker of truth to power.

come on craig, you don't need ot resort to that 'politically incorrect' malarky, your arguments are sound enough as they are

Riddley:

Oh, that was just me being snarky - because that's another part of the Moore-Coulter shtick that really pisses me off - the Park Avenue populist, pretending they're oppressed but undaunted speakers of truth to the evil forces arrayed against them. Please, if that pair ever said anything genuinely 'politically incorrect' to their respective constituencies - as opposed to just scratching their nastiest little itches like a whorehouse medic with no penicillin during a VD epidemic - well, I'd die of shock.

From the right side of the spectrum, I find it depressing that it wasn't so long ago that real conservative writers and thinkers like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama were on the bestseller lists and getting serious media attention. (And I could draw a similar line of de-evolution on the left.) When Coulter is the Madonna/J.K. Rowling of American conservatism, then I think we've gone from dawn to decadence in a human lifetime.

yeah fair enough, and well put. what's driving the degeneration of commentary do you reckon?

Craig,
there is a vast gulf between the vitriol urging violence used over and over again by Coulter and a few unchecked facts, and misquoted sources in Moore's' footnotes.

Moore, as I said I have my problems with him, largely due to lazy editing, and a tendancy to, shall we say, drift with the facts. I'm well aware that the rabid right have moved mountains to discredit him including repeated cries of "FLAT OUT LIES" but there is a vast difference between a flawed attempt (and despite the best efforts of the much criticised Hitchens piece, and the like, much of Moore's work does, and has stood up to scrutiny, or at least has been argued independently of Moore, in his favour with some success) to provide an alternative vision of the political realities that Americans live with day to day, and a relentlessly vicious columnist who offers little more than hate, infused with calls to violence, and incites others to that hatred, to simply line her own pockets.

I don't defend and can't defend Michael Moore's failings but to me the difference is obvious..and has nothing to do with giving the man a pass for anything.

Oh, and incidentally in both Bush elections Manhattan voted around 80% for the Democrat, so whilst his claim may not be precise, its, as a turn of phrase, roughly correct, and indicative of the way he is is perhaps more loose with facts rather than offering straight up invention.

Francis Fukuyama

I would say that Mr Fukuyama's most recent work, in 2006, was the recipient as much, if not more ink, especially in the mainstream, than any of his earlier books...and it reached number one on the NYT list as I recall.

He reached the front page of The Independent on it's release, had extensive coverage in all the major US broadsheets, The Times, and The Telegraph, was given a half hour on BBC World and interviewed on CNN.

I'm not sure what you mean by "serious media attention"

I find it depressing that it wasn't so long ago that real conservative writers and thinkers like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama were on the bestseller lists and getting serious media attention.

And also on that, there is a real, almost tangible sense that philosophies of the right are so tattered and discredited that their published thoughts (and I'm thinking more of the likes of Buckley and Kristol) are far more likely to be kept at arms length by the mainstream media in 2007 than in earlier years....almost a desire to avoid association with the rantings of The National Review or even the editorial stance of the Wall Street journal (their call to pardon Libby suffered quite a firestorm, even from the likes of CNN and the WSJ's own blogs)

And I could draw a similar line of de-evolution on the left

I disagree (but then I would), the renewed focus in the United States on the part of the liberal / progressive blogasphere and essayists, in the wake of last November's election, and the earlier and ongoing collapse in popular support for both Bush (28% last week on CBS) / Cheney and the policies of those that have guided them in recent years, seems to me to evident and self-invigorating. Show me anything on the right with either the profile or the power of Kos or MyDD. The right may hate them but they offer nothing that compares.

Whilst on the right, the packs seem to be turning on and wildly flailing in some sort of desperation at each other....and let us not forget that Coulter's comments were made at one of the most respected Republican meets, endorsed by no less than Cheney, at which she was a key speaker. She sits close to the centre rather than the fringes of the right