Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Friday Music: Big Day Out, Out, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Which means they need a big chunk of the potential market to turn up, leading to a situation where it's always going to be hard to make money and unlike say Glastonbury, which attracts a good percentage of reasonably on to it music fans, BDO has to rely on attracting a large munter contingent to make up the numbers.
Um, OK... It's also a lot easier to make money if you're charging Glastonbury prices - £210 ($407) this year. (I also have a sneaking suspicion the BBC isn't getting any of this access for free.) I suspect you don't have to be a "munter" to end up doing a pretty stringent cost/benefit analysis on spending that kind of cash on any music festival in New Zealand.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Chris Waugh,
However, I do think we could do worse than have a serious discussion about the roll polling, especially the reporting of polls, plays in our political culture.
Fair enough -- hell, for me the fundamental problem with polls is they all begin with "If an election was held today..." Well, it's not so I struggle to see the point of the whole exercise, and the only poll that actually counts is going on in a country that doesn't allow exit polling. And that's as it should be, IMNSHO: E-Day isn't about the politicians, and the pollsters and the media. It's about the electors.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Steve Barnes,
This reminds me of the last time I spoke to Helen Clark. I said the polls were so wrong and judging by what l could see, Labour should have been polling around 38%, this was 2008, she agreed but then said “trouble is, many people not only believe the polls, they tend to follow them”. “like sheep” I said.
You know, an awful lot of Tories (myself included) were singing the same fucking song at the same pity party in 2002 -- you know, the general election where all the polls were pointing towards National getting its lowest share of the popular vote in the party's history.
Yeah, blame the "biased media" and the "sheeple" but the ugly truth is even with Corngate blowing up in the Government's face, National was ill-disciplined, ran a lousy campaign with a platform nobody could take seriously while sober at a time where, like it or not, people were feeling generally OK with what the Government was doing. I thought otherwise, but you know what? 41.26% of the electorate felt otherwise at the only poll that counted.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Herald editorial uses 539 words before it finally gets to this:
We regret having reported inflated and conflated dollar figures.
Well, that's a damn sight better than the precisely zero words (as far as I know) expended on a retraction and apology for the allegations that Len Brown pressured the Auckland City Art Gallery into being a parking garage for his mistress.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Can we have a little more maturity this time, there is too much at stake for this kind of non productive behavior.
This probably doesn’t need to be relitigated, but it’s funny how that “maturity” always seems to be demanded of Greens and not of Labour supporters who start screeching “splitters” every damn time the Greens stake out a contrary position, or fail to be properly thankful for getting sledged by the likes of Damien O’Connor and Shane Jones.
I’m quite probably going to party vote Green again, but Labour’s sure doing nothing to woo me with the passive-aggressive condescension.
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Hard News: He Panui: Media Take, in reply to Russell Brown,
Well, that’s certainly a much more comfortable platform from which to lecture, but that’s not what our show is, or has ever been. We’ve always made a point of talking to media creators and decision-makers.
And frankly, you don’t have to be Andrew Bolt to find ABC’s Media Watch can be a little circle jerky and not particularly insightful into how and why things happen.
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Hard News: Labour's Fiscal Plan:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Essentially, the $150k mark means anyone bitching about an extra couple of percent tax on earnings over their $150k really does need to check their privilege.
What I’d like to see the media doing to everyone, is not just transcribing the claimed benefits (or drawbacks) of any policy but foregrounding the assumptions that inevitably go into arriving at them and putting them into context. If I want to read raw press releases, Scoop does a fine job of making them available. Journalists need to do more and better.
And how about the media checking the social, economic and that other C-word class privilege in assuming the only metric to measure any policy against is how it benefits the “middle-classes” with children and mortgages on over-priced urban property to support? That excludes an awful lot of people from the conversation and (surprise!) they’re the people who don’t look much like those who run this country’s newsrooms.
(ETA: Or at the very least, why can't the media-political complex just be honest and say straight up: "We don't really care about talking to you people because you don't win elections and sure as hell don't attract ad revenue.")
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Well, Labour actually managed to competently release a policy without the leader and/or relevant spokesperson needing to “clarify” matters a few hours later.
So credit where due and keep it up, say I. The policy is probably neither as terrible or totally amazeballs as any of the usual suspects would have you believe, but at least it seems to have been assembled by grown-ups and is worth serious consideration.
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Hard News: Radio New Zealand: changing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
If I recall rightly, the special correspondents system was set up by Al Morrison and it's been a real treasure. Fortunately, it looks like they're not going to mess with it.
Good - because if we're going to get into managerialspeak "authoritative" is exactly the box a sound news and current affairs brand should most emphatically tick. Of course, every newsroom should have sound general reporters up the wazoo. But the specialists that really know their round, have strong contacts with all the players, and a depth of knowledge to see the scoops that set the agenda instead of following it? That's value you can't reduce to a line item on a spreadsheet.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
What the hell else is he supposed to say besides “we can’t find anything”?
To be blunt as a cosh to the back of the head -- you'd expect him to just throw up his hands and say "fair cop" if he did? Congratulations, this is a system of nudge-nudge wink-wink plausibly deniable political money laundering that is working exactly to spec. Fuck it, I've got a limited supply of sympathy and none of it to spare for politicians and political parties reaping what they sowed with eyes wide open.
And I hope this does burn Labour down to the ground, and flashes back to char-grill National in the process. Because we might actually get some genuine transparency and accountability when the political cost of the status quo gets too high to ignore.