Posts by Alfie
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to B Jones,
I know what you're saying, but virtually every concert or festival I've attended has been as part of a group, almost always with a 50/50 gender split. If anyone had dared to grope any of the women in our group, the boys would have stood up for them.
When Robyn referred to a 2009 gig I thought, 'maybe I have a different perspective on "recent". To me that means anything from 2000 onwards -- that's one of the pleasures of getting older.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Joanna,
All the reports you have read except for oh, I dunno, essentially every single woman who has taken the time to be ignored on this sausage party of a thread?
Sorry Joanna. I can only report of my own experience from hundreds of gigs, big and small, from around NZ and throughout Europe. If you choose to interpret my comments as being somehow anti-female, then I can’t help with that.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Joanna,
How many times can I say this?
Once should be enough. While you may have seen groping by gangs of older men at concerts, I can honestly say that’s not something I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve been to lots of great concerts over my lifetime and so far have never come across the sort of behaviour we’re discussing here. Nor did any of the women who accompanied me. Or maybe we just avoided bands with violent and/or mysogynistic lyrics?
I’m 61 and was brought up respecting women, giving up seats for older people on public transport and generally having basic manners. Qualities which I hope I’ve passed on to my own children. There are bound to be some nasty older men around, but so far all the reports I’ve read about this type of behaviour in Germany, Sweden and now Auckland, have involved men under 30, and generally in their teens.
And I sleep like a baby at night, thanks.
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Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to izogi,
Mediawatch covered it a few days ago
Yep… I listened to that episode and appreciated Jeff’s thoughts. Having worked in Christchurch newsrooms for both TV3 and TVNZ, his story about Auckland news editors making ridiculous and geographically-challenged requests rang a bell with me.
But that Mediawatch episode was broadcast the day before Mediahub launched… thus my comment about the lack of any actual reviews since.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Alistair Guthrie,
no respect..
And that's the crux of the problem. For whatever reason we've bred a generation or two of young men who have zero respect for their elders, towards women, for other people's property or for the law. This isn't a purely NZ problem, although our societal attitude towards alcohol plays a very big part.
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There doesn’t seem to have been much media reaction to TV3’s Newshrub launch, so I thought I’d jot down my thoughts after two nights of watching the new 6pm bulletin.
1. Same old, same old
It’s still Mike & Hillary with the same contributing team and the overall format hasn’t changed much, if at all. Remind me again what all the fanfare was about?
2. We changed the colours
Big deal. The rebrand colour scheme is fine, although I’m not sure about that graphic of a real newsroom in the background. The people in the graphic never move, but if you look closely a couple of the monitors change slightly, sometimes. I suspect it’s a looped background.The BBC and others have long used real newsrooms as a background for their newsreaders. Mind you, if TV3 tried this, at least half the little people would need to be walking out to reflect the reality.
3. Mysterious letters in a circle
Most stories have a single letter in a coloured circle at the top. While this was never explained, it seems to be a device to inform viewers which category of story they’re watching. So the big S at the begining of a tennis story advises punters that they’re watching a sports story. Wow! Who would have known.And the W on a story about Syria might have stood for War, though it’s probably a more generic World symbol – for those viewers prone to mistaking Damascus for Dannevirke. Coloured letters? Meh!
4. More RVOs
There seems to be a higher incidence of reader voiceovers than usual. They’re the bits where the newsreader reads a short script while some B-roll pix are played over the top. That leaves the impression you’ve watched more news, but with far less of the boring detail than you’d get from full stories. That fits nicely with the more entertainment / less news philosophy the current management is pursuing.
5. Weather
New graphics with a bigger screen and full-length presenters. That’s right… the weather presenters appear smaller and have legs now. And the new forecast starts in Auckland, rather than moving up the islands from the bottom. Again, cosmetic changes only with the substance unchanged.
Like me, a lot of people would have tuned in on the first night to see what was up. I expect most won’t hang about very long and ratings should return to 3News levels shortly. -
FFS! What sort of society are we becoming?
I can't help but feel that the violence and obvious misogynism of many hip hop lyrics encourages anti-social and sexist behaviour. Having our mainstream media promote the "boys will be boys" line merely normalises and entrenches bad attitudes.
And I don't think our Police and lawmakers get off scot-free either. The decision not to prosecute the roasterbusters for stupification and rape of underage girls sent out completely the wrong message to young and stupid males. Even ignoring the fact that one of the perpetrators was a cop's son.
Kim Vinnell has identified the two gropers who attacked her at the festival. It's time she filed a Police complaint and allowed the courts to set a benchmark for other dumb youths to think about.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Richard Wain,
It’s not hard to set up a blog, right?
Right! It's a piece of piss these days Richard. All you need is a domain, a hosting account and enough nous to press the "create blog" button using your preferred platform.
That's the easy bit.
Attracting an intelligent and diverse audience is much harder. Witness the number of dead-end blogs which litter the net, languishing down dark alleys with little foot traffic and no real relevance.
I'm not sure if you're proposing kicking Rob out or inviting luminaries like Rodney Hide and Judith Collins to contribute guest posts, in an effort to restore some perceived balance which exists largely in your own mind.
Anyone who's read Public Address for a while appreciates that it's a low-noise, robust discussion area with some damn fine contributors. While I'm not a Labour voter I certainly count Rob as one of those people and look forward to him getting his own masthead.
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Hard News: Radio being made, in reply to izogi,
If Radio NZ is going to take advantage of its visual output in future then subtitles, or at least some form of text news ticker or annotation, would be nice.
Adding subtitles to a live stream is problematic. No matter how good the typist, the subtitles would always be out of sync and the opportunity for errors is huge.
Like Izogi, I also prefer the RNZ news over TV offerings. It covers more real news, less celeb and entertainment garbage, and I still like Campbell's approach. I tend to run Checkpoint on a 2nd monitor so I can listen to the radio and tune in when there's pix to watch. It's a good way of taking in news.
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Tremain in the ODT.
