Posts by Dylan Reeve
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It's fairly disingenuous (but entirely unsurprising) for Hosking to say of The Spinoff TV "they had never made TV before" - most of the people actually making the TV show had plenty of experience.
It's a type and style of show that NZ has never really mastered, but we keep trying. Maybe next time?
My biggest issue, especially in light of recent viewer behavior studies, with NZ On Air is that they're limited to free to air broadcasting only. If the goal is to help get NZ stories in front of NZ viewers, they're going to need to figure out how to champion our content on other platforms - some of which may not be free to the viewer.
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Up Front: A Word About Safety, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I've no idea whether the ability to assess the suitability of potential jurors by simply casting an eye over the cut of their jib is part of a lawyer's formal training, but I suspect there's at least a teensy element of cynicism in how it's applied.
That was one of the most surprising things to me - that jury selection is based on literally nothing. There's no opportunity for lawyers to query the jurors, they simply object to them on site as they walk toward the jury box. That's it.
That's not a selection process, it's a discrimination process.
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Up Front: A Word About Safety, in reply to Nick Russell,
So if you don't like judges and juries are problematic, how do you want these cases decided?
FWIW in the past when I've thought about this, the best I can come up with is some sort of "professional juror" - people, not necessarily lawyers or judges, who've undergone some level of formal training on law, evidence, process etc...
But I don't know how it would work, or how you get a good cross section of people.
However my experience in a jury room was shocking. I believe I'm a fairly legally literate person, and many fellow jurors were not. The way the case was discussed and decisions were made was not something I was comfortable with, especially when it came to actually trying to decide guilt.
To hear "well she shouldn't have gone to his house" or "she chose to get drunk with him" said in that room was disillusioning.
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Up Front: A Word About Safety, in reply to Emma Hart,
Everything else aside, I am so bummed that the question still apparently being asked is "Did she refuse consent?" not "Did he get consent?" But then I also thought "my partner is vomiting" was an obvious sign that something was very wrong, so...
I get it - consent isn't always verbal or specifically affirmative. But in the case I was on I'm pretty sure that locking your flatmates out then physically dragging a woman upstairs and blocking her exit was something a reasonable person might have considered would raise some consent issues. Sadly most of my fellow jurors disagreed.
I like the idea of jury trials, but I think they're really really flawed.
I certainly think vomiting and panic attack are good signs that maybe not everyone has the same idea.
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I served on a jury just once. It was a rape trial. Nothing as potentially nuanced as any sort of BDSM.
The jury instructions at the end of this were that it was not rape if an ordinary person in the same situation would reasonably believe they had consent.
Unfortunately it seems what many jurors consider reasonable is very very far from what it should be.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yeah, it's a weird time. People seem to take small incremental steps from one slightly fringe viewpoint into completely batty town. There's so much "information" out there for people to take in.
It starts from a comfortable place ("governments are largely controlled by corporations") and just builds a little bit more ("the people are the top are members of a secret society") and a bit more ("that society meets in a secret wooded enclave") and more ("where they sacrifice virgins") and more ("and kidnap children for pedophile sex rings") and then takes the big important just ("and they're all JEWS!")
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to andin,
There’s probably been studies done about it Im sure.
getting people to see the error of their ways or changing their mind by providing good counter arguments, facts even, is near impossible.Yeah, it’s pretty well studied. But even more than being hard to change minds, it can often serve to actually reinforce belief in the original misinformation. This has been labeled the Backfire Effect.
It’s amazingly visible with Trump stuff at the moment. Supporters see media stories about Trump as evidence that their belief in a compromised mainstream media is real. The more the media pushes, the more they are convinced that it’s a battle.
When conspiracy theorists are confronted with facts that contradict their ideas they classify it a government controlled disinformation, and the fact that the government is trying so hard to convince they world there’s no conspiracy is evidence that they are clearly onto something.
It’s fucking amazing!
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to sandra,
Does anyone know why TVNZ doesn't dip into its (presumed) cache of great documentary programming from the past and sell DVD series? I'm particularly thinking of all the great documentaries screened in 1990. I was living back in NZ for the first time in 10 years and lapped it up. There must be money to be made there ...
TVNZ doesn't really have any trouble making money (well, no more than any broadcaster in the current age).
But ultimately that is not commercially viable. However if TVNZ were again directed to have a public interest objective, rather than a purely commercial one, then it might make more sense for them to make those things available even where the commercial return wasn't good.
That said - most of the archive content is now managed by Nga Taonga. And they are taking steps toward making more available I believe. And a lot of stuff is online through NZ On Screen
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to James Littlewood*,
I just can’t take TVNZ seriously as a provider of any kind of public service. It’s a commercial broadcaster owned by the government.
Yes, that is currently by design. It's meant to be solely commercial. But it can be changed simply by passing new legislation.
Whatever value TVNZ has, it’s commercial, not civic.
So perhaps the debate on whether to keep it or not could be held solely on commercial terms, not civic.
Then it becomes just another asset sale. Currently TVNZ returns $10-20m a year to the government. Hard to say would it would fetch as a salable asset.
But if we sell it then we lose all the people, equipment, institutional knowledge and other assets it holds internally that could be used to deliver a civic service.
Instead if we were then to start a new public service broadcaster we would be starting from nothing, into a crowded market, trying to secure talent from existing commercial broadcasters.
We already have all those resources - why throw them away just to start again?
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Bart Janssen,
From my experience in a CRI most CEOs are fundamentally accountants in nature. They focus on "business" and most Boards of Directors are the same. In that environment the "purpose" of the organisation gets lost.
Well I think the issue is that CEOs and boards are concerned with meeting objectives and delivering outcomes and all that.
As it stands, the objective of TVNZ (and most SOEs, or whatever we call them now) is profit. If TVNZ's objectives were changed and outcomes were measured against metrics around public interest broadcasting then CEOs and Boards would work toward those.