MEDIA WATCH

NEW ZEALAND MEDIA WATCH:

>"China takes your breath away," raves Paul Holmes, writing from Beijing, in the Herald on Sunday, April13. Hmmm, that would be due to the pollution, then? No way, let's not talk about little inconveniences like pollution or...um, Tibet. "Oh yes, Tibet," Holmes continues. "Well, sorry about Tibet. Sorry Tibet, go away. Never mind that China thinks it always owns Tibet. Who knows actually." Holmes was obviously chuffed to be included in a bunch of VIPs, assorted high achievers and hangers-on invited to travel to Beijing (as a guest of Air NZ) to celebrate the signing of the New Zealand - China Free Trade Agreement, and was not about to rock the (Chinese) boat. His patronising view of the Dalai Lama: "I've met the Dalai Lama on two occasions and he was a very nice chap. I did not feel the presence or weight of greatness, however." I am not one of those who jumped on Holmes when he made his off-the-cuff gaffe about (then UN Secretary-General) Kofi Annan a couple of years ago. It was an inadvertent slip, I figured, from someone too smart to mean such nonsense. But what are we to make of the more considered comments in Holmes' China despatch? They take your breath away...

But wait, there's more: According to TV One's PR minions, via the Herald's Time Out guide, Holmes is apparently being sent to Yemen, "one of the world's trouble spots" for the Intrepid Journeys series. If they'd been really clever, they'd surely have sent him to Tibet. I assume TV One's blurb was printed verbatim in Time Out, since it also claimed Pam Corkery visited "Columbia" (sic).

>Kim Hill, "NZ's premier interviewer," (according to...well nobody I know, actually) was up to her old tricks when she had actor/director Oliver Driver as a guest on her Sat. morning radio programme recently. Driver is an interesting guy, who's not exactly backward, but every time he'd get started with an juicy anecdote, Hill would interrupt. Is it just me, I wondered, when the routine reached farcical proportions. No, judging from another listener's e-mail, (which Hill duly read out in her best schoolmarm's voice): "Let him talk!" "Let him talk?" retorted La Hill, "I couldn't shut him up!" Oh dear, she doesn't even realise what she's doing, and I guess her staff are too scared to tell her.

>Latest fads from TV News: Having reporters introduce their pre-recorded pieces "live" from a forlornly "dead" background. So the revelations about wayward cricketer Jesse Ryder (inexplicably the lead item on all bulletins) were introduced by the respective reporters standing in a deserted sportsground. For the other sports story which made No 1, the selection of the single sculls Olympic rep (deciding between Rob Waddell and Mahe Drysdale), the background for the live report was a similarly deserted Lake Karapiro. TV3 sent their hack all the way to Atlanta, Georgia to cover the arrest of the fugitive Nai Yin Xue, only to beam back to NZ a "live" report from in front of the US jail supposedly holding the culprit. They had to be content with the oft-repeated clip of our man being driven away in a local police car. Still with TV3, poor Lillian Ng had to do her "live" report from the adjacent newsroom. And how long is the current vogue for beginning every sentence (of these "live" reports) with "Now" going to last? Since both news channels have apparently decreed that their staff should conform to this style, the memos must gave gone out simultaneously, but who started it?

>Film director and writer Anthony Minghella and visionary science writer Arthur C Clarke died on the same day, but unfortunately Clarke's death (in Sri Lanka) following Minghella (in London) meant that there was no time to bring his TV obit up to date for our news cycle. The BBC's Razia Iqbal did a good fresh piece on Minghella, with plently of clips and even included a couple of up-to-the-minute tributes from actors Kevin Spacey and Gwyneth Paltrow who happened to be in London. TV One news screened this in its entirety, but TV3 decided to use virtually identical material (but from another source) and let Kate Rodger do the voice over. Too bad they captioned one of the world's most famous actors as Gwenyth (sic) Paltrow. Sure enough she was dropped from the item when it ran on Nightline (with a new VO) at 10.30pm. Minghella himself didn't rate a caption on either channel; either they weren't sure what he looked like, or didn't know how to spell his name. Arthur C Clarke had his name spelled correctly but the TV obits were stale, with poor, faded clips from 2001 and in the NZ Herald's piece the next day the photo caption pointed out (correctly) that he was best known for the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. A shame the pic had Clarke posed in front of a poster for the sequel, 2010, released in 1984. Still on movies, TV3's "exclusive" report on the latest James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, identified the director, Marc Forster, as Foster - but they are not alone, so did Aljazeera's Fabulous Picture Show in a piece on The Kite Runner.

>Even journalists swallow both TV channels' assertion that they have one-hour bulletins. NZ Herald reporter Claire Harvey, returning to Australia after a stint here, was interviewed by RNZ National's Media Watch, and invited to give her thoughts on NZ media. She suggested that the evening bulletins should be half-hour, as they are in most other places. Of course, as I've mentioned ad nauseum, the evening bulletins are about 20 minutes, the rest being sport and weather - weather info is given in three slots now!

>From a NZ Herald editorial on the American presidential primaries, Freshness of spirit will win the day (March 06, 08) : "Senator Obama is the only one of the three remaining candidates who voted against the war." Talk about perpetuating the myth. This would have been some feat since the US Senate vote was taken in 2003, and Obama did not enter the Senate until Jan 2005.

>The Middle East may as well be Middle Earth for all the attention paid to the troubled region by local TV news. When overcrowded Gaza literally burst its border with Egypt in late January, and the desperate citizens went on a frantic search for essential goods, there was much sloppy reporting, but little serious analysis by either TV One or TV3 news. TV One captioned the chief Palestinian negotiator SAEB ERIGAT (sic). TV3 got the name right, Saeb Erikat, but applied his caption to the Israel Govt Information Officer, Mark Regev. Then they datelined the story: Gaza, Palestine. Palestine has not existed (even in its most recent form as a British mandate) since 1948 when Israel was formed - indeed that's one of the reasons for the continuing dispute. Gaza and the West Bank are now described as the Palestinian Territories. Other NZ media had similarly superficial coverage, the sole exception being Matt McCarten's scathing opinion piece West stands by while a whole population is illegally jailed, in the Herald on Sunday (Jan 27).

>Was I the only one who declined John Campbell's invitation (during TV3's 6pm News) to check out his "exclusive" interview with the alleged "medals thief" in Campbell Live? I decided to give it a miss when Campbell revealed the interview would be voiced by an actor, while the interviewee was apparently disguised in a sinister-looking red hoodie which obscured his face. Turns out, in all the hoo-ha over the "interview" the following day, that the guy in the hoodie was also an actor, so if we neither saw nor heard the culprit, was it really a TV interview at all? Since viewers could not judge his demeanour or evaluate his sincerity through his speech, definitely not. Although TV3 News chief Mark Jennings gave a spirited defence (as you would expect) of this dubious practice (in radio and TV interviews), Campbell himself was probably closer to the mark when he admitted, "We shat in our own nest," but the upshot was, TV3 had it both ways.

>And the 2007 Charlotte Dawson Award for worst travel writing goes to the NZ Herald's Travel Editor Jim Eagles for his canvas special Five of the best. Readers expecting some personal discoveries from Eagles, who "loves travelling to new places" were instead confronted with reports from five destinations of stunning unoriginality - to New Zealanders. They included a cruise to Antarctica; the Himalayas; NZ's Fiordland; Old Trafford, England - home of Manchester United football team, and Raffles Hotel, Singapore. Not only that, each glowing account ended with the revealing admission: "Jim Eagles travelled as a guest of..." In other words, they were promotions. Is there anyone left who has to be told that Singapore's historic Raffles Hotel is a luxury hangout for the rich and famous? And isn't Jim being a teeny bit disingenuous when he claims surprise at being greeted by name by the staff? On the bright side, Eagles has a long way to go before catching up to The Australian's Travel Editor, Susan Kurosawa, who, for the last 30 years, has scooped up every travel freebie going, while vigorously defending the practice - regarding it as "necessary". Chuck Thompson's Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer reviewed here.

>One of the best developments in 2007 was (most) newspaper websites quietly allowing free access to opinion pages. Suddenly there were the NY Times' Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and others available at a mouse click. Even the NZ Herald followed, with its dialogue page no longer "premium content". I wonder if anyone actually paid to read the anti-Labour rantings of Fran O'Sullivan, when they were freely available in the "News" columns anyway?

>Creative book reviewing from Miriyana Alexander in the Sunday Star-Times: In her piece about British writer Duncan Fallowell's controversial travel book about a trip to New Zealand, Going As Far As I Can, she states: "The novel has already attracted international attention..."

>Lord knows I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to celebrities. I wouldn't know Aja Rock from Kid Rock, Karl Urban from Keith Urban, Rachel Hunter from Sharon Hunter - the list goes on. But for someone who specialises in this area, the Herald on Sunday's Rachel Glucina makes regular, elementary blunders. Her breathless report on Playboy Enterprises CEO Christy/Christie Hefner's visit to Auckland last month began: "Spy is the only media...invited..." (shouldn't that be medium?) She went on to tell us that Hefner would be accompanied by "husband Billy Marovitz, a former US Senator". (Actually he was a former Illinois State Senator). She continued, "(Hefner) is a regular contributing blogger at The Huffington Post " (she isn't, but Marovitz has occasional entries)...and is regularly featured in the Forbe's (sic) Most Successful Women List. Also, (possibly because she's a medium) Rachel claims The Constant Gardner's John Huston was spotted at Ponsonby's Prego restaurant. I very much doubt it, since he's been dead for some years now. Perhaps it was son Danny. And in a missed opportunity to legitimately use the weasel word "partner" she decided Susan Sarandon was visiting NZ with "hubby" Tim Robbins. (He isn't). And Spy spied local boy made good Martin (sic) Csokas on her rounds...Not to be outdone, HoS insert Detours (editor: Kerri Jackson) had an interview with another ubiquitous local actor, Peter Elliot, who was inexplicably renamed David.

>It was difficult to find any humour in the death of Australian actor Heath Ledger, but at least one NZ scribe had a go. The announcement of his untimely death in New York in January, was accompanied by speculation that he may have taken an overdose of a non-prescription drug, the controversial sleeping pill Ambien (marketed as Stilnox Downunder in Australia). According to the NZ Herald's Joanna Hunkin some Aussie users reported side effects: "Some 500 people described odd behaviours from walking, crashing cars, having sex, and falling from balconies after popping a pill."

2007:

>Speaking of parochial (see below) Both major TV News services are never too hot on international coverage, playing fast and loose with place names, political figures and even veteran reporters from major O/S networks. So how come TV3's 6pm News on Friday (Dec 28) attributed Benazir Bhutto's assassination to Al Qaeda when it was by no means certain or even claimed by the organisation? Then on Jan 10, in their report on US President Bush's first visit to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, TV3's caption over the welcome ceremony at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport read "Jerusalem". Over on TV One they have not been quite this sloppy lately, but I did notice Wendy Petrie mispronounce (twice) Canadian newspaper tycoon Conrad Black's company Hollinger, with a hard "g". Yes, a small point, but hadn't she heard/seen any of the reports (with correct pronunciation) broadcast all day prior to her 6pm bulletin? And still with TV One News, Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and frequent commentator on Iraq, had his name misspelled recently. Another regular commentator, usually on PBS NewsHour, Stuart Rothenberg, Editor of the Rothenberg Political Report suffered the same fate during one of (TV One) US correspondent Tim Wilson's reports on the US Presidential Primary. Former Clinton White House staffer and now TV commentator George Stephanopoulos did not rate any caption in a recent appearance. There really is no excuse for this. And although Prime News has never claimed its bulletin - to my knowledge - to be a genuine alternative to TV One or TV3's, nor is there any excuse for regular Sports presenter Kelly Swanson Roe moving into the newsreader's chair and pronouncing the African nation Chad as "Shard".

>Two strange opinion pieces - one from Kerre Woodham in the HoS, the other from Noelle McCarthy in her Saturday Herald column, mused on what is apparently their default news source - Newstalk ZB. (Alarm bells ring here). Woodham's piece was a mea culpa - as a "token representative of the media" which suggested "we've given far too much time to a story (the Tuhoe hikoi) which doesn't deserve more than a couple of sentences...because we have to fill a five-minute time slot whether there's five minutes of genuine news stories or not." She longs for the day "our newsreader at ZB announces at 9...there is no news." McCarthy, just returned from an overseas junket, admitted to "succumbing to a fit of travel-worn pique at the (parochial) stories which led the ZB news." She went on, "In an increasingly irrelevant news environment everything is copy, but sometimes you have to laugh." Perhaps crying would be a better reaction. Yeah, it must be tough filling up a whole five minutes with real news. And to think I bitch about TV news padding their alotted 20 minutes with animal stories, not to mention wondering why local journalists seem to have no curiosity about Aljazeera English or TV2 France (no English subtitles after Dec 31) or DW (German) TV News programmes. Kerre Woodham is probably a lost cause, but bright young thing Noelle (who's done plenty of good work on bFM) might pick up a few tips during her stint on RNZ National over the summer. Some of their news programmes run for an hour.

> Despite the swag of journalists sent to Australia to cover the recent election, there was precious little insight in their reports, especially on radio and TV. It was easier to check the more authoritative on-line Sydney Morning Herald site anyway. The NZ contingent seemed to latch on to a few well-worn facts which they repeated during every "live" broadcast: Labor leader Kevin Rudd, raised in Queensland in straitened circumstances, went on to become a Mandarin-speaking diplomat, with several international postings including Beijing. If Labor won, it would be only the third time since WW2 that it had done so. If John Howard lost his seat (to "TV presenter" Maxine McKew), he would be only the second PM ousted, since Stanley Bruce in 1929. The Opposition has to take 16 seats from the Government to win. When RNZ National's Danya Levy did try to explain Australia's preferential voting system, she came unstuck. "Unlike NZ's MMP system," she reported, "Australia's is virtually the same as first-past-the-post." Which of course it is not. Many are the candidates who have won the most primary votes, only to lose the seat when "preferences" (voters' second choices) are distributed and added to another candidate's total. What was useful, was Matt McCarten's post-election piece in the Herald on Sunday which argued that there was no connection between Australian and NZ elections.

> Reprinting celebrity interviews from overseas sources is commonplace, but there are traps for the unwary. So it was with the Sunday Star-Times Sunday magazine's piece on veteran Canadian actor Sarah Polley. Sally Williams interviewed her for the UK Telegraph Magazine, where they discussed Polley's debut feature as writer/director, Away From Her. A pity the "Sunday" crew didn't pick up Willliams' errors (also in the Telegraph's on-line edition) - the director is Terrence Malick and Polley has appeared in 40 movies and TV films, not "over 50". Williams made the common mistake of checking Polley's entry on the Internet Movie Database and including TV series and guest roles in her inflated total. And seems the Sunday crew didn't read the interview at all, since it revealed Polley's dislike of glossy photo shoots: she didn't want to appear in "some tiny little dress, right?" Wrong. She got her way for the Telegraph pic, but the SS-T didn't use it, instead featuring a full-page stock-shot portrait, with Polley looking uncomfortably all glammed-up, in what appears to be a...tiny lttle dress. On the plus side, in the same edition of the Sunday Star-Times, Bonnie Sumner's phone interview with UK actor Saffron Burrows, appearing in the NZ film Perfect Creature, was shorter, sharper and more informative.

> There's something about Mary (Kostakidis): The long-standing newsreader spat the dummy at the Australian TV broadcaster SBS, thanks to "improvements" made to its news service by ex-TVNZ executives (managing director) Shaun Brown and (news chief) Paul Cutler. She has since filed a breach of contract claim against SBS and Brown. I predicted trouble when these guys were appointed. Just what is the attraction of the double-header, "happy talk" bulletin anyway? As I've pointed out previously, most Aussie networks had ditched this hokey set-up prior to its introduction to TVNZ in the 1980s. It was a dumb idea then, and it's a dumb idea now. Kostakidis had, to quote Damien Murphy in the Sydney Morning Herald on Oct 06, "married integrity, credibility and style" during 20 years reading the SBS bulletin solo. I can vouch for that; the multilingual Kostakidis was the only reader who seemed able to get her tongue around the pesky Balkan place-names during the period of headline-making conflict in the '90s. The other import from the infamous Brown/Cutler duo was the introduction (to SBS) of the "soft bottom" story. Sometimes known as the "dead donkey" or "cat-up-a-tree" story this is a light/humorous piece used to end a bulletin. While this may be excusable for a commercial channel, on NZ bulletins, this item is often moved up into the first half hour - or earlier. It has no place in a serious public service channel. Jon Stewart satirises the technique on The Daily Show, with his closer - the "moment of zen."

> Yes, it's a disgrace, a shock, it makes New Zealand a laughing stock, somebody should be held accountable - blah, blah, blah. And I'm not talking about The Match, but the "largest inflatable rugby ball in the world," which somebody decided should be dumped in front of Paris' Eiffel Tower. This "high-tech" eyesore has got to be somebody's idea of getting back at the French for...well, something. Surely our cultured and articulate PM must be pulling out all the diplomatic stops when she describes this white monstrosity in glowing terms, urging curious Parisiens to venture inside it. I suspect she doesn't believe her own blurb. Maybe those who commissioned it thought it was going to be NZ's entry in the next Venice Biennale; yes, it's that awful, and it's so easy to get those European cities mixed up. It is possible to juxtapose the traditional with the modern in a striking and imaginative way. Just look at the American architect I M Pei's late 20th century pyramid in the forecourt of the 18th century Louvre gallery in Paris.

> Bits and bytes: A pity the Sunday Star-Times' Rose Hoare, in her report on a Japanese junket in the paper's Escape section, came unstuck in the opening paragraph when she attributed the classic film Ikiru, from Japan's most famous director, Akira Kurosawa, to fashion designer Akira Isogawa. (Somebody was sharp enough to correct the on-line version). Back on TV3, Nightline stand-in Samantha Hayes has been making a reasonable fist of the reader's job, but veteran ITV reporter Tim Ewart and the North Korean city Pyongyang are apparently unfamiliar to her, and she has to learn not to rely on poorly written links, like this one: "Coming up, George Bush puts his foot in his mouth again, and who's happier, men or women?" If you can't pick the error, see your local grammarian. C'mon TV3, shouldn't somebody be giving her a helping hand? Preferably not the staffer who designed the over-the-shoulder graphic for the 6pm News item on teenage drivers' road accidents. The one that read: To Young To Drive?

> The Herald on Sunday update: After three years it's interesting to see how the Herald's entry into the Sunday market has evolved. By chance I heard incoming associate editor Robin Langwell (ignominiously dumped from the top job at North and South mag) interviewed by RNZ's Kathryn Ryan who couldn't help pointing out "but it's a tabloid!" Langwell was unfazed and seemed eager to make some urgently-needed improvements, and candidly admitted that the sheaf of magazine inserts in the paper were mostly "words written around advertising." She got that right. In August, the paper had excitedly announced the appointment of "acclaimed investigative journalist Carolyne Meng-Yee" as assistant editor. A shame that her first piece was a page 3 story which investigated "...a prominent doctor (who) cat-napped a neighbour's cat (Max) and released it across the harbour bridge" It was a print version of the infamous TV (Meng-Yee is a TV One escapee) "dead donkey" news story.

But looking back at my notes on the first edition of the HoS: I had described it as "not all bad", but urged the scrapping of egregious columnists (UK refugee) Michael Barrymore and ("English novelist") Julie Burchill. This eventually happened, but on the downside they also dropped brilliant Aussie cartoonist Michael Leunig, picked up "woman's weakly" refugee Wendyl Nissen (though she's now banished to the gossip pages), incorporated Sport into the body of the paper - rather than a throw-away insert, fine-tuned the View (entertainment) section into a bland collection of O/S reprints, TV "reviews" which are straight from the channels' PR minions, even briefer movie reviews, and for a time, even tried glossy paper. Coincidentally, I had also noted that in one of her early columns "Kerre Woodham gave further confirmation that being one of TV's 'intrepid travellers' does not broaden the mind, with her intemperate comments on our very own political prisoner, Ahmed Zaoui." In her Sept.16 column (3 years later) she appears to have modifed her views only slightly, and launched into a lecture on refugees. However, if she wants to be a credible commentator on international politics, she'll have to do better at geography: Like discovering Burkina Faso. (Her version: Burkina Farso).

In the same issue, columnist Deborah Coddington chose to take a swipe at TV One's reporter Lisa Owen (no argument there) but I do take exception to her snide put-down of Radio National's sharp all-rounder Eva Radich, someone I had suggested could take over Nine to Noon when Linda Clark left. Coddington allows that Radich is excellent in her Concert programme (12-2 weekdays) slot; I assume it's when she encroaches on "her" territory there's a problem. I guess Deb, who doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humour, was not being ironic when she finished her column with "...it was great to see Holmes back, on form (on TV One) later the same night." I know Brian Edwards, on Radio National meant it when he said TV One spending charter money to bring Holmes back was "outrageous." I have to agree, but Brian, the joke's on us. And speaking of irony, how are we to take Steve Braunias' Sunday magazine column of Sept 30, where he states, in his piece on NZ identity: "Yes, yes, writers such as C K Stead are world class, so are musicians such as Shayne Carter, presenters such as Paul Henry, and of course the entire population went to see Peter Jackson's films about orcs and that." Spot the odd one out? Paul Henry's insufferable, condescending manner may suit programmes such as Intrepid Journeys, where this is a virtual job description, judging from the glimpses I've seen. But do viewers really put up with this for breakfast TV? Apparently so, but I never get to check, since I don't watch TV in the morning, and I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who does. But back to Henry. World class? Not next to accomplished all-round veteran media performers like polished and personable Maggie Barry, thank-you.

> David Slack, reporting from Paris on RNZ Nine to Noon regaled listeners with his observations of TV coverage of French politicians. He seemed fascinated by their media skills and urbane manner and was implicity contrasting this revelation with our own pollies, many of whom are poor media performers who do themselves no favours. But Slack did make me wonder why he - and other journalists in all media - had not already discovered the France 2 TV News bulletin (30 min., subtitled, no commercials) which is broadcast nightly at 6pm on Triangle TV in Auckland and Wellington. Regular viewers were treated to ringside seats in the recent French Presidential, and later parliamentary, election campaigns. France 2 newsreaders often interview politicians, including ministers and the PM, in the studio and they keep them there for the whole bulletin, enabling them to comment on items just aired.

> Why do TV3 and TV One find it necessary to include Rugby World Cup items in the news headlines and incorporate them into the first block of the bulletin? Isn't that why the second half-hour of news is devoted to sport? Not only that, TV3 seemed to think their dispute with Sky over RWC screening rights was so important it made the top of their bulletin. Surely even sports fans would have been bored shitless with the legal wrangling which was picked over in interminable detail. And only Prime News could cut from their own WRC backgound item to Eric Young asking (name-of-sports-presenter-who-didn't-get-the-WRC-gig) "What have you got for us in sport tonight?" How long is this farce going on for again?

> Two fascinating interviews, one with former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, by RNZ's Chris Laidlaw [listen here], the other with TV journalist Anita McNaught, by Sunday Star-Times contributor Steve Braunias (no link as it's absent from the SST website). One good, one bad. Which is which? Well, as Fox News would say: "You decide". Hans Blix, in precise English, patiently explained the frustrations of working in Iraq prior to the US invasion in 2003, trying to get "closer to the truth" by a process of elimination. I had the impression he felt he was preaching to the choir when he wearily recalled how he tried to convince the US that just because Iraq had biological or chemical weapons that were "unaccounted for" did not necessarily mean they were hidden, just that they were unaccounted for. Alarmingly, he casually mentioned that he'd never spoken to either Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz - and still hasn't. Best of all, Laidlaw was able to get through the entire interview without using the infamous expression so beloved of his RNZ colleague: "yeah-yeah-yeah."

The McNaught interview was a real puzzler. She was speaking by phone from Mosul, Iraq, embedded with US forces as a correspondent for Fox News Channel. There's two questions for starters, I would have thought. (Plenty of BBC staffers moved to Aljazeera English, but Fox?) But NcNaught was off, speaking "at length, with...fluency and intensity," writes Braunias. So we were told about the conditions at the US military base: "We are remarkably well catered for. Five kinds of porridge... doughnuts, scrupulous hygiene standards, air-conditioning everywhere, diesel generators providing constant electricity..."

TV Newser

Maybe Braunias - and McNaught - preferred to let us see for ourselves the irony in the occupying force bringing home comforts (for itself) to a country which still has precious few of its own 4 years down the track. "One of the mythologies about Iraq is that if the Americans left tomorrow, everything would be fine," says McNaught. Actually everyone realises that when it happens, the US withdrawal is going to be slow and painful. Robert Fisk puts it more bluntly: "The Americans must leave, but they can't leave." But maybe I've been reading too many of those blogs that "really irritate" McNaught, "written by people who've never been to Iraq." And I'm left wondering how McNaught's live reports fit in to the surreal breakfast show, Fox and Friends, hosted by a braying trio who provide a wacky commentary to news bulletins and where Iraq is treated as a country in a galaxy far, far away.

> Much as I hate to be an "I told you so" I have to point out that I predicted ex-TVNZ chief Shaun Brown's appointment to Australia's SBS-TV was an accident waiting to happen. Here's my comment (including the use of the forbidden word 'arguably') from this very site, in 2003:

"Could TVNZ have had a worse year? Am I the only

one who finds it scary that Shaun Brown loses his job

as head of possibly the worst TV network in the world

only to head up SBS-TV in Australia - arguably the best?

Hey, maybe they didn't read his CV."

My Aussie informers have kept me posted on the steady decline of SBS, so the inevitable walkout of top newsreader/SBS founding staffer Mary Kostakidis did not surprise me. In its heyday (when I was watching it) SBS-TV lead the field in virtually every area of activity. Around 20 foreign-language movies and documentaries, many in prime time, each week - some the only English-subtitled versions in the world. Groundbreaking current affairs, arts, local drama production and even sports coverage. When it became a commercial broadcaster to supplement its government funding, the commercials ran between - not during programmes. I'm told that SBS is now indistinguishable from the mainstream commercial channels - a depressing thought. An SBS insider reports here.

> I was surprised to see so many New Zealanders putting the boot into the 17-year-old Miss Teen USA contestant who got into a tangle with an answer to a judge's question regarding a reported 20% of Americans' inability to identify the US on an world map. (But was it a dumb question anyway?) I saw the item on The Late Show where David Letterman who, while amused, pointed out for those who were a little slow that all the contestants would have been counselled by the organisers to relate their answers to the wider world; in other words, regardless of the question topic, put the answer in context. So once she got off the track she never recovered - something which is easy to do for even an experienced performer. Indeed, a few minutes later, Letterman played his nightly example of President George W Bush's "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches," which conclusively demonstrates his inarticulate, bumbling manner. And remember the quiz on international affairs which a TV journalist gave Bush when he was President-elect? He could not even name the President of Pakistan - and scored zero. Note: President Bush is a Yale graduate, forty years' older and nowhere near as pretty as Lauren Caitlin Upton (The Miss Teen USA contestant). As for New Zealanders' knowledge of US geography, how about these boo-boos from people who should know better - journalists! See the item immediately below, and here and here.

> Why do they do it? A TV3 Nightline "interview" with a reporter from the Weather Channel, was nothing of the sort. The guy was doing a stand-up from the Mexican coast during the recent hurricane, opening with: "Hi everybody..." ie: It was a piece anybody could use, and inserting poor Carly Flynn in a box in the corner of the frame does not an interview make. No wonder she looked embarrassed, but she's off to Sunrise, TV3's new breakfast show soon anyway, where this kind of thing will probably go unnoticed. Carly was able to pronounce the name of the US state "Pennsylvania" however, something beyond reporter Whena Owen in her story on two young local actresses signed to Peter Jackson's upcoming film, The Lovely Bones. Owen informed us (throughout her report) the location for the movie would be "Pennslyvania", an error which went unnoticed by TV3's news editor in both the 6pm News and Nightline. Meanwhile back at Prime's 5.30pm News, a Wellington item on a report into police use of Tasers, doubled up on a soundbite from a police spokesman. Shouldn't somebody vet all these reports prior to them going to air?

> Former senior lecturer in political studies at Auckland University, Paul Buchanan, recently fired because of an objectional e-mail sent to one of his foreign students, attracted much support and condemnation. Much of the support was from former students who claimed he was an inspirational teacher, and columnist Matt McCarten suggested "he is regarded as one of the most intelligent, insightful and informed political commentators." I'd go along with that, from my own exposure, in various media, to Buchanan's always interesting views. But that is not the issue here. How could someone so smart, who "did not suffer fools gladly," already in his critical departmental colleagues' sights, offer them such a choice opportunity to dump him? Everyone now knows - or should know - that any e-mail is always liable to come back to bite you, should somebody choose to arrange it. What did surprise me was the Herald on Sunday editorial which asked (in a distinctly feminine tone) "...when will they design a dialogue box [for e-mail programs]...that asks, 'Are you sure you want to send this? I mean really, really sure?'?" Frankly, I'm confronted by too many computer double-checking dialogue boxes already thanks very much. How about thinking for yourself? But back to reality: The e-mail in question was so sloppily written, it must have been done in a hurry, and inadvertently undermined Buchanan's complaint about the poor standard of English among foreign students. Then he compounded the issue by offering (by his own standard) a "simply lame" excuse for his aberration. But should he have been fired by the university? No. Was there a better way of counselling a poor student? Yes.

Footnote: In one of Buchanan's op-ed pieces in the NZ Herald, long ago, he wrote about the post-Gulf War (I) "UN no-fly zones" in Baghdad, perpetuating a myth which the countries which actually decreed these boundaries: the U.S., the U.K. and France, did nothing to dispell, believing (correctly) that everyone would assume they had the UN's imprimatur. And no, the Herald did not think it was worth a correction - but I could write a letter to the Editor...

> It seems the celebrated Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died too soon after Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (on the same day) for it to be of interest to local media. I guess the international news package didn't arrive in time. Both TV One and TV3 managed to cobble together a rough and ready biography for Bergman. Some outlets even awarded him Academy Awards - the BBC World Service's The Ticket gave him 3 - when he actually won none, from 9 nominations, though several of his films did win in various categories and he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. TV One managed to crop the Bergman film excerpts so the subtitles were missing, but PBS NewsHour was even worse, using (American) dubbed extracts. But Antonioni did it tough and didn't get a mention. Even Arts and Letters Daily compiled a stack of links for Bergman - with a lone entry for the equally eminent Italian. Showing a typically civilised view of the importance of culture, the same day France TV2 News spent the bulk of their international bulletin on actor Michel Serrault (who died the day before) and Bergman - a total of about 20 minutes, with French director Regis Wargnier (who directed Serrault's last film) sitting in with newsreader Francoise Laborde.

> A continuing hazard of local TV News bulletins using "clean" feeds of O/S items (where the captions are stripped, to permit individual broadcasters to put on their "own") is their uncertainty in identifying the reporter and /or others appearing in the items. So it was with TV3's US report on Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. One of the unidentified sound bites was from New Yorker writer and media commentator Ken Auletta, a regular on US television. This sloppy approach is commonplace (with all channels) and makes one wonder why they don't simply run these items with the original captions. And TV One has a habit of captioning the US Secretary of State: "Condoleeza Rice" during its news programmes.

> Almost as bad (see below) was the decision by Prime News and TV3 to go with the new Harry Potter book as their lead on July 21. The local connection as far as I could tell was that it was being sold here. Wow, what a scoop. TV One had the good grace to lead with the transfer of child cancer patients from regional centres to Auckland to ensure continued essential treatment.

> The lead story (for every international bulletin) on Wednesday, July 4 was the release of kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston - but not in NZ. It was shuffled into second place to make way for the vastly more important non-story of the aftermath of the America's Cup loss to Alinghi the day before (shock and awe all round) but you could hear the collective sigh of relief when the government announced it was chipping in another NZ$10 million for the next challenge. Phew! How much would Team NZ have scored if they'd won? And just when we thought that TV One would get back to its routine of running BBC World overnight, there were the old guard (the after-guard?) "live in Valencia" replaying the races and getting deep into the post mortem. Most disappointed of all though, were the non-yachting hacks who'd scored a trip to Valencia only to have to come home prematurely. It seemed nobody was left out. Wait, there's TV One's Melissa Stokes (apparently summoned to make up the numbers permitted by the company expense account) there's TV3's Hillary Barry! There's TV3's Carol Hirschfeld. (Poor things had to introduce TV One's race footage to go with their reports). Was anybody left at home? It was left to John Campbell (in Auckland) to joke about the superfluous press gang.

> It seems every TV network in the world was gleefully going with the seemingly spontaneous meltdown of MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski as she refused to read the network's lead item about Paris Hilton's release from jail then tried to burn the script as her co-hosts protested, then, (in an apparent set-up) shredded the offending item. At poor old TV3's Nightline they were busy with a feeble item about a guy selling Paris' garbage on Ebay. Talk about dumb and dumberer.

> What's in a name? Nothing much, according to TV One News, judjing from their report on the legal dispute between fashion designer Trelise Cooper and up-and-comer Tamsin Cooper (no relation!) over their, er, names. Indeed, reporter Juliet McVeigh went so far as to re-name Tamsin as Tasmin Cooper all through her piece on Tuesday, July 3, 6pm bulletin. Even the caption clearly read: Tasmin, despite the correct name appearing throughout the news footage in McVeigh's report. Still, it was interesting to hear Trelise's reason for withdrawing her lawsuit against Tamsin for her alleged "trademark infringement": It would be a year of her "energy and focus" wasted, which could be more productively spent in more positive ways. One wonders what took Trelise, a supposedly savvy businesswoman, so long to realise that all she was achieving was giving her younger rival a huge leg-up through all the free promotion. Oh yeah, and how do her customers feel at the implication that they cannot differentiate between Trelise and Tamsin (or in Juliet McVeigh's case, Tasmin)? And did TV One correct their error before the bulletin finished 45 minutes later? Naah, but they had managed to fix it for the late (10.45pm) bulletin. Compounding the error, the NZ Herald's Sideswipe column reported McVeigh had decided the name was "Tasman - as in the explorer, the sea, the glacier" etc, etc. Not.

> Did that graphic behind TV One newsreader Simon Dallow really say "Shanghi Stock Slump"? I'm afraid so. Not long afterwards, C4's flashy promo for its forthcoming multi-city "Live Earth" concert splashed this same odd spelling in bold type all over my screen. They later corrected it. Still on TV graphics, how about Prime News using a heavier font for its captions. The revamped three-line caption info is a copy of the major networks' style: good contrast between type and background colour, but the subject's name should be the top line in BOLD type, not the second line in an illegible font. This is what an Aussie colleague of mine would call "Chapter one of television."

> David Slack on bFM expained for his hapless flock the perils of jargon for MPs: "The problem is...Wellington beltway jargon. You can only use that inside the beltway." No David, you can scrap "beltway" altogether - please! And hard on the heels of her bagging TV One journo Ruwani Perera for getting into a tautological tangle in one of her reports, Cushla Managh (from RNZ's Media Watch) referred to the Dalai Lama as being like a "chuckly avuncular uncle."

> While it was interesting to see the NZ Herald report on May 24, NZ to host international talks on cluster bombs, even though it was buried well inside, it was unfortunate that the accompanying graphic depicted a sanitised view of this appalling weapon. A cluster bomb is an anti-personnel weapon - designed to kill or maim people; it does not distinguish between soldiers or civilians. The graphic showed the target, a military tank, being "peppered with bomb fragments," where they would have no effect against the tank's armour-plating. Dropped on an unprotected person, the result would be fatal. Worse, many of the "bomblets" do not explode on impact and lie hidden, waiting for unsuspecting civilians - often children - to disturb them, when they are then likely to explode. NZ troops are currently helping to clear an estimated one million unexploded bomblets dropped by the Israeli air force on southern Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict last July.

> A funny thing happened when I was checking some errors in an interview with Chinese actress Gong Li, Bad Girl Blooms, by Tom Rona of Profiles International Media, published in the April 12 NZ Herald's Time Out section (but not on-line). I discovered it was a virtual copy (slightly edited for length, but not errors) of a piece by Australian journalist Paul Fischer, now based in Los Angeles, published on the Dark Horizons site here. While the internet has made it easier for students to download ready-to-submit essays, as they have discovered, it's also easier to check whether they have done so. The same goes for traditional print media. It took me just a few minutes to conclude that Tom Rona does not, as far as I can tell, exist. (I have met Paul Fischer a couple of times, in Sydney). A previous example of this kind of "borrrowing" is apparently not an accident.

> What a pity nobody at Prime News told reporter Liz Seatter in her Anzac Day piece that NZ Army Corps is pronounced "core", not "corpse". And did TV3 newsreader Carly Flynn really mean "broadcasted" the other night?

TV3 News still has no access to an Atlas judging from their 6pm News byline "Kartum, Darfur". I assume they meant the Sudanese capital, Khartoum (local spelling Khartum) and in any case it's nowhere near Darfur, a province in Sudan. And on Campbell Live two weeks' ago, caught Kate Rodger's woeful report on the Spiderman 3 press junket in Tokyo. (One silly question for director Sam Raimi). Her item was not redeemed by the following piece on Shooter star Mark Wahlberg, where the (Aussie?) reporter, in true house style, remained anonymous.

> Environmental science from TV One's Phil Vine on 6pm News, April 2: Every air passenger travelling from Europe to New Zealand "burns 5 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide." Really? What he meant - I think - is that the fuel burned per aircraft passenger on the trip produces 5 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide (a non-flammable gas).

> Worthy of a Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) "Moment of Zen": The TV3 News nightly dramatisation of a poor mite being smacked during the debate over Sue Bradford's "anti-smacking" bill. To compound the issue there was a different clip used each night and no mention of what it was depicting. Was it specially staged footage, stock footage, the "right way" or the "wrong way" to punish a child? Were any children harmed in the (re)creation of these clips? This kind of thing is a TV3 staple (remember the risible "drug rape" reconstructions with shots of sinister-looking tablets being furtively slipped into a drink?) so they shouldn't be taken seriously. But that's the problem, they're dealing with serious issues.

> Since the media were very big on the minutiae of Helen Clark's visit to Washington - extensive coverage of George Bush's comments re TV3 reporter Duncan Garner's suit, Bush's own cowboy boots, the Oval Office meeting (with NZ media squeezed off to one side), the lunch menu etc, etc, it was a shame the NZ Herald photo of Clark and Condoleezza Rice which accompanied Audrey Young's report Spring sees US warming to New Zealand, was descibed as showing the pair "taking a stroll before their meeting". They weren't, of course. They were moving all the way across the sidewalk from Rice's car to the entrance to Clark's accomodation, about 4 metres, as we saw on the TV footage the night before. Too bad, especially as in a sidebar, the Herald had pointed out that the famous Colin Powell quote was that NZ and the US were "very, very, very close friends," rather than "good friends." But there never was going to be a Free Trade Agreement resulting from Clark's trip or apparently anything else substantial to report, so TV at least must have breathed a sigh of relief when the cricket umpire story broke and (both) 6pm News bulletins led with this two nights' running. No mention of course, of BBC reporter Alan Johnston kidnapped in Gaza two weeks' ago. It's almost as though he never existed. RNZ's Morning Report is the only local outlet to have covered this story at all, to my knowledge.

> I've whinged regularly about the omission of photographer credit (in print media) when agency photos are used. Reuters and Getty Images apparently do not make it a contractual requirement, but virtually ALL major international newspapers and magazines do include individual photographer credits for all, not only their own staff. Lonely Planet's Sydney Office (suppliers of travel shots) diplomatically suggested that it maybe because "they can't fit the credit in" that local media follow this practice. It's nonsense, of course. Getty Images gets the credit for the unflattering cover shot (of Naomi Campbell) for the NZ Herald's canvas magazine (March 17). This "backstage" photo was by New York photographer Frank Micelotta. The accompanying story, from the Independent, referred to a photo series of past "supermodels", including Campbell which appeared in W magazine, from photographer Juergen Teller "in his inimitable and particularly unforgiving 'real life' style." What we used to call "candid". But wouldn't it have been more appropriate to have used Teller's (superior) shot of Naomi? Entire slideshow here.

> There really is no excuse for the omission of both source and journalist credit for a recent piece on actor/director Clint Eastwood, And now for his next Magnum opus, published in the NZ Herald. I had to find out for myself it was from Chris Vognar of The Dallas Morning News. And no, he didn't know about its local publication either.

> And still more on credits: How about TV channels stop the egregious, idiotic practice of splitting the screen during closing credits of programmes? Inserting scenes of the upcoming show complete with dialogue soundtrack - the playout theme music is dumped - means viewers are left with unreadable credits, no breathing space between programmes and incomprehensible clips from a show starting in 30 seconds anyway. It's also, I suggest, a breach of copyright. TV3 were first off the mark with this "innovation" (I call it an abomination) and it was quickly picked up by TVNZ (they squeezed the credits horizontally). But many of TV One's UK series like say, Waterloo Road, have minimal - no actor - credits at the beginning. Result: There is no way you know who's in it; you have to check online. Far from being slick or standard practice, it is simply more very sloppy presentation. Almost as bad is the insertion of a trailer for next week's Ep between a drama's closing scene and the end credits. Remember TV One's great two-parter, Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren? Who's was the last face we saw in the final part? Reese Witherspoon! Huh? Oh, OK, she's on next week in Vanity Fair. Phew, for a moment I though she might have been Elizabeth I's long-lost daughter. But really, this kind of thing is inexcusable. Perhaps someone could step in and brief the promo dept. on how this can be done sensibly. To give Prime their due, they seem to have stopped screwing up the closers of their cable shows like Weeds (where I complained bitterly during its first run) and the current, equally brilliant, Huff. Of course, Prime's signal looks as if it's coming from the dark side of the moon, but that's the trade-off, I guess.

> I cannot understand the fuss about the new RNZ National IDs. Either the initial idea for re-branding or the Kim Hill "spoof". I put spoof in quotes because don't forget Hill is not known for her biting wit or apparently, her awareness of the adage about "biting the hand that feeds..." For one who's done very well out of the state broadcaster, I would have thought she could try a little harder to make her programme more than an intrusion into the holiday fill-in A Prairie Home Companion, but maybe Kim feels she's indispensible. (It would be a start if she stopped saying "yeah-yeah-yeah" throughout her interviews). If you're David Letterman you can get away with bagging your employer - as he does regularly with CBS and its CEO Les Moonves. It helps that Letterman is actually funny, of course. One of his running gags is to pretend to forget the NYC mayor's name. "Mayor, mayor...?" "Bloomberg," suggests bandleader Paul Schaffer. Right, Michael Bloomberg, who runs New York city for one dollar a year and who appeared on TIME's latest list of the world's 100 most influential people. So what's the NZ Herald's excuse for spelling his name as Bloomburg in their reprint of Time's list?

> But IDs weren't the only thing on Herald on Sunday columnist Deborah Coddington's RNZ National hit list. Last week she scolded Morning Report for "recycling the same items every hour". You mean like the BBC and virtually every 24-hr News service in the world? Let's not be too hard on the ill-informed critics of public service broadcasting (Radio & TV). Those critics have obviously never been exposed to it, in say Australia, UK or even the US. Let's take Australia where I lived (and worked in TV and film) for nearly 30 years. The ABC - radio and TV - despite suffering a regular barrage of slings and arrows from successive Labor and Conservative governments is always funded, albeit grudgingly, because of huge public support. There is support for its popular staff, especially journalists and the benchmark programs produced in every area - news, current affairs, drama, variety, music and of course, Media Watch. There was also one vital clincher when it came to budget allocation: the organisation would point to New Zealand as an example of a country which had commercialised its Public Service TV channel, resulting in the appalling network we now have. This is something else the Aussies can thank us for - TVNZ.

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