Wide Area News
Chewing over the charter
by Russell Brown
It’s past time a decision was made about TVNZ and its conflicting objectives.
Opposition politicians hoping to embarrass the government in the course of the select committee inquiry into TVNZ got an early Christmas present with outgoing CEO Ian Fraser’s startling assault on the broadcaster’s board and, on the same day, the resignation of board member Ann Hercus.But for all its sizzle, Fraser’s key allegation – that he had been undermined by his own board, and by one member in particular – leads nowhere. The board’s John Goulter has emphatically denied Fraser’s allegations, and there is no evidence to prove the case either way. The most grievous claims of interference concern the negotiations over the salary of Judy Bailey, who has already left the building.
On the other hand, the memo from Fraser to his board in October – leaked, with exquisite timing, to the Greens – goes to the heart of TVNZ’s (and, by extension, the government’s) dilemma.
Fraser alerted his board to a “major commercial problem with [TV] One”. Programmes produced in line with the charter bequeathed by the Labour-led government to TVNZ simply could not be accommodated in current schedules, and “commercial reality” would mean having to “can such charter initiatives or consigning charter programmes to inhospitable places in the schedule unless they are ‘sure bets’”.
The memo was seized on as an indictment of the charter, but it is no more that than it is an indictment of the commercial model that effectively forbids the broadcaster to surrender any share of the advertising market or damage the commercial value of its business. Neither is particularly faulty in itself, but together they seem increasingly incompatible. The problem is that any risk potentially erodes TVNZ’s commercial market leadership, so TVNZ becomes utterly risk-averse.
Government ministers are gamely insisting that they have no plans to reconsider TVNZ’s dual remit – public service and a commercial dividend – but they would be fools to believe the broadcaster can simply carry on as it is.
Part of the problem is that little seems to happen. TVNZ has competent and enthusiastic staff working on digital and interactive projects, with no real indication of when they might go public. As far back as February last year the idea of a third, “PBS-style” channel for charter-friendly programming was canvassed; it never went anywhere.
Fraser’s memo posited three new options: making One a fully-funded non-commercial public service channel; making it a semi-commercial channel; and adding two new digital channels to provide public service programming. Another option – either selling or leasing TVNZ and placing the public service obligation in a system of contestable funding overseen by New Zealand on Air – has been aired by South Pacific Pictures CEO John Barnett and taken up by Opposition MPs.
All four have problems. The first two require the government to surrender revenue and ask the taxpayer to make up the difference. The third, digital option could only happen in the short-term if TVNZ went to Sky Television for the additional channels – which might be a death-knell to TVNZ’s plans for an independent digital terrestrial service, thereby entrenching Sky’s monopoly on digital transmission.
And the fourth? Fully contestable public funding models can sound like a good idea (especially for independent producers) but they have serious shortcomings, as the local science and research sector is discovering. In the interests of consistency and long-term strategising, it is useful to have a genuine public institution, able to make its own decisions, in the mix.
The government has gone for a steady hand on the tiller by appointing Sir John Anderson, the retiring chief executive of ANZ National Bank, as the next TVNZ board chairman. It can’t afford to go the same way for Fraser’s replacement. The times call for a genuinely strong new chief executive – with a mandate to take risks, and guaranteed operational independence – to make the kind of decisions that are so tricky at a political and policy level.
Don’t blame it on the blogger
Last year Chris Harrington, a producer for TVNZ’s Sunday programme, said in an interview on National Radio’s Nine to Noon that a Sunday investigation into historical sexual abuse at Wellington’s Berhampore Orphanage had been “appropriated” by a local blogger who wrote about the abuse and used material from Sunday without attribution.
Harrington was indignant, even angry, about what he regarded as plagiarism of a lengthy investigation, and told the host, Eva Radich, that this was symptomatic of the lack of any ethical structure for the new generation of bloggers.
While not naming the blogger, Harrington quoted his motto (“I think, therefore I blog”), and that was enough for Jason Watson of KeaBlog to publicly identify himself and file a Broadcasting Standards complaint over the interview.
Harrington told the Listener that he was “99.9 percent sure” that Watson had, without attribution, lifted material from Sunday for a piece on his blog. The material included quotes from the main subject of the programme, Kathleen Batchelor.
“It is conceivable that she said exactly the same things [to Watson], I suppose, but I very much doubt it,” says Harrington. “There is no doubt that the story was started by Phil Kitchin, on TVNZ, working for Close Up – and then getting the police to admit that they were going to charge Walter Lake. None of that was attributed, and he hadn’t talked to the police.”
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