Ross Giblin/The Dominion Post

 Why should we care about Radio New Zealand?

Because it is the only broadcast medium in the country that takes the time to examine issues of consequence to New Zealanders at length and in depth. It can do so because, and only because it is a non-commercial radio network. It is not beholden to advertisers, does not need to concern itself with ratings – though many of its programmes outrate its commercial competitors – and its programmes are not interrupted or abbreviated by the irritating presence of advertisements.

Radio New Zealand’s success in commanding a large and loyal audience with programmes such as Morning Report, Nine to Noon, Checkpoint, Afternoons, Kim Hill’s (and formerly my own) Saturday morning show, gives the lie to the proposition that the public are not interested in social and political debate or intelligent conversation. They are.

In contrast the free-to-air commercial television channels offer us quasi ‘current affairs’ programmes such as Close Up and Campbell Live whose function is less to inform than to entertain and whose mandate is to retain the ratings momentum generated by the channels’ preceding news, sport and weather packages.

The entertainment ethos that drives these programmes – and the channels’ network news bulletins as well – is that the viewer has a limited attention span, requires constant stimulation and novelty, and has little appetite for the serious examination of social and political issues. To be palatable, what information the programmes offer must be served up in tasty, bite-sized chunks. Nothing too long, nothing too tough, nothing requiring chewing. The viewer must be given no excuse to reach for the remote to change the channel.

This explains why the commonest thing said on either Close Up or Campbell Live is, ‘I’m sorry, we’ve run out of time.’ Of course the programme hasn’t ‘run out of time’ at all, it simply hasn’t allocated enough time. As a matter of policy these programmes try to run at least three items in the less than 22 minutes  of airtime allocated to them each weeknight. Can you deal effectively with a complex social or political issue in seven minutes? No you can’t. But that is the price the networks believe you have to pay if you are to satisfy your core commercial brief – to sell audiences to advertisers.

If this seems like a cynical view of the free-to-air channels, consider the placement of Q&A, the only network television programme worthy of being called ‘current affairs’. Why is it on on Sunday morning? Because the programmers believe that no one would watch it in peak or even off-peak time; because it’s about politics; because it has long interviews; because it has smart people discussing the week’s news; because – or so the programmers believe – it’s boring.  And Sunday morning is commercial free anyway and therefore worth – nothing.

Commercial radio does no better than commercial television and probably worse. The saturation level of advertising required to keep the stations viable makes any discursive examination of issues impossible. For a few months I worked as a morning host on Radio Pacific. I vividly recall an interview I did with Alex Haley, the author of Roots. Haley was speaking movingly about his slave ancestry.  Every four or five minutes I could hear my producer in my ear, telling me that we had to take a break to go to the commercials or to the next race at Trentham. ‘This time…’ It was embarrassing to me and demeaning to my guest. On National Radio’s Top of the Morning, a decade later, I could have devoted 40 uninterrupted minutes to that interview with a listenership of up to 340,000 people, outrating every other radio station in the country.  

Commercials and quality radio simply do not go together, which is the very best reason why RNZ should resist any attempt by the government to introduce sponsorship into its programmes. Sponsorship is simply the thin edge of the wedge that will lead to the full commercialisation of the only worthwhile radio network in the country – the destruction, in other words, of public radio in New Zealand.

Why should we care about Radio New Zealand? Not least because democracy requires an informed populace that has access to disinterested news reporting and the discursive and probing analysis of social and political issues and is beholden to no-one other than its listeners – not to government, not to political parties, not to power elites, not to commerce, not to the hawkers of goods and services.

That is why we should care about Radio New Zealand.