This morning I received the following email from Radio New Zealand Communications Manager John Barr:

Hi Brian

Your latest blog post re political interference at Radio New Zealand appears to be based on John Drinnan’s Media column in Friday’s Herald. Radio New Zealand has requested a retraction from the Herald and John Drinnan.

Radio New Zealand provided the following written response to a question from John Drinnan on February 16th in relation to this story. The response was ignored and Drinnan’s subsequent piece suggests political interference in Radio New Zealand programming decisions. This implication is repeated in your blog post. Any suggestion that Radio New Zealand CEO Peter Cavanagh instructed anyone to interview Mr Brownlee is wrong.

I would appreciate it if you could correct this perception.

Radio New Zealand Response to John Drinnan Question of February 16th
Re The Panel and Mr Brownlee

As I understand it Gerry Brownlee was listening to The Panel segment discussing the Christchurch recovery effort and phoned in to contribute to the discussion. He wasn’t immediately able to get through to the programme producers however and was subsequently put through to the CEO via Reception. I can confirm that all communication to the programme was via Reception.

After a brief conversation with Mr Brownlee, the CEO spoke to the manager responsible for the programme and let him know that the Minister was available and keen to make some comments in relation to the Panel discussion but had been unable to speak with any of the production staff. The manager spoke to one the programme’s producers who advised they would be happy to have a chat with Mr. Brownlee before the programme finished.
It is absolutely clear that at no time was there any instruction from the CEO to anyone that Mr. Brownlee should be interviewed. Mr Cavanagh did not arrange for him to be put on the programme.

Regards

John Barr

It is clear that this version of events is entirely at odds with Drinnan’s version in last Friday’s Business Herald on which I relied for my post.  So which version is correct?   Read the rest of this entry »

Good heavens, the idea that Cabinet Ministers could ring up the Director General  of the NZBC, as it then was, and throw their weight around, was already pretty well gone when I was an interviewer on the current affairs show Gallery in the late sixties and early seventies. If the Minister of Broadcasting himself wanted to issue a direction to the Corporation, he had to table the fact in Parliament. And it happened rarely.

One might have thought that 43 years later, the notion that it was OK for government ministers to interfere in the editorial affairs of public radio or television would be considered laughable. But apparently not.

Gerry Brownlee evidently  thought that his status as a Cabinet Minister entitled him to ring up Radio New Zealand and demand a right of reply to comments made on Jim Mora’s Afternoons programme some weeks ago by Christchurch MP Lianne Dalziel. The topic under discussion was of course the Government’s handling of the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes and Dalziel was predictably unimpressed. Brownlee is the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister and seems to have considered that his portfolio gave him the right to demand an instant right of reply on the programme.

The production team disagreed. As a regular contributor on the show, I can tell you that Afternoons is a tightly scheduled programme. It isn’t easy to slot in an additional item. More importantly, Afternoons would almost certainly have been  conscious of the significance of acceding to what amounted to a demand from a Government minister for immediate air time during a live broadcast. Brownlee was told that the programme could not fit him in.  Read the rest of this entry »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watched the second episode of The Nation. Two fairly simple conclusions: Stephen Parker can’t  chair; Duncan Garner can’t interview.

Parker was completely unable to rein in Radio Live’s  Mitch Harris, who seemed to think that the best form of interview is where the interviewee  is not allowed  to answer the question.

Garner’s interview with Gerry Brownlee exemplified the scattergun approach to cross-examination where you fire at random in the hope that one of your projectiles will hit the mark.

Duncan’s interview philosophy appears to have three  aims: to demonstrate that he is a fearsome interrogator; to show that he is a mate and the equal of the person he is interviewing;  and to score a few headlines in tomorrow’s papers. Read the rest of this entry »