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.

I read that Sean Plunket has lost his ERA case against Radio New Zealand. The Authority appears to have based its decision around the potential for a perception of conflict of interest, were Plunket to write a political column for Metro. This, as I indicated in an earlier post, was the only proper decision the Authority could come to.

Photo: Radio New Zealand

Sometime after my unceremonious sacking by Sharon Crosby as host of Top of the Morning, I was interviewed on Morning Report by Sean Plunket. I was surprised by the vehemence of Plunket’s questioning. His theme was that there had been a clear conflict of interest between my role as media advisor to the Prime Minister and my role as host of the Saturday morning programme. Had Top of the Morning been a political or current affairs show, he would have been quite right. But it wasn’t. It was a magazine show, devoid of any political content. Of the 750-odd interviews I did on the programme, only three were with politicians and in every case dealt with the guest’s life and times, not with their political views. Interestingly enough, I interviewed Jenny Shipley on the programme, but never Helen Clark.

The high moral ground which Plunket was occupying then seems to sit uneasily with his current assertion that he should be allowed to engage in political commentary outside his job as Radio New Zealand’s top current affairs interviewer on Morning Report. He should not. The issue here is one of perception. Whether he writes approvingly or disapprovingly of a party’s or politician’s policies or performance, his own political independence as an interviewer will be challenged and compromised. I suspect that Radio New Zealand will be flooded with complaints from both sides of the political spectrum. He would, in my view, be a liability to the company rather than an asset and unemployable in his current role.

Most interviewers are intelligent and informed people and it would be nonsense to think that they do not have personal political opinions and preferences. But as professionals, they understand that they must leave those opinions and preferences behind when they are doing their job.  In the late 60s and early 70s I was regularly interviewing politicians on the television programme Gallery. Privately I was a Labour supporter. But I never allowed that to influence my interviews. Indeed, there is a danger that I may have overcompensated to avoid that impression. Certainly, the then Leader of the Opposition, Norman Kirk, saw me as anything  but an ally.

Despite Kirk’s opposition, I stood for Labour in Miramar in the 1972 general election. That, of necessity, spelled the end of my career as a current affairs interviewer. Though I could have conducted interviews in a perfectly fair and disinterested manner, as I had before, no-one would have believed it. The cat was out of the bag. There would have been a perception of bias.

If Plunket starts writing about politics, he will invite that perception every time he expresses a view.

There was to be a sequel to my interview with Plunket on Morning Report. Some years later Judy and I were running a training session with a major New Zealand organization. During a break for coffee, one of the principals observed that they had been pleasantly surprised by our fees. They’d paid much more for a previous session with someone else. After a lot of cajoling they told us what they’d paid and who had done the training. Both pieces of information were surprising. The fee was indeed considerable and the trainer was Sean Plunket.

But the most surprising piece of information was yet to come. They had, they said,  made several appearances on Morning Report and been interviewed by Plunket both before and after the training. Had Plunket softened his interviews as a result of his business relationship with the organization? On the contrary, they were surprised to find him just as hostile as ever.

That, at least, did not surprise me. Plunket is a professional and he retained his professionalism even while interviewing his own clients.

But it still won’t do. The most telling part of this episode is that after the training  his (and later our) clients expected him to go more easily on them and were surprised when he didn’t.  Had his radio  audience been aware of this situation, that expectation would have extended to them too.

My understanding is that Plunket no longer does media training and it’s entirely possible that this was a one-off. He is also not the only radio or television interviewer to do a bit of training on the side. What is concerning is that neither he nor some of his supporters in this case, seem to grasp that the reality of their neutrality as political interviewers is not enough. There must be a public perception of that neutrality as well.

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