by Gavin Maclean
What a lot of issues the demise of TV3 news raises — and what a lot of cherished myths that stop us from making life better. The Feb 29 editorial neatly encapsulated six of them: the state-owned alternative, competition, journalism, democracy, employment, advertising. Rest assured, this cloud is macroeconomic good news, nearly all silver lining. The fact that it’s tough on workers is just how the system is designed. Perhaps it really is changing. We need basic income provision, universal.
There’s nothing wrong with a single state-owned medium, as we had in the past. It’s the best guarantee of quality, can be protected by legislation from government interference, and, as with many other public services, can be the cheapest and most efficient.
Private ownership, depending on advertising, seriously undermines media neutrality. Both overtly and subtly, this is far more dangerous than a regulated public service. Mainstream media, like The Gisborne Herald, cope surprisingly well with this conflict; but the result is a compromise, with an underlying “growth is good” mentality.
Private ownership lowers standards without lowering costs. Twenty years ago, in Debunking Economics, Steve Keen showed how, in any industry, competing firms can cost as much as monopolies, and the marketplace has continued to endorse that theory ever since.
In television, competition reduces standards shockingly, fighting to appeal to the lowest common viewer, who apparently demands chatty presenters, preferably more than one at a time, and has an average age of seven and an attention span of as many seconds.
Advanced symptoms of the competitive virus are the mindlessness of commercial music, and radio advertisers compulsively screaming “ninety-nine-ninety-nine”.
Journalism and the environment also suffer. Television reporters, however impressive their research, duplicate each other at ridiculous cost — and in desperation to hold our supposedly infantile attention, feel constrained to wave their hands around on camera, emphasise small words and syllables out of proportion (going FROM home TO the shops ON Friday), infantilise their English, and Americanise their accents.
Democracy has been misrepresented in the debate. Apart from illiterate Luxon and Seymour talking about “a media” when they mean “a medium”, it’s stupid of reporters to consult the minor co-leaders of a cobbled-together caucus as if they are real leaders. One’s bad enough. They are unprincipled opportunists who, along with the journalists who have for too long shaped our election thinking, simply don’t understand the very real possibilities, and term-to-term stabilities, of minority governments.
Unemployment gets doubly twisted in our prevailing economics. The financial cost of employment screws it one way; the human cost of job-loss the other. In a world that must consume less to survive, jobs must disappear, and with them, the very word “unemployment”, as people do more good work and fewer stupid jobs.
The process has begun, helped by automation and factors physical and financial, but it makes misery because we haven’t started to think and plan this way.
Well, the business world hasn’t. All over the developed world, we seem to think jobs are the only way to share income. Jobs share the wealth utterly unfairly; fighting for jobs makes people insecure and unhealthy; over-employment stops people from doing all sorts of good work; and inventing jobs instead of just sharing makes waste and destruction — from everyday commuting and pollution all the way up to building weapons in countries that should know better, and then weeping when another country fires them.
Advertising, of course, is nearly all waste, and its main purpose is to encourage needless consumption and planetary destruction. How could we possibly depend on it to supply media wisdom?
