John Roughan: Media studies puts an old hand to the test

It is many years since I sat an exam and I'd rather not remember the 1969 equivalent of NCEA level 3.

A great deal of nonsense is written about declining standards of education. School leavers who began sitting their third year's national examinations this week deserve to know their parents had it easy.

They had only one test that really mattered, School Cert. It was the first national exam they faced and it was a bit of a lottery; the results were fiddled to fit the Bell curve of expected intelligence, which meant the mark individuals received for each subject was a figure of mystery to them. It reflected the performance of all their contemporaries as much as their own.

We didn't really understand that at the time. We knew only that once you squeezed through that gate the path to life became straightforward. If you had passed School Cert by any sort of margin your school could award you the next exam, University Entrance, without your having to sit it.

At the start of the following year my class-master, bless him, told us the Bursary was hardly worth the trouble. We should relax and enjoy the final year of school, he said, which we did, swanning about as prefects, luxuriating in power, privilege and long pants, organising parties.

Class time was given over to worldly discussions. If there had been such a thing as media studies in those days, who knows, I might have salvaged something from the exams that I sat in a blur and quickly blotted from memory.

But I doubt it. When the Herald published a sample of questions from a level 3 Media Studies paper on Tuesday, I wondered whether even 30 years in the trade would have got me through.

Question one. Analyse how a specific media industry is organised and controlled?

Organised would be easy enough, but controlled? The markers want to hear about corporate forces, I suspect. The truth is that the media business is organised for the dual purpose of making a profit and providing reliable news. Since a serious publication's profit ultimately rides on the credibility of its content, it is in the interests of both purposes that editorial autonomy is preserved and, by and large, it is.

But somehow I don't think this is the acceptable answer. Possibly I could satisfy the examiners by conceding that the interests of profit and public information can be in conflict when the subject is the media company itself or its product. Not even state-owned media report their own problems with quite the alacrity they address those of others. Witness TVNZ's coverage of its current troubles.

Not so long ago there was a reluctance in newsrooms even to report the errors or embarrassments of rival publications on the principle of "there but for fortune ..." And I've sensed a residue of that in TV3's treatment of the TVNZ story.

But newspapers here are now largely owned by two big Australian publishers and competition, in both business and editorial terms, is much keener than it used to be when long-established local proprietors did not threaten each other's patch. Editors are more likely now to admit their misfortunes and mistakes before papers in the other stable feast on them.

Truthfully the commercial need of editorial credibility is what ultimately controls large news organisations. But I fear I have failed this one. Next question:

Explain the relationship between society and a media genre? I suppose news is a genre. How grand.

When media studies first appeared in schools one of its stated aims was to produce more discerning readers and audiences. My hope was that most people would come to realise what news really is.

It is not what newspapers like to claim they are, a "mirror of their community". News is what does not ordinarily happen in the community. In places where violence, corruption and disaster are daily occurrences they rapidly cease to be prominently reported.

It is where citizens don't expect those things to happen that their occurrence is news. If that seems insultingly obvious it is not realised by just about everybody who complains that the news is unduly dismal.

Thank God the news is usually negative. If peace, love, contentment and prosperity is news in any place you can be sure it is a nasty, depressing, poverty-stricken place for most of its inhabitants most of the time.

News does itself no favours, I believe, by focusing so tightly on the disturbing.

After last summer's Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, I longed for the cameras to pull back from the beaches just occasionally and show us buildings still standing, streets still busy and people going about their lives as normal.

I still have no idea how far they would have had to pull back, and that's the point. I never received an idea of the limit of the damage. There seems to be a belief in news gathering that unless you fill the frame with devastation you reduce the impact of the story. But this means the picture people receive has no frame, no definition, no perspective.

This applies to the words as well as the pictures. News loves stark facts and figures that look worse in isolation than they might in a wider context.

You realise the power of imprecise news when something happening locally is reported widely. When Ruapehu erupts people in Auckland get anxious calls from abroad asking if they are okay.

News is really no different from ordinary conversation. Interest is engaged by the exceptional, the tragic, the worrying, funny or salacious. But people have a way of keeping a sense of perspective in conversation that news needs to learn.

I don't hear in conversation, for example, much fear of bird flu or shock at Marc Ellis' purchase of a party drug, or any audible evidence that higher house valuations send the owners crazy with their credit card.

This is straying too far from the topic and time's up. Whatever problems remain with the NCEA, I'm glad there were simpler exams in my day.