Dialogue: Viewers have clear idea of TV heaven

PAUL SMITH* says changes must be made at Television New Zealand to provide a balance that informs, entertains
and presents new ideas for viewers.

Debate about the future of Television New Zealand has continued with viewpoints on the Dialogue page from Professor Barry Spicer, the dean of Auckland University's Business School, and Bruce Wallace.

Normally Mr Wallace represents free-to-air broadcasters, but this time he offered his personal perspective.

Between them they said that the network does not deserve the fate of reform because it exists in the best of possible worlds, serving the finest ends of commerce, of governance and the Government.

Maybe, but that assumes we live in telly-nirvana. As always, there is room for improvement not only for the network but for our television system.

Mr Spicer was concerned not only for the future of TVNZ as a state-owned enterprise, but for all state-owned enterprises, given the Government's plans to return TVNZ to public service broadcasting. However, he never once mentioned the word "viewer." In the end, the proposed changes are all about serving the viewer as both consumer and citizen.

He worried about confusion in governance, conflicting structures and remits. But he forgot that the need for reform arises from just such an organisational confusion. TVNZ's priority as a state-owned enterprise is to run as successfully as comparable businesses not owned by the Crown. This has always been controversial, for television is not only business but a cultural asset which belongs to all New Zealanders.

Mr Spicer offered a managerial perspective of television with all its notions of performance criteria, transparency and efficiency. On these accounts, TVNZ has been a great performer and deserves credit for maintaining revenue and ratings.

But when these two factors become the touchstone of creativity, originality suffers. We get not the television we want or deserve, but television modelled by governments, networks, advertisers and agencies for their mutual gain.

Mr Spicer also mentioned the loss of accountability as if this flourished outside the ledger in the state-owned enterprise model. Like the rest of us, he also worries about political interference. The state-owned enterprise form did not guard against this any more than the previous structure. It simply presented the facade of commercial purity.

Finally, Mr Spicer is concerned about loss of shareholder value. If it is accepted that the real shareholders are the people, the TVNZ charter and the retooling of the network should add value of a sort rarely discussed by market commentators.

Mr Wallace is right when he says our television has always been commercial, but in television's infancy it was limited to half the week. In the mid-1970s, just before two-channel competition, advertising rose from four days a week for each channel to five days. In 1985, it rose to six days. Under deregulation it became a seven-day affair.

In 1974, a balance existed between licence fee (42.5 per cent of revenue) and net advertising (56.6 per cent). Then, in the first of two National Government squeezes, new Prime Minister Rob Muldoon froze the licence fee for nine years. By 1985 the respective figures were: advertising, 77.8 per cent; licence fee, 16 per cent.

Mr Wallace said there was no indication that advertising levels should be reduced. That was probably news to viewers and would have surprised the 1985 Royal Commission on Broadcasting, which wrote: "There exists a diffuse desire in the public that advertising should be reduced and limited particularly on television."

Instead, the reverse occurred. The National Government froze the fee for another nine years, forcing television into unprecedented commercialism. A 1997 New Zealand On Air report found that advertising clearly emerged as a major irritant, with 71 per cent of viewers surveyed saying the amount was unacceptable. Somehow a balance has to be regained.

Mr Wallace points out correctly that TVNZ has 71 per cent of the viewing audience and so appears to meet the needs of many members of the public already. This media populism assumes that people really decide. But when ratings and revenue requirements dominate the choices offered, viewer freedom becomes a diminished thing. Ratings - once described as a fiction we have all agreed to believe in - remain a controversial measure of success.

Mr Wallace also asked whether television should be engineered in the interests of the government of the day - but history shows that every television era has.

The 1980s deregulators fashioned the present system with their customary haste - three months - and neatly swapped public service television for local content, which is not the same thing. Deregulation did, however, treble local production and offered more channel choice.

Increasingly, though, it also led to discontent over formulaic content and superficiality. New Zealand On Air surveys show that local content now represents only 24 per cent of programming on the major networks, the level it was 30 years ago. Today's proposed changes simply tilt the balance back in favour of the people. According to New Zealand On Air, they want to be informed (95 per cent), entertained (93 per cent) and given the opportunity to learn and think about new and different things (93 per cent). Of those surveyed in 1997, 40 per cent felt television was worse than it was two years earlier.

Now we have a draft charter and an opportunity to do more, differently. New forms of funding are being examined, along with structural change. All these moves are being pilloried, which would not have surprised Machiavelli, who once wrote: "There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new."

* Paul Smith, a former media commentator, is a Television New Zealand board member.