Paul Holmes: Ugly truth about beautiful people

TVNZ's Joanna Hunkin. Photo / Martin Sykes

My old friend Janet Wilson has lit some fire with her remark that the modern complement of female television reporters tends to be young women with tits and no teeth.

The subject is fascinating.

She is right about the age of them. But there seems also to be a movement towards the blonde in the reporting area. Now, neither the youth nor the blondness of the reporters necessarily says anything about the intelligence of the individuals concerned, nor does the development of their teeth.

Teeth, in reporting, take a very long time to harden. But others have observed this week they are young, they are blonde and they tend to be very good looking.

I'm sure, however, they are all very bright. I have met few people in broadcasting who were not.

Having said that I have met quite a few not unintelligent reporters who were nevertheless unimaginative - a worse sin, actually - and they were male and female and it made no difference what colour their hair was nor the shape of their build.

And let me say the same applies in newspapers. They also hire very young women because they do not have to pay them a lot.

Sometimes I despair when I am called by a child from the newspapers who can in no way understand the journey I've had that may have led me to the opinions I hold now. The difference at television is the reporters are seen by a large number of people.

Anyway, I'm sure the new crop of reporters must be bright because with the universities doling out Bachelor degrees in Communications and Media Studies willy-nilly and with so few jobs in the field available, young people will be lining up in their hundreds and the networks will take the best of the best.

And intelligence has to matter because no head of news wants defamation suits flying when he's had a couple on a Friday or Saturday night.

And if the best is also blonde, well, as I observed years ago - when even then I was giving this matter some thought - television is made for beautiful women and often, in television, they are also blonde.

Fortunately with men, it doesn't matter - apart from the newsreader. The newsreader has to look like a newsreader. He is the only man on television who has to be handsome.

The rest of the men can be ugly fellows but television does seem to favour, and attract, may I say, the beautiful woman. It always did and it always will. Beautiful women nearly all want to be on television, I have observed over the years.

No one is ugly, of course. Anyone can be attractive and charismatic. It all depends on a person's attitude to life, to others, to themselves and to the job. Work out how to turn your headlights on and you can blind anyone.

How a woman looks is a difficult thing to talk about in a post-feminist world, but I seriously doubt that youth alone or blondness alone are absolute criteria for a reporting job in New Zealand television. In fact, knowing the difference between criteria and criterion goes a long way, too.

Perhaps Wilson has too high an expectation of journalism and news reporting generally. She started in journalism. That has been her life. I had a different start.

I never assumed that journalism would be different from any other field of life and would have the same number of fraudsters and bullshitters and pretenders and dumb, lazy fleas as any other career.

No one ever said television was the way to heaven or the perfect life. No one ever claimed it to be a place of God. Some television people might believe that of it. I don't think I ever did.

Television to me was, and still is, hard work. Briefing up, reading up. Research. Getting to the core of an issue, getting it right. Getting to grips with stuff. That is hard work. No one can do it for you. No one can pour it into your brain through a tube.

These days, heaven knows, most of the people I interview now are younger than me and most came into Parliament after Holmes started. But I still do the work. In the end, success in television is about doing the work. How you look, ultimately, is secondary.

Hunter S. Thompson said famously television was "a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs". He then added, "There's also a negative side."

We had those words up in the office for a while. We loved them. We all laughed. We recited them to one another. We did so because we knew it to be true in many ways and yet we also knew that good men survive in that trench as well, men who are good in their souls and good at their jobs and were prepared to fight to do things properly.

In fact, Thompson originally made that remark about the music business. You could also apply it to the movie business and to the mobile phone business and the judicial bench and the legal fraternity and the building trade and the food business.

God knows life is tough. People pour acid on one another all the time. If being blonde or young gives you a helping hand, well, so be it. It is the way of the world. If you are neither, make them laugh, keep the fire in your belly and work on yourself.

But Wilson is right about the age thing. It bothers me too. I ask myself every time I sit down and watch New Zealand television news whether I'm going to learn anything I don't already know about life from this attractive, young, female person?

And I know what the answer will be. But that is an age thing, more about my head than the reporter's, I know. There is nothing to be done about that.

More importantly, I ask if I am going to learn anything I haven't read hours earlier online? That is what the reporters Wilson is talking about really need to think about. We have so many other ways of accessing the news now. Make us watch you. Be compelling.

But in the end, all we want, probably, is someone who can manage to tell the story fluently off the top of the head and give us the basics.

And the basics are all that news is going to give us anyway, no matter the accent, or the channel or the medium. You can listen to the flint-edged women on the BBC or the geezer droning on for half the day on CNN but, in the end, all that matters are the basics, regardless of whether the hair is light or dark or the face old or young.

That is all the news is. In the end, while the news tells us someone killed someone else here or there, it cannot tell us why. News can never explain it. News will never have the time.

I read today, for example, that New Zealand thinks an ancient Afghan province will be able to rule itself without us in five years. Right. Thanks. I've put that in the diary. Wake me up then and I'll see if you were right.

What is news anyway but an irritant? You know something? You can go all week without watching the news and end up knowing as much as someone who has.

Okay, I own up, I check online all day. But if by Friday you've missed something it will take you half an hour to catch up.

The New Zealand television news reporting staff are in a period of generational cross-over. In any case, the older women have children and won't work for the money the job pays.

But when this lot leaves to have kids? Mmmm. There might be a problem. Thank God there are so many men, even if some of them are ugly.