It was poet and philosopher George Santayana who said, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” Such is the case with TVNZ’s homage to its own history, the jauntily named “Cheers To 50 Years.”
This was a programme touted as a celebration of all that we’ve known and loved on the box for the past half-century but which resulted in the boring vying with the banal for two excruciating, culture-cringing hours.
Notice anything different about the front page of the Royal New Zealand Herald lately?
Take yesterdays headlines; “What Your Home’s Worth”, “The Envelope Please….Oscars Special” and “Mayoress Speaks Out” a teaser to a page three piece of dross which had Michael Laws’s wife, Wanganui’s Mayoress Leonie Brookhammer, denying she had left the family home because of a supposed ‘violent confrontation’ that had been misleadingly reported in the Herald on Sunday.
Ms Brookhammer later published a damning response to the story on Dave Farrar’s “Kiwiblog” site.
Equally, ‘The Lockout of Auckland’ also came from the same Fear and Smear School of Journalism, generating more hysteria than light on the subject of Auckland governance.
If all of this shabby tabloid tack seems more reminiscent of the Herald’s sister paper the “Herald on Sunday” (known by the apt acronym the HoS) there’s a reason for that.
There comes a time when virtually everyone in business and public life finds themselves in (to use a highly technical term) “deep doggy doo-doos”. This is a moment when the public and the media have, for whatever reason, rounded upon them with a vengeance.
Whether an act of omission or commission the newsmakers generally find themselves embroiled in a crisis, seemingly without warning.
If they are honest with themselves they will probably admit they should have seen the consequences of their action (or inaction) coming and they could have evolved a response plan, put it on the shelf, crossed their fingers they would never need it, and moved on with their activities knowing that, if worst came to worst, they could cope with the crisis.
Every good business has a business continuity plan, what to do if it has an IT failure, a power loss or natural disaster strikes.
Good businesses should also worry about and plan for what happens if the unnatural disaster of a media furore erupts around them.
Which is why I have to ask: What was Dr Patrick Strange and Transpower thinking? Transpower has had more power cuts in this city than Aucklanders have had cold dinners.
In the Silly Season, lists, labels and mock awards reign supreme as columnists, hacks and bloggers scramble to write something, anything, in the news vacuum.
Hey, I know this as much as any other poor sap, I’m one of ‘em.
So, to that end, let’s joyfully enter into the fresh New Year fray and examine who’s who when it comes to The Soundbite Tribes. These are the men and women who regularly fill newspaper columns with quotes, whose soundbites grace our screens and fill the airwaves.
Like any tribe these media practitioners are defined by what they say, how they deliver it and how they look when they do so.
Oh dear. There has just been another cock up at TVNZ that will probably cost the broadcaster dearly.
TVNZ announced today it had “offloaded” its Commonwealth Games coverage rights to Sky/Prime TV.
The only problem is – it hasn’t. Yet.
Bill Ralston Blogs:
It’s taken the mainstream media long enough to wake up to the fact it has been cleverly duped by an extraordinary guerrilla PR campaign.
Well, some in the media are now waking up to what bloggers like Cactus Kate and Gotcha’s Whaleoil were warning about days ago.
Exceltium is a savvy PR company run by Matthew Hooten and it seems it has waged an extraordinarily effective campaign on behalf of their client Diagnostic Medlab Ltd (DML) against their competitor Labtests NZ Ltd.
Labtests recently took over the lucrative contract to provide services to Auckland’s District Health Board and the loser, DML, has been screaming like a stuck pig.
