Comment - Blurred e-lines between transparency and corporate gatekeepers
Title -- 5407 REGION: Comment - Blurred e-lines between transparency and corporate gatekeepers
Date -- 30 March 2008
Byline -- None
Origin -- Pacific Media Watch
Source -- Avaiki Nius Agency 28/03/08
Copyright - ANA
Status -- Unabridged
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Comment:
BLURRED E-LINES BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND CORPORATE GATEKEEPERS
http://avaiki.blogspot.com/
WITBC Aotearoa 08 photos
By Jason Brown, editor, Avaiki Nius Agency
AUCKLAND (ANA/Pacific Media Watch): Haunting sounds of a powhiri echo in the background of a cellphone call, live, from the world's first indigenous television broadcaster conference.
“Oh, so you're a nobody,” says Vanessa Horan, her voice overlaying the traditional Maori welcome.
Horan was calling about a story filed a minute or so earlier to Pacific Media Watch, highlighting the fact there were only two broadcasters from Pacific Islands.
Just "two" - Fiji and Hawaii - in a region of 22 countries and territories with close cultural and historical links to Aotearoa.
Horan sounded annoyed, audibly so, about the story.
Web-cited as “publicist” for WITBC Aotearoa 08, the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Conference in Auckland, New Zealand, she claimed the story was “untrue” and called for a retraction.
She did not respond to a request for clarification of what was not accurate.
Her annoyance was understandable, perhaps, in a close knit country of four million, where the phrase “Maori bashing” is media shorthand for mainstream negativity aimed at the indigenous minority.
But her response also reflects what some regard as a deeply corporate culture in one of the most free market economies in the world - at a time when neo-liberal policies from the 1980s and 1990s are in retreat from opponents increasingly well organised via the internet and text messages.
The powhiri ended and delegates got down to business at what the main daily, the New Zealand Herald would report next day was, for the “most part” a “cheerful affair.”
The daily's story by Yvonne Tahana was headlined with criticism from the Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, who described an alleged lack of prominent Maori content at Television New Zealand, as “somewhat shameful".
Dr Cullen told 17 nations at the conference that the “state broadcaster has not kept up” with efforts by the state-funded broadcaster, Maori Television, hosts of Aotearoa 08.
TVNZ spokeswoman Megan Richards said Dr Cullen was “confused.”
She described his comments as “interesting” when TVNZ was required under its charter to not just meet public interests but profit and dividend requirements as well.
TVNZ received about 10 per cent of its funding from government, one of the lowest rates worldwide, said Richards.
The charter was adopted in 2003 after criticism that the state broadcaster had become overly corporatised and was failing to reflect indigenous aspirations as required under the country's founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.
Charter scrutiny
Since its adoption, the charter has come under increasingly intense scrutiny for putting the state broadcaster between a rock and a hard place - required to pay its own way through ruthlessly competitive pursuit of low brow, high rating shows, but also achieve prominence for low rating minority programming.
Similar schizophrenia is evident across town at Niu FM, another state-funded broadcaster, set up to broadcast language programmes aimed at Pacific Islanders.
Station programming is set by a palagi - a European New Zealander - and American-style rap and hiphop music plays on much higher rotation than anything readily identifiable as Pacific Islands.
The station now appears to be engaging in the same kind of ratings war as TVNZ, competing with the country's sixth most popular private FM station, Flava 96, aimed at a rapidly expanding demographic - Polynesian youth.
Niu FM recently came under unprecedented scrutiny when it moved a long time news editor sideways into current affairs, replacing her with a public relations practitioner who happens to be sister of a politician from the ruling Labour Party.
Station managers objected to media questions, insisting there was “no story” but the change attracted attention from TVNZ's One News, and Radio Australia's Pacific Beat show.
Pacific Beat's Bruce Hill quoted former president of the Auckland-based Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), John Utanga, as saying that critics were urging listeners to write in and complain about the changes to the editorial line up at Niu FM.
The critics' choice of weapon?
A campaign based around mass cellphone text messages, adding to increasingly blurred lines between transparency and the public right to know, on one side, and, on the other, traditionally secretive corporate entities and their public sector counterparts in government departments.
Old school gatekeepers
Search for identity is not confined just to minorities, it seems, but also to old school information gatekeepers in a dizzying era of instant feedback via weblogs, websites, RSS feeds, and other transformative “knowledge economy” developments that have already largely bypassed formerly popular notions of “e-commerce” or even “information superhighways.”
Even those at the cutting edges of media have difficulty keeping up.
A journalism trainer described controversy over events at Niu FM in typically pre-web terms.
“When you get any kind of controversy like this it doesn't exactly help,” Jim Tucker, a long time trainer formerly executive director of the New Zealand Journalism Training Organisation (JTO), told Pacific Beat.
Living and working in small communities like the Pacific Islands, or even its relatively larger neighbour, New Zealand, is no protection from technologically "empowered" audiences.
“New Zealand doesn't have six degrees of separation, it has about two.”
Somewhere in this big picture fruit salad, an annoyed publicist and, the next day, rumours of a reporter being “banned” from the WIBTC.
Vanessa Horan normally works for Maori Television and, for the conference, keeps her title as “kaiwhakaputa”, which translates as publicist, rather than press, media or even public relations.
In fact, as more details emerged about Aotearoa 08, there were more than two Pacific Islands attending.
One TVNZ source said there were also representatives from French Polynesia, in town on a separate mission but taking time to attend.
Separately, responding to the PMW story from Suva, Fiji TV CEO Ken Clark told Pacific Islands Journalists Online that Papua New Guinea was also attending, as was a manager from Cook Islands Television, bringing the country count to four.
“In our view, since this was the first conference dedicated to television matters for indigenous peoples around the world, it was important to be present and involved as we develop programming of whatever brand for the peoples we serve.”
He defended efforts by organisers of Aotearoa 08 to attract attendance from the Pacific Islands.
“Maori Television promoted the conference extremely well and with great enthusiasm. Time will tell us what the outcome of the attendance will be but there are very capable people organising and presenting.”
No shows
Within the industry, Pacific Islands media are well known for being difficult to coordinate.
Organisers of an annual convention for New Zealand-based Pacific Islands Media Association were equally annoyed, last year, for example, when a representative from their island counterpart, PINA, the Pacific Islands News Association, accepted an expensive ticket to the event but failed to show up.
Informal histories of PINA itself are legion with no-shows at regional conferences, ruinously costly to attend across the Pacific, an ocean of nearly 170 million sq km, the world's largest feature.
Even those who do sign in for the first day of a media workshop or conference have been noted, over the years, for using precious per diem payments on shopping and boozing sprees.
On one notable occasion, a male delegate attending a workshop aimed at mainstreaming gender issues was caught hiring a prostitute after hours. He was summarily sacked after returning home to Papua New Guinea.
At the time, colleagues kept lips zipped and reported nothing about his sacking or circumstances behind it.
This uneasy quiet seems increasingly unlikely to survive in an era when a mere "nobody'" - a blogger sitting at home for instance - can be berated via cell phone against a hypnotic century old chant, or expose a media star like Dan Rather in the United States and cause their sacking.
As more journalists approach e-commerce speed, their counterpart publicists, press officers spokesmen and women will find hyper-connectivity very much a double-edged sword.
* WITBC 08 website:
http://witbc.org/
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