Penn Raine: Listen Up, Radio New Zealand

I’ve a lot of time for Stickman, Pak’nSave’s poster chappie, but wonder how he has resisted being dressed in a frock and rainbow scarf. Perhaps his Foodstuffs’ mum and dad took to heart how the Australian Woollies’ brand was vilified for snubbing Australia Day, and the subsequent defenestration of its CEO, Banducci. His attempts to paint a friendly face on the company whose shady majority shareholders are Blackrock and Vanguard by insisting chummily that he be known as ‘Brad’ did him little good. Although Ozzies had been peevish over Woolworth’s perceived price-gouging, it took Brad’s refusal to let them buy tacky plastic merch to celebrate their national day to persuade them to boycott the retailer.

If Foodstuffs have a laminated notice of ‘Go woke, go broke’ on the wall in Head Office they’re wiser than TVNZ, Radio New Zealand and most national dailies. As the tumbrils rolled along Eden Terrace and Te Aro this week towards Newshub many an onlooker watched and wondered when they would come for all the other media entities whose hoovering up of the PIJF money lake must soon end.

Surely there’s at least one media consultancy firm in the Wellington beltway bright enough to tell its clients that the under fifties cohort are bored with their offerings and those over fifty are infuriated by them. But no doubt it’s occurred to them that such a simple fix will lose them business and so they carry on telling MSM that identity politics are the way out of the slime of fiscal failure.

A recent RNZ Saturday morning slot struck the DEI trifecta with an interviewee who was mixed race, gay and – icing on the cake- recently diagnosed with a disability. I bet that producer’s selection made RNZ’s Rainbow Tick certification costs worth its while and had John Campbell, that notable blogger, beaming with approval.

NZ Herald’s breathless description of Campbell’s defence of his ‘journalism’ last week as ‘elegant’ was a comedy high point. The take for the rest of us from his self-justification was that all journos are now opinion writers and that he feels he can justify his unapologetic political stance because he’s, in his own words, ‘human’.

As opposed to being AI, perhaps. But that’s a whole other discussion.

While the conversation gathers heat about defunding the lossmaking media among taxpayers tired of hearing that the world is going to fry by next Christmas, that some Jewish people stole Israel and men menstruate, up steps Reality Check Radio. Nothing they broadcast, even on a slow day, could be as witless and divisive as the PIJF mandated twaddle that has replaced facts and balanced debate.

Roll on, Reality Check.

While RNZ holds hands with other media who insist, for example, that the gangs must have a voice – even though they have besides the legacy media two cacophonous others, Labour and Te Pati Māori – it would be stubborn to insist that there is nothing of worth to tune into.

Simon Morris’s At The Movies remains the bright spot in a medium that thinks its purpose is to instruct and insist. Listening to Morris’s film reviews is always forensically useful, unlike, say, a score of 86% from Rotten Tomatoes, and summertime’s Matinee Idle with his mate Phil O’Brien is emblematic of RNZ’s glory days. 

I often wonder if Morris’s producer doesn’t pin him to the wall beside the water cooler to menace him with suggestions for more topical programme diversity but the person I knew who rightly scorned the word ‘fun’ used as an adjective probably has the creds to continue doing it his own way.

I bet Stickman listens to Morris.  And I hope they’re both eating healthy and getting their bloods done regularly and continue to offer alternatives to the unlovely personae of the state-funded goody-goods.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.