Journal re-launch
Listener editor Finlay Macdonald's speech at the relaunch of Pacific Journalism Review, 3 October 2003
I’m flattered, humbled and grateful to have been asked here today to help re-launch the Pacific Journalism Review.
I want to state at the outset that I have no more, and in many cases considerably less, claim to this privilege than anyone in this room.
There is much to praise in this first issue of the relaunched Review – not least that this country desperately needs more useful and throughtful coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and our place in it.
But I’ll confine myself to just one of its charms – serious media analysis.
The whole area of media criticism and self-analysis is a subject of great interest to some journalists and academics, and probably not to a great many others, for whom the media is only a part of their lives rather than a central concern.
It’s often said - as though indisputably true - that the media here is rather short on self-criticism and self-analysis, and that it is – possibly as a symptom of that - hyper-sensitive to outside criticism, especially by academics.
I’m not sure that either is true. I don’t deny that there’s a thread of anti-intellectualism running through the NZ media, just as there is though wider society, but I’ve also tended to find that journalists and academics have more in common than not.
As Wayne Hope – an academic - points out in a review in this new edition of the PJR, he has worked alongside many current and former practitioners of journalism right here at the Auckland University of Technology. And I know from experience that without academics most journalists would be routinely stuck for those easily accessible, ubiquitous and quotable experts who help fill the column inches and broadcast minutes.
So there’s no particular mutual loathing or distrust, I suspect, even if both sides maintain a healthy and justified scepticism of each other.
The commonest expression of that scepticism is, from journalists, that academics tend not to understand the daily realities of news production, and from academics, that journalists tend to be uncritical slaves to that very process, if not to their paymasters as well.
I’m generalising, of course, but there’s probably some truth in both views. If I could mount a brief defence from the practioner’s side of the argument, I’d say that for any thoughtful and serious journalist, the multiple pressures of financial imperatives, commercial competition, limited resources and fickle audience or readership habits all tend to focus the mind rather efficiently to the possibilities as well as the limitations of the craft.
But does that editorial self-awareness translate into the kind of public self-examination which is what most of us would characterise as media criticism? I think we’re all agreed that so elemental and influential a force in modern society as the media deserves the scrutiny, but the common call is that the media itself avoids that duty.
I don’t know about that, to be honest. And I think what we’re really debating is quality rather than quantity. There are times when I find certain forms of media self-obsession extremely tedious: the incessant carping about the antics of television presenters, for example, and the relentless personalising of media issues, as if Brian Edwards, Bill Ralston, John Campbell or that cheeky honkie on TVOne are the medium rather than its message.
I have only slightly less impatience with the kind of media column in this country which all too often exists only as a bully pulpit for its author to air their prejudices, enmeties and spite. Or the kneejerk tendency of most reporters covering media stories to head straight to the head of a journalism school for comment. With all due respect, if I hear Jim Tucker or Jim Tully or Paul Norris pronounce one more time upon some alleged orthodoxy of journalistic ethics or standards I’ll turn the Listener into the News of the World and be done with it.
I jest. The problem with media criticism is not so much that it doesn’t exist - it does - but in what form it takes. In the same little monograph reviewed by Wayne Hope that I referred to earlier – about media criticism in NZ - I was quoted rather more liberally than I’d expected, but not on the very point I had hoped to make clearest: that the reason I haven’t commissioned a regular media column is that media issues of sufficient interest and importance tend to receive standard feature treatment in the magazine.
The corollary of that is that I fear that very regular media columns tend to become editorial holes that need filling, and very soon become just another review column. Well, we have a radio and a TV review already, which also lend themselves when necessary to addressing broader issues rather than specifics.
The paradox is this: there is – in my opinion! - too much opinion in the media as it is. Columns are relatively cheap ways to fill space, whereas real reporting – let alone investigative reporting – is risky and costly in all kinds of ways. More subjective opinion in the media, about the media, is the last thing it needs.
Furthermore, I don’t think practitioners make the best reviewers at all. For all kinds of reasons, one is too immersed in the practicalities and politics of one’s profession to clearly perform the one task which is the duty of the reviewer: to be the reader’s, the viewer’s, the listener’s - the consumer’s - advocate.
I would much rather read the analysis of an intelligent and perceptive consumer of news and current affairs than the opinions of a competitor or a peer. Journalists and media managers spend far too much time in their own echo chambers as it is. What we can’t see, by definition, is the view of those looking back at us – the audience, the readership.
Alas, enlightened, witty and perceptive writers not already practicisng as journalists don’t come along too often, so I’m stuck in my own paradox. One way out, it seems, is the kind of common ground afforded by media commentary that sits outside of the mainstream’s competing and restrictive agendas, where informed debate and criticism from all quarters can find an outlet. To some extent Radio New Zealand’s Media Watch programme is one such place – God knows why state television hasn’t followed suit, though I do half expect Brian Priestly to pop up on The Big Night In, he’d fit the retro theme so well.
And then there’s the Pacific Journalism Review, which as I said in my blurb for this re-launch, should be required reading in every newsroom and journalism school. This new edition is superb, and all credit to the team behind it, especially editor David Robie for keeping the dream alive. I hope that some of its generosity of spirit and intellect, its open-mindedness and wide brief filters through into general media coverage of the issues it traverses. I won’t be holding my breath, but I wish it every success in its latest incarnation.
Finlay Macdonald
Editor
The Listener
October 3, 2003.
editor@listener.co.nz
Pictured above: Finlay Macdonald (from left), Dr Baba and David Robie at the launching.
