Kiwiblog

I enjoy being a regular guest on Radio NZ’s Panel with Jim Mora and initially was surprised at how many people would mention they hear me on it. Some taxi drivers even recognise me just from my voice. So I’ve always figured it must rate fairly well.

Just been told that The Panel is not only the number one rated talk hour in New Zealand (and has been for some time), it is the number one rated show on all radio for the 4 pm to 5 pm slot. It now ranks ahead of all the music stations.

I understand the latest survey has it with 162,000 listeners on an average weekday. That is pretty massive.

news.com.au reports:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will have her hands full when parliament resumes this week, fending off fresh leadership speculation, facing a potentially heated caucus meeting and bracing for a new opinion poll.

Newspapers said Joel Fitzgibbon, the government’s chief whip, was openly canvassing caucus for votes to return Kevin Rudd to the top job.

When the Chief Whip starts lobbying for change you have real problems. The challenge for Labor is deciding between the leader the public hates and the leader the caucus hates.

Incidentally I was staggered to be listening to Morning Report this morning, and hear an interview between I presume one of the hosts and the RNZ Australian correspondent. The host said something like:

“So Kevin Rudd will just be getting on with the job of Foreign Minister” and the correspondent said “That’s right”.

Rudd resigning as Foreign Minister and challenging Gillard for the leadership earlier this year was a rather major news story.

John Hartevelt at Stuff reports:

ACC Minister Judith Collins is taking defamation action against two labour MPs and a news organisation, her spokeswoman says.

I understand the MPs are Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little, and the media organisation is Radio New Zealand.

It will be fascinating if it proceeds, to see the proof Trevor and Andrew have to back up their assertions.

Whale Oil has the audio of a Cecil Walker on Morning Report yesterday slagging off Ports of Auckland, talking about how he is forced to walk work 16 hours a day and how the 10% offer from POAL is not worth losing his family over, and how he used to work long hours and almost lost his family over it as he was working 80 hours a week. He even said how one of his kids said he never sees him as he is always at work. He concludes his family is more important than money.

This makes POAL look like a heartless employer, with no consideration for families. However an e-mail to Whale (I presume it is accurate) paints a very different story of POAL, of how they gave Walker 21 weeks off on full pay when his wife had cancer, how they had a limo pick them up from their house to take them to and from Christmas in the Park to meet Frankie Stevens, and even how when he had a baby, The company tracked them down to where they was staying and sent a 5 tiered baby gift basket to him.

David Beatson blogs at Pundit:

I welcome the proposal that John Barnett from South Pacific Pictures has pitched to the board of Radio New Zealand for “radio with pictures”. …

Barnett told us he had been given a positive reception by the RNZ board and outlined some of the arsenal of new media technology that he proposed using to add the necessary visual enrichment required by the television audience.

He saw scope for including original productions currently provided to TVNZ 7 by independent producers – and was confident that he could deliver 18 hours of programming a day on a public broadcasting channel at a cost that is considerably less than the $13 million a year TVNZ was paid to produce TVNZ 6 and 7. My own analysis of the concept indicates that he is right.

That is not an unreasonable sum.

I have blogged previously several times that the Government should sell TVNZ, which is a fully commercial broadcaster, and put the proceeds from the sale into a trust to fund a full public service broadcaster, such as Radio New Zealand with pictures.

Willie Jackson writes in the NZ Herald:

Radio Waatea was contracted to provide daily news bulletins during the week of approximately two and a half minutes in duration four times a day. For that we were paid $280,000 a year which covered four journalists and our admin costs. And that was our national broadcaster’s commitment to the indigenous people of this country during the working week.

Let’s do the sums on this. 10 minutes a day times 250 days a year is 2500 minutes a year of headlines, or around 42 hours of news bulletins. For $280,000 that is an hourly rate of $6,720 an hour.

Now that has to cover reporting, editing etc but I’m pretty sure that that hourly figure is higher than most broadcasters.

With no more than 10 minutes of Maori stories a day, that equated to 0.1 per cent of National Radio air time. That’s about as close as you can get to nothing, zero, bugger all. But, hey, they were giving us 0.8 per cent of their $36 million annual budget, so I guess that’s something!

Well yes, it suggests to me that if they bring it in house, they may be able to afford to do more than 0.1%.

But even that figure is misleading. National Radio is not 24/7 news stories. Most of it is interviews, talk etc.

Their actions and attitude towards Maori is nothing short of shameful. Successive Governments have allowed National Radio to treat Maori in this way. And, sure, they can pat themselves on the back because Simon Mercep and Katherine Ryan are able to pronounce a few basic Maori words, but the Government really needs to intervene to ensure that a Maori voice is heard on a station that is meant to reflect this country’s identity.

Surely National Radio giving Maori only 0.1 per cent of the programming time requires some response from the Government?

This is presuming that Maori are not interested in any of the other programming,. It would be interesting to see what Radio NZ’s listening demographics are.