No the BSA will not be missed

Newsroom reports:

Media lawyer Steven Price questions how the Media Council could be placed to pick up the slack, on top of its existing workload.

“They have just got a bunch of volunteers who meet and sit, I don’t know, four times a year. That’s it. They take turns drafting the decisions. They have a staff of one, or one part-time person. How’re they going to handle it? They also have no expertise in broadcasting.”

This is actually an argument in favour. Just look at the stats.

The BSA has a staff of eight – and unbelievably six of them were lawyers. This probably explains a lot. Last year they only had 90 complaints to deal with, and the average cost per complaint was $18,500.

The Media Council runs on $325,000 compared to $1.67 million for the BSA. They dealt with 256 complaints at an average cost of $1,270.

Broadcasters currently pay $700,000 a year to the BSA. If they give even half of that to the Media Council, the Council will double its budget and only have a 33% increase in complaints to deal with.

And the Media Council don’t need expertise in broadcasting. They need expertise in media standards and complaints. That they have.

They already have 10 broadcasters as members including TVNZ, Radio NZ, Netflix, Warner Brothers and Amazon.