18 posts tagged “journalism”

In the last month, two New Zealanders were murdered—but I have to hand it to the mainstream media, especially TV3 and National Radio, for covering these without racial bias.
   Ten years ago, the Chinese ethnicity of the victims would have been made to be a big deal. Indeed, any crime involving east Asians was treated as more (negatively) newsworthy and coverage was, effectively, racist. Perhaps not surprising in the wake of the Yellow Peril speeches of the current Foreign Minister-outside-Cabinet during the 1990s.
   Statistics from the New Zealand Police have shown that crimes involving east Asians are not proportionally out of whack with the percentage of the population. It’s nothing for us to be proud of, mind.
   It has taken a while but New Zealand citizens of Chinese descent seem to be accepted by the media a bit better than in the previous century. The record is not perfect but this is a marked improvement.
   Their deaths were reported as those of New Zealanders. While the reporting of one woman’s funeral acknowledged her Chinese roots and her Buddhist religion, that was the extent of it. There was nothing made to be odd or strange.
   The tragedies are horrible—they should never have happened in the first place. In New Zealand, one is eight times more likely to be murdered today than 50 years ago. And that is a whole separate issue. However, I am glad that these two women were not made to be outsiders in a country they called home after their deaths, whatever might have happened in their lifetimes.

Samantha Powell (Miss Universe New Zealand 2008), Rebecca Connor (Miss Wellington), Rhonda Grant (second runner-up, Miss Universe New Zealand 2008), Kylie Anderson (second runner-up, Miss Universe New Zealand 2006).

Why is it that they stem from Christchurch? Are there more anti-pageant types down there?
   Last year, The Press ran a piece on how Laural Barrett, the winner of Miss New Zealand 2007, had allegedly stolen shoes along with her sister, when anyone reading between the lines of journalistic double-talk could tell the writer had used enough ‘seems’ and ‘allegedly’ in an ill-researched story based on a leaked rumour. It would have been fitting on a gossip blog, not a metropolitan newspaper.
   But hey, it sells newspapers in a land where tabloids can successfully masquerade as broadsheets. I had to go on the warpath that time and accuse Fairfax of tall-poppy syndrome with unpatriotic journalists appeasing foreign owners. However you looked at it, that Press story was poor, poor journalism, which only fed blogs, rumours and envious teenage girls.
   Now we had that liberal professor down at the University of Canterbury attacking 2008 second runner-up Rhonda Grant for being good-looking and effectively sending a message that her degree is valueless and that she should not be fêted for her success. Shame.
   I’m just glad that Samantha Powell has managed to steer clear of controversy this year, but then, she didn’t go to university—which obviously means that she escaped the liberal pen of an American Studies professor.
   But given that beauty pageant winners’ academic successes should not be celebrated according to the Association of University Staff—since the release was sent under its banner then I take it to be policy—it’s just as well Sam received on-the-job vocational training rather than have a worthless degree from a New Zealand tertiary institution.
   I sure hope I never joined the Association unwittingly when I was a lecturer, since I cannot agree with its position.
   I believe in individual excellence, working hard and being treated fairly.
   Unless Assoc Prof Maureen Montgomery’s aim was to send out a nothing story—when I first read it I had no idea anyone cared and nearly advised Val Lott, pageant director, to ignore it, and a contact at a TV network actually agreed with me—and see how trivialities can propagate in the New Zealand media.
   Because that made a fascinating study. I held off sending out a release till the morning because I had no idea anyone—from Paul Holmes on the wireless to TV1’s Close-up—would be interested.
   All Dr Montgomery needed was a willing conspirator in the form of the New Zealand Press Association, with the weight of the Association of University Staff behind her, and the publication of the wire story by The New Zealand Herald.
   From there, the story suddenly had legitimacy, even if I think the Irish-owned Herald should have sought comment from the pageant or Massey University side before publication of a clearly biased article.
   Perhaps Dr Montgomery’s Irish roots and the Herald’s part-Irish ownership just went hand in hand and there’s some unwritten rule to help your own inside the newspaper.
   I shall send my future releases to the Herald under the name O’Malley.
   If this was a study of the lowering of media standards and their (and the public’s) obsession with trivia, then I actually applaud Dr Montgomery, with a standing ovation.
   Being London-born, Dr Montgomery will have seen the lowering of standards in her lifetime before she left Thatcher’s Britain (she said ‘escaped’, which shows her thoughts on Thatcherism) with the Australian takeovers of two tabloids and The Times. And, perhaps out of interest, this was an experiment to see how far these tendencies went in New Zealand, a protest against the technocratic injustice that has been emerging over the last quarter-century—again something she has witnessed after her arrival here.
   I don’t know. If that were her aim then I thought it rather cruel to target a young woman who has never done anything against her.
   But as I said, there was a part of me that enjoyed it because it was darned good profile for the pageant and for Rhonda.
   Rhonda spoke well on TV for someone with no media training, and I think she did better on the live interview with Mark Sainsbury on Close-up than the recorded piece with John Campbell on Campbell Live.
   The other good thing was that Rhonda was one of two contestants who identifies with the Christian faith, which allowed her to put this into perspective of a greater plan.
   I shall be interested to see what happens next—or possibly next year. Will Christchurch go for the hat-trick?

[Cross-posted] I finally came across the full text of the press release attacking Massey University over its story on its alum Rhonda Grant, Miss Universe New Zealand’s second runner-up.
   You can read the statement from the Association of University Staff’s president, Assoc Prof Maureen Montgomery, via Scoop. I think she was pretty persistent, sending it out to the NZPA as well as other news sources—she really disliked the story.
   It’s a shame Dr Montgomery has received anonymous hate mail over this today, when her release is filled with good targets for debate.
   I respect her right to hold an opinion and I think she was right to circulate it, but I wonder just how it might benefit the Association of University Staff, or any institution promoting tertiary issues.
   A lot of the arguments are addressed in our own release, which pageant director Val Lott asked me to write. I was more than happy to put the record straight, something that Dr Montgomery gave me a good opportunity to do.
   You can tell Dr Montgomery failed to do what I thought academics should do first and foremost: get sufficient evidence and maintain an open mind.
   The story on Rhonda Grant was no better and no worse in quality terms than the puff pieces about alumni on the Massey University website, so we know she has been singled out.
   Dr Montgomery writes, ‘Massey’s story reads like the formulaic sort of thing that aspiring beauty queens are expected to say when interviewed on the catwalk.’
   As I said in our release, the reality is the interviews are tough—and there are no expectations of formulaic answers at Miss New Zealand.
   I defend the pageant because I know how tough the judging got: Rhonda was allowed to talk about nutrition, and other contestants were quizzed about everything from the moral repugnancy of bank charges to genetics versus socialization, depending on their university specialization.
   ‘One might expect a university public relations office to do more than piggy-back off what comes across as a publicity statement produced by the Miss Universe organisation,’ she said.
   Publicity statements from the Miss Universe Organization seldom focus on second runners-up but, whether we like it or not, Massey has engaged in journalism. We might argue over the quality.
   I share some of her concerns over objectification but I believe that was sufficiently addressed when Rhonda’s bikini-clad photograph was removed from the Massey University website in favour of something more conservative.
   Once that was done, then the complaint really is a case of the lady protesting too much, unless all alum puff pieces are equally, to use Dr Montgomery’s word, ‘banal’.
   And as deep journalism, maybe that’s not unfair—but it should apply fairly to all puff pieces, not just Rhonda’s.
   If it were couched in such terms, I would gladly stand by her.
   Dr Montgomery’s complaint on Rhonda’s piece specifically might be better directed at government educational policy that has supposedly bred a generation of sex-obsessed high school graduates who might find Rhonda Grant’s figure the reason to join Massey University.
   Actually, on the sexualization of youth, I would also gladly stand by her.
   But for now, as a colleague here at Lucire said to me today, ‘You have to ask yourself: what does Maureen Montgomery get out of it? It’s none of her business. Why has she been allowed to be involved?’
   I suppose the answer comes, rightly or wrongly, from the anti-American stances of liberal universities around the world, and Dr Montgomery’s own informs them. It helps the profile of the University of Canterbury, where she works, and cements its liberal position.
   My own father equated Dr Montgomery’s release to Rosie O’Donnell’s outburst on The View against Miss Nevada 2006 and Donald Trump: ill-considered, narrow-minded, poorly investigated and founded on opinion.
   Where Dr Montgomery and I do share some basic views is how images can shape agenda. I know this. I publish fashion magazines. Let’s not kid ourselves. 
   She wrote, ‘Massey University has provided an excellent example of how the desperation to market universities as “attractive” places to gain knowledge and transferable skills intersects with the use of the sexualized female body as a site of desire.’
   There is an element of truth to such statements, but I question if university choices are made based on attractive alumni—even with my rant yesterday on sexualization.
   When I went to university, I had far more pressing concerns such as degree programmes and career prospects.
   Vitally, we are talking about a story that is hard to find on the Massey University site—a site that had proxy errors in the small hours of this morning that rendered it inaccessible. If it were not for her own strong and widely disseminated disapproval, it would have been seen probably by a few dozen people—perhaps one prospective student.
   I’d personally have saved the energy for when universities started putting out alumni swimsuit calendars.
   By all means, speak out—I do on even lesser issues. But consider the effect of the publicity: right now, it seems Rhonda Grant is going to be promoted to national stardom on Close-up and Campbell Live, and the pageant will get prime-time coverage on the same day Miss New Zealand Samantha Powell did her Good Morning interview on TV One. Earlier today, Paul Holmes promoted this as a major item on his radio show in Auckland.
   We couldn’t have dreamed of this profile.
   This has played into the hands of the pageant exceptionally well and, as a judge, I thank Dr Montgomery, even if I do so somewhat selfishly.

 
I am going to be doing some banners to promote Autocade soon. It’s still very much in beta with only a few dozen cars on it, but I have been thinking about the reasons I started it.

• There are a few, but not many, car sites out there with geographically unbiased information. I believe that German cars, for example, should be written with the point of view that the German market is the domestic one and others are export ones. Wikipedia is not one of them. It tends to take the American view on a lot of topics, but 80 per cent of the internet audience is not Stateside. Some of the better car wikis out there also have this bias, though they do not claim to be international—Wikipedia does.
• The Wikipedia layout is boring.
• I want basic information, not long stories, and I should be able to trace the global lineages of car models relatively simply. I’m fine with the long stuff appearing at specialist sites, but there should be one place where I can get the basics, including info on model changes and even a little opinion on the vehicle.
• I am more passionate about cars than many other things in life.

   When I began researching some of the Autocade entries, I was surprised to note how much incorrect information exists on Wikipedia about various models—and that I was absolutely right to have doubts about it. (I realized that I could go and edit Wikipedia myself, but why bother, if the actual editorial approach differs?) I also noticed how many references I have that take the brief format—Michael Sedgwick’s work, the first issues of Your Classic with buyers’ guides, and The Complete Car Guide five-week supplement in Autocar & Motor in 1988. This worked with readers like me then, and I can’t see why it wouldn’t work now in 2008.
   The way Wikipedia and some other sites is organized isn’t to my liking. For example, one of the Autocade entries is on the Holden Belmont. There is no such entry at Wikipedia: searching for the car name takes you to a forwarded page on the Holden Kingswood.
   But if I wanted information on the Holden Kingswood, I would type in Holden Kingswood. Specifically, I wanted information on the Belmont, to cross-check the information I had. There is a lineage there, and the way the engine options differed between series is interesting to car nuts.
   I took Sedgwick’s approach and recorded the Belmont separately of the Kingswood, just as he did in the same circumstances.
   And I have been using non-digital sources to confirm a lot of the info.
   Most of the work is still mine, but I’d welcome extra pairs of hands once the marketing gets under way, provided that senior editors take the approach that I have above.
   My work isn’t perfect and I am sure I have made my share of mistakes, but I hope I have made fewer, relative to the number of pages on Autocade, than many generous writers of Wikipedia have. Then again, there is less to go wrong at Autocade. It looks like too many cooks spoiling the broth at Wikipedia (i.e. you can’t bank on the Wales)—something we need to be careful with as Autocade goes out of beta later this year. 

Before I begin, I should note that this story does not have a response from the Clintons directly, but it makes very disturbing viewing. As Peter Paul says in the first part, the case against the Clintons is proceeding, dealing with a massive election fraud, but there is nothing in the media about it. At the end of Part One, Mr Paul shows a video that demonstrates Mrs Clinton was in full knowledge of the campaign contributions that were raised for her by him and his organization.
   Equal Justice Foundation of America, which presents the documentary, calls the incident ‘most shocking expose on the blatant corruption surrounding Hillary Clinton. Includes exclusive home videos of Hillary to expose the illegalities that elected Hillary to the Senate and the obstructions of justice that keep her there.’ One commentator believes that Sen. Clinton has committed a felony punishable by five years’ jail time.
   Let us say this is not beyond the realm of imagination and needs to be considered fairly.

 

Sad news for car nuts: automotive and technical writer Jeff Daniels has passed away, according to Keith Adams’ Austin Rover Online website. There’s a longer piece at Just-auto.com.
   There probably isn’t anyone of my generation who doesn’t recall the greats like L. J. K. Setright, Jeff Daniels, George Bishop, Phil Hill and Paul Frère.
   Jeff wrote a column called ‘Danspeak’ in Autocar for many years, and it is probably his style, more than anyone else’s, that informed me when I started my columns.
   I found him one of the more knowledgeable car writers out there and it is sad that much of this old style of journalism has given way to the Jeremy Clarksons of this world. Just as in television presenting, where the William Woollards gave way to the Jeremy Clarksons on Top Gear.
   While I love Clarkson’s style (since he could never get away with it without some actual research) and can be said to adopt elements myself, there is still room for the more technical, educated approach of Daniels et al.
   Jeff Daniels was 68 and continued working up to his death. He will be sorely missed.

As much as I have gone on record to express a dislike for the Hon Winston Peters, the Foreign Minister Outside Cabinet, and express an admiration for TV One talking head Paul Henry, the Foreign Minister’s interview tonight on Close-up (which I still think of as a weekly Thursday night show) was very much won by Mr Peters.
   In it, he defended himself on the Owen Glenn affair by going on the warpath, accusing journalists of cooking up falsehoods and writing stories before they had researched them.
   As I have written here and elsewhere regularly, we have seen many examples of poor journalism, and one sympathizes with Mr Peters.
   His attacking style—coupled with confidence and some might say smugness—played on emotions well, using a mixture of rose-coloured glasses (‘There was a time in New Zealand when …’) and a keen understanding of the law.
   It also exposed the inadequacy of the research that was given to Mr Henry and his colleagues, and the desire of the MSM to sometimes cook up sensationalism when there are better things to do.
   As to whether there would be an ambassadorial role in return for political donations, Mr Peters handled that matter well, too, saying that the government had left the matter over a consul to Monaco at large since 1996.
   It was a reminder that while as daft as some of Mr Peters’ arguments have been over the years—to the point of being a broken record—he is a skilful politician who seems to have rediscovered some of his former vigour.

I have been a regular reader of Autocar since 1980 but did not know about this hidden message in the 1992 Road Test Yearbook, which I bought 15 years ago. James May, of Top Gear fame, was one of the team that put the Yearbook together and was known for his regular column in the magazine in those days. He was fired over an incident where he put in a hidden message, using the initial caps of each road test summary in the Yearbook.

   It took Wikipedia to tell me—so it is good for something after all. The message is, with punctuation, ‘So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’
   No one had spotted it internally, but readers eventually asked the magazine if they had won a prize.
   On Radio 2, May said in an interview, ‘So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. … It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I’d actually forgotten that I’d done it because there’s a bit of a gap between it being “put to bed” and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company’s office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I’d done because I’d made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they’d written in thinking they’d won a prize or a car or something.’
   Shame he was fired over this. I thought the British sense of humour would have seen him through. But then, he might not have gone on to do his other things.

PS.: I got out my copy of the September 23, 1992 issue and note that eight pages are missing from the above thumbnails. That makes 16 missing characters. The full message is, with punctuation: ‘Road Test Yearbook. So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’ 

Not long ago, I dissed the Times of India for running a story about Miranda Kerr which never happened.
   So I wonder now if Britney Spears actually did marry George Costanza from Seinfeld. After all, it’s in the newspaper. It must be true. (In case they ever change it, Sepia Mutiny has a screen shot.)
   Not only that, the photo was sourced from Reuter. And those guys almost never get it wrong.

I spotted the below on Ninemsn today and thought, ‘Poor Brian.’

   I clicked on the first link and found quite the opposite:    It’s not as embarrassing as the network, and the Murdoch Press, reporting on the Miranda Kerr incident two years late and getting the venue wrong, but it’s still an about-face.
   Netizens will be able to work out that the first link came about because the Ninemsn website reported that Delta Goodrem turned down boyfriend Brian McFadden’s marriage proposal. Then, the site’s staff found out more and had to instantly change the piece, but due to caching or the way the Ninemsn site is structured, the headline link on another page had not changed.
   This is not abnormal and at least the link goes to an accurate item of news.
   And Ninemsn was not alone, as Murdochs did the same thing:
   It all makes me wonder about the wisdom of such immediacy when it comes to the gossip press. Usually, the items are of little significance. They are disposable news, so what harm is there with a brief delay to get the facts right? The contrary argument is that since these items are inconsequential, then why should the facts need to be dead right?
   I realize that’s not the way celeb-based factoid-reporting works, and on the web, even more rules get chucked out in the quest to be the first on to Google News with the headline.
   But we are representatives of the media. We are, supposedly, journalists and editors and publishers. And as the fourth estate, we have a duty to the public.
   Call me a traditionalist, but I would prefer to get everything straight before committing to press in any medium, even if it means a delay.
   After the Miranda Kerr embarrassment, propagated by Sky, news.com.au and The Daily Telegraph (Australia) newspaper, I have had to conclude that I can’t trust Murdoch Press items at all. Before this week I took only The Sun and News of the World items with a grain of salt (remember all the speculation about who the next James Bond would be?), but am saddened to have to apply the same doubts across more of the Murdoch Press. Especially since the chief himself, Mr Keith Rupert Murdoch, has (thank goodness) vowed to up the journalistic standards at papers such as The Wall Street Journal.
   Maybe I should not lecture since I have never been on dailies, but my feeling is that the damage to goodwill across a group is too great when this sort of misreporting starts happening regularly.