Posts by Steve Withers
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Re the Sunday Star Times magazine rip-out: Is THAT what all the fuss was about? There wasn't a dirty word in the piece and - frankly - I found it hard to tell what was actually going on, the words being so heavily redacted. Maybe I'm an innocent soul. In any case, I'm not sure exactly what it would be that was supposed to offend me. I had imagined a steamy explicit excerpt, not a txters flower garden of impenetrable (to me) obscurity.
As for the "Media 7" show last night: Excellent yet again. not a boring or irrelevant moment in the piece, except perhaps in a "meta-boring" form while discussing the irrelevant live crosses on news broadcasts. :-)
Simon Wilson is likely correct when he said that the furious debates in the blogosphere likely will have zero impact on the election's outcome. Conventional media are still undeniably king of the mind-share hill as far as political matters are concerned. Bloggers will have impact only and solely to the extent that the "old" media allow them to by covering anything they say. To that end, I think the "old" media have caught on and will - as a matter of policy - NOT give any light or air to anything bloggers have to say unless the police are involved or the matter concerned has a sexual angle or the views expressed line up with those of the editors concerned and they want them aired by proxy.
Let's see what happens. "Probably" isn't certainty. Anything can happen....but will it?
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Tom Semens: One of the rare points of agreement betwen myself and Winston Peters was related to his throw-away remark to journalists about looking to foreign ownership of New Zealand's media. I've been around long enough to see the change from the Horton family to Sir Tony O'Reilly has wrought on the NZ herald in particular. The Fairfax media backed Howard in Australia and they back the Nats here. It would be nice to have some diversity of opinion along with all the "free speech".
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I went stone cold on Clinton after she clearly and obviously lied about arriving in the Balkans under fire. A CBS reporter who was there located the relevant footage and all was laid bare. During the same week (in my hazy mind), Obama made his frank and straight-forward "race" speech and he came across as MUCH more genuine. Hillary has blown her gender premium to bits in my view. Plus she voted for every piece of legislation enabling the invasion of Iraq and all funding since. She lcaims she was fooled by that nasty Mr. bush who, she now admits, "mislead Congress".
Well......HELLO!
Clearly either incompetent or lying..or both. Not good enough to be President.
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Craig: You finally got through to me. Thanks for persisting. :-) I agree.
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Agree about the "legal experts". Last year, in Canada, I saw that sort of thing first hand. The "legal experts" was used as a front for grumpy editors with a view instructing a junior reporter's word processor. Or so a journalist told me by way of explaining some bizarre (and anonymous) legal opinions in a few of her stories on the very same issue: the use of government pamphlets by people who advocate those policies. How bizzare! It can't be illegal to use government information to support their policies. Agreed it is more problematic if you're one of the parties in government. Would we have the same issue if it were NZ First distributing a government document for a policy it had advanced? Would it be the same if National distributed a government document as an example of what it thought of as bad policy?
I honestly don't think you can frame a law that would deal with this in a way fair to all other than to ask each voter to make up their own minds based on the evidence. There appears to be little enough of that and it should be encouraged.
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Craig: MPs do hold stocks of publicly available, government information that may be useful to constituents. An MP - list or local - is a representative of voters as well as being a party-affiliated politician. The offices I have been in all contain government information of some sort. Some more than others.
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The issue of government information pamphlets is a frought one. Last year I spent 6 months in Canada working for the pro-MMP side of the electoral reform referendum held there on October10th, 2007. The electoral finance laws in Canada are very tight and make our own government's new law look somewhat laissez-faire.
The body that recommended a change to a form of MMP, the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, brought down it's final report on May 15th, with a recommendation that a referendum on changing the voting system be held about 20 weeks later, in October. They produced a set of documents including a pamphlet, a more complete 20 page booklet and a full, 274-page technical manual with chapter and verse on everything they did. These documents were the official output from the deliberative process that the government had set up to impartially assess how elections were conducted in Ontario.
The government of the province of Ontario committed to make these documents available to all citizens, but drew the line short of delivering them to every home as had been done in 2005 in British Columbia for their earlier referendum on chaing that province's voting system. Instead, you had to ask for them and they would be sent to you. But you first had to know to ask for them and the government, who really didn't want MMP, wasn't telling.
Pro-MMP campaigners immediately ordered 500,000 copies of the pamphlets and began distributing to every home and at any and all public events they could attend.
Anti-MMP folk then declared this to be "unfair" and said the documents were "biased". In mid-August, the Ontario Government withdrew the documents from print and effectively suppressed them. The "official" infomration campaign conducted by Electins Ontario then refused to use them as they were deemed to be "advocacy material" for one side.
That decision was as bizarre as declaring a jury's guilty verdict against a defendant, based on the evidence presented, as "biased" and contrary to the interests of the accused...and quashing the verdict.
Instead, the official information campaign merely told people they had a "Big Decision" to make and proceeded to not tell them anything about why they were being asked to make it. The recommendation for reform was effectively suppressed and the public left none the wiser.
My view, based on that sorry experience if cynical manipulation by government in withholding information, is that if there is a public document available for the PURPOSE of informing the puvlic about something the government is doing then that document should be available to actually do the job. Argue, if you like, about hwat is in it, but don't go down the path of effectively suppressing public information because someone actually thinks people should know about it and does something to spread message.
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Just watched the latest Media7 via OnDemand. I loved it. Good pace. Absolutely relevant. Not a boring or superfluous moment in it from one end to the other. Great body language from everyone - host and panelists. The Waiheke segment was great. Wonder why that sort of thing isn't possible in greater Auckland? There is a clear need for an alternative to the Herald....and it ain't the DomPost.
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Looks like another law the vast majority of people will be blissfully unaware of as they go about their business moving songs from CDs.wherever to MP3 players and/or including bits and pieces of them in their own compilations, videos and mash-ups.
Am I the only one to notice the chilling effect on YouTube of requiring the "partners" to not use copyrighted music? The "partners" now either use Creative Commons tunes or no tunes at all or they attempt to write them themselves.
The effect of removing the shared aspect of popular music as a component is interesting. I didn't realise the extent to which the known songs and song fragments previously employed also communicated meaning as part of the whole.
It's an interesting aside in the ongoing story of living in an era of "owned" popular culture.
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Jackie: Hear hear! It's now painful to read the ListeNBR. So many articles asserting things can't aren't givens at all.