The Market Rationale for Keeping Campbell Live Alive - Open Letter (Of Sorts) to Julie Christie and Mark Weldon

Written quickly ...

Mediaworks review of its 7.00pm mainstay current affairs program, Campbell Live, shows shallow reality-TV minds are sadly in ascendency at that company, with little understanding of markets and long term profitability.

Building a viable advertising base is not ‘only’ about ratings, surely, it’s about building diversity to reflect and keep a diverse audience, because not all advertisers want to advertise to Jono and Ben’s audience, whom are mooted to be the replacement show. To the programming architects of Mediaworks, Christie and Weldon: all TV has damn near lost our household, and thus so have TV advertisers. We watch the 6.00pm news, the two 7.00pm current affairs shows, Sunday, and oftentimes Native Affairs, also Graham Norton over a Friday night bottle of wine or three, but nothing else. Reality TV bores us witless and has taken our evenings back to books, Internet and DVDs. (Sometimes Mrs and H and I even talk to each other). I bet we are not alone: there will be a huge number of ‘us’ who are being switched off. I think Christie/Weldon are destroying Mediawork's future by taking the quick bucks from an immature reality TV, and forgetting we all grow up and want actual satisfying content that entertains and feeds our souls and intellects.

If I was an advertiser of anything other than junk food and Briscoes, I would be concerned about the mono-culture all TV now largely caters for (and has created by short term ratings-think). Personally I’m starved of arts and literature content, there is no longer a single show on the fine arts and the written arts, thus, and sorry, add to my evenings above, I get same now by listening to huge dollops of streaming BBC3 and BBC4. There is no reason for any New Zealand TV advertiser doing business in those fields - and that's a wide range of business from arts and entertainment to restaurants - to spend the marketing budget on TV. Say there is finally, again, a book show, then it may not get huge ratings, but it will get an audience that is different to the reality TV munters, which still won’t be ‘small’, and thus an opportunity for a different range of advertisers.

All businesspeople understand the strength of diversity, and the fallout of servicing a single client category when the model changes. But TV, both private and state, doesn’t seem to ‘get it’.

Also, given that ratings seem to be the main player here – I’ll deal with politics shortly - how do ratings work? Via MySky technology I watch both competing TV3 and TV1 shows in that 7.00pm timeslot: I watch Seven Sharp because I like Hoskings and that show’s lighter fare, and I watch Campbell because it tackles the more serious issues in depth and John is a likable guy, doing good works (eg, the current fund raising for Vanuatu). But how does ratings cover that? If I was one of the ones in the ratings mix – and I don’t know a single person who is: who are they? – then I suspect only the show I watch ‘live’ would count? If so, what poppycock. That would be a meaningless statistic.

Regardless, finally a personal note. It has also been suggested via the Herald that part of the problem is Christie and Weldon don’t like Campbell Live because of its anti-government slant: um, that’s not a criteria for programming. If this seriously is the case, then those two should be looking for new jobs tomorrow. John Campbell and I would largely be political adversaries – read my blog - but John’s show is class, depth television even if I don’t hold with some of its sometimes advocacy. Albeit noting that even political adversaries have commonalities: as a Christchurchian through the quakes thank God for Campbell Live which has been the only TV source rightly trying to foot trip the politicians with transparency, and John and I see eye to eye, exactly, on animal welfare. Because we are all different, there are many similarities across political identifications.

Plus another anomaly: unsurprisingly I’ve read Campbell Live is popular with the advertisers, so this review becomes more ‘worrisome’ indicating credence to the political motivations.

If Campbell Live is ditched then in my opinion Mediaworks deserves its often dalliances with bankruptcy; indeed, it probably explains them. Perhaps your past problems, Ms Christie and Mr Weldon, are because your programming is creating a mono-market of mainly teenagers – who don’t, incidentally, spend the ‘big’ money – and you are destroying a diverse market that represents a diverse content starved population, and thus are restricting yourselves to a narrowing range of advertisers who find TV relevant to them anymore.

To John Campbell and crew: keep your peckers up, I still believe intelligence and ‘actual content’ wins the long game, despite generation airhead in charge of your employer.

Pushback: The Tedious Straight-Line Thinking of the Left & Our Arts Community.

If you belong to either or both of those two groups - the Left and the Arts Community - how does it feel to be lumped into such arbitrary groups, identities, and told what and how you think based on that, as I have done in my heading?

My next post, after this one, timed for Parliament's next sitting on February 10, in which I seek to eviscerate ACT’s David Seymour, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, will be easy; this, however, because I have a great deal of respect for the participants, is not. So, without abating any of my respect for the participants, and their talents, yet noting, gloriously, free speech is all about the spirited (because passionate about my life) retort:

Keep covering this in my blog, but let it be tweeted: those who assume I am heartless, without compassion 4 those in dire circumstances 1/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 That I do not like arts & literature, culture, as much as the most cloistered humanities academic, that I have no care 2/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 for the future of a child, who assume I'm greedy, who assume I must be wrecking the environment, not conserving it; those 3/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 who assume all these things about me *because* I'm not Left wing. Such people are trite. Are stupid to being vapid. Worse 4/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 Such people are tedious. End transmission.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015

These tweets come from a debate happening in New Zealand currently which is angering me greatly. Such a facile position as intimated in my tweets, taken by too many of the Left, and by our Arts community almost wholly, is not ‘intellectualising’: its lazy, sloppy, emoting, not thinking at all, as I have explained in my post The Mind/Heart Dichotomy – Feeling Our Way To The Police State.

This Left DumbThink that throwing the tax take at any social problem solves it, not subsidises it, is not compassionate, it’s a societal disaster. Read the second half of my piece on Maori self-determination – which classical liberalism has to advocate – regarding the hellish results of unthinking welfare beyond the barest of safety nets; in fact, let me help you by quoting:

The [Native Affairs – Maori TV] story on housing was framed by interviewing five – from memory – individuals who were living it dire conditions. The opening interview was a teenage mother who had been living in a car with her baby; the woman – sorry, girl – had herself been brought up by her solo dad living on a benefit. The father of the girl’s baby was neither seen nor mentioned: that is, he’d scarpered from both his fatherly, and financial responsibilities.

Stop. In those last two sentences how many bad life choices, across three generations, are evident? The summation of those bad choices is called a cycle. And then it got worse. Apart from a single respondent who was a male living in his car, the remaining three respondents were all teenage girls, all with babies, the final one had not long given birth to her second – conceived while living in a car, as was the first, presumably – all living in appalling circumstances, not a teenage father in sight, and no extended family for support. For those I am annoying right now, if you read that and can guess the multitude of problems I have with these girls and their missing, irresponsible sperm donors – they ain’t fathers – then even as huffing and puffing with your indignation, you were thinking the exact same thing as I was.

Which brings me to my beef with the reporting of this piece. The circumstances of these teenage girls with their fatherless babies is disgraceful and my first reaction is to emote, just as the Left do: give them money, house them, do something! And yes, something must be done. But surely it is also compassionate to understand the cycle evident here of why too many people are making not just these irresponsible, but insane life decisions, and on how our welfare state incentivises this. What chance have these babies got of breaking the cycle of their parent? From memory, pursuant to some of the last statistics I read on Lindsay Mitchell’s blog, we are up to one in four babies now born into a family dependent on a benefit. Perhaps the Native Affairs selection was unrepresentative, but four out of five, really? We will never understand this cycle until we face it and ask the hard questions which the Native Affairs reporting did not ask: namely, why did you girls decide to get pregnant when you were in no position financially nor emotionally to raise children; on getting pregnant, why did you decide to first take your babies through to term, and then on doing so, keep them?

Hard arse isn’t it. But we have to be hard to break this cycle. As to the first question which should have been raised to each of the girls - where are the fathers - Liberty Scott speaks well to this point:

In an age where contraception is cheap and universally available, without shame, to anyone of breeding age, where it is possible to trace fathers of children through DNA testing to prove their responsibility, child poverty should be exceedingly rare.

What the reporter of this piece never did, nor have I seen it done on similar reports run by current affairs on the networks – remember mum of eight, ninth on the way with her Sky decoder – was give us the backstories, with the shame of that being all long term solutions come from those backstories, not the patch up after-the-event welfare solutions that the Left guilt society with from their smug arrogance – arrogance because they believe themselves to have a monopoly on compassion (with my tax money). My challenge to Native Affairs on stories such as this is to go under the level we were given here and investigate causes, not just make causes out of the welfare patch-ups that set lives lost on the next cycle of dependency. And same to the networks, thinking of Bryan Bruce’s appalling documentaries before the 2011 elections, and Nigel Latta’s fluff pieces showing currently - his opening piece on inequality was one-sided nonsense …

To the debate at hand, proper, referring to the children in that Native Affairs piece, as well as what chance do those children have of breaking the cycle of their parent(no ‘s’), what chance have any of them got of their parent imparting to them a love of books? As if my love of books came from tax dollars, not my (poor and in today’s terms large) family which nurtured it.

If you want to understand how selfish, hence, vicious, progressive societies set up around iterations of the common good are, that notion of the common good, moreover, which is fatally written into that other founding document of our nation, the school curriculum, read my 1984 Comes To 2012 – Children Nowadays Were Horrible, which is my most read post, over 21,000 views, and merely changes the narrative point of view to recite the Truth and the sleight of hand that has been mindwashed into our children – that’s you.

If you want to understand how progressivism is gutting a vibrant literature that held the historical and, once - not any more - the future hope of resistance against unbridled authority, rather than worship at the premise of it, a post, furthermore, rejected outright by two literary ‘journals’ it was sent to because - I know in one instance, suspect in the other - it seeks to turn outward from our modernist literature of interiors – from Proust via the Bloomsbury group – to a literature placed in our politics (note the ironies in the current context), then read my Disquisition on Our Contemporary Literature: Standing Upright Here, noting at the end of that piece my thoughts on how the concept of a ‘book’ and the book market is changing, via technology born of capitalism, to open books up to groups who’ve never had such opportunity before, as well as to authors who’ve had no mass market outlet up until now.

Yes, that piece is over 18,000 words (and in truth is as much a critique of our contemporary literature as a disquisition, with a further piece on aesthetics coming at some future date); as is the race relations piece approaching a similar word count. Diddums, no apologies.

And unrelated, related – because those of us versed in Systems thinking understand everything connects – while on matters cultural, if you want to understand how Marxist (identity bound) feminism is the final Maoist Cultural Revolution seeking to destroy those few oases of legislative freedom left in the West, and to borrow from George Orwell’s 1984, by rejoicing in the ‘destruction of words’, read my Retrieving CERA Boss Roger Sutton’s Corpse from the Cross Of Shesus. The West as the bastion of free individuals living in free villages: it’s long gone, as soon will be the central tenets of same, the burden of proof on the state, not the defendant, and the right to remain silent; more coming on that and the parlous state of our judiciary in future posts. And never forget the ethic that once informed our western societies, making them the countries those living in tyrannies wanted to escape to.

Argue any or all of these points above intelligently with me, but don’t just launch ill-thought-out op-eds tarring individuals who don’t think as you do with the same damned brush. And don’t think because you’re of the Left Politick you have any type of moral or emotional transcendence over me. Of all groups in society, I once thought artists would/should be the least likely to view the world in straight lines, without sophistication: I was wrong, perhaps this, also, is a product of the progressive capture of our literature, which starts in our primary schools. Regardless, serve me up like this, then unfortunately I will end up ignoring you (and I love ya really, while being at pains to point out this piece is very widely scoped in actuality.)

Postscript:

The term 'Neoliberal', in my opinion, describes nothing actual, or useful, as regards New Zealand, or Western, politics. For example, our current National led Government is unfortunately socially conservative, but is also unfortunately not capitalist, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of it. I am a laissaz faire, minacharist capitalist, but a social liberal, more socially liberal, indeed, than any sitting Labour Party MP and probably most in the Green Party, that is, a classical liberal, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of yours truly. Invariably those throwing that term, Neoliberal, around, do so in pieces that are invariably, as stated, unsophisticated, ill-thought out, catch-bags of stereotypical prejudice which have nothing to teach to me. 

On the Love Between James Takamore and Denise Clarke.

A culture which is used as a tewhatewha to cleave apart the desire of two individuals being together in life and death, is a culture that needs to change, not the individuals change for that culture. There is no culture worth preserving that would strike asunder the voluntary bond of love of such a couple, and their promises to each other. Look at the cultural collateral damage in every twenty first century hate-filled warzone. A culture that forcibly intrudes itself between James Takamore and Denise Clarke in death, cannot allow, logically, a relationship between itself and other cultures in life. Not really. Such a culture has no room for entente, nor compassion, and forebodes only a tradition of grief.

My previous post on race relations, my first, made clear Maori self-determination is virtuous. But the conditions on which that can happen peacefully are not in the iniquitous treatment of the grief of Denise Clarke and this couple's two children, by the whanau of James Takamore, who also disrespect the wishes of James Takamore himself.

Worse, in their grief the whanau of James have become bullies.

Rules of Engagement:

For those who need to brand me culturally insensitive, understand my argument: consensual love between two people, and considering there are children, the love that binds a family, must trump force and unchanging tradition. This is not the first time I've said this.

Connect your mind to your heart, and find your own answer, beyond the grime of time.

TVNZ 7: Freedom has a Price.

I’m going to take a big breath and say it: I liked TVNZ Channel 7. I understand from what I have read about the ratings, and despite what the save campaign say, on some of their programming it may have only been me watching. But it was possibly some of the best programming, for me, outside the Food Channel. Emily Perkin’s ‘The Good Word’ show about all things bookish was one of my favourite spots of the week on our TV.

And let’s get this whole sordid confessional over.

During the day when I’m working I am normally streaming Concert Program or BBC3 – currently listening to the Early Music Show as I pen this. I listen to a lots of the arts related slots, especially books and writing, on BBC4; I listen to a lot of Kim Hill’s interviews via podcast; and in a nauseous orgy of state broadcasting I’ve started listening to National Program’s Checkpoint at 5.00pm over Larry Williams on ZB, and I even – face palming, ashamedly looking through the frost chapped cracks in my fingers - have been known to listen to Jim Mora for an hour or two.

Woe is me. Woeful am I. Losing TVNZ 7 hurts.

But this said, I do not support state broadcasting. Why? Read every other post on this blog, that’s why. Freedom is a package deal: I can’t just pick those parts of the big state I like, and ignore the rest and the fact the whole edifice is based on a theft enforced by the police state powers of tax enforcement, and thus the truncating of liberty. And yes, persecuting rich pricks, more than they already are, so I can watch The Good Word, is immoral. So instead of philosophising on the last rites for TVNZ 7, I would like to point to something that has been missed in the debate – that is, why is commercial TV so awful? Because there’s a connection.

I suggest it’s because after so many decades of Gramsci in our state school system, and the dumbing down that has occurred, there’s a nihilism – as in gaggle - of unemployable youth being churned out, barely able to speak intelligibly anymore, and commercial TV, to survive, has to generate its revenues off the scary menace their minds have become: thus, as this generation would txt, our welfare mentality, reality TV has become ‘a bit shit’. The crap that is commercial television, merely represents our age of crap that has been begot of the welfare state, which has replaced the creative, free individual, and his pursuit of happiness, with the collective ascendency of a coke swilling, binge drinking moronacy of barfing idiots. And as I’ve explained, already, I don’t believe this is fixable anymore, as the philosophical rot is seventy years deep.

The only question left from this is why not, then, grab onto that which is good, as in uplifting for the secular soul, anymore, no matter it may be served up on taxpayer money. Why not turn a blind eye to the persecution of the rich pricks, who are most likely uncouth businessmen who wouldn’t know Shakespeare from Shakespeare’s Sister anyway? Right?

Well I once posed the following question to Lindsay Perigo on his SOLO site; what if lack of regulation, say, of fisheries, led to fisheries being depleted, possibly wiped out? His answer was that men acting in their self-interest would probably not do this, but it was possible, yes; freedom has a price. And he’s right. For me, the price is no TVNZ 7; I have not participated in any protest online or off. As much as I love that channel, I would rather have my freedom, than be reading Shakespeare in a Gulag, even if I say this from the depressing vantage point of knowing I will never be a free man.

PS: Mr Dotcom, yes, I saw you on the funeral march: quite apart from all the ironies involved, what Sky channel was TVNZ 7 on? …. Yeah, I thought so.