RIP BSA

An unlamented loss

The abolition of the Broadcasting Standards Authority was inevitable. Dithery Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith finally made a decision, or more likely his cabinet colleagues and some Act MPs gave him a boot in the behind and told him to get on with it.

But exactly when this relic of the analogue age, brought into existence before TV3 was even on air, will actually be disestablished is unclear.

You’d think a short and concise piece of legislation would take care of a body that hasn’t been needed for years.

But no. Apparently changes have to be made to the Criminal Procedure Act as well as the Broadcasting Act before the BSA’s demise can happen.

Some are thinking it may be 2027 before it’s finally put out of its misery. Oh dear.

Will we miss it? No. Will the media companies, and their managers, producers and governors be relieved? Not especially because they knew that the BSA’s threshold for upholding a complaint was pretty high and the penalties were usually so inconsequential as to be meaningless.

Ironically the day after the announcement about the BSA’s demise, it issued a damning finding on a 1News report about a Donald Trump comment. The broadcast in question, in which a Trump quote was taken out of context and edited to give a meaning at odds with what Trump actually said, is not that far away from what the BBC did in its now infamous Panorama story about the January 6^th riots and the “fight, fight, fight” phrase.

Donald Trump is suing the BBC for 10 billion dollars.

1News has to read an on-air apology.

TVNZ should be thankful that Donald Trump doesn’t watch the news in New Zealand!

If the BSA goes out of existence – although any Labour led government in 2027 will surely give it a stay of execution – then who will make judgements like the one above?

There is the Media Council, a voluntary and self-funded outfit that the likes of TVNZ, RNZ and the NZME and Mediaworks radio stations will probably join. The Media Council has a record of not upholding many of the complaints made to it. Its latest raft of decisions, released on April 20^th, upheld just three of the eleven cases. One of them was the Winston Peters complaint to Stuff about the inter-island ferries.

The other eight cases in this tranche were either not upheld or had “no grounds to proceed.”

This suggests the Media Council also sets a high bar for complaints.

But in any event it only rules on matters that may be affected by its twelve principles. The most important of these is Principle 1 – accuracy, fairness and balance.

Here’s the rub though. The Media Council doesn’t punish the media organisation that gets things wrong. The only punishment incurred is the potential embarrassment of having other media outlets publish the Media Council decision.

But the management and directors of broadcasters, particularly those owned by the government, now need to really step up to the mark. Those companies should be best at self-regulating, but their shareholders, through the board, must ensure there is the appropriate capability to carry out the necessary discipline.

It’s capability that was sadly missing when Paul Henry made not just a racial slur, but a factually incorrect one, about former Governor General Anand Satyanand. It was also missing when the (still current) Breakfast host Chris Chang pointed a toy gun at a Donald Trump toy and made out as if to obliterate it.

The government as the owner of TVNZ, and RNZ, has to ensure the complaints processes at those companies are robust and honest and can be dealt with all the way to board level if necessary.

(Ironically Paul Henry is now a TVNZ board member. Even he might have had a say about the toy gun incident.)

I have serious doubts that robustness will ever develop - but then the BSA did nothing about those two incidents anyway.

The media scene in this country is becoming more and more fragmented by the day. There are thousands of New Zealanders who just don’t bother with what we still call legacy media. They can find out what they think they to need to know from a myriad of on-line sources.

That ignites the “misinformation” calls. But then as the Donald Trump incident shows, the legacy media are far from perfect in their dissemination of information, especially on matters of balance. And we know that BSA ruling on 1News and Trump is not a one-off example.

Internet technology means the media world knows no bounds. It’s impossible to regulate it. That’s why self-regulation inside media companies by sensible and experienced media leaders is the best way forward.

We don’t need the government getting in the way of what the people say.