After 51 years in TV news, current affairs and documentaries in Australia, the UK and New Zealand, Phil Wallington despairs at the state of modern journalism, the pervasive influence of spin doctors, and the standard of political discourse.
A former ABC producer and executive, Wallington believes journalism is now widely perceived as being in the “shit-can of professional choices.”
Journalism jobs are becoming scarcer and the pay is generally lousy as media organisations shed experienced senior staff and hire younger, cheaper recruits from media and journalism training schools.
“They keep churning them out, weighed down by student loan debt, buoyed by false or exaggerated expectations of journalism as a career,” he said. “I see a parade of eager young faces willingly multi-tasking and working for peanuts.”
A senior producer at Top Shelf Productions after spending 11 years as an executive producer and producer at TVNZ, Wallington made these remarks while delivering the John O’Shea memorial lecture on Thursday at the SPADA conference in Wellington.
While most of his observations were focussed on New Zealand, where he has lived since 1989, much of what he said will resonate on both sides of the Tasman.
In his view ministers and senior civil servants are avoiding journalistic scrutiny, partly due to journos themselves. “No journalist, editor or media organization is now capable or even willing to indulge in deep and intrusive scrutiny of the motives of the government and to make the connection with day to day policy action,” he said.
“Such analysis is time consuming and it also costs too much at a time when we all told, 'we have to do more with less.' Shrinking budgets and staff cuts encourage us to look cursorily at what the powerful do…. and to then move then on without questioning too much, why they did what they did.
“Long-form current affairs is now an almost extinct genre in New Zealand. Just last week TV3 announced the end of 3D — citing poor audience figures. Sunday on TV One has been slashed from a commercial hour to a commercial 30 minutes. Too little time is now available to expose or examine anything of substance in any sort of depth or detail.”
Lamenting the rise of media communications and professional spin-doctors, he derided some as "little better than paid liars.”
Taking aim at pollies, he said, “In our parliament we have a dominant group of people who try — and who largely succeed– to avoid logical and open debate on important issues. They demonstrate open hostility to intellectual curiosity and even wilful ignorance of factual evidence in their quest to shut- down troublesome critics. The current government has relied greatly on these tactics. It is a style of politics based on power, information control and impression management.
“The journalism that is being now practiced almost everywhere is unlikely to be able to see through the smoke and mirrors. The essential, bull-shit detectors just aren’t being installed in the new model journos.”
Turning his attention to the 6 pm news bulletins on TVNZ and TV3, he blasted the producers for using “celebrity click bait” stories and other largely unimportant stuff designed to entertain and divert rather than deal with serious issues.
On a more positive note, he exhorted the makers of drama, documentary, observational documentary and even comedy and satire to continue to challenge and inspire audiences.
“We need less orthodoxy and much more heresy. Be sceptical. Don’t follow any party line,” he concluded.