The Medium is the MassAge

Living in a country where deregulation has long been the name of the game, we're no strangers to commercially driven news. Gone are the days of front pages consisting only of text; the days of thirty minutes of actual news, rather than an hour's worth of sensationalised headlines from around the world (the world of the UK and USA, of course), and a story about a South Canterbury farm-dog with ESP/HIV/[insert acronym here], read out by someone who can name every designer to show at Fashion Week but didn't know why Sarah Palin's pledge of support for North Korea was funny. The consequences of deregulation are, for the average kiwi, many and varied. We have to channel surf a lot, because of all the ads. If we actually want to know what's going on in the world, we have to be prepared to spend a lot of time trawling the internet, reading what's in the lines and what's between them. We have to accept that our state-owned TV network has abandoned the quaint idea that media should be the fourth estate, and considers us all to be a pack of cooking-show obsessed imbeciles.

We also have to accept that, being driven by money, media outlets will be completely irresponsible and unethical as long as someone will buy it. We saw it for years on TVNZ's conservative morning orgy, Breakfast, where Paul 'Mouthpiece of the Nation (while I make a hundred times what you do)' Henry was continually allowed to make offensive comments because Ken loves a good gay joke before going to work and sexually harrassing his secretary. Last month, the Herald published a column written by a contributor we'll call Hannibal, in which he argued that abortions carried out between 1974 and 2009 are largely to blame for the problems we face now with national superannuation. Putting aside for a moment the absolutely ludicrous nature of the claim, we have to ask: how was this published? If mass media is not going to fill its other functions as fourth estate, why is it allowed to provoke a debate for which it will never provide a fair forum? When will someone stand up and say publishing this kind of view is completely irresponsible, and an abuse of access? We all know that whenever a documentary about white supremacist groups is broadcast, membership increases. Maybe we are the moronic consumers we're presumed to be; but if we are, isn't there more responsibility to use mass media, well, responsibly? Have your say.