Fatally Killed

I love that even though Russell Crowe ‘threatened to kill’ someone with his bare hands - the first information we get is that he’s New Zealand born

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/3639320/Russell-Crowe-threatened-to-kill

Just thought I’d post a few headlines from Dunedin’s community newspaper. We’re a town that likes to think big, to make sure everyone knows that we’re both a real, vibrant, forward-thinking city, and a traditional, family-values community.

In advance, I’d like to apologise for the low-quality cellphone photos.

I had wondered why I was so cold. Thanks for clarifying that. Speaking of clarification:

“Road use clarified.” Haha, I can just picture a police officer helping the curious citizens of this fair city come to terms with these bold strips of bitumen and gravel snaking their way between the empty frames of our wall-free homes. You might think that this newfangled technology was frightening, that it put us off our lunches, but:

We coped with the new development very well thank you and decided, after tea and scones, to test out these new “roads” by walking and driving on them.

Well, that was fun, huh? I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise for my lack of vitriol lately… I guess I’ve just been so overloaded, there have been so many pointless live crosses, bad puns, instances of record companies getting free airtime for their talentless 16-year-old meatbags and worst of all, Newsboy and Daniel Vettori shilling for the Rugby World Cup. Sigh. Sometimes it all gets too much. More soon, I promise.

Tip of the iceberg, this. Over here, the Dim-Post discusses this story on tonight’s One News about a survey of opinions on the proposed opening of conservation estates to mining.

Danyl chooses to focus on what the results mean, but doesn’t question the survey itself. 

ONE News asked a thousand voters whether they supported government plans to increase mining on conservation land. Forty-four percent said yes, while 48% said no.

Nowhere in the article (and I suppose it goes without saying, in the actual television piece) is there any mention of how the article was conducted or margin of error. Maybe we’re lucky to even get the sample size.

There is no helpful link on the page to a general policy on this sort of thing, and to be honest I don’t want to go digging, considering how badly organised their site is. When One presents the results of a Colmar Brunton poll, we all know where to go to find that stuff out (here, as it happens), it’s very transparent, and probably done about as well as these things can be. After all, Colmar Brunton are a mature, well-respected market leader in that area (don’t get me wrong, I’m not their best buddy, just making a comparison here). On the other hand, this poll is unbranded and TVNZ aren’t prepared to be up front about how it was performed.

For all we know, they sat outside a cafe in Remuera and asked local extremely rich people what they thought. Maybe they polled TVNZ employees. Maybe they offered people money for answers. Maybe they took money for answers, like one of those ridiculous phone-in polls on Campbell Live. Maybe they didn’t, but it was still opt-in. This is all wild conjecture of course, but the point is that it’s very, very easy to produce a completely invalid data set, and if you don’t prove (or even claim) otherwise, people should assume that that is the case, like I have.

Even in the extremely unlikely event that these data were gathered in a conscientious manner, taking into account a margin for error of somewhere between three and five percent, this is pretty much a non-story. I’m not worried about that. I’m just worried that this gets presented the day after the Colmar Brunton poll and no distinction is made.

From the front page of yesterday’s paper:

Oh, ODT, there was a time when that Nuggets player would have been “battered.” What has happened to you? Did you pass up this opportunity just because it would have been in poor taste?

Oh well, let me let my eye slide cautiously to the right…

Oh, how could I doubt you. You’ve done it again! You’ve taken something unpunnable and given it a visual pun of the lowest possible quality. I applaud you. I mean, if it were me, I would never have even thought of giving a piece like that an image in the first place, but I can admit when I am so, so wrong.

I must admit, I find this pretty disgusting. Tonight’s One Network News, or whatever it’s called these days, runs a teaser about Auckland being bombed in its intro, then presents a story about a reenacted WWII air battle off Mission Bay. At the end of the story, they mention that the reenactment was staged by TVNZ to promote the launch of the new Spielberg show The Pacific this week (whichscreensonmondayat8:30pm!).

So that’s a couple of minutes about something your network did to promote a show it’s playing. This seems to be happening quite a lot these days, and to be fair is probably more valid than some of the other dross that makes the cut, but it gets worse.

Cut back to the studio, where Peter WIlliams is standing ominously in front of one of those Important Story displays, a la TV3 news. Uh oh, here we go. It seems One had decided that now would be a good time to give us a small history lesson on WWII’s Pacific theatre. Now, this kind of oversimplified overview is a little frustrating to someone with a history degree, but I guess probably better than nothing for the layperson, and certainly, at the risk of sounding like somebody’s grandpa, I think it’s useful for us to be aware and respectful of these things that happened in our name. But there is absolutely no evidence that that is what’s happening here.

Nope, as if the hermetically sealed, glue-encrusted coffin needed that final nail in it, on returning from the story, we were again informed that The Pacific screens on Monday at 8:30pm. A couple of minutes later the show went to an ad break. I must admit I was expecting the promo for the show, but instead there was a promo for something else. However, with my crapometer tingling, I noticed that the standard One promo screen has been replace with one in the style of the The Pacific promo.  Rank.

There are going to be arguments about whether or not raising awareness here is a good thing, in much the same way that there are arguments that reading Harry Potter is better than reading nothing at all (I’m with the latter), but at the end of the day, this is supposed to be the news, not a presentation of events concocted to promote other shows.

Rather unsurprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be any coverage of the reenactment over at TV3, nor even on stuff.co.nz where they seem to have absolutely no idea what they should be covering.

First, a joke a L’il Wayne’s expense:

[insert Billy T James laugh] Like, a single village tequila, eh?

And now for today’s puns:

Jeepers.

So much fear. I mean fair. A veritable fare of fair fear. It’s fearsome.

Good job, good job. Although the headline below should have been “Sharks fail to bite Reds.”

Oh man, they weren’t kidding, the Rugby World Cup organisers, when they said we would be saturated with the song at the core of the last two posts on this blog. It’s freakin’ all over the damn TV, on every channel, paid or free. And the actual event is still a year off (I’m not sure of the exact date, I just presume it will cut into cricket season, which is another reason to hate it). If you believe the folk behind the Forsyth Barr Stadium here in Dunedin, that undersized, overpriced concrete tent will be ready in time for kickoff, so maybe the event is in two or three years, I don’t know. Zing!

Anyway, it would be awful enough if it were just some private company buying all this advertising space. But it’s not - it’s the New Zealand taxpayer. That would have been fine by me had the whole question of broadcast rights not been turned into a circus last year, with the National party, unhappy at the idea that Maori TV should be allowed to have a go at it, pumped money into a joint network bid. There was an outcry, if you’ll remember, from “middle New Zealand” against the only free-to-air coverage of the cup being shown on a network where the presenters might, on occasion, not speak English. Let’s just put aside the fact the MTV have two channels, one in 100% Maori, one that’s multilingual, and the will and capability to simulcast in two languages. Let’s also put aside the fact that the hardcore fans have Sky in HD, and they already get all of the matches live. Let’s put all that aside, and assume that, if a government funded indigenous broadcaster was to get these rights, that means that the government is racist against poor old downtrodden “middle New Zealand.” Sounds good. While we’re at it, let’s make sure we all previously voted in a government who agreed with that and pumped extra money into other (already partially government-funded) networks’ bids.

Yeah, let’s do that, and make sure that, after having to endure the marketing for a whole year, we end up with rugby on all the channels at once. It’s my dad’s worst nightmare.

I’m not for a minute saying that there should be no public funding going on here at all. And people are more perfectly entitled to enjoy their game and get caught up in the spectacle. But being brow-beaten like this, so far out from the event and with such consistency, is a bitter pill to swallow. And it only serves to remind me of all of our hard-earned dollars that went into this so that hotels and bars could make money next year and feed the magic trickle-down system that hasn’t yet made me a rich man. I want some of those dollars back, so that I can buy some new earmuffs.