With the brave new world of coalitions, and with an increased number of politicians, every whisper of discord and self publicity muttered around the Beehive, is transformed into a crisis on the front pages of the newspapers and the lead stories in the evening television news. There are, I am glad to say, still some steady hands on the tiller. Magazine journalism is flourishing and in some respects, layout for example, newspapers have improved. National radio sails majestically on. None of this can be said about television, where local content has dropped from 30 to 18 per cent over the past five years, and tabloid values reign supreme.
Commercials brutally interrupt every program and the result is offensive and intrusive.
The scarcely concealed aim of broadcast managers is to deliver as many eyeballs as possible to advertisers. With the impression that the reality portrayed by the media in New Zealand, and reflected on the Internet, has nothing to do with the daily life of the population. Things are not as bad as they seem from afar. But whether this dichotomy between virtual reality and reality will change remains to be seen. It's about time we woke up to the fact that, to adapt what vegetarians say, we are what we see and hear just as much as we are what we eat.