I have major problems with politicians ‘improving’ scripts on public TV, no matter how crap they might be. The quality of scripts is an operational matter for TVNZ — if they’re crap, then that’s TVNZ’s problem and is no matter for government to concern itself with.

Now now Lew you are just being too beltway centric – for the average political punter seeing Bill English on an advertisment for a TV show/debate/pseudo documentary whatever is going to strongly asscoiate him with his portfolio and his party whether that is the intention of the advertisement or not. How often outside of the electoral cycle and outside of the evening news does one even see this sort of coverage given to a political party or its individual members on TV? Whilst I agree that the situation is less than ideal and the format of the advertisement was irresponsible I believe that Bill English would have been seriously unwise to have taken whatever TVNZ said he should read and simply read it. Just as it would be irresponsible for say a CEO of a major company to read whatever the ad gurus said he should without checking it if he/she was fronting an ad for a company.

I agree with you and I believe that the problem here is that this format of ad was chosen by TVNZ in the first place – with my conspiracy theory tin foil hat on I believe there is an equal chance of the following scenarios – A) the charge can be levelled at TVNZ that they were told to format that ad in such a way by the shareholding minister or B) that they knew formating this ad in this way would create a ruckus thus increasing the exposure of the month of programming and thus deliberately and consciously chose to do it this way without any input from the Minister C) that the format was always to be this way but a non-National TVNZ insider was livid with it and thus wrote the ad so poorly in the knowledge that it would have to be change and that the ruckus follwing the revelations could potentially damage the government.D) that they didn’t think twice about it and simply got Bill English to puppet their lines and yet he wasn’t too enthralled by them hence the re-write

However I am a firm believer in Occam’s razor and as I hold managers of all stripes in NZ in very low esteem I believe that there was no malice intended its just that the drones at TVNZ could not forsee a problem as they are simply to daft and hence a fuckup was inevitable….

I have major problems with politicians ‘improving’ scripts on public TV, no matter how crap they might be. The quality of scripts is an operational matter for TVNZ — if they’re crap, then that’s TVNZ’s problem and is no matter for government to concern itself with.

Whether they’re crap is arguable, because we’re comparing two different forms; a political ad and an ad for a TV program. There’s plenty of ways those words could have been used in a perfectly interesting and compelling ad for a TV program; the fault is not with the words themselves, but with the fact that they are incongruent with the form of the final ad. For a bit o’ political propaganda such as we ended up with, they are crap, but what the changes indicate is that that’s not really what TVNZ intended to make.

L

http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2009/10/dreams-and-realities/

I think what makes it political for me, is comparing it to what one of these ads might normally look like. Normally we night have a journo doing a voice over or on screen talking. The politicians might have the camera pointed at them, but the ‘feel’, if you like, would be of the viewer and the journo looking at the politician doing his business, and judging him. The viewer would be ‘connected’ to the observing journo. The politician might be quoted saying “we need to cut spending” or what have you, but we are simply observing him do this.

The way it is, we are ‘connected’ to the politician. And as you said, the new text makes that connection work better. There is not that ‘observing’ distance, we are not mediated by a journo. Bill English, the Minister of Finance and deputy Prime Minister is there in our lounge talking to us about what ‘we’ need to do, as if his political views are simply a matter of fact. That’s sure as shit political, and if the new text helps make it wrk better, and communicates that idea better then, gabba gabba hey, QED, and Bob’s your uncle.

forget cute issues like the quality of TVNZ ad writers. here’s why it’s a serious problem in case you missed them above:

http://www.thestandard.org.nz/oia-docs-confirm-english-wrote-propaganda-ad-script/#comment-169794

http://www.thestandard.org.nz/oia-docs-confirm-english-wrote-propaganda-ad-script/#comment-169805

But English authorising changes is not trivial – he’s the shareholding minister and he can’t be involved in this way. From this and his housing scam it really seems the guy has no idea what the words “conflict of interest” mean.

And John Key is so relaxed he probably isn’t even aware of it.

It also doesn’t let him off the hook for all the lying to parliament about it. Was Gerry answering on behalf of English or Key?

The issue is did English change the message to promote the National party? Reading the script above, I can’t see one single word that attempts to do this. If anything, the message is one of positive encouragement with the aim of helping get the economy back on track.Therefore, I don’t see any problem at all with the changes to the script.

Let me ask, if readers were not aware that English had authorised the changes, is there any aspect of the alterations that would give any cause for concern with respect to promoting the National Party?