Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for November, 2008
Air New Zealand Crash and Mumbai Bombings
28 November 2008
Something big always breaks when I’m on holidays. I just didn’t expect to be in an affected newsroom when such an event happens.
So here I am on holidays in New Zealand. I dropped by my friends at Radio New Zealand in Wellington this morning to shoot the breeze. It’s been eleven years since I’ve seen my Radio New Zealand comrades, and I was looking forward to being with them again, and having a fun time.
I’m standing outside the Morning Report studio, ready to go in to have a live on-air chat when the confirmation comes through that five New Zealanders were on the Air New Zealand plane that went down in the Mediterranean off south-west France.
While television here in NZ was reporting that there might have been New Zealanders on board the plane (which had been leased to a German company), the stations were saying that Air New Zealand was unaware of any such details.
So it was a pretty emotional time here when the CEO of Air New Zealand called a media conference to confirm that yes, five New Zealanders were on the plane, one of them an Air New Zealand pilot, three of the airline’s engineers and one from the NZ Civil Aviation Authority. Two Germans were also on board.
Combine this with the news of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it was an extraordinary day for any newsroom, let alone a newsroom in New Zealand.
There was certainly a feeling of shock in the newsroom as the Air NZ CEO made his statements. In one short period we went from the possibility of one of his country-people being on the plane, to a confirmation that as many as five could have perished. As I write this, the news has come through that the French Coast Guard has said that there is no hope of finding any survivors. This has not been confirmed by Air New Zealand at this moment, but it doesn’t look good. There are also reports that two bodies have been found.
Newsroom people spring into action when news like this breaks, and that’s what happened here at Radio New Zealand. Journalists are trained for such things but, as an observer watching reporters cover an event which so closely affects them, you notice how they go just that bit more quietly, how subtley they lose their ebullience. After years of covering local tragedies for radio and TV myself, I’ve never been aware of these slight changes in the feeling of a newsroom. It’s just confirms that journalists are not all that hardened.
They are people, and they get affected by what is going on around them.
Because they’ve got a job to do, and they do it, doesn’t mean they don’t care. We’ve got to remember that.
– Phil
Barack Obama and the Magic Money Pudding
26 November 2008
Here in Australia we have a fabulous childrens’ story by Norman Lindsay called the Magic Pudding.
The Magic Pudding told of a living, breathing pudding that could be eaten, but always grew back. It was created at the close of ther First World War, when the times were not so good, and kids dreamed of the luxury of having as much of what they wanted whenever they wanted (hence a pudding that never got smaller no matter how much you ate).
Barack Obama is about to inherit George W. Bush’s Magic Pudding. Except that his pudding is made of money. The current adminstration has just announced that it’s going to spend another 800 billion US dollars to shore up America’s economy. This comes on top the the 700 billion dollar bailout from last month.
The markets reacted failrly well to this announcement, going up overnight by a little bit, after the previous two days’ great gains. Clearly the aim of the extra injection was to keep up the momentum in the market recovery.
The Magic Pudding aspect to this is that it seems that no matter how much the administration spends, the pudding appears to be full again. The money just keeps on being there.
Of course the money is not there. This is deficit spending. The money needs to be borrowed.
And repaid.
With interest.
And it is that repayment, and interest, that will cost the US government. It won’t cost George W. Bush. It will cost his successor, Barack Obama, big time.
He’s come out this morning to say that waste is out. There will be no more wasteful spending, and instead he’ll be making investments that stimulate the US economy.
Taken at his word, this means no more bail-outs of sickened companies. Instead the money would be targetting future success.
But political expediency is bound to bind the new president. Would any president allow a company like GM to fail, even if it’s been making wrong decisions and caused a lot of its own problems. It would be a brave president who let this company fail, taking with it all the workers from other companies that rely on GM.
One thing’s for sure, the Magic Pudding is a fairy tale. In real life, puddings get eaten, and there just isn’t any more to go around.
– Phil
Sir Roger Moore. James Bond and Beyond.
25 November 2008
That was one of the catch-l;nes for one of Roger Moore’s Bond films, maybe the one in space, Moonraker.
Bond and Beyond.
In the case of Roger Moore though, he did go beyond his action hero superstardom, by becoming a UNICEF ambassador, travelling the world and (as he says) making a general nuisance of himself, trying to get governments and corporations to help fix the problems for the world’s kids.
We’re interviewing Sir Roger a bit later today here in the studio, and in preparation for the chat, I read his new autobiography, My Word is My Bond. It was full of all the funky stuff, like how he was nearly eaten by a crocodile on the set of Live and Let Die, or how a rabid fan tried to pull his pants down when he was playing TV’s Ivanhoe.
For me though, the highlight of the book came in the last 100 pages, when he talked about the UNICEF role. The stories that come out are startling. He tells of meeting a South American man who was forced to watch his daughter being raped, later finding out his whole family was murdered. This was an event that was an eye-opener to the English policeman’s son, and a realisation that the rule of law only applies in some places and some of the time. Moore also saw children dying for want of a lack of a teaspoon of iodine. He devotes many pages in his book to his meetings with some of the world’s despots and through his fame as James Bond, convincing them to iodise their salt.
One gets the feeling from the book that being James Bond, Simon Templar, a Persuader or Ivanhoe means little to him compared to what he has been able to do with this fame as a UNICEF ambassador. Obviously the Queen agrees, having first given him an OBE, then a knighthood for all his charitable work.
It makes you think about the nature of fame. People here are agog that Roger Moore is going to be coming in this morning. They’re agog purely because he’s the guy who walked on the screen through a gun-barrel in seven Bond films and saved the planet from Drax and Jaws.
I think they should be agog because he saves real lives.
But then there is no shortage of people who are working across the world right now tending the sick, collecting food for the starving and training the helpless.
They’re real superheroes. As is Sir Roger Moore.
All that said, I’m really excited about meeting James Bond too.
– Phil
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Do Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackman work?
24 November 2008
In a word, yes.
I saw the Melbourne premiere of “Australia” last night.
No, Nicole and Hugh weren’t there, despite the presence of a red carpet and heaps of security. I don’t know who they were trying to protect. Me?
But the night belonged to the film, all two and three-quarter hours of it.
It didn’t seem a minute too long.
The action happens in the north of Australia, where an English lady comes to a remote cattle property after her husband is killed. On first appearances she is totally unsuited to the rough and dry of the outback, but with the help of Hugh Jackman’s Drover, she becomes a local celebrity by droving 1500 cattle up to Darwin and winning a big contract away from the local cattle king, played by Bryan Brown.
It’s a tale of hardship, although the extreme heat and privation of the Northern Territory never really comes through. What does come through is the Japanese. For the first time that I can remember on film, the bombing of Darwin is depicted in all its gross detail. My mum and dad were in Darwin at the time, and though they will never get to see the film, I would’ve loved to have got their view of how the bombing was portrayed.
The great thing about this movie though is the aboriginality. Baz Luhrmann enlisted author Richard Flanagan to co-write the screenplay, and you can tell. Audiences will be treated to a lesson in understanding aboriginal culture and how the forced removal of aboriginal children from their parents tore at the aboriginal communities. Other aboriginal concepts like singing the land are also shown. Singing is the aboriginal way of mapping the land. They sing a song that includes landmarks (trees, rocks, mountains, ponds) that guide them through the land. Although the songlines, as they called, have been noted for some decades now, it has taken all this time for the concept to make it into a major international film.
This is a three-cry movie. There were sobs around me, even from the rather crusty man sitting behind me, who had given a dispproving tut when the film opened with a warning that aboriginal people might be offended because dead aborigines are depiected in the movie. He obviously thought such a warning was a waste of time.
I hope that by the end of the piece he had a little more undersatanding of the cultural sensitivities of other people. If Baz Luhrmann manages to do this, then I think he’ll feel his job was worth while.
I give “Australia” 5 out of 5.
– Phil
How to Stop Smoking, and How Anti-Smoking Campaigns Get It Wrong
21 November 2008
Yesterday on the Breakfast Club we spoke to Martin Lindstrom, an advertising man, who makes the extraordinary statement that most big ad campaigns are failures.
He cites the Pepsi taste test campaign, where tasters are given two colas (Coke and Pepsi) with their labels hidden, and are asked to choose which one they prefer. According to Pepsi, most tasters choose thie product.
But the interesting thing is that once these pepsi-preferrers go away from the taste test, they go back to drinking Coke, Linstrom says the reason for this is the more effective advertising by the Coke people in Atlanta.
How extraordinary. People are choosing to listen to ads to make their choices, rather than trust their own taste.
There’s another side to this. Lindstrom says that the psyche of a product can be so in-grained that the mention of a product, or type of product can elicit a ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ response, so that people start to crave the product, like hoe the dogs would salivate when pavlov rang his bell. This means that by telling you about the Pepsi-Coke taste test, I could well have made you crave a can of cola.
More important than any of this is the effect that advertising has on people who smoke.
Here in Australia we have some pretty tough anti-smoking campaigns. On television there are ads that show people in hospital beds with oxygen masks fitted to their faces, while their young children and partners stand around the bed and are crying. On the cigarette packets themselves, the Australian authorities ddidtate that there should be photos of dissected lungs, amutated toes and rotted, yellowing teeth.
You would think that this would make smokers think twice about taking theire next puff.
No, says Lindstrom. In fact these images make people smoke more.
How, we asked?
He says the simple visual image on TV of people smoking brings in those ol’ dogs of Pavlov again. The smokers would see that image and think, on a simple level, that “Oh yeah, I’d love a ciggie”.
It seems cravings are an impulse that will win out against self-fear every time.
I did come out of the interview feeling pretty chuffed though. I suggested to Lindstrom that what we should do is an advertsiing campaign aimed at pretty young things who think smoking is glamorous. What we should do is run ads that say that smoking causes cellulite (the lumpy fat that can affect the thighs of the female of the species). Yes, he said, you would do well in adverting.
Its still pretty sad though that a distate for a poor self-image is stronger than a distate for dying.
– Phil
