Lingerie football – TVNZ…Why do we need to know?

OK, it’s Saturday, it’s football season, but this is not right. Not only do we have the Cronulla Sharks to deal with, now we have the ladies’ league to distract and bewitch us.

Consider my utter and absolute dismay when Lingerie Football [NSFW] was presented as a “news” item at the end of the TVNZ bulletin.

I am very disappointed that TVNZ thinks it’s OK to humiliate female newsreaders for the sake of a tits’n’arse ratings point or two.

I’ve been home most of the day, I was doing some marking and preparing for my Writers & Reader’s Festival gig tomorrow afternoon. I had the TV on in the background because Moac was shopping for warm, smart and “grrrrrhhhhh…..merino!”

Throughout the day I was switching between Snoop’Dog THS, football, baseball, motor racing, Coro-omnibus, gardening shows, netball and news. At least a dozen times I heard the Sky-guys yakkin’ on about “lingerie football”.

A “no news” news item that’s most certainly a result of Flat Earth replicators. So it was and so it came to be that TVNZ replictated the advertising meme on cue.

SST – dancing to Zoe’s beat?

I wrote last week that I’d probably have little to say about the Tony Veitch case now that it’s before the court. I also wondered if the news media would do the same.

No chance actually. Now I find myself back in it too; trying to make sense of the spinning. I read this stuff and feel like it’s a public rehearsal of Tony Veitch’s defence arguments. It is trial by media. Only in this case it’s the complainant who seems to be in the dock.

The Sunday papers are all over the story again this week with revelations about the incidents covered in the charges laid against Veitch a week ago.  The Veitch saga: What Kristin told police (SST) Water assault charge for Veitch (HoS)

But what really caught my eye was another interview with Zoe Veitch in the Sunday Star Times.

Veitch’s wife: ‘We shouldn’t have given in to her demands

No free speech in New Zealand?

An interesting media release on the Scoop site today.

At the opening of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) annual conference, former newspaper owner Matthew Horton made some interesting comments about freedom of speech in Aotearoa. There are elements of anti-political correctness and pro-National bias present in the quoted comments and a demonstrable lack of understanding of the power of social media.