Sunday, August 7, 2011

What I’m reading

Brian Edwards gives TVNZ a serve for its treatment of reporter Kate Lynch over the story Close Up ran that was plagiarised from ABC:
Anyone who knows anything about how a magazine programme like Close Up is put together will tell you the idea that a story could be filmed, let alone put to air, without its content and treatment having first been discussed with the programme’s producer, is utterly preposterous. Equally preposterous is the idea that a producer would put to air an item they had not already seen and approved. If Lynch did indeed “act alone”, then her producer should have been demoted with her or possibly fired. [. . . ]
What this entire debacle reveals is an appalling lack of oversight at all levels in the organisation. Lynch may have made an error of judgement, but against a background where her employer and her immediate superiors considered what she had done was something she and they were ‘perfectly entitled to do’. And no one, either in management or in the Close Up office, expressed any reservation to her, either before or immediately after the item went to air. TVNZ’s handling of this affair, from go to wo, has been an absolute scandal. And only Lynch has paid the price.
Rauparaha examines the Greens’ policy for helping the poor and asks:
is the best plan really to:
    • raise marginal tax rates on them,
    • give them cheaper bachelor’s degrees,
    • increase the barriers to entering the workforce at the minimum wage; and
    • increase the cost of rental properties?
    Eric Crampton takes Labour MP Jacinda Ardern to task for playing “silly buggers with the stats” on youth unemployment.

    At the splendidly strange Ever So Strange, there is a photo of a crucifix toad which I won’t post here because it is too repellent. The intro to the text says:
    A wise man once called for a reclassification of the Australian fauna into: i) dangerous ii) odd iii) sheep.
    Like so many other Australians, the crucifix toad comes under category ii).

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