Those standing for office in the upcoming local body elections, having rushed to media outlets to inform the public of their excellent attributes, will have found that it was not only an expensive exercise, but they will also have been given an infinite variety of choices.
There are at least 5 radio stations and three newspapers that will have plausibly endeavoured to convince the incumbents and aspirants to choose their particular vehicle for their message. As each option tends to have its own defined audience, and as you need to reach a wide cross section of potential voters to promote your cause, they may have felt it necessary to spread themselves across the lot.
It wasn’t always like that. When I first stood for public office we only had one newspaper and one radio station and in those days the news was left entirely to newspapers. Radio stations had no news segments on the hour or half hour. They played music, advertisements and mid-morning and in the evening “serials” which in those pre-television times you found yourself fixated with.
Mums, most of whom were at home in the mornings, would tune into ‘Portia Faces Life’ or ‘Doctor Paul’ and in the evening we kids would listen to ‘Life With Dexter’, ‘Hagen’s Circus’ and as the night wore on cops and robbers shows like ‘Night Beat.’
Night Beat starred an unlikely newspaper crime reporter named Randy Stone. “I cover the night beat for the daily” he would intone in his opening stanza. Near the conclusion of the thirty minute drama, after numerous criminals had either been jailed or shot, he would noisily recall the outcome on an outdated typewriter and then yell out: “Copy Boy!” addressing apparently a young lad who would no doubt hasten the story to a grateful editor.
Radio provided great entertainment, but almost everybody got the daily newspaper. I used to do a paper run in Lansdowne and we only needed to know the names of those households who didn’t subscribe.
It was a very short list.
Today, news has become big business and radio and television stations have encroached on this once sacred preserve of the newspapers. Now each media competes for audiences and the news is packaged and presented with more gore than Randy Stone would have dreamed of.
A study conducted by the New York University made a list of ‘Journalisms greatest hits of the twentieth century.’ You might have expected news stories about new vaccines, fantastic inventions, the rise in living standards or the spread of democracy from ten per cent of the countries to sixty per cent over that 100 year period.
Well you would have been disappointed. The greatest hits were all about war, natural disasters, dangerous chemicals and unsafe cars.
We don’t really want good news at all.
The problem with an interconnected world is there is always a flood, a war, a plane crash, an earthquake, a serial murder or starvation somewhere and with the proliferation of video cameras, now even an integral part of your mobile phone, there is a constant supply of horrific scenes to fill our TV screens and to be fleshed out later in print in our newspapers.
These disasters were always part of the world order, but by bringing them to us daily, particularly with such clarity as allowed on our modern highly pixelated TV screens, we risk imagining our world is getting worse, when in fact it is vastly improving.
In a town that has barely grown, the rise of news media outlets, despite causing unwanted increases in your advertising budget, should be applauded not bemoaned. We tend to look back wistfully as though there were better times, but life improves daily, even if we are loathe to recognise it.
When 19th century liberal historian and politician Lord Macaulay, wrote his History of England he couldn’t understand why the English always talked about ‘the good old days' and he warned later generations - and that’s you and me – not to romanticise the past.
He wrote: ‘In spite of overwhelming evidence that living standards are improving, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live.
‘It may at first seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward at eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we are.
‘That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful for us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.
‘But in truth there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we would cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future.’
There are at least 5 radio stations and three newspapers that will have plausibly endeavoured to convince the incumbents and aspirants to choose their particular vehicle for their message. As each option tends to have its own defined audience, and as you need to reach a wide cross section of potential voters to promote your cause, they may have felt it necessary to spread themselves across the lot.
It wasn’t always like that. When I first stood for public office we only had one newspaper and one radio station and in those days the news was left entirely to newspapers. Radio stations had no news segments on the hour or half hour. They played music, advertisements and mid-morning and in the evening “serials” which in those pre-television times you found yourself fixated with.
Mums, most of whom were at home in the mornings, would tune into ‘Portia Faces Life’ or ‘Doctor Paul’ and in the evening we kids would listen to ‘Life With Dexter’, ‘Hagen’s Circus’ and as the night wore on cops and robbers shows like ‘Night Beat.’
Night Beat starred an unlikely newspaper crime reporter named Randy Stone. “I cover the night beat for the daily” he would intone in his opening stanza. Near the conclusion of the thirty minute drama, after numerous criminals had either been jailed or shot, he would noisily recall the outcome on an outdated typewriter and then yell out: “Copy Boy!” addressing apparently a young lad who would no doubt hasten the story to a grateful editor.
Radio provided great entertainment, but almost everybody got the daily newspaper. I used to do a paper run in Lansdowne and we only needed to know the names of those households who didn’t subscribe.
It was a very short list.
Today, news has become big business and radio and television stations have encroached on this once sacred preserve of the newspapers. Now each media competes for audiences and the news is packaged and presented with more gore than Randy Stone would have dreamed of.
A study conducted by the New York University made a list of ‘Journalisms greatest hits of the twentieth century.’ You might have expected news stories about new vaccines, fantastic inventions, the rise in living standards or the spread of democracy from ten per cent of the countries to sixty per cent over that 100 year period.
Well you would have been disappointed. The greatest hits were all about war, natural disasters, dangerous chemicals and unsafe cars.
We don’t really want good news at all.
The problem with an interconnected world is there is always a flood, a war, a plane crash, an earthquake, a serial murder or starvation somewhere and with the proliferation of video cameras, now even an integral part of your mobile phone, there is a constant supply of horrific scenes to fill our TV screens and to be fleshed out later in print in our newspapers.
These disasters were always part of the world order, but by bringing them to us daily, particularly with such clarity as allowed on our modern highly pixelated TV screens, we risk imagining our world is getting worse, when in fact it is vastly improving.
In a town that has barely grown, the rise of news media outlets, despite causing unwanted increases in your advertising budget, should be applauded not bemoaned. We tend to look back wistfully as though there were better times, but life improves daily, even if we are loathe to recognise it.
When 19th century liberal historian and politician Lord Macaulay, wrote his History of England he couldn’t understand why the English always talked about ‘the good old days' and he warned later generations - and that’s you and me – not to romanticise the past.
He wrote: ‘In spite of overwhelming evidence that living standards are improving, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live.
‘It may at first seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward at eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we are.
‘That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful for us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.
‘But in truth there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we would cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future.’
“Copy boy!”
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