John Campbell, James Shelley, who owns the airwaves, and the role of public broadcasting.

John Campbell is the face of the TV3 current affairs programme after the daily six o'clock news. He is a hard hitting journalist deeply concerned about issues of social equity and individual rights. Unfortunately, pitted against a light weight entertainment programme of vaguely newsy character on TV1, his audience ratings have been gradually dropping. As advertisers call the tune, there is talk of axing John Campbell for something lighter and frothier with greater appeal to advertisers. Somehow over the years various governments lost sight of the purpose of broadcasting. When the then Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, appointed Professor James Shelley, the most popular and dynamic educator at Canterbury University, to take charge of New Zealand broadcasting in 1936, Shelley injected a vision into public broadcasting that shaped Radio New Zealand and public television for two generations. For him education was no mere technical enterprise, 'but the relentlessly discriminating pursuit of the good life, and the arts must lie at the heart of this'.  Broadcasting was a public good. Then the barbarians took over. They saw broadcasting, and television in particular, as a cash cow. They didn't care that the air waves, like water, didn't belong to any privileged group but to the people of the whole nation, they flogged off the right to make private money from it, and on the way the government clipped the ticket. So now we have a situation where advertisers decide what programmes people should see, and if this means dumbing down the choice offered it matters not as long as at the end of the day they turned a profit. Milo Mindebinder, the fictitious character of Joseph Heller's  Catch 22,  who saw the merit of bombing his own troops because there was profit in it, would approve. The possible dumping of John Campbell, despite enormous public support for him, raises the whole question of what should the purpose of public broadcast be. Is it appropriate to leave it in the hands of a private corporation the legitimate object of which is to make money, not to enhance the educational well-being of the public? Perhaps the whole programming schedule should be reviewed. Why should challenging, searching news items be screened at a time when families should sit down to dinner with their children? Would it not be more appropriate to screen light programmes for family entertainment?  Why do both the main television channels have to screen cooking competitions, house renovations, talentless talent quests at the same time? Would it not be better to give viewers a choice and screen Campbell Live at a later time when grown ups watch grown up television? We should all care about John Campbell and his style of mature news broadcasting. To have a well-informed society that can make sound democratic decisions we need serious informative programmes, and we should resist the kind of political interference that saw the destruction of the state of the arts Broadcasting House to be replaced by a large phallic symbol made of pebbles just because the then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, didn't like some of the questions when he was interviewed on television. We should also resist handing decision making to advertisers who believe that there is more money in advertising on cheap light mindless television programmes because aimed at young minds reluctant to watch programmes that require concentration and thought.