The demise of a decent channel on the box.

I am not an overtly political person. Yeah, I have my political leanings, but all in all, I think as long as everyone in our beautiful country respects each other and gets a fair say in everything, then we should be sweet. This, however, was shattered by the news I heard last weekend: that the TVNZ Charter is to be abolished under the National Government.

SAY WHAT???!!!

Back in my student days, I was not just a Theatre major, but a Media Studies major too, and I vividly remember studying Public Service Broadcasting. Famously, the BBC was set up with the Mission Statement "to inform, educate and entertain", which I reckon is a fair whack of what Public Broadcasting is about. It is paid for by the people, thus it is made for the people. Without the idea of Public Broadcasting, it is almost possible to see that local programming in NZ would have made way for UK and USA TV galore. Imagine how that would have impacted on our nation!

Yes, the Charter is not working as planned, but could we not, rather than scrapping this idea all together, look at what was, and eliminate what wasn't? It this just giving up a bit too easily? What worries me the most is that everyone knows that National seem to have an underlying agenda for privatising some of our S.O.Es. And I think that by taking away TVNZ's duties to the NZ tax paying public, the government is weening us off this S.O.E so that they can sell it in their next term in Government. It's nice to see that the Greens agree with me. And once they start our country back on the slippery slope of privatisation, I just get nightmare visions of the U.S Health care system. And that would be bad. The idiot box is coming to New Zealand.