Dinner at 5pm sharp will never be a goer around here, nor will insisting every blade of grass on the property is whipped into submission.
I try not to moan about young people, but I am fond of tut-tutting pedantically about grammar.
Yelling "comprise does not take an of" at the television this week had one of the offspring saying I was not keeping up with the inevitable evolution of the language.
My childish and churlish retort is not worth repeating.
Although I subscribe to a variety of online news sources, I still like the ritual of watching the 6 o’clock news on television, even if sometimes I break out and watch it an hour later.
And, because I mostly watch Newshub’s bulletin, its impending demise will affect me.
I have not appreciated all their coverage. Successive political editors there have sometimes taken themselves a little too seriously, prone to dramatic pronouncements on all manner of topics which did not warrant it.
On a good day I can find that funny.
If it gets too much, I can always turn over to TV1. It can be fascinating to see how they cover the same story.
That’s the beauty of competition. You have a choice. You can make comparisons.
While other news outlets provide some video coverage of stories, soon there will be only one national television station covering New Zealand.
As advertising revenue shrinks for traditional media, fewer and fewer staff work under considerable pressure to produce work which is then hi-jacked by big digital platforms which pay nothing for it.
It would be great if this government has the gumption to pass legislation to require the tech giants to pay for the content they use, but I am not holding my breath given the coalition’s reverence for big business.
Reporters also have to deal with better paid communications/public relations operators, many of whom have gone to the dark side from journalism, plying them with the world view of their masters, often couched in gobbledygook which avoids answering the questions posed.
It drove me mad in the few years I was a health reporter for this newspaper earlier this century and I doubt it has improved since.
With a much smaller journalism workforce throughout the country, fewer stories can be covered.
Sometimes coverage of a controversy starts with a hiss and a roar but is not followed up.
I have always considered the big stories holding the rich and powerful to account would be found and told one way or another, even with a diminished workforce.
That may be magical thinking.
My concern, as the queen of the worthy but dull, has been the smaller stories, be they local, regional or national.
Less coverage comes with reduced understanding from the public of the nuts and bolts of how our society works or doesn’t work.
The risk is that this contributes to a lack of cohesion and leaves a vacuum ready to be filled by disinformation.
Even in their heyday our news organisations could not cover everything, but I often wonder now how much is missed.
A case in point for me recently concerned the McDonald’s television advertisement "It’s good to be the driver".
It was my observation the drivers depicted, instead of concentrating on their driving, were all distracted by wanting to scoff McDonald’s products scrounged from their passengers.
Police told me while cellphones were the most common cause of distraction for drivers, what was portrayed in the ad could be considered as another form of distraction.
They realised what was portrayed was a common occurrence throughout the country but urged drivers to give the road their full attention.
McDonald’s response to me said the commercial had been shot to ensure there was no suggestion of unsafe behaviours.
The only time a driver was depicted with both hands off the wheel, the car was stationary, and when in motion eyes were on the road ahead. It pointed out eating and drinking while driving was not illegal.
Curiously, the fast-food giant did not mention the ad had been the subject of four complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority raising the same concerns as I had.
In a majority decision in December the ASA complaints board did not uphold the complaints, finding the ad did not reach the threshold to encourage an unsafe practice.
An unspecified minority disagreed.
If there was media coverage of this decision anywhere, I did not find it.
But I was impressed my queries prompted the ASA to call me and engage in a helpful discussion about its processes.
This wouldn’t have been a big story, but should it have been covered?
I would say yes, but that might brand me as an old stick-in-the-mud television watcher.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
