Mike McRoberts and Duncan Grieve speak in a sleep-inducing monotone, devoid of emotion, sense of urgency or importance. Are they happy, sad, upset, worried…? Who knows. The audio can’t tell. They are both grey men – their hair, their faces, their being, a palette of grey scales. I realised this yesterday when McRoberts was discussing Newshub’s impending euthanasia on RNZ’s Saturday morning show.
Was he happy or sad? It’s hard to answer. He was very depressed. Mike McRoberts. The huge redundancy pay stifled any instinctive reaction. What else could have caused it? The staff crew who came to make the news programmes on contract at TV3 were merely strikebreakers helping out with the business, but McRoberts was godlike. Bad things happen, then you get paid and you slide into an apparently (by his own account, bullshit) cushy job. So I have no grudge against the Americans who celebrate the destruction of Newshub from their New York headquarters on Independence Day. Fuck you.
McRoberts spoke briefly about wartime communications. The main requirement for the job may not have been to be able to speak Arabic, but to be someone who could deal with the reality of death with raw emotion. He was a good war correspondent and was available at disasters. I once wrote a column about his cynical behaviour. A true professional, he would go above and beyond to treat the victims he chose for his story. The best Maori performance in the white saviour role was… Paddy Gower. Move the other patients. This is the news!
What emotional attachment can one form to someone so robotic and personalityless? Not even Mark Jennings, TV’s Geppetto, could create a front man as deadpan as McRoberts. This adoration comes not from the PR power of billboards or women’s magazines, but from the ratings they get at 6pm. This adoration must be due to the audience of an oligopolistic television system. The network star – the highly paid, mediocre physical type – is rapidly going the way of the Feyre. John Hawkesby’s $6 million for six days on air with Judy Bailey would not amount to sixpence now.
With the unwavering rhythm of an AI replicating car directions, Grieve recently interviewed 23-year-old media newbie William Territe for a podcast. Territe worshipped Newshub. McRoberts and co. were legends, childhood heroes. His attitude towards Newshub’s collapse (nuclear destruction) may have been blunted by his new job at Pacific Media Network. He wished the staff bandits well, without dwelling on the radioactive wasteland thus created. For someone so obsessed with the news (it was odd to hear him speak nostalgically of the events of this century), it was surprising to hear him speak without a hint of anger. Maybe young people just have a more forward-thinking outlook, like the Cultural Revolution or Year Zero.
I was unexpectedly moved by watching the final episodes of late night news on TV One and TV3. I watched them on YouTube. As I freely admitted in previous columns, I am part of the problem. I don’t own a TV and haven’t watched it regularly for over a decade. Programmes end because we don’t watch. It has nothing to do with news resources or the quality of production. It’s not their fault, it’s ours. I can’t help but feel sorry for the loss for which I am partly responsible.
It’s a painful journey looking back over the 34 years of TV3’s Nightline. In 1990, a news show with two women on it was a novelty. What Territe, who grew up with TV3, may not understand is how groundbreaking it was. TV3 was more Aotearoa than New Zealand. It was iconoclastic. Territe never mentioned TV One News. This is a generational shift, a reflection of the ineptitude of the national broadcaster’s staff and the organic, homegrown nature of TV3.
TV3, whose outwardly conventional newscaster Philip “Eyebrows” Shelley hosted its evening news show, produced the late-night manicured “Mr Hyde” to balance “Nightline with Dr Jekyll.” TVNZ poorly copied it for 34 years, then pulled the plug on it this year soon after TV3 announced its fate.
For TVNZ, late-night news was able to cover a range of generations. The show most familiar to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers was Eyewitness News, a 9:30pm breaking news show that frequently featured interviews and live interviews. This was a news show that was as often news as it was reporting. Richard Harman recalls filming an interview with Muldoon at Vogel House after his defeat in the 1984 election. Muldoon had stubbornly refused to comply with Labor’s instructions to devalue the currency, and after the instructions were broadcast, he was thoroughly disparaged in an interview with Ranji. The country was on the brink of bankruptcy, and high-tension dramas were playing out on the late-night news, as was the Queen Street riots in December. I remember watching in amazement as the incredible footage unfolded. Richard Prebble lambasted Lange for dismissing him as SOE minister in Eyewitness News in 1988, and the next day Lange was sacked from cabinet altogether.
We’ve seen the retreat of evening news before. I remember my dad buying the “8 o’clock edition” of the Oakland Star to find out the horse racing results. That ended and Oakland’s afternoon newspaper, the Oakland Star itself, went out of business in the early 90s. TV evening news moved from 6:30pm to 6pm, talk radio stations aired in-depth news on their afternoon shows, and outdated newspapers delivered by schoolkids at 4pm seemed to have no audience to read in the late afternoon.
Now, in June 2024, there is no late night news at all. The dismantling of fixed-time television seems almost complete. Where once newsmakers, politicians and viewers would catch the late night news and strive to use it for something, to make it worthwhile, there is no action, no energy. It is no longer a thing. Now it is a cultural artifact of interest only to researchers digging through the archives. After 9pm, we are all either binge-watching Netflix, or hate-watching our enemies on TikTok or Facebook, or pessimistically scrolling on Twitter, or cam-holing after 9pm. There seems to be no appetite for news. Other countries seem to maintain their late night shows and viewers, but not here. Why?
Abandoning news like this would be a regression, a step back in the history of human development – that’s the intuition. Less news, less information, less knowledge, less civilisation. But if I was blogging then I would have said the same about 8 O’Clock and the Auckland Star. I said it when TVNZ 6 and 7 were abandoned, but even with all the cuts, the world keeps turning… even if there’s no one left to report on it.
When I look at Bryce Edwards’ comprehensive daily news listings, I always see that on some topics most of the sources are paid. Combined with the withdrawal of TV news, it really makes me wonder what impact this will have in the next few years. Who will the voters of the future get their information from? Audiences are fragmented, and the era of collective experience is gone, replaced by algorithms and memes.
