Mediawatch's weekly catch-up with Lately. This week Colin Peacock talks to Karyn Hay about the media targeted in Gaza live on TV - and the Gaza crisis spilling over into sport on screen. Also - an epic US broadcasting deal that could change the game here, a front-page foul-up and a brutal book review.
The media targeted in Gaza
Photo: AFP
So many Palestinians have died in the attacks on Gaza - and people in Israel too from fire going the other way - it seems churlish to highlight the plight of the media. But the Israelis taking down the HQ of major media outlets in Gaza last weekend was extraordinary.
The owner of the Jalaa Tower housing international media said an Israeli intelligence officer warned him by phone he had just one hour to ensure that the building was evacuated. His plea for "10 extra minutes", broadcast live by Al Jazeera, was denied.
AP’s footage of their staff bugging out of the building in a hurry was chilling too - before the destruction of the tower by jets, also covered live on TV:
LIVE footage of the moment an Israeli air raid bombed Jalaa Tower housing the offices of Al Jazeera and The Associated Press in Gaza City. pic.twitter.com/NDulJYte6V
— Fuata Nyuki (@ArapKungu) May 15, 2021
It’s extraordinary but not unprecedented.
During the Sarajevo siege in 1992, hotels housing international journalists were targeted - but so was much of the central city at the time.
In November 2001 the Kabul office of Al-Jazeera was destroyed by a missile fired by a U.S. warplane. Al Jazeera's Baghdad office was hit by a missile fired by a US jet \in 2003, killing one reporter and wounding another person.
The US copped a lot of flak for that - and it hasn’t been forgotten. Israel seems more than willing to cop the criticism.
The US news agency Associated Press was also HQ’d in the same tower, and also London-based online outlet Middle East Eye .
To enable them to continue working, Agence France-Presse has opened its Gaza office to AP and Al Jazeera.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists demanded from the Israeli government a "detailed and documented justification for this military attack".
"This latest attack on a building long known by Israel to house international media raises the spectre that the Israel Defense Forces is deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza," said CPJ executive director Joel Simon.
"Journalists have an obligation and duty to cover unfolding events in Gaza and it would be illegal for the IDF to use military means to prevent it."
Gaza spills over into coverage of sport
When Leicester City won the English FA cup final on Sunday, two players posed with a Palestinian flag. The TV pictures were only fleeting but -- the images went round the world on social media:
Wow! this from the Palestinian Ambassador on behalf of the Palestinian government and people thanking Hamza Choudhury & Wesley Fofana of Leicester City Football Club for using the historic FA Cup triumph to show solidarity. “No one is free until Palestine is free” #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/eHPIY2I8gG
— Claudia Webbe MP (@ClaudiaWebbe) May 16, 2021
Meanwhile in Melbourne, Wellington Phoenix’s Israeli striker Tomer Hemed was cautioned by the referee for putting out a kippah as part of a goal celebration -- and he charged into the arms of fans with Israeli flags after scoring a penalty. That certainly got noticed in Australia too.
When the Phoenix came home on Monday, media wanted to talk to Hemed - but had to make do with putting awkward questions to general manager David Dome instead at the airport:
He said Hemed's celebrations were "a plea for peace."
NZME sports writer Michael Burgess said Tomer Hemed is "not playing for Israel at the moment – he's playing for the Phoenix - and needed to be more respectful of his club and the optics around that and has put them in an awkward situation."
"Hemed also needs to be respectful towards Australia and New Zealand, where the majority of people probably have a vastly different view to his own about the current conflict, especially the Israeli concept of 'defending' their nation with strikes that cause untold collateral damage, including sleeping children in their beds," he added.
Football authorities take a take a dim view of political posturing on the pitch. But Black Lives Matter has changed the game and emboldened players now they know they have the power.
It also puts the broadcasters in an awkward position.
Sports authorities will want them to treat players making personal / political / nationalistic statements like streaking or fan violence - and turn the cameras away.
But is that a form of censorship?
Some networks suffered blowback in the US for showing sports people taking a knee in support of BLM - but showed the scenes anyway. And what if the cameras never showed the 1968 Olympic Black Power protest salute?
A big deal for Discovery?
Photo: Mediaworks/Discovery Inc
The ownership of MediaWorks former TV business could change again after surprise news that US-based telco AT&T has announced plans for an epic deal to spin off its WarnerMedia division and merge it with Discovery Inc. - which picked up MediaWorks TV (Newshub, Three, Choice TV) in New Zealand in September last year.
AT&T said the plan was to create a new company to be one of the leading global direct-to-consumer streaming platforms".
Variety described it as a “head swiveling” surprise for TimeWarner staff.
AT&T’s media assets include several TV entertainment channels, News channel CNN - and the Warner Bros. studio (Batman and Harry Potter) and HBO (Game of Thrones etc).
Discovery Inc, which has TV networks and channels in many countries - including New Zealand.
Discovery shareholders will have to approve and US regulators will have to give a green light..
Some analysts are suspicious because it’s a throwback telcos - including AT&T - buying content creators and broadcasters (remember Sky and Vodafone’s failed bid to merge a few years back?) and often they ended up being bad deals.
What might it mean for Newshub and Three and the other Discovery NZ stuff?
Really hard to say. Maybe nothing because it’s such a “branch office” and in the process of being folded into the Australian arm of Discovery.
The Spinoff boss Duncan Grieve thinks it could be huge. He wrote about a cascade of effects that could change the game for the former MediaWorks channels - and also Sky TV and even the Government's proposal for a new media entity.
“There is a version of this merger which sees these brands all taken out to the large network of free-to-air stations the cable giant would own, and having them function as promotion for a new streaming colossus. Tova O’Brien breaking stories on CNN / NZ at 6pm (and serving as the local correspondent for a global audience), before an evening of local reality TV souped up by global budgets and distribution – with major sports and drama rights for good measure? It really could happen.”
But it might not.
Discovery / AT&T might carry on re-selling content to other broadcasters and platforms as it does now because it’s more lucrative.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Know your local MP
Oops wrong party . . . Photo: photo / RNZ Mediawatch
A galling front-page error in the Hawkes Bay Today yesterday. Under the headline 'Disingenuous’ it said:
“Māori Party MP Meka Whaitiri accused Napier City Council of being disingenuous in delaying Māori wards” - and photos of Meka Whaitiri and Napier’s mayor Kirsten Wise.
Small problem though - MP Meka Whaitiri is a Labour Party MP.
As she pointed out on Facebook herself, “a wee Google” would have showed she has been MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti - since 2013.
The local daily shouldn’t need to Google the identity of a local MP (Ikaroa-Rāwhiti covers the entire BoP) and she’s not exactly obscure. It generated a lot of headlines when she was sacked as a cabinet minister in 2019.
Today’s paper carries a tiny one-line ‘news in brief item’ on page 4 headlined - Apology to Meka Whaitiri - “who was inadvertently referred to as a Maori Party MP on our Tuesday front page.”
It would have been better placed alongside the page 3 item about yesterday’s protests / hikoi on the Māori wards issue - or the the editorial page of this morning’s paper carries readers’ Facebook feedback on the issue of Māori wards. it also said the ‘Disingenuous’ story was the most-viewed story online for the day.
The paper made no acknowledgement of the error the previous day on its website, Twitter account or its Facebook feed - even though it was harvesting readers’ views on Facebook.
Rough reviews crossing a line?
While The Apprentice helped elevate Trump into a celebrity President, the hiring firing boss figure in TVNZ’s 2021 reboot - Mike Pero - “puts in a performance so wooden that you start looking at his face for signs of borer” - according to Steve Braunias in his review for the Herald on Tuesday.
But ODT books editor Rob Kidd wrote an longer, harsher book review last week.
Polly Gillespie is a long-serving radio host and Sunday Star Times and Woman’s Day columnists her book is a sort of memoir and series if observations on modern life - subtitled 'Reports from a Riotous Life.'
Robb Kidd said the time it took to read the 304 pages was “one of the darkest periods of my life.”
“It is riddled with cliches and peppered with more brackets than Bunnings Warehouse,” he says, which reflects badly on the publisher Penguin Random House.
But Rob Kidd was pretty personal with his criticism too. For instance he called Gillespie a “a cosmetic-surgery cautionary tale on the brink of obscurity.”
He also dissed the likely readership.
“The women’s mag readers will no doubt swallow every insipid morsel,” Kidd wrote.
Some media people praised his review urging others to read it - others hated the review:
For example sportswriter Jamie Wall called it “the best book review you will read all year” - but sportscaster Jason Pine disagreed:
“I think it’s mean-spirited, small-minded, unnecessarily nasty and says far more about the reviewer’s desire for easy clicks than it does her.”
Broadcaster turned lawyer Linda Clark called the review “an ego trip” and former RNZ and Guardian Charlotte Graham McLay had an interesting response:
“I decline to review books like this one because I know what the commissioning editor wants me to do and no one really needs me to do it, plus it makes me a worse person. I have done some scathing reviews in my time but only of things that I wrongly thought I would actually like . . .
