Media Report

Tony Veitch has been a major television personality in New Zealand but he's now gone to ground after he publicly confessed he had "lashed out" at a former girlfriend.

That revelation was always going to be a big story, but what made it even bigger was the fact that he reportedly paid her around $150,000 and she was quiet about the matter for several years. So too it seems were some executives at TV NZ who knew at least some of the details.

Colin Peacock is the presenter of Media Watch on Radio New Zealand...

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Now let's head across the ditch and an extraordinary media story about alleged domestic violence and one of New Zealand's brightest media starts.

Tony Veitch: Following dinner we had a major disagreement and we argued for a long time. In the end, my frustration took over, I broke, and lashed out in anger, something I will regret to the end of my days.

TV3 NEWS THEME

TV3 Announcer: This is Three News, with Alistair Wilkinson, and Sacha McNeill.

Sacha McNeill: Good evening. The government has launched an investigation into the Tony Veitch affair and will be asking the State broadcaster to explain who knew what, and when. The Prime Minister says she is deeply concerned about how the matter was handled ...

Helen Clark: If senior managers thought it was OK, to have things confessed to them which clearly were at variance with what any organisation would want linked with them, then there's a moral crisis here.

TVNZ Reporter: Well we made a repeated request for an interview with the head of News at TVNZ, Anthony Flannery, no response from that department. I also submitted a list of written questions to the publicity department, no response there either. And Steve, we were issued with this rather bland statement from CEO Rick Ellis a short time ago and that he says a significant review process is under way and to the circumstances surrounding Tony Veitch, including the disclosures he's made this afternoon. It also says that he considers that violence is a major issue in New Zealand. Beyond that, we haven't had any answers to the questions that we really wanted answered, that is, who knew about this, how much did they know and when did they find out?

Antony Funnell: Now Tony Veitch has been a major television personality in New Zealand but he's now gone to ground after he publicly confessed that he had 'lashed out' at a former girlfriend.

That revelation was always going to be a big story, but what made it even bigger was the fact that he reportedly paid her around $150,000 and she was quiet about the matter for several years. So too it seems were some executives at TVNZ, who knew at least some of the details.

Colin Peacock is the presenter of Media Watch on Radio New Zealand.

Colin Peacock: Tony Veitch was different, he was very young, very energetic, and very enthusiastic on air, and he built up quite a career and this career of his had its peak because he was going to be one of the main presenters for Television New Zealand at the upcoming Beijing Olympics. You know, the value to him for the broadcasters, well he was a guy that could get the sort of hard to reach audience of young men coming in and enjoying the broadcaster's product. So he was quite valuable to them. But once the story broke, I mean it's just been everywhere, and talkback radio for instance went mad on it, and there was almost nothing else on for I would say seven days after the story broke.

Antony Funnell: Now Tony Veitch worked principally for Television New Zealand which is New Zealand's public broadcaster. It came under a lot of pressure, and we've heard the New Zealand Prime Minister there before, Helen Clark, talking about a moral crisis. How much pressure is there still on TVNZ even though Veitch has stepped aside, as I understand it?

Colin Peacock: Yes, it got political as you say, right up to the Prime Minister, and I think in your audio montage you could hear her talking about this moral crisis, and that really did push the story on. So yes, the board was under tremendous pressure because once Tony Veitch had given a public statement where he would only go so far as to say 'Look, I lashed out', he didn't actually own up to any serious violence, but once he did that, the pressure went on the broadcasters that employed him, the two main networks, the radio network and Television New Zealand, because people then wanted to know, Well hang on a minute, did you know that this assault two years ago, allegedly, did you know about that? And later it emerged that the current head of News and Current Affairs at Television New Zealand who is a former Channel Nine news boss, Tony Flannery, or Anthony Flannery, he has said that he did know that a sum was offered, so that got very murky, very quickly, and that prompted that 'moral crisis' comment from the Prime Minister.

But since then, we don't have all the details on this, because Tony Veitch put out a statement when he resigned saying 'At all times I have been open and fully honest with my employers'. So that one may have a bit to run yet, but definitely his resignation took the sting out of it, and of course the Labour Party here has an interest in this because they're the government, and Television New Zealand is a state-owned broadcaster, and they've been very much damaged, this government, by people in state-owned enterprises giving golden handshakes to leave the organisations and they were determined that that wouldn't happen in this instance. And the fact that Veitch resigned in the way that he did, and the broadcaster has since said, No, look there's no huge payout, no golden handshake, that also has taken a bit of the sting out of it for the company. But it's the latest in a long line of managerial mishaps basically at Television New Zealand, and the reputation of the company, perhaps not among the audience but certainly among opinion-formers and politicians and the chattering classes if you like, has probably never been lower.

Antony Funnell: And given that New Zealand is coming in to an election, it is soon going to have an election, is this likely to play out as an election issue, or is it, as you say, part of a bigger problem for the government?

Colin Peacock: Well no, it won't be an election issue as such; I don't think anyone will cast their vote over the government's or TVNZ's handling of this issue. But it is political in that, as I said earlier, it's a state-owned enterprise and for that reason Television New Zealand's been subject to more scrutiny in its handling of this matter than has commercial radio employer, the radio network, they seem to have escaped a lot of the opprobrium that's come TVNZ's way. So it is political and the backdrop to it is that Television New Zealand's a very commercial broadcaster. They call it the public broadcaster, but in actual fact it's an almost entirely commercial operation, although it does have a Charter which gives it these public broadcasting responsibilities, and that was brought in by the current government five years ago; the broadcaster's made an awful mess of implementing it, nobody's happy with it, either in the industry or among the audience; the politicians have had to kind of grit their teeth and stick with it.

But in the middle of this row about Tony Veitch, which in a sense reflected it, because the reason they had this superstar performer on the payroll was because they need the ratings for the News Hour and so on, a purely public broadcaster probably wouldn't have employed a guy like Tony Veitch. But in the middle of all this, the National Party that's riding high in the polls and many pundits say is set to take over government later this year, they announced their broadcasting policy very early, and their policy is to remove these public service obligations from Television New Zealand and just let it behave like a commercial broadcaster in the marketplace as it used to do. So in a way, the two things are intertwined. Then come election time, this will be something that gets discussed.

Antony Funnell: And look, how much genuine introspection has this whole incident prompted within the New Zealand media itself?

Colin Peacock: Well unfortunately, not an awful lot, although there was really room for that. I mean the media just kind of feasted on it, because this was a story of scandal and celebrity, it basically had the whole lot and a crime at the centre of it, if that's how it's proven to be. So really, no, the media feasted on it as a scandalous story but some of the more thoughtful commentators have pointed out some really interesting things, and one is this thing that was thrown at Tony Veitch, you know, he's got to be punished because he's a role model, and one of the commentators, Finlay McDonald, a former magazine editor stood up and said, 'Look, just because somebody's famous, it doesn't mean they're a role model. We've got to get over this.' And the same thing with sportspeople, because we've had a little bit about that too lately, All Blacks who've been penned for drunken driving and for misbehaviour while drinking too much, and bars down south. 'So look, it's time to stop there, just because kids look up to them for the way they play Rugby, or indeed for Tony Veitch because he was entertaining and gobby and talked about sport, that doesn't mean they aspire to be them and that their behaviour would be somehow inspired by him. So time to get over that.'

Antony Funnell: Well look, thank you very much for bringing us up to date on that, Colin, but look, just before I let you go, last time you were on the program, around about a year ago, we spoke about some major cutbacks in the New Zealand media. Now there's been news this past week that Fairfax in New Zealand is planning to introduce what they're calling 'centralised hubs' to produce some sections of their New Zealand newspapers. Is this a continuation of the outsourcing of sub-editors that we saw last year, or is this part of a different trend?

Colin Peacock: Well it is part of a slightly different trend, but the context to it is all the same really. What we have here in New Zealand is almost 90% of the newspaper market is controlled by two major publishing groups, and they both have their headquarters on your side of the ditch, that's APN News and Media, and Fairfax Media.

Now what happened last year was that the APN organisation introduced this radical plan: they said they were going to let go dozens of sub-editors and then contract an outside company, they were going to outsource their sub-editing, which they did. They hired Australian-based company Pagemasters, to build a new facility in Auckland, where newly-hired sort of junior sub-editors really would go and sub the copy for all of their regional titles and even some of their magazines and their main daily paper, The New Zealand Herald.

Now a lot of the news stories are still being done locally, but things like television pages, racing pages, sports, world news, all those things, can now be done at this remote facility. So that was very controversial, and this was something that prompted international interest because it hadn't really been tried before apart from a couple of places around the world. But Fairfax's move is slightly different. They're not taking the production out of house, they're still going to employ their own sub-editors to do it, but what they're doing is setting up what they're calling 'hubs of excellence' to prepare this copy. So basically the world pages, business pages and other things like television, racing, news, all that sort of thing, will now be prepared at these other locations and then inserted into Fairfax's many daily and even some of the weekly papers up and down the country. So this is something that's very unpopular with journalists of course. But it's got a lot to do with the march of technology really and what we've basically seen is both Fairfax and APN, they've rationalised the way that the content's being produced, you know, such that stuff that's prepared by journalists down south can be shuttled around the system and appear in the papers owned by the same company up north. And now they're really doing the same with the production facilities as well.

Antony Funnell: And that was Colin Peacock, presenter of The Media Watch program on Radio New Zealand.

Guests

Colin Peacock
Presenter 'Media Watch', Radio New Zealand

Further Information

Mediawatch - Radio New Zealand

Presenter

Antony Funnell

Producer

Andrew Davies

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