Why the Government might want to merge TVNZ and RNZ

Thursday, 1 April 2021

“We are just concerned about the lack of information and the lack of transparency,” says Better Public Media chairman Myles Thomas.

OPINION: The biggest single obstacle to merging RNZ and TVNZ into a new public media entity vanished when NZ First, which had stymied the move, lost the balance of power in last year’s election.

But there’s plenty of water to go under the bridge before we find out, probably in October, whether Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi can now persuade fellow ministers that the idea is a winner.

Cut through the vagaries about creating “fit for purpose” structures and more than 16 months after it emerged the Government was serious about a merger, Faafoi appears to still be reluctant to articulate the likely deliverables, saying he would “not go into specifics”.

There were already calls last year for the Government to be more transparent and involve the public and other political parties in the plan.

The longer it holds out on those requests, the more likely it is that people may feel the merger is something that is being done to them, rather than for them.

* RNZ warmer than TVNZ on merger in front of MPs

* Partial business case for TVNZ/RNZ merger quiet on specifics of what they would do differently

There appears to be a fair degree of scepticism about the proposal from different ends of the political spectrum.

Better Media Public has been concerned RNZ’s public media mandate might get diluted within an entity that was also receiving revenues from commercial advertising.

On the other hand, Television New Zealand chief executive Kevin Kenrick has appeared most concerned that the function TVNZ provides in providing a commercial advertising platform for New Zealand businesses does not get undermined.

The Taxpayers’ Union lobby group, not unreasonably, says any restructuring of public broadcasting should be a cross-party effort.

Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi is hoping to overhaul the industry he once worked in.

Then there are more nuanced questions about how an entity with a more complex charter might be pushed and pulled by the political tides as future governments come and go.

Better Public Media chairman Myles Thomas believes the Government’s announcement on Wednesday that it had appointed a panel of eight experts to oversee further work on the entity may be a case of Faafoi kicking for touch, describing the situation as seeming to be “a bit of a mess”.

“It seems to me the minister is too busy to commit to anything and make a decision,” he says.

“We are just concerned about the lack of information and the lack of transparency.”

RNZ, it should be said, has been very supportive of the concept.

Faafoi has made clear the merger would not be about rationalising jobs.

Pressed for an example of one thing the new entity might do differently from RNZ and TVNZ today, he suggested that it could help them save money by allowing them to share equipment.

But it doesn’t seem plausible the Government would be going through all this just to save money on microphones and stationery supplies.

So is there something more to it?

Before the media merger was formally proposed, television channel Three owner MediaWorks was lobbying hard for the Government to make TV One commercial-free.

Consultant PWC has now handed the baton to Deloitte, helping the Culture and Heritage Ministry finish a business case for the new public media entity.

While a new public media entity wouldn’t be needed to make that happen, it is a change that could perhaps be brought in as part of the package.

But the pressure on the Government to make that sort of reform seems to have greatly receded following the takeover of MediaWorks’ TV business by deep-pocketed US company Discovery.

If a commercial-free TV One was ever part of the plan, there is little reason to assume that’s the case now.

Might this simply be a case of public sector empire-building by Faafoi, himself a former TVNZ journalist?

Or perhaps something that has sprung from a view that public agencies need a bit of a shake-up – any kind of a shake-up – from time to time to stop them atrophying?

Well, maybe.

A more sophisticated but also more dangerous rationale for the merger might be that the Government believes an entity with more scale is needed to assist and reduce the cost of RNZ and TVNZ together pushing into the online news market, currently dominated by Stuff and NZME.

RNZ and TVNZ are already multi-platform media entities with strong partnerships of different kinds in the sector.

But Kenrick has made it clear he does not believe TVNZ is where it wants to be in the online news market despite no lack of effort and intent.

If that is the primary goal of the merger, it would be understandable that Faafoi might not want to articulate that, given the negative implications a strong push by a new public media entity into online news could have for media plurality.

It would also deepen a potential conflict of interest for the Government as it mulls a regulatory backstop to encourage the likes of Facebook and Google to chip in to the cost of producing journalism shared through their online properties.

But there may be a risk of over-analysing things.

It is also possible that there simply is no strong thinking behind the new public media entity and it is just the product of ill-defined aspirations that have been allowed to snowball in a policy vacuum.

An unedifying 89-page partially completed draft business case produced by the Culture and Heritage Ministry in conjunction with consultant PWC last year is perhaps the best evidence for that possibility.

The ministry has now appointed another consultant, Deloitte, to help with the final leg of its business case.

But it is hard to get excited.

Regardless of the rationale, the momentum for change, if that ever existed, seems to have been lost.