Source: ACT Party
The Haps
An ACT MP becoming Deputy Prime Minister has seemed impossible for most of the Party’s history. Now it is real. David Seymour’s first speech since becoming Deputy PM has been described by Mike Hosking as ‘uplifting’ We agree. He thanks supporters who helped the party ‘through the wicked old days, when we went it alone’ and you can read it or watch it here. Seymour will also be debating at Oxford Union at 7:30am Friday morning NZT streamed on YouTube here. Seymour will be opposing the moot ‘nobody can be illegal on stolen land.’
Meanwhile ACT MP Laura McClure’s campaign against deepfake pornography has gone ‘global,’ with her video covered in the UK press and videos of her speech to Parliament attracting tens of millions of views. The Party’s Deputy is rolling out reforms to WorkSafe this week. After months of travelling and listening to the people affected by regulations, Brooke van Velden is reforming WorkSafe to help people be safe instead of scaring them into paying consultants an arm and a leg. Road cones are the visible example of this problem. Without clear guidance, the simple way to show your commitment to safety is to pay for another cone.
ACT is Changing the Media
ACT’s ‘David vs the Media’ series is a simple idea. When David (or other ACT MPs) interview journalists, the Party independently films the whole exchange and posts it online. This has made journalists very upset. They have even tried to have it stopped, which is odd for people who are supposed to be in the truth business.
They may be upset because it is rating better than many of their own efforts. A good David vs Media is watched 60,000 times, better than some TV and radio shows. This is most obvious when the journalists put their own content on YouTube, on a level playing field they struggle to compete.
We know they’re upset by the comments. People see inanity of them trying to catch politicians out by asking the same question ten different ways, and they pile on in the comments. The journos seem genuinely upset to receive a fraction of the abuse heaped on politicians, often because of the image media have created of them.
However we believe there’s a much deeper reason David vs Media is upsetting them, it manifests something that’s been happening for a long time, but is becoming unignorable. Moore’s Law means the fall of the media monopoly, and monopolists hate competition.
Moore’s Law says that the number of transistor gates on an integrated circuit will double every eighteen months. It’s usually expressed more simply as ‘available computer power will double every 18 months.’ Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted the law in the 1970s and it has been amazingly durable.
In practice it means the cost of capturing, storing, transmitting, and displaying text, photos, and video has fallen through the floor. Now anybody can do for a few hundred dollars what used to cost millions.
Once upon a time you needed to a TV studio with cameras and lights, and massive rooms filled with film or tape. You needed cables going up hills to transmission towers, projecting the one or two available channels down on to people’s roofs. Now anyone can compete with their mobile phone.
Journalists are losing the power to decide what people see. For one example, A TV journalist recently interviewed three people in Newmarket who didn’t like David Seymour. This was presented on the news as the view of the electorate. Epsom has elected Seymour four times with up to 50 per cent of the vote, so one of three things has happened. Either there’s been a major change of views, the journalist is incompetent, or the journalist is abusing their power to give viewers a false impression.
The tide is going out on such incompetence and treachery. Fewer and fewer people, and almost nobody under 40, is watching the 6 o’clock news. If rumours are to be believed, we may be back to one channel by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, journalists are forced to put up more ‘raw’ content themselves. Guyon Espiner’s show 30’ is what it sounds like, a 30-minute uncut interview. At one level it’s extraordinary to see someone who commanded an audience of half a million with monopoly power barely eke out the views of David vs the Media on his best days.
At another level, we are seeing the seeds of journalists trying to actually inform their audiences and make up their own minds. Espiner’s highest rating videos are the ones where he genuinely tries to help his audience understand what the interviewee has to say.
Another example is John Campbell, who was apoplectic when David Seymour showed up to an interview with his own microphone and camera. The full 42 minutes is gold: “You’re a real star on ACT’s YouTube channel!” “Marvellous!” “That’s not a good thing, John.”
Campbell ended up putting the whole interview on TVNZ’s website himself, not something you’d normally see. The shorter, edited version was edited surprisingly well, would this have happened if it was not for the knowledge that the whole video might get more views than his edit anyway?
Campbell has written a long, too long, meditation on whether Seymour is too combative to win people over. What he’s missed is that he’s having to change himself because of the transparency ACT is bringing.
The problems with our media won’t be solved by subsidies, taxes, or any other approach. What will change is technology, competition and innovation. Who would have thought the ACT Party would be helping save the media?