Broadcasting a ‘battered baby’

Press, 17 August 1979, Page 4

Broadcasting a ‘battered baby’

PA Wanganui Elements within both political parties were guilty of trying to make broadcasting toe their party line, said the chairman of the Broadcasting Council (Mr lan Cross) last evening.

from their own, that it must make detached judgments they disagree with, and that from their immediate point of view it must sometimes be a nuisance to them. “Most of the time these days my corporation acts as a welfare worker on behalf of broadcasting, trying to make the parents realise their responsibility and trying to help the child grow into a mature and balanced individual as soon as possible. “Thank goodness that on both sides of the House the majority of Parliamentarians understand the complexity and difficulties of broadcastiing’s present situation.” Mr Cross said that New Zealand depended on them for the political wisdom to ensure that broadcasting remained a free and independ-

Mr Cross was speaking at the annual seventh-form dinner of Wanganui Boys’ College, of which he is an old boy'. jfe said that one political group had a party line for the Government of today; the other group had a party line which it thought would suit the Government of tomorrow. broadcasting was the ‘’battered baby” of New Zealand’s Parliamentary democracy. “Both its political parents semetimes abuse their child, usually for the same reason — partisan suspicion in some wjy or another, broadcasting is.being manipulated by the either side. • *Their anger fails to take into account that broadcasting must have a separate life

ent institution, responsible to Parliament and the law and yet free of political interference. On children and television, Mr Cross said the question was not so much the quality of television, but how much television parents should allow their children to watch. "I am beginning to believe that especially for primary children, rationing television is better than attempting to improve the so-called quality. “I say so-called quality because very often it is these quality programmes that children do not like,” Mr Cross said. Proper use of television was not in his hands or those of the producers, but in the hands of parents, he said.