Editors seem ready to be damned

Press, 7 May 1980, Page 17

Editors seem ready to be damned

Review-

Ken Strongman

Having read the description of the first of three “Contact” programmes — “Publish and Be Damned” (Mon, TV2) — as dealing with hypothetical problems, I switched on prompted by a morbid fascination. I felt the very bottom of the barrel was about to be scraped. Surely, real desperation must suggest the screening of a discussion about non-news rather than news? Fortunately I was wrong, and a reasonable attack was made on the problems of publishing or not publishing. This was done by facing some of New Zealand's foremost editors with a series of hypothetical examples of news items.- These items, which all embodied some moral awkwardness concerning the public interest, had supposedly come to the editors by chance, misfortune, or clandestine endeavour. The editors responded very well, but with an intelligent, hardheaded pragmatism. It was good of them to play the game; in the ordinary working day they must surely spurn hypothesis in favour of fact. The problem was that in each case they said they would publish and showed a well-practised but nevertheless creative ingenuity in finding good reasons for so doing. One ended up thinking that whatever the issues, in some way their publication would be

in the public interest, as long as the facts were definite, of course. This attitude was reassuring, but it also pointed up a weakness in the programme. One wanted to know what considerations would push them in the other direction; in other words; just what they would not publish. In his hypothetical examples, Jim Hopkins did not even come close. In fact, it is difficult to see how he could have. The nice point was made that if ideas are come by in good faith, then they are legally public, unless they have been patented one presumes. Quite right, too. The main feeling the programme generated in me was of comfort and security. Our editors appeared to be an impressive group of men of some integrity. I hope they carry the courage of their convictions. » To return to the main idea of the programme: hypothetical news. It is a notion which could generate .a new concept in television. I don’t yet know what the other two programmes will be concerned with. Perhaps TV

pundits will be presented with hypothetical series — “On The Pdat" with “The Osmonds," "Fair Go” with “Wonder Woman” — and asked if they would screen them. Of course, the implication would be that such programmes exist, but that in our own interest they remain locked away in a vault somewhere. Monday is rapidly becoming an evening on which it is difficult to turn off the set and write reviews. First, there is the Darwin series, which gets better and better, and about which I reserve the right to wax lyrical in the future. Then “Kaleidoscope.” continuing with The Dance, but now clashing with the new series of “The Professionals.” I would like five minutes alone with whomever it is who assumed that these two programmes could not be of interest to the same person. They put me in such a dilemma that I nearly read a book instead. After this things deteriorated a little. Reflecting on the evening, the mind was drawn back to the 6.30 news. Did the Iranians really take over .their own embassy in London to hold other Iranians hostage, or was it all one of Jim Hopkins’s hypothetical examples which had somehow slipped into reality?