Tuesday, 21 May 2019

139. We are not Bill Ralston


The Media Scrum crew like to act like we know everything, just like everybody else, but we're just self-aware enough to know we're still ignorant little shits a lot of the time. We're trying, honest, we're trying, but sometimes we don't realise something blindingly obvious, like the fact that somebody has already used the Media Scrum name for a column before.

We only realised this last week, when somebody told us Bill Ralston had a column of the same name a while ago, and we should have fucking known it, because it takes three seconds of googling to find out.

But we can assure you all that we're not Mr Ralston. Only one of us have ever met him before, and they were both very, very drunk. He's from a different generation of journalists than us. We didn't introduce Rant TV to NZ screens with his bits on early TV3, we didn't shape the flow of news at the national broadcaster around the turn of the century, and we didn't get chopped up into little pieces by Peter Jackson at the start of Braindead.

And we didn't greet news of another potentially painful restructure at one of the country's biggest newsrooms with a snide comment suggesting they deserve it:

As Mr Morrah points out, the worst thing about that comment is that it's just bullshit – the TV crews at both Newshub and TVNZ both break a fucking tonne of great stories every week. They may be locked into the necessity of covering the entire day's events in between the ads, but there are people at the TV stations who are doing stories that nobody else are doing, and they often lead the news agenda with juicy shit.

And it's not wrong, it's just fucking rude. If you consider yourself a journalist, you don't trash your fellow professionals like that, because it's not very fucking professional. Experienced and knowledgeable journalists are a endangered goddamn species sometimes, but the ones that are left don't start piling on each other.

We're still a bunch of competitive fucks – there was some real emotions going on at the Voyagers in Auckland the other night – but we also have trained together, and worked together, and we know how fucking awful it can be to feel like your job is on the line. We've all been through that pain in the past decade or so, nobody is immune, and nobody is going to go on record sneering at anybody else facing that kind of uncertainty.

We hope that the Mediaworks restructure doesn't see the loss of too many bodies in the newsroom, because nobody wins that, and the TV3 crew are a fucking good bunch, and we were delighted to get rat arsed with some of them at those Voyager's the other night.

Maybe giving your rivals in other newsroom public shit about their product, and suggesting that they deserved to get fired for not living up to your own lofty standards, was something that journalists of a previous generation got off on, because they haven't got anything else to complain about.

But that's not how we do things anymore. It's not cool. It's not us. We're not Bill Ralston.

- Margaret Tempest
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