Paul Henry Rant - Victory for the People

I'm feeling quite chuffed that Paul Henry resigned.

In my mind he was fired (it makes me happier - I picture him being pushed down the plank to the sharks in the press gallery).

I think that it's unacceptable to make such public and blatantly racist remarks in any profession. I wouldn't even let school kids get away with making those comments without a wee lecture. A grown man has no excuse left. He knows exactly what he's doing and it's arrogance rather than a lack of self-control or a naive kind of ignorance that is the issue.

It boils down to some sort of public bullying. I think people who defend him with lines like 'he's only saying what most people think' forget that even if lots of people think those kinds of things they would express them in a more private context. A public forum (not to mention one governed by Standards and a Charter) is a situation that demands more discretion. It speaks for more than one person's opinion.

And what a public broadcaster deems as acceptable banter for its light-hearted morning shows is an indicator of what's acceptable banter for NZ society. It's not some extremest niche channel and it's not an adult-only time-slot. There is no warning saying 'content may offend some viewers'. There are gonna be kids watching.

And he's not a fictional character set up as a foil for a moral protagonist - he's a real person who writes his own scripts (or at least the ad lib bits, which is where he gets in trouble).

A few people I know (on Facebook mainly) have defended him - saying it's freedom of speech. I think freedom of speech is fine - but it has to exist on some kind of continuum with censorship. We do live in a world that tries to be civilised. Human nature is such that to be civilised we do need some rules and standards. People are flawed and lack self control and empathy.

Censorship steps in where people's emotional safety is threatened and freedom of speech comes into conflict with rights protected in the Bill of Rights. I might not have that exactly right, but it's essentially what makes us different from America (they have nothing that is higher than their freedom of speech - we do). In the case of TV it's the Broadcasting Standards Authority that steps in if something is not 'decent' or is 'offensive'. In reality, it is a body that doesn't have much teeth. It can make you publicly apologise.

A much more powerful tool in the age of capitalism is consumer demand. I think anti-Paul-Henry-ites were smart enough to see that the real way to TVNZ's heart was complaining to advertisers and threatening to boycott the other TV1 shows. While a lot of the people who were offended by Henry probably didn't even watch Breakfast, they make up a bigger percentage of the One News audience.

I think it's a sad thing that you have to go for the ratings-jugular in order to get a real reaction. It would be kinda nice if a bunch of people saying 'Oi - this guy is a racist jerk, take him off the air!' was enough but moral righteousness is very muffled in a consumer driven economy until it turns into some kind of dollar force. TVNZ does have a commercial impetus that is increasingly over-riding its cultural one.

It'll be interesting to discuss with my classes tomorrow, see what 'the youth' thinks.

Essentially he's the kinda guy that would've pissed me off at high school. In my experience, most of those guys have matured since then. Maybe not all. Arrogant git.

I wonder if Fox News is looking to hire...