Foreign owner accelerated evaporation of Point of Difference between Television rivals

The mystery of why Television Three’s Newshub operation converged in content with the content of the South Seas nation’s competing government controlled media is another example of the perils of New Zealand’s infrastructure falling into foreign ownership.

The nation’s only independent free-to-air television broadcaster is in fact owned in the United States by Warner Brothers Discovery.

This meant a Hollywood-grade infusion of active progressivism added to the channel’s existing tendency to anyway embrace unquestioningly and unbidden such causes.

The result was that instead of establishing a clear point of difference between it and the government channel the TV3-Newshub operation simply converged in content with its opposition.

Why didn’t management see what was happening? Then do something about it by introducing and enforcing a clear point of editorial difference?

The answer is that the channel had now become boxed in by editorial policies stemming from the United States parent Warner Bros which also owns CNN.

Cable Network News is determinedly activist and it was now that TV3-Newshub’s already demonstrable alignment became supercharged.

At first the by now two mirror-image channels failed to see the effect that they had created.

So did the National Party and ACT which stood by as, for example, any weather report from either channel about rain, storm, sun or hail was always capped with the word crisis.

Even after the New Zealand general election toward the end of 2023 in which a coalition of three conservative-orientated parties was victorious both so-called rival channels continued their practice of screening Labour party types face-to-face while only indirectly reporting what anyone in the National Party-led coalition was saying.

Not long after the announcement that the TV 3 channel would abandon active current affairs coverage leaving it commercially merely as an outlet for its parent US programme feeds there was another announcement.

This time the announcement was from the government-owned rival broadcasting operation that it was cutting back drastically on its own current affairs programming and personnel.

Management of the state broadcaster instead of taking advantage of its rival’s publicly-announced decision to quit the current affairs sector, instead deliberately revealed that it was on the ropes too and intended to fire many of its staff in the same television sector.

The conclusion remains that both channels the independent one and the government one operated in its own world, far removed from anything to do with things such as competing for audiences.

Exactly why do both channels share similar no-go areas notably in climate politics in which immense international commitments given by the Labour government are studiously ignored?

Similarly both channels leap avidly and simultaneously on voguish trends designed to annoy their audiences which they must know from their own advertising is comprised of those of mature years, and for whom the world did not start just this morning?

There are questions too why the US parent through its subsidiary CNN failed to use its muscle and help out its New Zealand stablemate and fill out its Newshub operation with sympathetic news syndication economies of scale? Some helpful down-the-line feeds from global trouble-spot correspondents? A quick authoritative cut in from Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour (pictured)?

It couldn’t because CNN is readily available packaged into the Sky subscriber service.

This means that in sharing content CNN owner Warner would be competing in with its local already paying customer for CNN which is Sky Television which is a main board NZSE company.

On the government side in state broadcasting the inertia favouring this same progressivist tilt is immovable because it is guaranteed through selective employment.

The view that TV3 and its Newshub operation are victims of fractionating audience is not entirely true. It and its radio subsidiaries remained buoyant well into the internet era

It failed though to understand how its audience was changing and growing older and then compounded this by its warm embrace of activism.

This meant that instead of distancing itself from the government broadcasting operation, the independent broadcaster progressively blended with its opposition.

An organisation that by definition exists to identify trends failed to realise how in eliminating the point of difference between what it was doing and what its state-controlled opposition was doing was in fact deliberately and successfully putting itself out of business.

The forces that led such a highly educated collective to wilfully ignore market teachings on the danger of merging your brand with that of your opposition’s will be a suitable case for study at any business school.

As will be its competing channel’s response to the dislocation which instead of taking advantage of it was to announce its own weakness in the form of mass lay-offs.