1. Relocated Mountains Maori TV, Saturday, 8.30pm
Follows the trail of Kurdish refugee Sirwan Namo as he travels back to his homeland in northern Iraq.
2. Weird or What? Monday, TV3, 7.30pm
William Shatner, of Star Trek’s ‘Captain Kirk’ fame hosts this news series about the remarkable, bizarre and mysterious.
3. Coronation St Thursday, TV1, 7.30pm
Forty-nine years and 364 days since making its debut in Britain, The Street is going just as strong as ever.
One of the few certainties during the unfolding horror of the Pike River mine disaster was that the media was always going to get it in the neck.
Despite bringing New Zealand a detailed coverage of the emergency while treating the issue with sensitivity, the Kiwi media was repeatedly used as a punching bag by state agencies and the public alike.
No surprises there, really. The media was always going to be resented by the insular coasters, and for a soap-box merchant such as police minister Judith Collins, it was just par for the course.
Collins’ most recent nonsense came when she described some elements of the media at Pike River as “disgraceful”, apparently because an Australian reporter had asked what seemed a pretty valid question.
Why was a country cop – albeit a well-decorated one and a bloke responsible for two thirds of a deserted part of the South Island – overseeing the biggest industrial tragedy in New Zealand since the Wahine disaster?
Collins knew that the police were obstructing the media in Greymouth, creating what could be described as a “black market” for information.
She knew police refused to release the list of trapped miners’ names, even after all next-of-kin had been informed, in a bid to keep media in the dark.
She also knew about the security guard who was employed to prevent the media making contact with the trapped miners’ families, despite some of them wanting to talk on the record.
And then there was the mining company’s deliberate withholding of the CCTV footage of the initial blast until days after it had been shown to all the miners’ families.
The plain fact was that police and the mining company were stifling the media, while at the same time feigning horror at the tactics employed by some agencies.
In the face of that sort of obstruction, our fourth estate fared remarkably well.
Your say
I FIND THIS ARTICLE VERY OFFENSIVE
I have long thought that this obviously syndicated column is a total waste of space in the Mountain Scene. The writer clearly has a number of hobby-horses that he likes to ride but his viewpoint is of no relevance to us in the Wakatipu. However, this week I find his column truly offensive. In this column (published on the day of the memorial to the 29 miners) he bleats on self-righteously about how the poor media was treated by the police and Pike River as if dealing with the media should have been their number 1 priority, and then compounds his insensitivity by calling the Coasters "insular". How disgraceful. Please drop this jackass and use the space for something more worthwhile.
03 Dec 2010 11:46AMJamespenwell
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