You won't see nothing like the Mighty Quinn

Resisting Nanny's self-satirising opposition to satire goes on the positive side of TVNZ's ledger. Going against is the news that, as Lindsay Perigo puts it, "some halfwit gum-chewer about to decide Keith Quinn's fate didn't even know who he was." As you'd expect, Perigo goes further, launching into the whole "braindead" broadcasting culture.

It was with incredulity that I read (Keith Quinn? Who are you?—DomPost, Wednesday July 4) of a TVNZ employee who may be about to axe Keith Quinn’s job ... not knowing who Keith Quinn was! Then I reminded myself that this is, after all, the Age of the Airhead, and TVNZ was long ago pronounced “braindead” by some wise person whose identity eludes me. The bimbo in question works for, or rather occupies space in, the company’s Human Resources department. Such departments are another bane of our time, issuing forth great torrents of MBA-speak as empty as it is pretentious.

TVNZ attributed the airhead’s ignorance to a “generation gap.” It’s not a generation gap—it’s an intelligence, standards and knowledge gap. State television has faithfully mirrored state education in dumbing itself down, and must now cater to and employ the latter’s imbecilic progeny. To a generation that has no clue what an apostrophe is for it serves up newsreaders who emulate flight attendants, emphasising prepositions and conjunctions and throwing away nouns, in a complete travesty of how news should be read. It serves up interviewers with the fashionable Attention Deficit Disorder who cannot even listen, let alone sustain a linear train of thought. It promotes children’s hosts whose vocabulary barely extends beyond “cool” and “awesome” and whose speech is all nose and no brain, under the guise of encouraging our “national identity” (shudder). It drowns the text of its programme trailers in a cacophony of headbanging caterwauling (to which it also repairs at other times on the slightest pretext) thereby rendering the content of its own promos inaudible.

TVNZ is a morass of moronry. It should be privatised forthwith.