‘Wildly Inaccurate’ Statements By N.Z.B.C.

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30961, 18 January 1966, Page 9

‘Wildly Inaccurate ’ Statements By N.Z.B.C.

To defend its policy of commercialising the only television channel available to viewers, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation has been making wildly inaccurate statements as to what the licence fee would have to be if the profits from commercials were lost by their abolition, says an article in “Televiewer,” the official publication of the Canterbury Televiewers’ Association. In March, a senior spokesman of the N.Z.B.C. said that the fee would have to be £4O. In that year the total surplus, or net profit, from all sources was £l.3m, and television licence fee of £4O would have increased the surplus by more than £l2m, the article says. On September 8 the Minister of Broadcasting (Mr Stott), in reply to critics of the N.Z.B.C. and its policy, said in Parliament that to get rid of advertising on television the licence fee would have to be increased from £6 10s to £lB, says the article. It has since been confirmed by Mr Scott that the figure was given to him by an official of the N.Z.B.C. “Grossly Inaccurate” The figure of £lB, while not as inaccurate as £4O, is still grossly inaccurate and bears no relation to the figures given in the annual report, which are very clearly set out and easy to follow.

“A fee of £lB would produce additional net revenue of more than £4,300,000, considerably more than the N.Z.B.C.’s total gross revenue, and more than three times greater than its present total net income,” the article says. It is only a matter of Standard IV arithmetic to show that in the most recent year for which figures are available, 1964-65, an additional 25s paid by each television licensee would have more than compensated for the loss of income from commercials, had there been none, the article says.

The net income from television commercials was £434,931. More than 360,000 licences were taken out during the year at £6 10s. An additional 25s a licence would have produced more than £450,000. With a licence fee of £7 15s and no commercials, the N.Z.B.C.’s net income would have been higher than it actually was. ZB Income The article says that income from television commercials is competitively gained from other advertising media. In this connexion income figures for the ZB radio stations was given as follows:—Net income for 1963-64, £383.677; net income for 1964-65, £141,570; amount of decline during year, £242,107.

“In other words, £242,107 of the TV commercial income was taken by the N.Z.B.C. from its left pocket and put in the right one, and cannot therefore be regarded as profit, but as the N.Z.B.C. competing with itself internally. Had there been no TV commercials this amount of profit would not have been lost by the ZBs. Such being the case, the additional amount of licence fee required to equate TV the commercial income would have been about 12s, and not 255,” says the article.

“Advertisers naturally prefer television to the ZBs as an advertising medium. They have a captive audience, which has no alternative, as listeners have with radio, so one can readily imagine with what degree of enthusiasm advertisers regard the prospect of a second television channel, which would afford viewers an escape hatch, and which channel they would presumably have to pay for in its entirety. “Two Masters”

“It is surely impossible for one man faithfully to serve two entirely disparate sets of masters, in this case, viewers and advertisers, and as Dir-ector-General of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Mr Stringer is in a very invidious and unenviable position.”

The article says that Mr Stringer has made some very misleading statements about the present television set-up. In Palmerston North recently he told the National Council of Women that television advertising accounted for £1,700,000 of income. That figure was not income but gross revenue, and was reduced by costs to a net figure of £500.000.

“Mr Stringer stated further that New Zealand viewers are subjected to less advertising than other Englishspeaking countries except Britain. He failed, however, to place this statement in context by adding that in England and Australia, whose licence fees are incidentally much lower, there are channels available which are free of any advertising, and that in the United States and Canada there are no licence fees whatever, the advertisers footing the whole bill. “New Zealand is the only country in the world in which a licence fee is charged for commercial television and it is irrelant to argue, as the N.Z.B.C. does, that it is only partly commercial. Any commercial channel is only partly commercial, and in greater or less degree. Fees Compared

“The TV licence fee is among the highest in the world, not among the lowest, as officials of the N.Z.B.C. are constantly stating, and is the highest in the Commonwealth.

“Advertisers pay for the production of their advertisements, amd for their diffusion by the N.Z>B.C. For their

| showing they have free access Ito, and use of, a capital investment in TV sets of over £65m., which dwarfs the capital investment of the N.Z.B.C. “Advertisers and their agencies represent a lobby in the purlieus of the N.Z.B.C. with which viewers have no hope of competing, so there would appear to be little immediate hope of a second channel free of this brainwashing invasion of privacy. “Judging by the public utterances of the senior officials of the N.Z.8.C., from the Director-General down, there would appear to be little doubt which side the N.Z.B.C. was on in the matter of the interests of viewers as opposed to those of the advertisers. The N.Z.B.C. would appear to be intent on defending the image of the commercial TV set-up to the last ditch, and indulge in wildly inaccurate statements in so doing,” says the article.