Public radio at its finest shedding light on a tough time

Fellow millennials in the professions tease me for listening to RNZ. They consider RNZ National to be on a par with Emmerdale as far as coolness goes.

Twitter is the social media platform most beloved by journalists, politicians and activists.

This makes it the best place you can go to see the most conventional opinions. At the moment, the received wisdom is that The 9th Floor, an interview series produced by Radio New Zealand, is very good.

It is fair to say that, as a longtime listener, I have a love-hate relationship with RNZ.

I expect it is hard for anybody of a Centre-right disposition not to hear it through gritted teeth at times.

Overt bias is rare, but RNZ broadcasts often ooze with a gentry liberalism that many in the country do not share.

For example, one presenter recently expressed surprise that tradesmen were listeners. Delighted by the discovery, she tweeted: ‘‘The tradies working on the house across the street are listening to [RNZ]... Yes, really... That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.’’

The comment was meant to be celebratory. And it was – in the same same sense that a parent might celebrate a toddler using utensils for the first time. Later comments showed that the presenter did not see why the comment was patronising.

I showed the tweet to several skilled workers and they all considered it to be condescending. The inference they took was that those who work with their hands tend to be philistines. Nothing more refined than Radio Hauraki or The Rock is to be expected.

Oversensitive? Quite possibility. Could be probably. Still, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you would say if you were mates with many tradespeople.

Many of my own friends and family in that category are avid news consumers who enjoy highbrow media. Fellow millennials in the professions tease me for listening to RNZ. They consider RNZ National to be on a par with Emmerdale as far as coolness goes.

But I cannot deny that RNZIS capable of producing very good content. And on this occasion, Twitter is right. So far, The 9th Floor has been very, very good. In parts, it has been excellent.

Interviewer Guyon Espiner, who also co-presents Morning Report, does not badger his subjects. Instead of interruptions, he applies gentle prods to keep the narrative going. This might be because, not being live, there is less need for interjection to keep things on track.

In other words, he lets the interviewees render their own verdicts on their legacies. This is not without drawbacks, of course.

The interviews released so far have been with Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Mike Moore and Jim Bolger. All were party to unpopular reforms, so they all had things to be defensive about. The non-combative approach allowed them to indulge in some rationalisation and excuse making – ‘‘ducking and weaving’’ was an apt description put forward by a friend.

But this doesn’t detract from the value of the series. Churchill’s The Second World War is an epic chronicle of events from the end of one world war to close of another. It was also written while he was still an active politician. There is no doubt that he spun events to put himself in the best light and, at times, exacted petty revenge on rivals.

That’s only a problem if you were to read it in isolation. That places on any single work too great a burden for it to bear. The fact that it is imperfect does not mean it does not add to our understanding of events.

The same goes for The 9th Floor. The series adds to the sum of knowledge we have about a tumultuous time in our political history. So far, it has imparted genuine insight into what it takes to govern this country.

You need to take it for what it is, but if you keep that in mind, you will probably get a lot out of it.

It pairs well with the 1996 television series Revolution, which can be found online.

This series traverses much the same period that The 9th Floor has so far. It is an excellent introduction to what is – for those born in the 1980s or later – more history than memory.

Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Mike Moore and Jim Bolger were all interviewed in Revolution. Events were much fresher then, of course, and Bolger was still prime minister. It is interesting to compare what they say now to what they said then.

Both Revolution and The 9th Floor were made with taxpayer support. I would like to think demand for content like this would lead to its supply via the market. But I am not, in all honesty, convinced that it would.

In the most recent episode of The 9th Floor, Jim Bolger pointed out that there is nothing perfect in this world. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing good. That goes for public broadcasting as much as anything else.