Damien Grant

Mountain-climbing playmate raises questions for media.

APlayboy Playmate climbed to the top of Mt Egmont and did what Playmates do: get naked and have a picture taken.

The day she posted her picture, the Commerce Commission officially rejected the long-awaited NZME/ Fairfax love match.

I’m not a fan of the Commerce Commission. I’d like to drag it to the top of a mountain and leave it shivering naked in the cold, but the impending collapse of our news media raises a serious question; does news matter?

Statisticians have a term; the Signal to Noise Ratio. This refers to the amount of useless data that obscures the signal they are trying to see. If you drive your car outside of the safe confines of Auckland you can experience the Signal to Noise ratio as the amount of static on the radio rises.

Reading the paper is an exercise in filtering stories about naked girls on a mountain from actual news.

If you spent a year in a hermitage reading Proust, it would take less than 10 minutes for a friend to give you a re-cap of the relevant events. Everything else, and there is a lot of everything else, is noise.

The media is spilling a small lake of ink on election speculation. Are you better informed as a result of reading this speculation, or would your time be better spent walking the dog and waiting for the final result?

Worse than the noise, much of what we read is actively misleading – stories about a housing crisis can make readers think there is a housing crisis.

The object of the news media isn’t to provide news, it is to entertain and create its own news and controversy by, for example, using a mountain’s colonial name to generate outrage.

If something is important, information about it will find you. If you want to be informed, read a book.

Writing in a newspaper about the pointlessness of newspapers assumes that the editor values diversity of opinion. If I’m not here next week, you will know I misjudged.