Hill bids a grateful goodbye to Winston
About to shut off her mic, the veteran broadcaster still has something to say about political ‘debates’, memorable interviews, and the New Zealand public’s lack of appetite for quality journalism
Broadcaster Kim Hill is just a few weeks from switching off her microphone, but her announcement has done nothing to dull her passion to reignite political debate and the contest of ideas in New Zealand.
In an interview with Media Insider, Hill, 68, who leaves RNZ in November, has given more insight into her decision to quit, thoughts on the state of the media industry, and reflections on some of her most memorable interviews.
And Hill — one of our greatest broadcasters — says, “if there’s nothing else I’m grateful for, it’s never having to interview Winston Peters ever again in my entire life!”.
Hill, RNZ’s Saturday Morning host, watched this week’s leaders’ debate on television.
“I don’t know what it was like to be there but watching it at home, it was so old school. It was quite moving — the kind of nostalgic view that it was a water cooler event that people could talk about.
“Except that there was nothing to talk about. It was content-free, because they were so practised, and they were kind of hollowed out into having to not offend anybody, I suppose.”
She was not criticising the show producers or host Jessica Mutch McKay. “This is no criticism of anybody. It’s just the way it is. We’ve moved past that now. We have to find another model.
“I mean that wasn’t a debate right, you know that wasn’t a debate.”
She recalls the film The Journey, the fictional account of a true story in which Northern Ireland political enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness are forced to travel together in a van.
“Maybe we put both leaders in a room and make them stay there for 24 hours where they get food and water and let’s just see what happens.”
It raises another point, about politicians and others being coached to the nth degree for interviews more generally.
“I was watching Moana Maniapoto on Winston Peters. She’s wonderful. And she did her best. She treated Mr Peters like a weird uncle and kept nudging him and saying, ‘Oh, you’re doing that thing again, stop doing that thing’.
“And he played up to it to a certain extent but there was still no getting through him. There was still no breaking that: ‘I did it and you don’t realise how great I am and you’re all stupid and you haven’t done your homework’.”
I ask her how she would handle Peters now.
“Some people you just can’t do. I mean if there’s nothing else I’m grateful for, it’s never having to interview Winston Peters ever again in my entire life.”
Among her thousands of enthralling interviews — and she has spoken to world leaders from Nelson Mandela to the Dalai Lama, leading politicians, celebrities, businesspeople, and acclaimed authors — three tetchy ones stand out for me: John Pilger, Tony Parsons and Jeffrey Archer.
She interviewed Pilger, an awardwinning journalist, about his thennew book on Iraq for her television show Face to Face in 2003.
An angry Pilger accused Hill of not asking informed questions. “Just read. Read. It takes time,” he told her.
Hill told the Herald at the time that she had spoken to Pilger before the interview. “He said, ‘You ask me anything you like’, but he said, ‘Don’t play media games with me’.
“I don’t know [what he meant by that] but clearly he is sensitive to what he would regard as some kind of rightwing domination of the media.”
She tells Media Insider: “There’s a lot of myths surrounding that Pilger interview. I never threw a book at him or a pen. I just slid the book over the table towards him. And he was on the video so it wouldn’t have been any good to throw the book at him.”
She says she has not watched the interview.
“I could never watch it. I couldn’t watch it the first time. I can’t watch or listen to myself ever and certainly not that one.”
Meanwhile, Parsons came at her, saying “you’ve got your head up your arse”, while British author and politician Archer told Hill she was rude and he had “every right to tell her so”.
“[Parsons] gave an interview to The Listener because [they] went in and said ‘What was that about?’ And he said something like, ‘Oh, I would never have said that if I realised she was so old’.”
Hill says she only reflects on interviews in her mind, rather than listening back.
“Because what’s the point? You know? There’s a million ways [to go] … they are like Rubik’s Cubes most of the time. You could go this way; you could go that way. You could follow that up. Your time’s running out. You will squish this bit in.
“There’s a million ways to do them. And mostly it’s live radio and the way they’re done is the way they’re done — that’s my view. I mean, I screw them up terribly sometimes. But that’s what it is.”
Hill announced her departure from RNZ only last Friday and has already been approached with offers of work. She may do some special projects for RNZ but nothing is yet set in stone.
Her daughter is due to have her second child in November. Hill adores being a grandmother.
“It’s hard for young families now, and I can be a bit useful. November might be a bit busy because I’m not going till the end of November and if baby comes early, I might have a few weeks of sleeplessness, but so it goes.
“I’m just going to take a few months off, greet the baby, enjoy the summer, and see what happens.”
Following her announcement, she described her emotions as “scared and a bit sad and a bit excited”.
Over the past week “nothing much has changed”, she tells Media Insider. “I think I feel like the hard bit is over now. You know committing to it, actually making the call and saying this is happening. And now just the question of pretending it’s not happening and doing your best to the end of the line.”
As well as being one of our most acclaimed broadcasters, Hill’s 38-year tenure at RNZ makes her one of our most loyal. But she hates that word.
“Loyal makes me sound like a faithful, martyr-ish dog. It’s not a question of loyalty. It’s a question of loving the job and taking pride in Radio New Zealand. So, loyal? Nahhh.
“I mean, there have been other directions available and I chose not to go in them because I think Radio New Zealand’s the best place to work.”
She says RNZ, NZME, Stuff and other newsrooms are all producing “great investigative journalism”.
“But people don’t seem to value the quality of it at the moment. They’d rather go on Twitter and shout at each other.” She is worried about the financial viability of the industry, and individual players. “As [the closure of ] Today showed, people aren’t it for the long haul. They whip their money in and they whip their money out. It’s instant returns. And maybe that’s the way things work now, but it doesn’t augur well for quality.”
Away from the microphone she also has her garden to focus on and in recent weeks she has taken up the court sport of pickleball, a fad sweeping the world. Players use paddles to hit a hollow plastic ball back and forth across a low net.
“My skills are such that just playing pickleball I am triggered back into my childhood of nobody picking me for the team,” says Hill. “And my mother looking at me sadly and wondering where her sporty genes went to.
“I realise that my time will be up soon and absolutely nobody will want to play with me at this point. Everybody sort of plays together and it’s quite fun. Nobody takes it too seriously except a few people.
“It’s not competitive … much. Well, I’m not competitive. Let’s face it, some people are.”
Interviewing broadcasting royalty can be quite daunting — at one point as I gibbered away, she asked, “Sorry, what’s your question” — and my final question to her was quite twee.
“If Kim Hill was interviewing Kim Hill, what would she have asked?”
A long pause, before: “I have no idea! That’s an impossible question because I know everything about Kim Hill and she’s bloody boring!”
MediaWorks settles with team of 17
MediaWorks has settled with a large group of staff who took on the media firm following the sudden closure of Today FM in late March.
Media Insider understands a group of 17 former Today staff, represented by lawyer Charlotte Parkhill, have agreed to financial settlements from MediaWorks, based on their initial claims of hurt and humiliation and lost wages.
The staff have been subject to strict conditions of confidentiality but are understood to be hugely relieved that they have settled, each on individual terms.
Among those in the group are highprofile broadcasters such as Tova O’Brien.
“The matter has been resolved and we have no further comment to make,” said a MediaWorks spokeswoman.
Parkhill and O’Brien said they could not comment.
Succession plays out — Rupert Murdoch steps down
Big breaking new out of the United States, with Rupert Murdoch announcing he is stepping down as chairman of News Corp and Fox, drawing to a close a seven-decade career that has seen him rise to become the most influential and controversial media baron in the world.
The 92-year-old Australia-born businessman’s pending retirement also means one of the global media industry’s biggest questions — one which was said to be the model for the hit TV show Succession — has been answered.
Murdoch’s son, Lachlan will become sole chair of News Corp in November and continue as executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation.
“For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,” Murdoch told News Corp and Fox staff in a memo.
“But the time is right for me to take on different roles, knowing that we have truly talented teams and a passionate, principled leader in Lachlan who will become sole chairman of both companies.
“Neither excessive pride nor false humility are admirable qualities.
“But I am truly proud of what we have achieved collectively through the decades, and I owe much to my colleagues, whose contributions to our success have sometimes been unseen outside the company but are deeply appreciated by me.
“Whether the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code, we would be less successful and have less positive impact on society without your dayafter-day dedication.’
Murdoch said he, like the companies, was in “robust health”.
“Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges,” he said.
“We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years — I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them.”
Murdoch won’t be letting go entirely, becoming chairman emeritus when he steps down in November.
“In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas,” Murdoch said. “Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community.
“I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest.”
Murdoch and his four eldest children — James, Lachlan, Elisabeth and Prudence — were widely believed to be the model of the HBO show Succession.
Murdoch has had a strong New Zealand influence over the years, although he no longer has shares in any Kiwi media businesses.
His purchase of the Dominion
newspaper in the mid-1960s — sparked when he learned of its sale while on holiday in New Zealand — marked his company’s first foray outside Australia.
He would build up a portfolio of newspapers in New Zealand — as well as the Dominion, he took ownership of the Press, the Evening Post and a range of regional titles under the Independent Newspapers (INL) brand.
For a time, he also had a significant investment in Sky TV.
Sir Colin Maiden was chair of Independent Newspapers — which eventually became Fairfax and then Stuff — when it was part-owned by Murdoch.
Maiden met Murdoch and son Lachlan on several occasions. In 1995, he and then INL managing director Mike Robson celebrated Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup victory in San Diego, alongside Murdoch on board his superyacht, Red Dragon.
“Trays of champagne were brought out . . . it was as though Mike Robson and I had won the America’s Cup!” Maiden told me recently.
“I have a lot of memories of Rupert. I must admit with his views and Fox News and all the rest, I have become rather disillusioned in recent years. But we never saw that side of it. I don’t like what I see of that side . . . Fox News.”
Former All Black David Kirk also came to know Murdoch and Lachlan reasonably well when he was CEO of rival Australasian media firm Fairfax.
Kirk played tennis for a time with Lachlan, and the companies met occasionally — without breaching anti-competitive laws — to discuss how they could collaborate and share costs, and infrastructure such as printing plants.
Kirk met Rupert Murdoch on several occasions. “He knows he’s the most important person in the room put it that way, but he’s very polite,” Kirk told me recently.
Stay tuned to nzherald.co.nz for more reaction and developments on Murdoch’s departure.
‘Maybe we put both leaders in a room and make them stay there for 24 hours where they get food and water and let’s just see what happens.’
Senz’s $6 million loss
New Zealand sports radio network Senz has posted an almost $6 million loss, accounting for more than half of its parent company’s $10m deficit, in its most recent financial year.
But the company maintains it is committed to the New Zealand market despite the sea of red ink, and increasing pressure in Australia. While it said its New Zealand arm continued to be in a loss-making position, the A$5.5m (NZ$5.9m) loss was characterised as an impairment expense.
Reports out of Australia suggest Commonwealth Bank could potentially demand an “immediate settlement” of a $28.7m credit facility provided to parent company SEN.
“In the Sports Entertainment Group’s preliminary final report, it’s highlighted that the company has slightly more than $1m left in its line of credit,” the Ministry of Sport website reported.
“To manage its obligations, the company sought ‘covenant relief ’ from the Commonwealth Bank in the June quarter. The bank, in response, did not push for immediate settlement of the liability.”
Senz launched in New Zealand in mid-2021 with some of the biggest names in sport and broadcasting, including Brendon McCullum, Israel Dagg, Ian Smith, Kirstie Stanway and Stephen Donald. It promised to deliver 24/7 sport content as fans had never heard or seen before across almost 30 radio stations and through its digital channels.
“Senz continues to show strong ongoing growth across our radio and digital platforms,” a Senz spokesman told Media Insider yesterday.
“With great momentum from the Rugby World Cup in our capacity as an official radio broadcaster . . . [a] radio partnership with the New Zealand Warriors, an exclusive radio commentary partnership with New Zealand Cricket and several other exciting initiatives, we look forward to continued improvement and growth moving ahead.”
The spokesman did not answer specific questions around any costmanagement or cost-cutting moves the company might be making. Almost every mainstream New Zealand media company is in careful cost-management mode in difficult economic times.