Chad Taylor

Her radio and stereo, yes, all the same to me

"Why are you in London for the worst winter in 50 years?" A Correspondent Asks. Actually every winter I've been in London it's been the worst winter in 50 years, or since record-keeping began, or the wettest, or something. Likewise reading about NZ I see it's the worst summer there since like, ever, or the best, and it's about to get worse, and so on. Which is why I'm a global warming skeptic. While terrified by humanity's disregard for the environment and worried that we're killing the oceans, and perturbed how we're fighting over deserts while leaving the rain forests to defend themselves, I still can't bring myself to believe what I read about the weather in a newspaper. Which means I guess that I'm not a global warming skeptic: I'm a skeptic about global warming reporting.

Latest reports from my home country suggest that the National government and John Key are softening up Radio New Zealand for budget cuts. Because I've done two of my better interviews courtesy of the bookish people at RNZ, namely Bookmarks and National Radio Book Club, I share PEN NZ's concerns that cutting RNZ would short-change New Zealand's authors.

RNZ is one of the few places where authors get to talk and discuss their work at length without being pressured to frame it as "news". Writing is slow and hard to pin down, not unlike the weather. The non-commercial environment of RNZ's arts programme format means that journalists don't have to make idiots of themselves pretending that a book is the best book in the world or the worst in 50 years, or the wettest on record, etc, in order to generate a headline. Instead they can get into the details of the thing: its shades and variations, its fine points, its ambling. Its humanity, in other words. Reporting art without empathy is like reporting sports without the score.

Literature, like the weather, is always of interest - but that doesn't mean it's big or easy news. I feel generally sympathetic towards journalists who have been dispatched to cover it. As for squeezing a book review into a few hundred words, let alone finding moving images to accompany the story - bonne fucking chance. Even the willing, media-friendly juggernaut of the best seller bogs down in the 24-hour news churn. Witness for instance how difficult it is to make even Stephanie Meyer into news: the author of the biggest seller on the planet is merely a footnote in a frock at the New Moon premiere. Authors are too self-contained, too introverted to be the subject of editorial fantasy. Whereas la Winehouse walks down the street: newsfelch!

The RNZ issue is evolving, and the matter as any fule kno is being filtered through the language of other media which itself is a rival and competitor to radio. But Mr Paul Reynolds, A Blogger, has written something good about it.

Other nice radio interviews I have done: Peter McLennan at the 95Bfm Culture Bunker. Yakkity yak yak yak.