Television
Rob Harley, Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker
My name’s Rob Harley, I’ve for a number of years worked as TVNZ’s Medical Reporter based out of Auckland during a time when there was quite rapid change and a certain amount of turmoil within the health system in New Zealand, particularly in the area of mental health.
Television’s accessible, and television is where most people get their daily fix of information from. Television has a way to actually bring it to life, and you actually get to look into the eyes of another moving, breathing human being, and hear their pain and hear their story.
Rob's Top Tips
#1: Avoid BOPSA stories (bunch of people sitting around)
#2: Find people who are on a journey, with something at stake
#3: Research journalists whose stories you like and phone them up
#4: Sunday’s news has a big audience, but is harder to find stories for
#5: Keep your messages simple, and give people things they can do
#6: Use empowering language, don’t finger-wag
#7: Don’t be afraid to use humour
#8: Don’t be reactive or defensive, take the time to educate
Transcript
#1: Avoid BOPSA stories (bunch of people sitting around)
It used to be that you could tell stories in a fairly static fashion. You would tackle an ‘issue’, and often what you would get as part of telling the story of that issue was you might go to a conference where a bunch of, say, mental health professionals were sitting around discussing an issue. And pretty soon we realised seeing people at conferences was just pretty boring, and somebody very cruelly coined this phrase – BOPSA – which stands for ‘bunch of people sitting around’.
The very best story or documentary was best told through the lives of a person, so that if you were going out to tell the story about schizophrenia, for example, you would avoid conferences like the plague, and you would actually find some person, and some family, or some individual that was actually grappling with schizophrenia and try to tell the story through their eyes.
#2: Find people who are on a journey, with something at stake
Because drama is so titillating and so exciting, on night after night, television documentaries have to reflect that in terms of having subject matters that are compelling to watch - not just people whose lives are merely interesting, but people that are going through a time in their life which is a particularly testing time.
So one of the basic, almost indispensible elements of a good documentary now, or a documentary that’s going to actually make it into anywhere near prime time is where somebody is on a personal journey, there is something at stake, there are big issues and there are sort of touch points within that story that many viewers could identify with.
#3: Research journalists whose stories you like and phone them up
And try and make friends with somebody who is a reporter on, say, one of the television stations. Let’s say you watch a news bulletin and there’s a reporter whose work that you quite like; somebody you think seems intelligent, someone that you think presents a story in a balanced and compassionate way; I’d go find that reporter, I’d go ring him up and say ‘hey, love your work, got a story you might be interested in’. Everybody’s up for a little bit of flattery.
#4: Sunday’s news has a big audience, but is harder to find stories for
To call a reporter, for television it’s a bad time between about five and seven at night, during the day get in nice and early. A good time to call sometimes is on a weekend – they’ve still got a one hour news bulletin to fill, and there’s no Cabinet meetings, and there’s no business meetings, and there’s lots of other things that aren’t happening.
Sunday night’s evening news bulletin is a very well-watched bulletin. People in the know often will choose to release stuff on a weekend, because often that’s when news organisations are actually quite hungry for some information. You can get a big audience on a Sunday night.
#5: Keep your messages simple, and give people things they can do
The simpler the better in terms of the message – give people easily repeatable steps to do. You can look at something like domestic violence and think ‘now that’s a government-sized problem’. The key in getting messages out there is to show some person an easily achievable step that they could take that sort of takes the thing up another click in terms of advancing our understanding and our ability to be involved. So something as simple as ask them if they’re ok. That’s good, I can do that.
#6: Use empowering language, don’t finger-wag
It’s using empowering language rather than disempowering language. I mean recently this whole thing, you know, ‘never shake a baby’, I’ve been particularly impressed to see one of the ads that had a very strong looking Maori man both in the print and in the television version of that; he comes in and this baby’s crying and he picks the baby up, and you think ‘uh-oh, what’s going to happen now?’.
Instead of this guy shaking this baby, he holds it and comforts it, and there is this message which is one of the most brilliant things I think I’ve ever seen which is that, you know, you have the power... you have the power to protect this child. And once you actually turn that message around and basically instead of doing this finger-wagging thing saying ‘bad parent, bad potential baby-shaker’, what you do is that you turn the thing around and say ‘you’re a very powerful person and you have the power to actually give this child life’.
#7: Don’t be afraid to use humour
There’s a general rule, which if people are laughing their defences are down, and I think it’s a good way to go. I mean there’s one that I’ve seen recently which I just think was absolutely inspired – The Nutters Club. You know, Mike King who effectively came out and talked about his own battle with depression. But there he was suddenly fronting a show in which, much as the gay community reclaimed the word ‘queer’ and said ‘we’re not going to live under that and be crushed by it, we’ll take it on and we’ll adopt it’.
This idea of him having people on who had suffered from depression, who’d been suicidal, who’d had mental illness, and him actually mainstreaming that as far as a discussion subject, I thought was just absolutely inspired. I thought ‘dang, I wish I’d thought of that; that’s a really clever... that’s a really clever concept’.
#8: Don’t be reactive or defensive, take the time to educate
As far as mental health’s concerned, I’ve done so many stories in my life about people who use the whole NIMBY thing – ‘not in my backyard’. We were in Lower Hutt and there was somebody wanted to set up a halfway house for people with mental health issues in Lower Hutt, and they said ‘oh you can’t because it’s near a school’. I suddenly thought everywhere in New Zealand’s near a school, for crying out loud, you know, there’s schools on every second corner.
It was really interesting to see just the level of paranoia and lack of understanding. I mean I was a reporter, I wasn’t a medical... a mental health expert, but some of the things these parents were saying, you know, in these fairly well-to-do suburbs down there about, you know, ‘these people coming into our neighbourhood’ – they didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about. I’d been up and I’d met some of the people that were going to come in there.
The way you approach those stories... yeah, I think what I’d try to do is avoid the quick headline, because, you know, anybody can go out there and get a headline saying ‘neighbourhood gripped by fear’. But I think you’ll find that many reporters, provided that you can educate them and say look, in fact most of these people are probably less at risk of hurting other people than your average jock who’s got fuelled up with a bit of booze on a Friday night.
*
I think one of the first things to recognise is that hardly ever does one story change everything; it’s almost like you’ve got to be committed to a process.
I mean I remember a number of years ago being sort of part of a media campaign to try and get crash barriers on the Newmarket viaduct. But it wasn’t just one story that did it, it needed several news organisations to actually pick that thing up.
When I was growing up as a kid, you know, you’d call people ‘spas’, you know, ‘oh there’s a spas’, ‘he’s a spastic, that bloke’ and so forth without thinking for a moment about the injury and the hurt that might have caused. That’s not cool in my house.
People worry about our society, but actually our society has gone through some really healthy changes in the last few years; you know, who would have ever thought that a main news bulletin in the evening would have words like aroha, and hapu, and iwi sprinkled through it in a way that we assume everybody understands. Maybe we can get to that point in talking about things like schizophrenia. It would be nice to think so.
