I’m in love with Hannah Hogson and what the hell do TVNZ think they are doing?

You know something I don’t fucking get folks? Is why TVNZ fucked it’s own news show, Tonight, so very, very badly. It’s as if they don’t care, or ‘get’ that urban folk watch late night news! Due to traffic jams, due to runnin’ around and getting this and doin that – all the regular things that fill up our busy, busy days, most NZers just don’t get home in time for 6pm. There is a huge market for late night news, it just staggers me that TVNZ seemed to go out of their way to dump crap shows just before the news, forcing anyone above watching sad individuals obviously in need of some deep compassionate counseling sold off as freak of the week documentaries, to tune in exactly at 10.30pm. An inane strategy that would demand a static appointment time slot, yet the time-slot for Tonight would yo-yo wildly at the mere whim of god knows what, sometimes I thought the timeslot would fluctuate with the full moon, at other times it seemed to sync in with my girlfriends cycle.

It was almost as if TVNZ didn’t care.

Which is a fucking shame, because I’m all about a healthy democracy, and part of a healthy democracy is a critical media unafraid to speak truth to power and in that vein of thinking, Tonight really blew me away when I watched it last night. I’m in love with Hannah Hogson, there I said it and I don’t care! Her report into NZers perceptions to poverty and whether John Key could solve them was one of those rare stories that reminds you there are good reporters, but by Christ do you have to go looking for them. TVNZ doesn’t even have Tonight listed on their website other than as a line, no profiles and Hannah Hogson wasn’t even listed. Oh they do the full spectrum production of the blessed ‘ONE NEWS TEAM’ in a way that would make Ron Burgundy blush, but not a whisper of it’s flowers in the attic malformed twin sister.

If TVNZ could just find it in their heart to stop crippling their own late night news show and put Hogson and fresh new young journalists of her ilk to work in a stable time slot that could actually shed some light on the events of the day.

You know, for the sake of that whole ‘healthy democracy’ thing I was talking about.

Seeing as you are the public broadcaster and all.