THE VOICE OF A NATION
TV does a lot of the heavy lifting around what we need to do to get the news coverage in and then we can slice and dice the material that we gather in many different ways. – Richard Sutherland
THE 1975 general election was an election of firsts. It was the first election shown since the arrival of colour TV, the first election covered by two competing TV channels (TV One and South Pacific Television) and the first election to usher Robert Muldoon—arguably the country’s first ‘made for TV’ politician—firmly onto the screen.
In essence, 1975 was the first ever election in New Zealand’s history to be strongly influenced by the medium of television. For the next nine years, Muldoon went on to project his bullish yet undeniably entertaining style of Prime Ministerial governance onto the nation’s screens, with other charismatic and dynamic personalities, such as David Lange, John Key and Winston Peters, stepping in front of the camera in the ensuing decades.
From that point forth, politics and TV have remained inexplicably linked in a complex mutual embrace, and this year’s 2017 general election is proving no exception. And while the remit of political coverage on TV extends well beyond the triennial election cycle, the intense and prolonged media
