What the Fox?!!

I am ashamed. Just after 1am, when we had three international news services on offer - BBC on TV ONE, Al Jazeera on Triangle TV and Fox News on Prime, I opted for Fox over the other two! Maybe it's just because it's Friday and I need something light-hearted to make me laugh...

Lately I've been watching more of Triangle TV and Voice of America which has been providing analysis on the US presidential election campaign, something the two NZ news services haven't done enough of. There was one night when they were analysing an earlier NBC debate amongst the Democrats John Edwards, Obama (I won't bother attempting to spell his first name and getting it wrong!) and Hillary Clinton, and they were commenting on the way each presidential candidate answered the question on what they thought their strengths and weaknesses were. They liked Obama's self-confessed weakness - being bad with paper, and felt the other two candidates' weakness being that they cared TOO much was too clichéd. Now when I think back to my pharmacy interview when they asked me what I thought my strengths and weaknesses were, guess what I said was my weakness? That I cared TOO much about people! I think I need a better answer for next time...

With this year being election year though, I was thinking maybe it's about time I did join a political party, or one of those ones on campus and get started. I was thinking that by studying law it would eventually lead me into politics one day, but now that it's not looking likely that I'll be doing law, maybe joining a political party earlier will help me get to know the in's and out's of the whole system. One thing I'm mostly concerned about is whether joining a particular political party will put me at a disadvantage later on in life, if it will come back to bite me in the behind. My contingency plan should I realise I've joined the wrong political party (or one I end up realising doesn't share the same vision as mine) would be to quit and join the opposing political party for roughly the same amount of time! My friend Lindsey who's studying politics down in Otago likes to rub in my face the fact that National is way ahead in the polls, but election year has only started and things are only just warming up! I don't really know how serious I am about my supposed political aspirations, but we'll see..

TVNZ finally announced the news presenters for their new TVNZ7 factual channel. What a shame they haven't taken the opportunity to rebrand ONE News to something that would reflect the organisation as a whole, such as TVNZ News. Most news articles linking to something mentioned in a ONE News report call it TVNZ news anyway, and now that TV2 don't have their own news programme, why not have the same news brand across all channels - TVNZ News? It also has NZ in there as well for when their foreign correspondents (oh they have foreign correspondents? Yes...very few...still quite disappointed at the disbanding of the Asian Bureau!!!) report from overseas. At least people will know where they're from, instead of something insignificant like ONE News.

But what would I know anyway? Of what importance is it to me anyway? Very little probably...oh wll at least there's Triangle TV to occasionally serve my news and current affairs cravings!