\u201cThere is more pressure on journalists these days to meet an unknown deadline because it\u2019s always there.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I began, we had all sorts of things that we had to do before we filed copy. In my case, you had to have a screw mouthpiece phone, put it onto crocodile clips, and feed it into a mutter box. Plug your tape recorder into it, and you could feed audio.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, now you do it by computer. So, while there\u2019s more pressure on journalists, you can file copy with great ease, and the quality of the audio would be perfect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve filed from India before with old technology, and it\u2019s bloody awful because the phones took several hours to get a connection through to New Zealand, and when you got the connection, you only lived in hope that it would be a good connection.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne point I make in the book, I remember it vividly, standing on the west lawn of the White House with a brick phone, being interviewed back home, and thinking, this is unbelievable. Here I am, no wires, no mutter boxes, and I\u2019m talking, and the people of New Zealand are hearing it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Barry Soper through the years at Parliament’s press gallery. Photos \/ supplied; montage \/ Phil Welch<\/p>\n
Soper also makes the observation that there has been a certain decline in the \u201cart\u201d of politics.<\/p>\n
\u201c[In Muldoon\/Lange\u2019s time] … Parliament was full of the type of characters you just don\u2019t get now,\u201d he wrote, and \u201cUnlike today, there were a number of fantastic debaters.\u201d<\/p>\n
“\u200aThere used to be an unwritten rule in Parliament that if you took part in the Wednesday debate, you were not allowed to speak with notes. You had to stand up, you had to be a good orator. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were pulled up in my early days and told, \u2018You are speaking from notes, you\u2019re not allowed to do that!<\/p>\n
“\u200aIt was harder, but the oratory was so much more superior than what you get today. Lange, in particular, though, his voice would rise to a crescendo, and then he would drop it down to almost a whisper, and the whole audience would be silent and taken with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like being in an opera. Whether he said anything that was particularly newsworthy is another matter.\u201d <\/p>\n
Listen to the full episode<\/a> to hear more about:<\/p>\n Journalist\/politician dynamicsWinston PetersThe \u2018Golden Age\u2019 of Prime MinistersA good politician vs. an effective PM.<\/p>\n The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime\/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.<\/p>\n You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As former PM John Key wrote in one of the book\u2019s forewords, \u201cBarry knew, and still knows, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17525,2840,184,59346,2108,43863,1668,78,121117,60724,42677,13617,117,111,43,139,69,90,28630,415,56382,26633,8475,223,11548,80],"class_list":["post-406225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-17525","tag-across","tag-barry","tag-beehive","tag-book","tag-certainly","tag-front","tag-in","tag-lid","tag-lifting","tag-ministers","tag-name","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-page","tag-prime","tag-recognisable","tag-soper","tag-thats","tag-the","tag-voice","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}