A striking change of editorial tone

Is Newshub protecting the government? It seems a reasonable question to ask after last night’s 6pm News.

Once again Newshub found itself with an exclusive, agenda-setting story from its investigative reporter Michael Morrah, who has been ahead of the pack throughout the Covid-19 crisis. Morrah interviewed leading epidemiologist Professor David Skeggs, who was scathing – albeit in a politely restrained way – about repeated failures to intercept infected persons at the border.

This followed the announcement that a worker at the Sudima Hotel in Christchurch, where Russian and Ukrainian fishing boat crews are quarantined, had tested positive for the virus. This in turn led to concerns about a nearby Countdown supermarket, which the infected hotel worker had visited, and a close contact of the infected person who attended Cashmere High School.

Skeggs told Morrah that repeated failures at the border (there have been six in three months, starting with the Americold scare in August) posed the risk that New Zealand might have to go back into lockdown. He was particularly critical of people sharing rooms in quarantine hotels, which he said contravened basic isolation principles. "How many wake-up calls do we need?" Skeggs asked. "Soon our luck will run out."

Skeggs largely echoed what one of his University of Otago colleagues, public health expert Professor Nick Wilson, had told Morning Report yesterday morning. Wilson said the pattern of border failures showed the system wasn’t working properly. He urged a whole-of-system review and specifically called for pre-flight testing (why not, for heaven’s sake?) and a ban on people arriving in New Zealand from countries where the pandemic is out of control.

All this was decidedly at odds with soothing assurances from the prime minister and Ashley Bloomfield that the system is working exactly as intended, yet it was these bland assurances that led the 6pm bulletin on Three. In striking contrast with Newshub’s usual approach of leading the bulletin with its most arresting item, typically dressed up in florid, alarmist rhetoric, it served up Jacinda Ardern and Bloomfield saying officials were on top of things (“No horse has bolted,” in Bloomfield’s words) and nothing was happening that hadn’t been anticipated.

Morrah’s item squarely contradicting this anodyne message was deemed of less significance and ran second in the bulletin. Okay, it still ran; but its placement struck me as inconsistent with the aggressive, go-for-the-jugular ethos that Newshub normally favours, and which it used mercilessly to derail Judith Collins and the National Party during the election campaign.

Now that the election is over and National has crawled off to a cave to lick its wounds (job done, Newshub), I would have expected normal service to resume. That would mean fiercely and rigorously holding the government to account.  But someone at Newshub apparently made the decision last night that soft and reassuring trumps edgy and alarming, and I can’t help wondering about the sudden change of editorial tone. Just saying.