(This post is a one-off. It does not signify a reactivation of my blog.)
There’s a crisis in the news media and the media are blaming
it on everyone except themselves. Culpability is being deflected elsewhere –
mainly to the hapless Minister of Communications, Melissa Lee, and the big social
media platforms that are accused of hoovering up advertising revenue that would
otherwise go to traditional mainstream media companies.
But while it has been clear for a long time that Lee is out
of her depth, she’s not responsible for the media’s collapse and it’s not
exactly clear what her media tormentors expect her to do about it. Bail them out
with government money, presumably. But the proposition that the government
should prop up news media that are openly hostile to it makes about as much sense
as Israel providing arms and ammunition to Hamas. In any case, why should the long-suffering
taxpayer be made to pay for the media’s manifest failings?
And while it may be true that Facebook and Google have been
piggybacking on the mainstream media (although I sometimes wonder whether the
damage has been conveniently exaggerated), pointing the finger at them neatly
sidesteps the uncomfortable issue of the media’s own contributory fault.
For anyone unable to join the dots, the publication last
week of the fifth annual Trust in News survey should help. It showed that New
Zealanders’ trust in the reporting of news has continued its headlong downward
plunge – from 42 percent in 2023 to an even more dismal 33 percent this year. Significantly,
this is a faster decline than recorded by similar surveys in other comparable countries.
Even report co-author Merja Myllylahti said she was shocked by the results.
In 2020, the year the New Zealand survey began, 53 percent
of respondents said they trusted the news “most of the time”. So there has been
a cumulative fall since then of 20 percent, and the decline is accelerating.
Even the Otago Daily Times, which
emerged from the latest survey as the most trusted media outlet in the country,
scored only five on a scale from 0 (“not at all trustworthy”) to 10
(“completely trustworthy”).
RNZ and TVNZ both fell short of the break-even point. As
publicly owned news providers, RNZ and TVNZ have a special obligation to
provide trustworthy (in other words fair, accurate and balanced) news and
commentary, but they have failed themselves and us.
The latest survey, conducted by Horizon Research for the
Auckland University of Technology (AUT), also revealed that more New Zealanders
are actively avoiding the news. I’m one of them. I’ve been a news junkie all my
adult life, but I haven’t watched a TV news bulletin since last December. And
it seems I’m not alone; I exchanged emails yesterday with an old friend,
another retired journalist, who announced that he was boycotting the news and thought
there had been a subsequent lift in his mood.
The report accompanying the trust survey gives a rather
large clue to why so many people have lost faith in the mainstream media. It
noted that those who no longer trusted the news were concerned about its
negativity and, perhaps more tellingly, by “what they perceive as political
bias and opinion masquerading as news”.
Eighty-seven percent of those who didn’t trust the news said
it was biased and unbalanced, 82 percent said news reflected the political
leaning of newsrooms and 76 percent felt it was too opinionated. Moreover, 47
percent of respondents couldn’t be sure that the news media were free of
political or government influence most of the time – a predictable legacy of
the ill-conceived Public Interest Journalism Fund, which showered public money
on journalism projects that satisfied ideological acceptability tests.
No surprises there. But are the media listening, or are they
too self-absorbed – too busy weeping, wailing and gnashing their teeth, as the
Bible might put it – to see what’s obvious to virtually everyone else? The
level of self-delusion is staggering.
One thing is inarguable: notwithstanding all the contempt being
heaped on the Minister of Communications, she can’t be blamed for the collapse
of trust in the media. That’s entirely the media’s own doing.
Neither can the problem be attributed to Facebook and Google.
Even if the social media giants were made to pay in some way for the news
they’re accused of currently pillaging free of charge, that wouldn’t solve the
trust issue. So the media need to start rebuilding trust, as the authors of the
Trust in News survey suggest. That is, if it’s not already too late. And
perhaps the process of rebuilding trust could start by no longer angrily looking
around for other people to blame for a media crisis that’s largely of the
media’s own making.
Physician, heal thyself, as Shakespeare might have said.
Problem is, the media appear to have no self-criticism mechanism – or if they
have, it’s been out of use for so long that no one can find the switch to
activate it.
Some high-profile casualties of the current media upheavals
have plaintively and volubly appealed for public support on the basis that the
media are essential to a functioning democracy. Doubtless that same argument is
used to justify the fact that the threat of journalists’ job losses gets
infinitely more media attention than, say, the closure of a meat processing
plant or clothing factory. Journalists are supposedly different because of
their noble calling. But arguments about the special place of the media hold
true only as long as the media are fair, balanced and neutral in the way they
treat the news. Once they abandon that
obligation, all bets are off – which is exactly what has led us to where we are
now.
The truth is that the New Zealand mainstream media have been
in self-destruct mode for years. Traditionally, the media’s legitimacy and
moral authority rested on their role as a “broad church”, willing to report and
reflect a wide array of news and opinion. To put it another way, the “old” media
sought to reflect the diverse communities they served; a nation talking to
itself, in the oft-quoted words of the playwright Arthur Miller.
The “broad church” model served the public and democracy
well, but that changed with the ascendancy of a new generation of journalists,
many with university degrees, who fatally saw themselves as being
intellectually and culturally superior to the masses.
Rather than attempting to connect with the community at
large, this new generation of journalists preferred to write about, and for, people with the
same interests, values, tastes and ideological beliefs as themselves – an
approach doomed to commercial failure, since it reached only a narrow
demographic group. The nexus with the
broader community was severed and in the process, the mainstream media
succeeded in delegitimising themselves.
All this coincided with the digital revolution and the resulting
emergence of online platforms that gave people alternatives. Hence the
continuing plunge in newspaper circulations and the shrinking audience for TV
news.
It’s surely significant that the decline in trust has become
sharper over the past few years. New Zealanders could be accused of being passive
and even apathetic, but they are not entirely stupid. They observed that for
six years, the media gave the Labour government a conspicuously easy ride,
obligingly falling into line over crucial issues such as Covid (remember the
media disdain for the anti-vaccine protesters at Parliament?), climate change, rampant
crime, co-governance and the Treaty.
These were issues that provoked deep and growing unease and
division. Yet a stranger to New Zealand, monitoring the media in the years
2020-2023, would have formed the impression the country was united in blissful
accord behind Labour’s policies.
Jacinda Ardern was treated obsequiously and her ministers
largely escaped critical scrutiny, other than in instances of behaviour so
egregious it couldn’t be ignored (the names Kiri Allan and Michael Wood come to
mind). Legitimate Opposition attacks on the government in Parliament went
unreported and press statements from conservative lobby groups were routinely ignored.
Media complicity was crucial in the advancing of a radical government agenda.
Compare that with the relentless barrage of anti-government
rhetoric that has dominated news bulletins and newspaper headlines in the six
months since the election as the media gorged on a diet of left-wing outrage over
the coalition’s policies. It began almost the day after the election and it
hasn’t abated since. Ministers are being subjected daily to a level of
interrogation that their Labour predecessors encountered rarely, if ever. Regardless
of one’s politics (and I’m not a supporter of the coalition), the contrast with
the media’s pusillanimous, sycophantic approach under Labour is striking.
Unfortunately for the reputation of journalists, the public can
weigh all this against the knowledge that people in the media are overwhelmingly
sympathetic to the Left. In the Worlds of Journalism study published by Massey
University in October 2022, New Zealand journalists were asked to identify
their political views. Of the 359 who completed the survey, roughly two-thirds
identified as left-wing, 23 percent described themselves as centrist and only 12
per cent said they were right-wing.
Those figures don’t tell the whole story, however. An
astonishing 15 percent of journalists described themselves as “hard left” and 6
percent as “extreme left”, although I’m not sure how they distinguished between
the two. This was against an infinitesimal number – barely enough to register on
the chart – who considered themselves “hard” or “extreme” right. The political
imbalance was stark.
In a perfect world, this need not be an issue. Many, if not
most, of the journalists I worked with over the course of a long career were
left-wing in their politics. This becomes a problem only if journalists allow
their personal views to influence (contaminate might be a better word) their
work. Regrettably the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that today’s journalists
do exactly that.
This is not only allowed but in many cases encouraged.
Journalists reflect the ethos and culture of their workplace, and contemporary newsrooms
more often than not are places of left-wing groupthink. Many journalists of the
current generation have been taught that the purpose of journalism is to agitate
for change. They have been conditioned to believe that editorial balance – the
idea that there is more than one side to every story – is bogus, and that they
should be free to decide which narratives are valid and deserve to be promoted.
Theirs is the journalism of advocacy and activism.
This is especially problematical because the biases of
journalists do not reflect the views of the populace at large. New Zealand is
not a society that naturally leans sharply to the left. That’s clear from the
last election result, and from the broad sweep of our political history.
When journalists are so obviously out of step with the
society they purport to serve, it’s small wonder that people stop buying
newspapers and watching the news. Readers, viewers and listeners naturally
resent being lectured, talked down to and subjected to social engineering projects
such as the renaming of cities and the arrogant imposition of a new hybrid
language which the country didn’t vote for and only a minority supports.
It’s often said that the police operate with the consent of
the public. The same is true, in a way, of the news media. And once public
confidence has been lost, it can be very hard to win back. To quote an old
Dutch saying, trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback. In other words, it
takes a long time to build but can quickly evaporate.
To use a different analogy, the current relationship between
the media and the public is like an unhappy marriage that has irretrievably
broken down and one spouse has walked away, leaving the other wondering what
went wrong and trying to convince anyone who will listen that the fault was not
theirs, when clearly it was. In this case it’s the public that has moved on,
leaving the media to howl at the moon.