Mallard in Fantasyland?

I attended two sessions at the Featherston Booktown Festival on Saturday. One, on the state of the news media, was almost totally useless. I walked out before it had finished. The other, however, was not only entertaining but produced one of those “Did he just say what I thought he said?” moments from former Speaker and Labour Party minister Sir Trevor Mallard.

In the panel discussion on the media, Duncan Greive from The Spinoff was the only speaker who brought any insight to bear. The contributions of the other participants – Mike McRoberts from NBR, TVNZ’s Te Aniwa Hurihanganui and moderator Michelle Duff – were shallow, predictable and carefully modulated to elicit murmurs of sympathy and agreement from the full hall.

It would have been a whole lot livelier if Sean Plunket, Michael Laws, Heather du Plessis-Allan, Peter Williams or even Barry Soper had been invited to speak, but that was never going to happen. Book festivals are not noted for their openness to ideas and opinions that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. There are audience sensibilities to be considered.

The preceding session on politics was a lot more rewarding. The subject was the turbulent politics of 2017-2023: the Ardern years. And while there was the same non-threatening quality about the speakers, two of them – Chris Finlayson and Trevor Mallard – at least spoke with the advantage of first-hand, close-up experience. Two journalists, Stuff’s Henry Cooke and the aforementioned Hurihanganui, seemed to be there to make up the numbers and didn’t have a great deal to contribute.

It was a crowd-pleasing session, deftly chaired by Toby Manhire from the Spinoff. Finlayson, nominally the right-wing voice on the panel, was never likely to upset anyone and was presumably invited for exactly that reason. He’s the Left’s favourite conservative: an old-school National Party liberal who quickly earned the crowd’s favour by making it clear he doesn’t have much, if anything, in common with the “Muppet” government (his term) that’s now in power. He remarked that because of the coalition government’s “blowback” on Maori issues, he now feels more like the opposition.

The fact that Finlayson has long been out of politics not only renders him acceptable to left-leaning book festival audiences - since he's no longer in a position of power - but frees him to be frank, all of which makes him ideal for the festival circuit. He’s an engaging raconteur and can be tartly humorous, as when he talked about the many “WTF moments” when National was chaotically in opposition, drolly referring to one former party leader as “Muller the Brief” and to another, Simon Bridges, as a shit.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Finlayson say that if he had won the then Labour-held Rongotai electorate, which he contested for National with no expectation of winning and plainly no desire to do so, he would have demanded a recount. It’s a good self-deprecating joke that bears repeating.

For his part, Mallard, having been Speaker during the anti-vax occupation of Parliament's grounds, was plainly concerned with putting a favourable spin on his involvement in that unprecedented brouhaha. He told the audience that a lot of “marginal people” were involved in the protest camp – people who had “gone down rabbit holes”, including mentally ill individuals he knew from his Hutt South electorate; in other words, nut cases and no-hopers.

I wonder if anyone else in the hall felt, as I did, that this was a less than empathetic way for a Labour MP – one who makes much of the fact that he represented the battlers from working-class Wainuiomata – to brush aside the concerns of people who are social casualties. Henry Cooke pointed out that many of the protesters had lost their jobs because of the vaccination mandate (although I don’t recall Stuff taking the trouble to make that clear at the time) and Te Aniwa Hurihanganui acknowledged that they were a “real mix of people”. Mallard justifiably copped a lot of flak for his arrogance and indifference to the protesters’ grievances during the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and I wondered on Saturday whether he had learned anything from the experience. Perhaps not.

He also criticised the police for taking too long to deal with the protest encampment (oh, so it was their fault, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty) and he defended the use of water sprinklers – which were seen, along with the notorious Mallard-instigated Barry Manilow broadcasts, as an attempt to dislodge the occupants – as being necessary to wash away human waste. That was a new one on me and I wondered whether it was a convenient justification post-event.

But the big surprise – one that even had the stranger next to me turning to me with a look of disbelief – was Mallard’s claim that the protest camp was funded by Russia. Yep, that’s right: Mallard reckoned someone paid for millions of dollars – yes, millions – worth of camping equipment that mysteriously turned up in Parliament’s grounds. Protesters suddenly had money to spend and he had no doubt that money came from offshore – Russia, he said.

Whoa! That came completely out of left field. My astonishment was shared by my fellow  journalist David McLoughlin, who was also at the session and like me, thought Mallard’s claim was bizarre. No explanation was offered as to why Vladimir Putin should spend millions paying for anti-vax protesters to camp in comfort in the most distant capital in the world. Payback for New Zealand supporting sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine invasion, perhaps? Not totally implausible, but it's the sort of far-fetched scenario that only an over-active imagination might come up with. Neither was it clear why the allegation had never emerged before.

Certainly there was feverish talk in 2022, some of it from the excitable, conspiracy-obsessed Sanjana Hattotuwa of the Disinformation Project (remember them?), about alleged Russian-sourced disinformation. Canada too was identified as a source of malevolent anti-vax propaganda, Jacinda Ardern noting the supposedly incriminating evidence that Canadian flags were being flown in the protest camp. But Russia spending millions on tents and sleeping bags? That was a new one.

Surprisingly, despite two political journalists being on stage with Mallard when he made the allegation, nothing has been reported, at least to my knowledge. Here was a former senior government politician – the Speaker of the House of Representatives and subsequently ambassador to Ireland – alleging malign foreign interference in our domestic affairs. I would have thought there was a story in it (“Russia funded Wellington protest camp, says Mallard”), but apparently not. Perhaps Cooke and Hurihanganui decided it was just Mallard running off at the mouth and not worth taking any further. But previous generations of political reporters, their news antennae twitching furiously, would have been pursuing him for elaboration.

What, if anything, should we make of it? For me it had echoes of former Waitakere mayor and Labour grandee Bob Harvey’s startling allegation in 2000 – similarly unsubstantiated – that the CIA was involved in the death of Norman Kirk, which had even his friend Helen Clark looking sideways at him. Mallard’s claim has the same slightly loony, off-the-wall quality. If he has evidence, he should front up with it. Otherwise people will be justified in concluding it was a case of Mallard in Fantasyland.

Why the Maiki Sherman-Lloyd Burr incident is a matter of public interest

 A good and respected friend – like me, a former newspaper editor – takes the view that the furore over TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman’s alleged verbal abuse of Stuff press gallery journalist Lloyd Burr is not news; that at best, it would warrant a mention in a gossip column.

Fair enough, but I differ. If the high-profile journalists who provide the public with political news and comment are bitchy, entitled, childish, over-stimulated and perhaps inclined to run off at the mouth after a few drinks at the end of a long day, I think we deserve to know. That knowledge is potentially very helpful in judging how much notice we should take of them, or indeed whether we should take any notice of them at all.

You can be sure that if MPs behaved in the same scandalous way and the media learned about it, they’d be all over the story. Ah, people might say; MPs are different. They’re public figures, elected and accountable – which is true. But high-profile journalists like Sherman wield more power than many politicians, and certainly a whole lot more than your anonymous, run-of-the-mill list MP.

They effectively set the political agenda. They present themselves as people the public can trust and whose opinions we should respect. That being the case, any character flaws that become apparent – such as might be evident from the hurling of vicious personal insults over drinks in a senior minister’s office – become a matter of legitimate public interest; the more so when the alleged antagonist is employed by a taxpayer-funded broadcasting organisation and therefore has a special obligation to behave in a mature and responsible way.

It’s true that we may not yet know the full facts of the incident. It’s the nature of these things that the complete truth often emerges bit by bit over time. While it doesn’t seem to be in dispute that Sherman used the word alleged (to wit, “faggot”), it’s been reported that she was responding to a racial provocation. Either way, the incident presents an unflattering picture of the country’s supposed journalism elite and won’t do anything to lift public trust in the media from its woeful level. Again, that makes it a matter of public interest (and by that I don’t necessarily mean something the public is interested in, because for all I know the public isn’t, and probably regards the affair as akin to a school playground squabble).

Just to complicate things, some commentators are questioning blogger Ani O’Brien’s motives in breaking the story. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m assuming they were honourable. I even sent her an email congratulating her for exposing what had happened while the mainstream media resolutely looked the other way. But O’Brien does run a political consultancy and it’s undeniable that politics has never been murkier than now, with political agendas and connections that are not always out in the open.  

Pushing the views that suit them

It’s verging on dishonesty for RNZ to describe political commentator Janet Wilson as a former National Party press secretary, as it did yesterday in an item about the reported unrest in the National caucus, as if her former status endows her opinion with special force or credibility.

For the record, Wilson described National as a “slow-slip political earthquake” and “a miasma of nothingness”. These were damning words. The unmistakeable implication was that if Wilson is dissing Christopher Luxon then the party must be in a truly dire predicament – because after all, isn’t she supposed to be on National’s side?

Wilson is often critical of National and appeals to the media for exactly that reason. The subliminal message is that the party has been abandoned even by its own supporters.

Stuff plays the same game, routinely introducing Wilson’s political columns by mentioning she has worked for National. It’s a useful, if slightly deceitful, way of trying to prove to readers that Stuff is politically even-handed, contrary to what its critics keep saying. (Stuff does the same with another political columnist, Ben Thomas, who was Chris Finlayson's press secretary so long ago that it's scarcely relevant.)

But the fact Wilson once worked for National tells you nothing about her political sympathies. She was just one of the many hired guns – sorry, I mean communications advisers – who ply their trade around the Beltway. She provided media training to John Key and was later employed on a relatively brief fixed-term contract as press secretary to the National leader (two, in fact – the hapless Todd Muller and then Judith Collins) during a chaotic period in 2020 when the party was in abject disarray.

Interestingly enough, her LinkedIn profile doesn’t mention that time. Perhaps she was burned by the experience and doesn’t want to remind anyone of it. Certainly she saw the Nats at their worst, which may explain why she so often seems hostile to the party and happy to undermine its leader.

This is not to say Wilson doesn’t have a valid perspective, but when all is said and done she’s just one opinionated commentator among many (in fact rather too many, you might say, considering the 28 comment pieces about Luxon’s leadership that political scientist Bryce Edwards included in his daily roundup this morning).

Moreover, like most commentators she’s fallible, as she proved when she rather rashly wrote National off after the 2020 election. Readers may recall the party made an emphatic comeback three years later. But Wilson remains a favoured commentator largely because her past association with National is seen as giving her opinions a special patina of authority.

The question is, would RNZ have been remotely interested in her view on National’s leadership imbroglio if she had said Luxon was secure and deserved to lead the party into this year’s election? Somehow I don’t think so.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not and never have been a supporter of National or Luxon and believe the party probably deserves whatever happens to it. I just wish the media weren’t so damned predictable in the unsubtle way they push opinions that suit them.)

Luxon still hasn’t got the hang of politics

“I’m not going to play that game,” Christopher Luxon said – rather lamely – when Tova O’Brien asked him how many Maori National MPs were in his cabinet.

“It’s not a game,” countered O’Brien, doubtless trying hard to conceal her glee at having so easily caught the prime minister out.

Oh, but it is a game. The game is called scalp-hunting and it’s commonly practised by journalists and broadcasters who mistakenly think their role is to make politicians squirm.

The funny thing is, no one can recall the game being played when Jacinda Ardern was PM. Ardern appeared to be surrounded by an invisible but impenetrable shield that protected her against awkward questions.

It wasn’t so much that such questions harmlessly bounced off her. They just weren’t asked. And if they were, as happened sometimes on Mike Hosking’s breakfast programme, her response was to stop going on his show.

O’Brien would have been thrilled at causing Luxon to stumble yesterday when he couldn’t answer her question. It was the equivalent of a bowler stumping the opposing team’s opening batsman with the first ball. You could almost see the thought bubble above her head: “Howzat!”

Luxon should have seen it coming. O’Brien has built her reputation on hatchet jobs and would have been eager to make an impact in her new role as presenter of TVNZ’s breakfast show. The hapless PM obliged by walking straight into her trap.

Then he compounded his mistake by saying that the newly promoted James Meager, who is of Ngai Tahu descent, is a cabinet member when he’s actually a minister outside cabinet. O’Brien pounced again and left Luxon looking like a possum in the headlights.

It was depressing evidence that even after four and a half years as leader of the National Party and two and a half as prime minister, Luxon still hasn’t got the hang of politics.

His rise to the top of the corporate ladder was no preparation for the shark tank he now swims in. He still exhibits two fatal frailties: he lacks a killer instinct and he’s far too keen to be liked. Those are dangerous political weaknesses that leave him vulnerable and make him an easy target for aggressive broadcasters and journalists, to say nothing of his political opponents.

Far from developing the agile - and sometimes necessarily forceful - verbal and mental responses essential in his position, he appears to rely on stilted, formulaic talking points supplied to him by his communications advisers. Not only do these not resonate with the public, but rigid adherence to them leaves him exposed and floundering when an unexpected question lands.

A more street-smart politician would have known how to deal with O’Brien’s mischievous query (and it was mischievous, since its clear purpose was not to enlighten viewers so much as to catch Luxon out).

Yes, it might be argued that Luxon should know how many Maori National MPs are in his cabinet. But his response should have been that the ethnicity of cabinet ministers is irrelevant. It's competence that matters.

He said he wasn’t going to play O’Brien’s game, but he did. Rather than feebly protesting at her question, he should have gone on the front foot and challenged her attempt to reduce cabinet appointments to a matter of identity politics. Luxon and his ministers need to constantly remind themselves that one of the reasons New Zealanders so emphatically rejected Labour at the last election was that they were desperate to be extricated from that ideological morass.

For all his faults (and God knows, there are plenty), Winston Peters wouldn’t have given O’Brien the satisfaction of claiming his scalp. That’s the difference between the two coalition party leaders, right there: Peters is a born politician whereas Luxon is still on trainer wheels.

The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Printing the paper in Christchurch and then freighting it north by truck and ferry, as Stuff apparently proposes to do, will be a death blow to a paper whose heritage dates back to 1865. I was tempted to use the phrase "coup de grace" rather than death blow, but strictly speaking, a coup de grace is a swift and merciful end for a person or animal that is suffering. This will more likely be a cruelly slow and inevitable decline, and painful to watch for anyone who values newspapers.

The proposed move means The Post’s final editorial deadline would be pushed back to the early afternoon, at best. Nothing that happens after that time will be covered in its news columns. It will therefore abandon any claim to be a genuine morning newspaper, or even a newspaper at all. Whatever “news” it contains will be withered and stale by the time it reaches any remaining readers.

The Post will be forced to rely even more on soft, flabby content that isn’t time-critical. This means more long-winded and ultimately pointless opinion columns, more cheap filler material lifted from overseas sources and irrelevant to New Zealand, and more lifestyle-oriented fluff – such as articles about movies, television, the arts, gardening, interior design, food and fashion – that used to be the preserve of glossy (for which read women’s) magazines.

Already the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald consistently carries more – and sharper – Wellington news. Wellingtonians who want to be informed on what’s happening in their own city have to read a paper published 500 km away.

And The Post won’t be the only title affected by the move. Stuff’s other North Island dailies – the Taranaki Daily News, the Manawatu Standard and my own local, the Wairarapa Times-Age – will also be printed in Christchurch and trucked north, which means they too will be subjected to the uncertainties of Cook Strait weather, ferry breakdowns and the inevitable road delays caused by a New Zealand Transport Agency that seems blithely indifferent to the impact of its endless and needlessly disruptive roadworks.

Those newspapers will therefore lose even more of the vital sense of “localness” that makes them relevant to their communities. Already their newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where coverage of local news is scant and superficial. With the shift to Christchurch, the factors of time and distance will mean the papers become still more remote from the readers they supposedly serve.

This is madness. Much as I feel for the journalists still employed on these papers, some of whom I know personally, it might be more merciful – and more realistic – to shut the papers down now and abandon the pretence that they will continue to mean something in their terminally enfeebled state.

How did Stuff arrive at this dismal juncture? The immediate cause is the acquisition by the wealthy property investor Troy Bowker of the land and building that houses Stuff’s Petone printing plant. Bowker is not favourably disposed to Stuff, I assume for ideological reasons (Stuff is left-wing, Bowker is decidedly not), and I sense that he derived some satisfaction from giving the company notice to clear out next year and take its printing press with it.

He would have known very well that this created an existential predicament for Stuff, notwithstanding Stuff owner Sinead Boucher’s insistence that the company was ready and prepared for it and will take it the massive disruption and expense in its stride. Bowker obviously doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do either.

But the real origins of Stuff’s decline lie much further back. It began with the creation in 1999 of Sam Morgan’s Trade Me, a bold use of digital technology that deprived newspapers of a vital revenue stream from classified advertising – those lucrative pages of small-type ads for jobs, cars, properties and second-hand goods. In Australia, classified ads were famously described as “rivers of gold” and the same was true here.

That was followed by a much wider migration of advertising from print to online. Display advertising – the industry term for big ads, often occupying a full page, placed by department stores, car manufacturers and big corporates such as banks and telecom providers – soon dried up too as advertisers realised they could target their ad spend more effectively online.

Simultaneously, newspaper publishers were panicked into a suicidal rush to place editorial content online at no charge to readers. The assumption was that advertisers would follow in due course, to the benefit of newspaper websites. They didn’t.

The result was that newspapers were left with the same cost structure (because good journalism, after all, costs money) accompanied by a catastrophic slump in advertising revenue and income from newspaper sales – because why would people pay for a paper when they could read the news free on their PCs and mobile devices, and hours before the paper came out?

It didn’t help that some key media leaders – Boucher was one, as was Paul Thompson, now chief executive of RNZ but then executive editor of Stuff’s precursor, Fairfax Media – had an almost evangelistic faith in the digital revolution. The old newspaper model was being deconstructed and it was assumed that a brilliant new one would replace it. We’re still waiting.

Another baneful development was the sale of Independent Newspapers Ltd’s chain of newspaper titles – the ones now owned by Stuff – to Sydney-based Fairfax in 2003. INL was controlled by Rupert Murdoch but it was run by New Zealanders with a fierce commitment to newspapers.

Fairfax showed no such commitment either to newspapers or New Zealand. When the print media business became just too tough, the Aussies fled back to Sydney. They showed just how much they valued their New Zealand titles when Nine Entertainment, which by then had merged with Fairfax, sold them to Boucher for a token sum of $1. (The Petone building wasn’t included in the deal, for reasons that escape me.) 

Boucher herself then showed how much she valued her papers by changing the company name to Stuff. A company that took newspapers seriously wouldn’t have demeaned them by giving the company a frivolous name originally created for the INL website by whiz-kids from the advertising agency Saatchi, no doubt over a few bottles of expensive wine.

There have been other missteps along the way. Stuff recklessly alienated previously loyal readers by abandoning traditional journalistic principles of objectivity in favour of an overtly left-wing line that permeated all its news coverage and editorial comment. This coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, declining levels of public trust in the media overall. Stuff’s breast-beating front-page apology to Maori in 2020 for decades of supposedly racist coverage was dishonest as well as disgracefully unfair to generations of journalists who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

This was consistent with the ignorance and disregard Stuff has regularly displayed for its editorial heritage. In 2023 it announced that The Dominion Post would be renamed The Post, a bland and meaningless name that conveyed no sense of the paper’s notable history. In fact it was a conscious disowning of the paper’s past. “We are under no one’s dominion,” then-editor Caitlin Cherry pompously pronounced, in a spectacularly fatuous statement that reflected the paper’s ideological obsessions. Cherry’s time as editor was short-lived and the inane change of masthead is the only reminder that she was ever there. The pointlessness of the change is evident from the fact that three years later, people still refer to the paper by its old name.

So now the paper formerly known as the Dom Post, and before that as two competing titles, The Dominion and The Evening Post, is about to take another step on its slow march to oblivion. It saddens me because I love newspapers and want them to survive; but it angers me too because at so many points along the way, the company that owns the paper has needlessly hastened its demise. And society as a whole is all the poorer for losing what was once a crucial source of reliable information about events of significance.

I often pass the Stuff printing plant on my way to Wellington on the Wairarapa train. It still displays the name of The Dominion Post. I was in that building on the night the new, state-of-the-art German press was used for the first time in 1990, when I was editor of the Dominion. It was a time of optimism and faith in the future of print. Now the press is to be dismantled and the building, by the sound of it, will be converted into apartments.

Much of what has happened in the years since the first papers rolled off that press was unavoidable. It was inflicted on the industry by the advent of digital technology. But the effects of the digital revolution could have been mitigated with better editorial and managerial judgment. Newspapers don't need to die; well-managed titles are still thriving overseas. 

For now, the Petone building is a poignant reminder of a time when newspapers mattered in New Zealand and the print media thrived; when the local paper was a vital part of daily life. Once the printing press and the Dominion Post sign have gone, the memory of that time will gradually recede to the point where it will be erased altogether. And The Post itself, which is already only a ghostly echo of what it used to be, will fade away too. Moving to Christchurch won’t save it, and anyone who says it will is either in denial or dishonest.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Sinead Boucher bought the Stuff papers from Fairfax Media. In fact the seller was Nine Entertainment, of which Fairfax had by then become a part.

A masterclass in damage control, and Labour's PR flunkies didn't have to lift a finger

It has been fascinating to observe the media’s treatment of allegations against Labour leader Chris Hipkins by his ex-wife.

The first thing to note was the uniformity of the coverage. It was as if the political editors of the mainstream news outlets hurriedly got their heads together when the news broke yesterday and decided on a common approach.

The stories were all brief and couched in “nothing to see here, folks” language. They all made the same points: that the claims were “unsubstantiated” and that no one was accusing Hipkins of doing anything unlawful.

All the reports focused on Hipkins’ denials of his former wife’s damning claims. But crucially, not one explained what the allegations were. So the public were left in the dark.

Labour’s media team couldn’t have asked for a more obliging response. It has been a masterclass in damage control, and for all we know the Labour PR apparatchiks didn’t have to do a thing.

The stories also emphasised that the private Facebook post by Hipkins’ ex-wife, Jade Paul, had since been taken down – the clear implication being that at the very least she had had second thoughts, or that her claims were defamatory or untrue.

She has now said, however, that she stands by her post, which appears to have been triggered by a Labour Party election policy statement that she regarded as hypocritical.

“So many women are hurt by high profile men who just do what they want with no consequences,” Paul wrote in a subsequent post.

“We get told all of the time that if we speak out then our lives will be ruined, our kids will be impacted. We get labelled as ‘crazy’ or defamatory when we tell the truth.

“Today I have had enough.”

So what are Jade Paul’s claims? Essentially, that Hipkins treated her cruelly – for example, leaving her to drive herself home in a bloodied hospital gown after she miscarried because he was too busy to visit her and bring her clothes, and refusing to help after their brief marriage ended when she couldn’t afford groceries, saying their two children were her responsibility in the weeks she had them.

If true, the allegations are a damaging reflection on Hipkins’ character. In a brief statement, he rejected them “entirely” and said he didn’t intend to make any further comment. The stories also reported that Hipkins was taking legal advice (subtext: “I am the wronged party here”).

Will that be enough to settle public questions about the man who wants to be our next prime minister? I don’t think so.

The tone of the media coverage was summed up by a headline on the RNZ website: “Chris Hipkins’ ex-wife makes series of unsubstantiated claims about him”. It accompanied a relatively brief story by RNZ’s deputy political editor Craig McCulloch*.

It was a very peculiar headline in which the key word was “unsubstantiated”. It’s a word I don’t think I’ve seen before in hundreds of stories reporting accusations against politicians.

It neatly shifted the focus from the claims themselves to the fact that they were “unsubstantiated”. This could have been read as meaning they had no basis in fact (which is in itself unsubstantiated), or at the very least that they lacked credibility.

But “claims” are, by their very nature, unsubstantiated, and the media are not in the habit of inserting this loaded word in stories about allegations relating to politicians. Was this a case of RNZ acting on over-cautious legal advice, or did it decide the claims couldn’t possibly be truthful, that Hipkins’ reputation had been unfairly tarnished and it was the media’s duty to protect him by shutting the story down?

Here’s another thing to consider: would RNZ, and the media at large, have been so deferential if the accused politician had been, say, David Seymour? Hmm.

The claims against Hipkins presented the media with a crucial test. Public trust in journalists, as measured by opinion polls, has never been lower. That low level of trust is at least partially attributable to the public perception that journalists overwhelmingly lean left and that they give politicians of the left a free pass.

This perception was cemented during Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, when Beehive press conferences were an exercise in sycophancy and voices of dissent against the government were marginalised, ignored and shunned as pariahs. Bizarrely, National in opposition was subjected to harsher scrutiny – some of it merciless – than the party that was in power.

The government has since changed, and with it the tone of political reportage. Journalists and broadcasters who were obsequious toward the former government are notable for having magically rediscovered their killer instincts. Government politicians and policies are subjected to a level of aggressive scrutiny that was markedly absent during the Ardern years.

The disclosures by Hipkins’ ex-wife gave the media a chance to redeem themselves – to restore public faith in the willingness of political journalists to apply the blowtorch to the left as well as the right. And they blew it.

They could have reported the nature of the claims against Hipkins while making it clear they were unsubstantiated. That’s how the media in previous times would have dealt with the story.

There is a crucial matter of public interest here, and I don’t mean mere idle curiosity about the private lives of party leaders.

The accusations against Hipkins go to the heart of his character. New Zealanders are entitled to know what sort of man is putting himself forward to lead the country.

The claims against him may be false or unfair, but in other comparable countries – Australia, Britain and the US – you can be sure they would have been all over the front page. The public would have been told what he was accused of, Hipkins would have been given ample opportunity to defend himself and in due course the court of public opinion would have reached a verdict.

But no, not in New Zealand. Here the media try to extinguish the story as a non-event and expect the public to accept soothing assurances by a leading female Labour MP, Barbara Edmonds, that “marriage break ups are hard”, the implication being that Jade Paul has lashed out in anger because she’s hurting.

The tone of Edmonds’ statement struck me as patronising. It also raised an interesting question about Labour Party feminists and their solidarity, or lack of it, with a woman who claims to have been badly treated. Perhaps loyalty to the party takes priority over all other considerations.

I don’t know whether Jade Paul’s claims are true, although to me they have the ring of truth. They don’t strike me as the sort of stories someone would make up. But the bottom line is that the public are entitled to know what she has alleged, and it’s the media’s duty to tell them.

*The original version of this post wrongly described Craig McCulloch as RNZ's political editor. 

Stuff's operating model: cheap and lazy

(Estimated reading time: 10 minutes)

Last Tuesday’s edition of my local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, devoted an entire page to an Associated Press (i.e. American) feature story about affluent middle-class professionals taking extended career breaks.

The people mentioned in the story are representatives of an elite US metropolitan class who can afford to put their careers on hold while they spend months enjoying a “reset” in exotic locations such as Egypt and Brazil. It’s hard to imagine a story less relevant to readers of a paper in a New Zealand provincial town where many people are struggling.

Stuff, which provides most of the content in the Times-Age, made a half-hearted and thoroughly unconvincing effort to dress up the article as something important by labelling it “The Global Read”. That it was published in the Times-Age was an insult; in fact a double insult. It was insulting to the paper’s readers first because it was a lazy way to fill space, and second because of its complete lack of empathy. People who worry about being unable to pay the grocery or electricity bill are hardly likely to relate to stories about privileged lifestyles that they could never dream of emulating.

The article lacked even the saving grace of being well written. In common with much American journalism produced by earnest university graduates, it was turgid and overlong. I couldn’t imagine a single Times-Age reader persevering to the end. Most would have given up after the first few sentences, the subject matter being only marginally more compelling than a doctoral thesis on nematodes.

For this, the small editorial staff of the Times-Age are blameless. The paper is owned by Stuff and much of its content is generic, being shared with other papers in the Stuff chain. Local (i.e. Wairarapa) input is generally restricted to three or four news pages at the front, plus letters to the editor, an occasional opinion column, some featherweight community-contributed content (the “Thought of the Day” is popular) and a bit of sport. The rest is centrally generated by Stuff and relies heavily on syndicated content from overseas providers such as the aforementioned Associated Press. The editor of the Times-Age has no control over it and his opinion of its merit is not known to me.

Stuff papers are – excuse the pun – stuffed full of content that’s shovelled into the pages with little concern for relevance and even less for attractive display. Turn the pages of any Stuff paper and you’re bound to be confronted by great slabs of dull grey type devoted to subjects of minimal interest, typically illustrated with lifeless, static pictures downloaded from an online image library. Filling the space seems the sole imperative, and Stuff’s editors appear to grab whatever happens to be available.

It’s cheap and it requires minimal effort; that seems to be Stuff’s operating model. Never mind what the readers might want. Who cares?

Let’s return to Tuesday’s Times-Age. Eager to read something interesting and relevant after the AP snorefest, readers would have turned the page to see a double-page spread, this time reproduced from Britain’s Sunday Times, about Ukraine creating underground classrooms where children can learn without the disruption caused by Russian missiles and drone attacks.

I didn’t have the patience to do a count but I would guess the story ran to at least 2000 words, which is far too much to ask of a provincial newspaper reader on a weekday morning. (Note that the original British version was published on a Sunday, when people have the luxury of time – and bear in mind that the Sunday Times is read by the leisured class.) And while the subject was interesting enough, the story could have easily been crunched down to a quarter of its length without losing any crucial information (hint: it’s called editing).

And so it continued. The following page was another grey slab – this time a wordy opinion column on aged care, accompanied by another file picture retrieved from an overseas image library. More laziness.

Further on, another two-page spread: a travel article about a remote location in Queensland. Travel pieces are a handy way of padding a newspaper with fluff. The writers are often prepared to accept a token payment because their principal reward is the free trip (or junket, in journalistic parlance).

The Wednesday paper wasn’t much better. This time, the full-page “Global Read” was about Singapore Airport’s introduction of a levy to pay for sustainable aviation fuel. Really? An entire page, in a paper serving provincial New Zealand? Couldn’t they find something a little more germane to readers’ lives and interests?

Oh, but hang on – there’s more. A few pages further on, there’s a full-page opinion piece – running, I’d guess, to about 1500 words – by a university lecturer from Leicester, England, about the potential harm done by social media. And opposite that, another full-page piece of similar length by another university academic, this time an Australian-based American writing about cyber crime.

Most readers of the Times-Age will have flicked over these pages with barely a pause because they offered nothing to lure them in. The vital principle that a successful newspaper reflects its community appears to have been forgotten or ignored.

Thursday’s paper brought yet another double-page spread, again from the purveyors of stodge at Associated Press, about an American man raising twin boys with autism. It was labelled with the tag line “In depth”, as if that magically made it something people in provincial New Zealand would want to read about. And on the following page, an opinion piece by a University of Auckland academic about slavery laws. Academics, like freelance travel writers, are a handy source of cheap copy because they’re keen to get published and in their case, the taxpayer picks up the tab because the writers are on the public payroll.

This is a rip-off worthy of the attention of Consumer magazine. People in the Wairarapa (and come to that, in Wellington and the Manawatu and the Waikato and Christchurch and Timaru and Nelson and Invercargill too, all of whom get served the same dross by their local Stuff papers) don’t buy their daily paper to read wordy articles by academic non-entities about subjects far removed from readers’ real-life interests and concerns.

Another “In depth” piece on Friday – from The Times of London – was a dispatch from Greenland about how Donald Trump is making the locals nervous. Again, a legitimate subject – but two pages? And further back in the paper, another two pages devoted to newly released movies that may never be screened in the Wairarapa.

People pay good money for their paper. They deserve better than to be presented with pretend newspapers that contain barely a skerrick of hard news. Every one of those esoteric non-stories occupied precious space that in a previous era would have been filled with content of genuine interest and value; information vital to the functioning of informed communities. Even as recently as 10 years ago, no self-respecting paper would have wasted space on them.

To use a biblical analogy, we’re being fed lots of chaff but precious little wheat. Even the few supposed news pages come up short. In seven years as a news editor on daily papers, I always held to the view that on a typical day there were probably about half a dozen stories of such national interest and importance that they had to be in the paper. They might be stories about politics, crime, business takeovers, fires and fatal car accidents or whatever. You could be confident that if you read a daily paper in any of the major cities or provincial centres, you’d be informed about them. And if you didn't see them, by definition you were not well informed.

That operating principle was abandoned years ago. News coverage is now a random, hit-and-miss affair. You might read about a major event or you might not. We literally don’t know what we’re missing. Vast areas of the country are black holes; we hear virtually nothing about them. (The demise of the New Zealand Press Association, which used to ensure that all news of significance from anywhere in the country was promptly distributed nationwide, is a separate tragedy of its own.)

The American journalist Walter Lippman once said that without the news media, we would live in an invisible society; we wouldn’t know anything. We haven’t quite reached that point, but we’re heading in that direction. We know less about ourselves than at any time since the emergence of the popular press in the 19th century.

In place of news, we now get bulky opinion pieces from Stuff journalists. Too often they take a partisan political or ideological line. The short, sharp, punchy news story, which previous generations of reporters could write in their sleep and once filled papers, is virtually extinct.

In the case of Stuff papers, there’s a disproportionate preponderance of content from the Press. The Christchurch paper has become the engine room of the Stuff chain, with the result that Stuff papers carry a lot of Christchurch news that’s of zero interest to readers elsewhere.

Obituaries? Don’t get me started. I frequently see full-page obits for Americans and Brits whom most Stuff readers will have never heard of. The deaths of notable New Zealanders, meanwhile, pass unnoticed.

I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the pages devoted to soft, lifestyle-oriented content that used to be the preserve of glossy magazines: articles about gardening, interior design, food, fashion and relationships. The Times-Age, like other Stuff papers, also devotes acres of space to movies and TV shows that most people will never watch. In the days when everyone viewed the same free-to-air television, stories about programmes and personalities made sense. Not so, however, when most TV content is streamed on subscription platforms and viewing patterns have become hopelessly fragmented.

A few of the Stuff journalists who edit all this generic copy (if editing is the appropriate word, given that much of it is lifted holus-bolus, headlines and all, from other sources) are old enough to remember when newspapers were full of stuff that mattered. I can’t imagine all of them are happy to be processing editorial content whose sole purpose is to fill space.

It seems hard to believe that with its resources, Stuff can’t present the readers of its papers with a more compelling editorial product. I’m therefore forced to the conclusion that the company is run by people who don’t care much about newspapers and may even regard them as a tiresome anachronism that they would rather be rid of. I get the impression print readers are deemed far less important than those who “consume content” – a hideous phrase – online (Stuff owner Sinead Boucher was an early convert to digital).

How have we come to this? That’s a long, sad story that can wait for another time. Suffice it to say that newspapers were hit by a digital technology revolution that fatally undermined their profitability, and their decline was hastened by owners who were panicked into doing the wrong things – such as making content available free online.

The strange thing, in view of all the foregoing, is that I still value the Times-Age enough to keep paying my subscription. Reading it with my first coffee of the day, although it takes far less time than it once did, is a morning ritual. But more than that, the local paper – even in its tragically feeble and eviscerated state – is still a valuable means of keeping communities connected. With a bit more care and commitment from their apparently indifferent owner, Stuff papers might yet avoid the inevitable fate that otherwise confronts them.