Friday, October 20, 2023

Suddenly, the media are unimportant - and it hurts

I sometimes wonder whether political reporters ever pause to think how precious and entitled their behaviour looks to outsiders.

I doubt it. They are too self-absorbed.

Right now, members of the parliamentary press gallery are feeling peevish. After feasting for years on a rich banquet of political news and sensation, they suddenly find themselves on starvation rations. And they’re not taking it well.

Post-election, everything has come to a dead halt. We are in the customary hiatus period when the leaders of the successful parties disappear from public view to conduct their horse-trading.

As an aside, this is one of the downsides of MMP that no one talks about. Ironically, an electoral system that was supposed to encourage transparency had the reverse effect.

When coalition talks begin, all bets are off. The politicians disappear behind closed doors and all the pledges and promises solemnly made on the campaign trail are up for negotiation. Voters can’t see what’s going on and have no influence over the outcome.

Inscrutability comes with the territory. It’s what we voted for in the early 1990s when we decided to punish politicians - you may permit yourself a rueful grin here - for breaking promises and not being honest about their intentions. But it frustrates the hell out of the media.

Thus we get moments of exquisite preciousness from people such as NewstalkZB’s Jason Walls, whose pride was wounded when Christopher Luxon said he wouldn’t indulge in “parlour games” with the media over the substance of coalition talks.

This, Walls pronounced with no trace of self-awareness, was “terrifically offensive … it’s actually called reporting the news to the New Zealand public.”

Er, no it’s not. You can’t report news when there is none. When the details of a formal coalition arrangement have been hammered out, we’ll be told. Until then the players are bound to play their cards close to their chests. It’s not an ideal set of circumstances, but that’s the way it is.

It's not, however, what the media are accustomed to. They’re conditioned to expect that politicians will bend over backwards to humour them (Winston Peters being a standout exception), and for once, just for a few weeks, the shoe is on the other foot.

Walls’ indignation indicates his apparent failure to accept that after being indulged by politicians for the past three years – and never more intensively than during the election campaign, when the need for favourable public exposure is greatest – the media are suddenly unimportant. The politicians don’t need them right now; in fact the media just get in the way.

It’s a tough adjustment for political journalists to make, but do I feel sorry for them? No, and I doubt there’ll be much public sympathy either. (Incidentally, where did Wells get that weird accent? It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard.)

TVNZ’s Jessica Mutch-McKay was another who pompously played the journalists-as-noble-guardians-of-the-public-interest card. Shayne Currie reports today that Mutch-McKay lectured Luxon at a media stand-up, telling him: “You talk about your negotiations and you’ve done a lot before [sic].

“This is very different because you are an elected prime minister. We are the Fourth Estate that represents the public and it feels like you’re treating us like we’re the ones that are hyped up.

“We’re not, we’re the ones asking on behalf of the public, who have [an] interest in what’s going on. Can you see where we’re coming from?”

This appeal to Luxon’s sense of public obligation might have some moral weight if (a) he had anything substantive to announce and (b) if all members of the press gallery were consistent and conscientious about fulfilling their own obligation to inform the public fully and fairly on matters of public interest. But the media have squandered whatever moral authority they might once have enjoyed through a pattern of partisan, highly selective and often embarrassingly petty political reportage.

That the election has disrupted the normal relationship between politicians and the media was evident in other ways too – almost comically in the case of veteran West Coast Labour MP and cabinet minister Damien O’Connor when he was ambushed by a media pack eager to know whether the party leadership was likely to change.

Accosted on his way to the toilet during a Labour caucus meeting, O’Connor told a reporter to fuck off. I wonder how often MPs from both sides of the House have desperately wanted to say that, or a variant thereof, when bailed up and asked asinine questions.

On this occasion the normally amiable O’Connor, doubtless feeling out of sorts after losing his seat, didn’t hold back. On RNZ’s Midweek Mediawatch, Hayden Donnell noted the irony that for once, a politician gave a heartfelt response to a question rather than rehearsing formulaic, pre-prepared lines, and copped a media backlash as a result.

If only more politicians could be so viscerally honest occasionally. I don’t think the public would think less of them. If anything, quite the reverse.

Astonishingly, O’Connor was stopped again on his way back from the dunny. This illustrates a striking characteristic of the press gallery media pack: a sort of dull, brutish insensitivity and sense of entitlement that’s manifested in oafish rudeness and a failure to recognise that continuing to ask the same questions, when a response is clearly not forthcoming, is stupid as well as pointless. The pack mentality - the excitement of the chase - takes over and common sense takes flight.

We saw the same phenomenon when reporters pursued Peters through Wellington Airport, peppering him with fatuous questions that he obviously wasn’t going to dignify with an answer.

Of course it’s often the case in such instances that reporters are far less interested in obtaining a genuinely useful morsel of information than in simply provoking a reaction. TV viewers watching the news realise this, which does nothing to lift journalists off the bottom rungs of the public respect scale. 
I don't think political journalists realise just how cynically they are regarded by the public. They are immune in their bubble.

Another testy exchange took place between Newshub’s Amelia Wade and Helen White, the new Labour MP (for the time being, at least) for Mt Albert. Wade was gratuitously provocative, asking White whether she was embarrassed by the result in her electorate (where Jacinda Ardern’s 22,000 majority in 2020 was cut to a mere 106 on election night) and more bluntly, “How did you do so badly?”

This appeared to be a classic case of a question being asked in the hope that it will goad the respondent into an injudicious (and therefore bulletin-leading) response. I suspect Newshub’s political journalists are under standing instructions to take this approach.

The confrontation between White and Wade illustrated another immutable verity of political journalism. When you’re a predator, all wounded politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, make irresistibly tempting prey. In that respect, if in no other, political reporters tend to be impeccably even-handed.

This in turn points to an even bigger truth: the media always win. They just shift their targets as circumstances dictate.

Unlike politicians who must submit themselves for re-election, journalists are not held accountable and almost invariably escape punishment when they get things wrong. They have no skin in the game and nothing personally at stake. They create their scandals-du-jour and move on, rarely pausing to look back.

Power without responsibility, the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously called it (although credit for the phrase is given to his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). Or to paraphrase a cynical British writer: journalists hide in the hills while the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.

That being said, it’s important to state that not all political journalists are egotistical, feckless sensation-hunters. The harm is done by those who hunt as a pack, and more especially by those who play the alpha predator at media stand-ups and thus tend to be most in the public eye. To those more traditional political reporters who are conscientious and committed to the values and principles of good journalism, I apologise now for slurring them by association.


 

 

 

 

 

14 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. Corrected version tired eyes, sorry,
    I'm sure the news hounds (poodles when the previous lot were in power) will now avidly sound their ''holding the govt to account'' mantra now that they have a govt they detest. It's amusing to see Stuff taking pot shots already at the (too many) pakeha (can't call them white or European) men in blue suits in the Nat ranks and contrasting it with the inclusive diversity of other parties (even grudgingly NZ First) .
    Despite the best efforts of Stuff, the Herald lot to a large degree and our TV channels, who seem to inhabit a Guardianesque bubble of virtuous superiority, the ''wrong'' lot won. Even worse for the saintly ones, the dreaded Winston has again pulled out the silver bullet, pushed the garlic aside and returned with fangs

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  3. I won't hold out hope that Jessica, Jason and co. will read your comments and reflect on their behaviour, Karl - self reflection doesn't seem to be something these wolves are capable of. Watching the exchange with Christopher Luxon had my blood boiling. Top marks to Luxon for the way he responded to their childish whinging. It boggles my mind that these so called journalists felt completely entitled to being privy to the details of negotiations when the PM in waiting was quite clear that he wasn't going to play that game, and any announcements would be made when negotiations are concluded. Their attempts at accusing Luxon of gagging his MPs was equally pathetic. These drongos need to understand that their job is to report facts, not opinions, and the further they sink into the hole of sensationalism the further their already rock-bottom reputations will fall.

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  4. @ Paul Peters

    I couldn't agree more. I note there has yet to be any scrutiny of the rather unequal gender balance in the Greens at any stage over the last several years, but I suppose it's okay when the balance is in favour of females rather than males. Reminds me of Stuff's prior announcement of their new executive team, where if memory serves me right, there is but one male. They'd be screeching like banshees if it were the reverse. But alas, gender politics has never been about genuine equality.

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  5. Luxon'x responses to the media demonstrate the difference between having skills in big commercial negotiations, where details are invariably kept close, and having skills honed in the corridors of university, public sector departments, and parliament - where loose talk and attempts to garner favouritism is the norm.

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  6. We don't have a "Fourth Estate" in New Zealand any longer. Over the past three years especially the media have let New Zealanders down very badly. They have accepted funding from the Labour government and agreed in return to parrot the government's line on important issues like the Treaty that go to the heart of our democracy. They are due for a major reckoning, not least because the financial underpinnings of the organisations they work for appear to be crumbling. Many of us now get our news and views on politics from other sources because the media have disgraced themselves. No wonder the Labour government was planning to censor our access to the Internet and social media via their Regulator of Online Content because of "Disinformation", ie anything that did not fit the government's narrative.

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  7. Do we really need a Press Gallery in the Beehive - appointed by the Speaker and paid for by taxpayers?? If so - WHY??

    Frequent, regular meetings between relevant minsters and any journalists would work just as well - probably better.

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  8. Andy,
    I don't think there can be any question that in a transparent democracy, journalists need to be able to observe and report on Parliament. That tradition was established in Britain in 1840.
    Incidentally, the Press gallery isn't in the Beehive; it's in the House of Representatives. Its members are not appointed by the Speaker, although he/she must approve applications for membership. And press gallery journalists are certainly not paid by the taxpayer, although Parliament does provide them with accommodation and facilities in recognition of the importance of their role.
    You can read more about the rules relating to the gallery here: https://www.parliament.nz/media/10260/rules-of-the-parliamentary-press-gallery_.pdf

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  9. OOPS -I should do my homework before jumping into writing comments. Sorry.

    Thanks, Karl.

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  10. Slightly off subject but local govt. issues of transparency.
    A RNZ article on Stuff says:
    Councils have been reprimanded for holding secret workshops behind closed doors too often and for invalid reasons such as allowing councillors a “safe space” to ask “silly questions”.
    Our own TRC is among them. There are eight.
    The eight councils investigated were: Clutha District Council, Rangitīkei District Council, Palmerston North City Council, Rotorua Lakes Council, Taranaki Regional Council, Taupō District Council, Timaru District Council and Waimakariri District Council

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  11. Refreshing to read a reslity check on 'rubber necking' media msvens. O. Henry had 'their number' his apt phrase...sussed their type way back. Sniffing for a breath of scandal claiming 'public interest' when it is patently their need to be in the 'public eye!' I chuckled.

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  12. Great article fellow Wairarapian.
    Jason has explained his accent. A hybrid of various countries that he has lived in. It's his pronunciation that gets me, it's like his tongue is too big for his mouth

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  13. Plenty of people live in different countries without picking up weird hybrid accents. I think it's an affectation.

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  14. Art here: where to start and where to applause? There’s much here, Karl, for which we shld be thankful, which we shld flash in neon lights over the beehive, and which shld become absolutely de rigueur in any adequate journo course (good luck with that one!).
    Actually, I feel sorry for D O’C: he was the best of a very bad bunch, and I sense (having met him a couple of times) he was torn fairly often in different directions. As for other feckless named princesses (of either gender): you paraded, Karl, their vaunted pathetic practices nicely - just a pity they are indeed likely not heed any of your suggestions.
    Please keep up your helpful work!

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