The sad, ignoble decline of Frog City

On a recent Monday morning, my wife and I had breakfast at Bordeaux Bakery on Thorndon Quay, Wellington. I expressed surprise that the place was empty. A couple of years ago it would have been humming.

We sat by the window with a view over the street. What we saw was a forest of traffic cones and red-and-white posts designating the cycle lanes that have spread like a cancer all over the city (a city, it should be noted, whose topography makes it singularly unsuited to cycling because many of its main thoroughfares are narrow and winding).

Cyclists rode past in dribs and drabs on their way to work but there were no cars outside because there were no parking spaces. One guy took his chances, stopping illegally for a few minutes while he came in for a takeaway coffee. Other than that, it was just my wife and me.

I felt sorry for the staff. Working in a business with no customers must be demoralising.

It was no surprise, then, to read the depressing announcement only days later that the three Bordeaux cafés around the city were closing, causing the loss of 40 jobs. The owner of the company was blunt about the primary reason: “Everyone keeps telling us how hard it is to get to us,” he told the NZ Herald.

And so continues the slow, torturous death of a city that 20 years ago was buzzing with vitality, ideas and promise. Wellington today is a hostile, alien environment, unfriendly and often bewildering even to its own residents, to say nothing of hapless outsiders trying to navigate streets that resemble obstacle courses. I spent most of my working life in Wellington but sometimes barely recognise the moribund city it has become.

Who’s to blame? The decay began in 2010 when Wellington voted out the last in a long run of capable mayors and perversely allowed itself to be persuaded its future lay with a Greenie blow-in from Britain. Three more useless mayors and Left-dominated councils later, the city has become so terminally dysfunctional that government intervention looks both likely and necessary.

But while it’s easy to pin the blame on ideologically driven zealots at the council table and the tone-deaf, unelected commissars and planners who really run the show, not to mention their media enablers (the Dom Post, under a former editor, harangued its readers almost daily with lectures on the virtues of cycling), it has to be said that the citizens and voters of Wellington can’t entirely escape responsibility.

It’s an old cliché that people get the governments they deserve and the same can be said of councils. New Zealanders en masse tend to be passive, complacent and apathetic. The late Gordon McLauchlan, in his book The Passionless People, called us smiling zombies. We gormlessly stand by while stupid and dangerous things happen, then shriek with indignation when the damage has been done.

We’re all familiar with the parable about the frogs in a pot of water that heats so gradually they don’t realise they’re being cooked alive. By the time the temperature reaches boiling point, it’s too late to reverse the process. The scientific veracity of the analogy has been challenged but it’s apt nonetheless. The city's steady decline, so obvious to occasional visitors, may not seem so apparent to the people who actually live there. 

In this case, the frogs are the people of Wellington who allowed a clique of barmy activists to take over their once-proud city. My good friend Neil Harrap points out in a letter in The Post today that Wellingtonians who voted in the last local government elections were far outnumbered by those who couldn’t be bothered. There’s the problem, right there.

The rising stars of the Southern Cross

 

[An abridged version of this article was published in the September issue of North & South.]

You know you’re getting old when you can look at a 1949 Christmas card illustrated with caricatures of the editorial staff of the Labour Party newspaper the Southern Cross and not only recognise many of the names, but recall knowing them personally.

I didn’t know them then, of course; I hadn’t quite been born. But I worked and drank with them two or three decades later.

The Christmas card (above) is reproduced in Pressing On, the second volume of Ian F Grant’s monumental two-part history of New Zealand newspapers. Volume I, Lasting Impressions, covered the period 1840-1920 and was published in 2018. The sequel, which was launched in May, brought us up to the year 2000 – a cut-off point sensibly chosen because after that, things got messy and chaotic in the print media, with no clear picture of where all the turbulence would lead. (It’s probably safe to say there will be no Volume III, or if there is, it will be a lot shorter than the 670 pages of Pressing On.)

The Christmas card reproduced in Ian’s book was drawn by John McNamara, aka “Mack”, the Southern Cross’s resident illustrator. The subjects were identified in spidery writing so tiny that I had to use a magnifying glass.   

In those days newspapers pompously referred to reporters and sub-editors as their “literary” staff. I couldn’t help letting out little yelps of recognition as I identified those depicted on the Southern Cross Christmas card. Not all of them, but quite a few.

They were journalists of a generation that now seems as distant and archaic as clunky Imperial 66 typewriters, wads of copy paper, metal spikes on sub-editors’ desks (on which to impale stories that didn’t make the grade), Lamson tubes (pneumatic suction tubes for dispatching stories to the printer to be set in type) and overfilled ashtrays – all standard newspaper office appurtenances in that era.

Even the Southern Cross itself was a thing of antiquity. The idea of a daily paper published by a political party is unimaginable now, but the Southern Cross was born out of frustration with newspapers that were seen at best as unsympathetic, at worst downright hostile, to the political and industrial wings of the Labour movement.

Launched in Wellington in 1946, the Southern Cross was Labour’s attempt to even the score, or at least the odds, in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. But the paper lasted only five years before being brought down by a combination of inadequate capital, incompetent management, struggles for control between competing party factions, and not least by the departure of journalists who, although sympathetic to the cause, became fed up with being told what to write by the likes of party leader Peter Fraser and trade union tyrant Fintan Patrick Walsh.

Seventy-five years on, the Southern Cross is notable chiefly for the talented people it employed, many of whom went on to positions of prominence as writers, editors and broadcasters – which brings us back to the faces and names on that 1949 Christmas card.

In the top row, I see Ian Cross, Noel Hilliard and Winton Keay.

More than two decades on from his stint as a young reporter at the Southern Cross, Cross would become the Listener’s most successful editor ever, albeit helped by a state-imposed monopoly on the right to publish weekly TV and radio programme schedules. Long before that, he had attained fame as the author of The God Boy, a novel partly inspired by a murder trial he had covered as a young reporter but also incorporating elements of his own Catholic childhood. Published in 1957, The God Boy was acclaimed by the New York Times as “a brilliant first novel”.  Its success wasn’t replicated by his later literary efforts and Cross vanished into the PR game before resurfacing at The Listener in 1973.

I first dealt with him after he was appointed chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, effectively making him the supremo over virtually all television and radio, which was then still under tight state control.

Cross was a zealous defender of the Listener’s sole right to publish TV and radio programme information in advance. Daily newspapers were allowed to publish programme listings no more than 24 hours ahead, giving the government-owned Listener a huge competitive advantage.  On one occasion, when a paper challenged the monopoly by breaching the rules, Cross punished the entire daily press by withholding all programme information – a petulant response that penalised the public at large. I edited the Evening Post’s TV page at the time and wrote a column accusing him of behaving like a teacher who placed the whole class on detention because of one pupil’s transgression.

I interviewed Cross at length for the Listener in 2014, in the big, chilly Kapiti Coast house where he rattled around with his wife Tui. Cross was a hard man to read; not cold, exactly – that would be overstating it – but rather distant and aloof. Like many good journalists, he always retained something of the quality of an outsider. When he died in 2019, I was privileged to write his obituary for the magazine he had once edited.

Noel Hilliard was another who became famous as an author. His 1960 novel Maori Girl, which was followed in 1974 by Maori Woman, broke new ground by tackling the taboo subject of racism in New Zealand. He and I worked together in the 1970s at the Evening Post, where Noel was a sub-editor. We lived a short distance away from each other in Titahi Bay, and on the rare occasions when I had the use of an office car I would sometimes drive Noel home, he never having had a driver’s licence (a peculiarity he shared with several other male journalists of his vintage). I would sometimes sit with Noel’s wife Kiriwai on the bus from Porirua station; she hailed from the Far North and had been introduced to him by the poet Hone Tuwhare. The Hilliards’ daughter Hinemoa babysat our kids.

Noel personified many of the characteristics of a particular type of journalist from that era: a natural leftie from a deprived working-class background whose political views were forged by his experience of the Depression and its impact on his parents. In pub conversations he was always polite and affable, in fact almost courtly, but his politics were never far from the surface and you could sense a controlled anger. He had been a member of the Communist Party but like many others, had quit in disgust after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. 

Noel had previously worked at the Listener and was a veteran of a famous stoush over the 1972 sacking of the magazine’s editor, the stroppy Alexander MacLeod (whom Cross succeeded). MacLeod’s dismissal, which resulted in a commission of inquiry, was widely seen as punishment by the Broadcasting Corporation board (heavily dominated by National Party figures and chaired by Major-General Walter McKinnon, father of Sir Don) for taking a defiantly liberal editorial line on such issues as race relations and the Vietnam War. It didn’t help that MacLeod’s people skills weren’t great. He had a strained relationship with some of his staff and his firing triggered a bitter schism that left its imprint for years. I can’t recall which side Noel took, but I would guess from his political leanings and his subsequent departure from the magazine that he was in the pro-MacLeod camp.

Next to Noel on the Christmas card is Winton Keay, who in 1949 was the Southern Cross’s editor. By the time I knew him in the 1970s, Win was an old man and seemed an unlikely person to have been in charge of a paper with an explicitly political agenda, still less a left-wing one. He was a frequent visitor to the public bar of the Britannia Hotel in Willis St, where Wellington’s newspaper journalists drank, but I don’t recall him ever showing any interest in talk about politics. Win was dapper, charming and a lifelong bachelor, a combination which in those days was assumed to mean only one thing. He was also one of the few regulars at “the Brit” who could fraternise with equal ease among journalists from both the Evening Post and the Dominion – rival papers in those days, with distinct cultures that weren’t always entirely compatible.

Elsewhere on the Christmas card I see Alex Fry. Alex was chief reporter and nominally assistant editor at the Listener when I worked there in the late 70s and early 80s. Not only was he a former flatmate of Noel Hilliard, but both had spent time in a hilltop sanatorium at Pukeora, near Waipukurau, after contracting tuberculosis – a life-threatening illness blamed on living conditions in their unheated Wellington flat.

Alex was that rare creature, a journalist with a university degree. He had a BA at a time when virtually all his peers joined newspapers straight from school and worked their way up from menial jobs as messengers and reading room copyholders. A West Coaster by birth, he had served in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, though not during the war, and worked for the Manchester Evening News. Like MacLeod, Alex wasn’t popular with all the Listener staff and had a reputation for being irascible, but I liked him. He was a graceful and erudite writer who should have spent more time doing what he did well rather than pointlessly shuffling bits of paper and largely being ignored in his glass-fronted enclosure.

Talking of erudite writers brings us to another of the rising stars (excuse the pun) on the Southern Cross Christmas card: W P (Bill) Reeves. In the 1960s, Reeves became editor of The Dominion and forged an unlikely friendship with an ambitious young Australian newspaper entrepreneur named Rupert Murdoch. It was the time of Murdoch’s successful bid for a controlling interest in The Dominion – his first acquisition outside Australia – and the two bonded over their shared passion for newspapers and journalism. When in Wellington, Murdoch would stay with the Reeves family and the two men would spend hours sprawled on the floor planning the layout of the soon-to-be-launched Sunday Times (now the Sunday Star-Times).

As Dominion editor, Reeves – a natural-born liberal – had gently eased the paper away from its traditional conservative stance. He later recalled that Murdoch made no attempt to interfere with the Dom’s editorial line; in fact was something of a left-winger himself back then. But when the young tycoon decided in 1968 that the paper should go tabloid – a grievous mistake, reversed four years later – Reeves was replaced as editor by Jack Kelleher, whom Murdoch thought better-suited to tabloid-style journalism. Reeves stayed on as an editorial writer and columnist and continued contributing his weekly Standoff: A Radical View – always authoritative and impeccably crafted – long after his retirement.

It almost goes without saying that there were few women on the editorial staff of the Southern Cross; to be precise, two out of the 32 people on that Christmas card. It wasn’t until the 60s and 70s that women started to infiltrate newsrooms in numbers. But one of those two on the Labour daily, women’s editor Christine Cole, would become Dame Christine Cole Catley, an influential figure in journalism and book publishing.

Again, I had a personal connection with her because she was one of the tutors on the Wellington Polytechnic part-time journalism course that I attended two nights a week – my course fees paid by my employer, the Evening Post – in 1968. Something of a trail-blazer for women journalists, Chris had been the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent in Indonesia during the turbulent years of the autocratic Sukarno regime. She wrote a popular daily TV review in the Dominion under the nom-de-plume Sam Cree, the choice of a male name indicating that even in the 60s, editors weren’t sure their readers were ready for women columnists. (Chris told me years later that she deliberately adopted a “tough-sounding” name because she didn’t want to sound effeminate.) Later again, while living in the Marlborough Sounds, she and her husband founded Cape Catley Press. She became an important mentor to New Zealand writers and was made a Dame in 2006, five years before her death, for services to literature.

Moving along, we come to the force of nature that was Gordon Dryden, then a young and very left-wing sub-editor. How left-wing? A small clue: he later edited the NZ Communist Party paper The People’s Voice. The son of a sawmiller, Dryden lost count of the number of schools he attended and got his first newspaper job at the scandal-sheet New Zealand Truth when he was 15.

He would go on to become a PR consultant to Labour Party leaders, a pioneer of talkback radio (he founded Radio Pacific) and the promoter of an unsuccessful bid – squashed by prime minister Norman Kirk – to run the country’s first private TV network.  He also, in later life, became a formidable current affairs interviewer. Robert Muldoon reputedly called him the most dangerous man in New Zealand and refused to be interviewed by him again after they clashed on the TV show Friday Conference. An irrepressible communicator of ideas, Dryden also became a passionate promoter of child welfare and educational reform, but never forgot his roots in newspaper journalism. On trips to Wellington from his base in Auckland he would make a point of calling in at the Brit for a beer – or several – with old colleagues. (If my research is correct, he was the last of that 1949 cohort to pass on. He died in 2022, aged 91.)

One of Dryden’s drinking mates, and another face on that Christmas card, was Tom Walsh, whom I knew during his long tenure as the Evening Post’s chief sub-editor. Tom was old-school to the core, with a voice like the bark of a seal. The uncle of Dame Fran Walsh, of Lord of the Rings fame, he was the only man I ever knew who would light each cigarette with the butt of the previous one, which is where the term chain-smoking came from. Tom would be in the public bar of the Brit every afternoon as soon as the day’s work was done and wouldn’t leave until it was time to go home for dinner. Like most journalists of that era he drank too much, at least by today’s standards, and smoked to excess. I doubt that he ate a healthy diet – certainly not at work, because deadline pressures didn’t permit it – and I can’t imagine that he was a stickler for regular exercise. He lived into his 90s.

(As an aside, pubs were central to the culture of journalism. A journalist visiting an unfamiliar city always knew where to find local journos because every issue of the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper carried ads showing which pubs they frequented.)

Several other familiar names leapt out from that Christmas card. One is Ben O’Connor, who came from a big Irish Catholic family from Nelson and the West Coast – the same family that produced present-day Labour MPs Damian and Greg. Ben became the Evening Post’s business editor and later, the spokesman for the Bankers’ Association. A trenchant and acerbic conservative despite his family’s left-wing leanings, he once stood up at an Independent Newspapers Ltd annual shareholders’ meeting and called for my sacking as editor of the Dominion because he disapproved of the paper’s editorial line, which (among other things) supported the Labour government’s right to defy the US over nuclear-armed ships and the Anzus Treaty.

Louis Johnson, who became a much-admired poet, is on the card too. So is Noel Harrison, who established the aforementioned Wellington Polytechnic journalism course (New Zealand’s first, and long since absorbed by Massey University) and critiqued the press on the weekly TV programme Column Comment, as did Ian Cross.  Harrison’s career ended under an undeserved cloud when he was implicated in allegations of fraud at Northland Polytech, where he was chief executive. A judge threw the case out for lack of evidence and an investigation by North & South reporter David McLoughlin concluded that Harrison had unfairly been targeted by disaffected staff. Harrison later won a $124,000 Employment Court payout and successfully sued National MP John Banks, who had levelled the accusations against him, for defamation.

Lastly there’s Merlin Muir, who understandably preferred to be known as Lin (although his caricaturist misspelled his name as Lyn). Lin covered Parliament for the Southern Cross and would later spend more than 20 years as a desk man at the NZ Press Association. I remember him well from my time as a young and hopelessly inadequate industrial reporter at the Dominion, because Lin would sometimes phone me to query some aspect of a story I had written about the constant industrial disputes which in those days (the early 70s) caused enormous disruption in the life of the country. (All daily papers supplied copies of  important stories to the NZPA so they could be distributed nationally.) I came to dread those calls from Lin because while his questions were always polite and reasonable, which wasn’t always the case when sub-editors pulled up mistake-prone reporters, I was often embarrassed because I couldn’t answer them. He exposed flaws in my stories that the Dom’s own subs never picked up.  

The same Merlin Muir had a celebrated feud with his Khandallah neighbour, the architect Ian Athfield. Muir complained that Athfield’s hillside house kept expanding with scant regard for council planning laws or the rights of those living next door. The bitter dispute culminated with Muir bringing a defamation action against the Institute of Architects, whose magazine took Athfield’s side but ended up publishing an apology to the retired journo.

There were other notable journalists who worked for the Southern Cross but didn’t feature in the Christmas card, presumably because they weren’t on the staff in that particular year. One was my uncle Dick Scott, the paper’s farming editor. Dick, another communist (though he too would quit the party), was married to my father’s younger sister. He subsequently edited the union paper Transport Worker and wrote the book 151 Days, a partisan but immensely lively and readable account of the 1951 waterfront dispute. He also founded and edited New Zealand’s first wine magazine, but left his most indelible mark as the author of Ask That Mountain, the 1975 book that lifted the veil on the Parihaka affair – a stain on the country’s history that had previously been ignored.

The aforementioned Jack Kelleher also once worked for the Southern Cross, as did Russell Bond, a quiet little man who would later occupy a back room at the Dominion, where he wrote editorials and classical music reviews.

That so many former Southern Cross journalists went on to work for the Dominion (Cross was another – he became the Dom’s chief reporter in the mid-50s) was ironic, to say the least. Politically the papers were poles apart, the Dominion having been founded in 1907 by wealthy farmers and professional men with the express object of bringing down the Liberal Party government that laid the groundwork for the welfare state and broke up the estates of the landed gentry.

Another long-serving Dominion journalist was the dignified and gentlemanly Read Mason, a Second World War conscientious objector whose brother Rex had been the influential Minister of Justice in the first Labour government. Kelleher, on the other hand, was a Catholic and a conservative, albeit a liberally minded one. Despite the paper’s Tory roots, the Dom welcomed journalists of all political shades and its newsroom always had a slightly wild, anarchic spirit.

In any case, while many of the Southern Cross journalists may have been left-wing in their personal beliefs, I don’t think they necessarily saw it as their mission to promote a particular political creed. It’s more likely that some simply thought the field was unfairly tilted in favour of the Tory press and that the other side deserved a fair shake.

While it’s a mere side track to the main narrative in Ian Grant’s newspaper history, the 1949 Christmas card is an important journalism artefact.  It recalls a time when newspapers were staffed mostly by egalitarian, personable, highly literate and idealistic lefties, some of whom had a very limited formal education. They observed the rules of editorial balance, had a broad general knowledge, were well-read, could spell properly and were sticklers for correct grammar. Today’s journalists, despite being the most highly educated in history – at least in terms of academic credentials – could learn a lot from them.

Pressing On: The story of New Zealand’s newspapers, 1921-2000, by Ian F Grant, is published by Fraser Books in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library. Recommended retail price: $69.50.

My complaint to the BSA about the use of 'Aotearoa'

On the night of August 1 I was watching Sky Open’s coverage of the Olympic Games. The presenter, Laura McGoldrick, repeatedly referred to New Zealand as Aotearoa. I found this irritating, not least because it was unsubtly making a political point in what was supposed to be a sports programme, but I wasn’t so enraged as to throw something at the TV. We have become accustomed, after all, to media people flaunting their impeccable ideological credentials by the use of Aotearoa, despite the name having no popular mandate. That’s what they’re counting on: that we’ll come to accept it as the norm – or as Jacinda Ardern once put it, that Aotearoa will be adopted “organically”. How convenient to avoid the complication of seeking formal public endorsement.

Sky Open crossed a line for me, however, when the medals table appeared on screen. Where the name New Zealand should have been, Sky Open had inserted (rather crudely) Aotearoa. It seemed to me that for the presenter to use the name informally in her patter was one thing: irritating, as I say, but not something worth complaining about, especially since the Broadcasting Standards Authority has made it clear it approves the use of te reo in the media. But arbitrarily to substitute Aotearoa for New Zealand in the official medals table struck me as qualitatively different. At best, it was an act of conceit and arrogance; at worst, a deception and a manipulation.

I decided to do something I’d never done before: complain to the BSA. But the authority’s rules first required me to approach the broadcaster, so I sent the following email to Sky Open:

“Last night, Thursday August 1, Sky Open’s coverage of the Olympic Games displayed a medals table that listed New Zealand as Aotearoa.

“There is no such country as Aotearoa. Athletes from this country take part in the Games under the name New Zealand, not Aotearoa. They are selected by the New Zealand Olympic Committee, not the Aotearoa Olympic Committee, and they wear the letters NZL, not AOT.

“The medals table displayed last night was not the official one. It appeared to have been tampered with. The official list of participating countries makes no mention of Aotearoa and I would be interested to know whether the International Olympic Committee or the New Zealand Olympic Committee gave permission to Sky Open to use that name in place of the officially recognised one. I suspect not, in which case the medals table was altered without authorisation.

“Unless your response indicates a reversal of policy in relation to the misnaming of New Zealand, it is my intention to make a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority under Standard 6 of the Broadcasting Standards Codebook, which relates to accuracy. I am doing this because there could be no more fundamental point of accuracy than to name a country correctly. I await your response with interest.”

Sky Open duly replied (more than three weeks later, but within the 20 working days allowed under the rules). Their reply was as follows:

“The Sky Broadcasting Standards Committee reviewed the content in question and assessed it against the standards in which [sic] you complained.

“The Accuracy standard requires that: ‘Broadcasters should make reasonable efforts to ensure news, current affairs and factual content: is accurate in relation to all material points of fact and; does not materially mislead the audience (give a wrong idea or impression of the facts).’

“As per the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), the use of te reo Māori in broadcasts is a matter of editorial discretion rather than an issue of broadcasting standards. The Authority noted that te reo Māori is an official language of New Zealand and that its use is protected and promoted by existing law.

“You may read the full press release of the BSA’s stance here: https://www.bsa.govt.nz/news/bsa-news/bsa-draws-a-line-under-complaints-about-te-reo

“With regard to the use of ‘Aotearoa’ on the medals table during the Olympics coverage, the word is widely accepted and understood to mean New Zealand, and is unlikely to mislead the audience. In this instance, the Committee determined its use to be an editorial decision and therefore treated as informal feedback rather than a formal complaint. [Clumsy wording: I think they meant my complaint was to be treated as informal feedback.]

“Our task is to assess the content against the Code of Broadcasting Standards. Taking the above factors into account, the Sky Broadcasting Standards Committee determined that the programme did not breach the Code, and your complaint was not upheld.

“Thank you for contacting us, we now consider this matter closed. Please note that you have the right to refer your complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority if you are not satisfied with our response.”

All of which was exactly as I expected. I then submitted my complaint to the BSA, with no greater expectation of success than I had with Sky Open.

After setting out the background circumstances, I wrote (and readers may note that I grovellingly tried to ingratiate myself with the BSA by using an upper-case A for authority, which as a journalist I wouldn’t normally bother to do):

“I have read the Authority’s statement of 9 March 2021 relating to the use of te reo Māori in which the Authority noted that Maori was an official language whose usage was protected under law and stated that its use was an editorial decision for broadcasters.

“My complaint is not about the general usage of te reo Maori, but specifically relates to the substitution of Aotearoa for New Zealand in Sky Open’s Olympic Games coverage. More specifically still, it concerns Sky Open’s use of Aotearoa in what was otherwise an official Games medals table shown on screen on the night of August 1 (and presumably on subsequent occasions, although I can’t confirm that). That table gave the appearance of having been altered, rather crudely, so that New Zealand was listed as Aotearoa.

“I accept Sky Open’s point that Aotearoa is widely understood to mean New Zealand. However it is a name that, at best, has limited official recognition and whose authenticity as a synonym for New Zealand is disputed by reputable scholars and historians.

“I don’t question the right of broadcasters to use Maori words and phrases in a general context, which I consider to fall under the general protection of free speech. While I found the Sky Open presenter’s constant use of Aotearoa in place of New Zealand irritating, I accept that it fell within the Authority’s guidelines. However I submit that Sky Open crossed a line when it displayed what purported to be an official medals table in which it arbitrarily substituted Aotearoa for the country name that is recognised by the International Olympic Committee and under which our athletes competed.

“I submit that it breached the accuracy standard for the reasons set out in my complaint to Sky Open. The name of a country is a matter of fact, not one of editorial discretion. Until such time as a change of name is constitutionally mandated by statute, it remains New Zealand. It follows that Sky Open cannot take refuge in the argument that the usage of Aotearoa was a legitimate editorial decision.

“I repeat that there could be no more fundamental point of accuracy than to name a country correctly, and I invite the Authority to rule accordingly.”

The BSA’s response was prompt (it came within two days) and again it was pretty much as I expected. Their email read as follows:

“Thank you for contacting us regarding your concerns about the use of ‘Aotearoa’ rather than ‘New Zealand’ in Sky Open’s coverage of the 2024 Olympic Games.

“Te reo Māori is an official language of New Zealand. The Authority has previously highlighted that the use of te reo Māori in broadcasts is a matter of the broadcaster’s editorial discretion and does not raise any issues of broadcasting standards (decision number 2020-135). You have suggested your complaint raises different considerations as it’s not the general use of te reo you are concerned about but:

■ an ‘inaccuracy’ in calling New Zealand ‘Aotearoa’ (given it has limited official recognition and given scholars/historians dispute it is a synonym for New Zealand)

■ the broadcaster’s tampering with the country name on what purported to be an official medals table, and use of a name that may not be officially recognised by the Olympic committee.

“However, noting:

■ the accuracy standard does not mandate the use of ‘official names’ or require absolute accuracy – it requires reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy on all material points of fact;

■ New Zealand viewers were unlikely to be misled by the use of Aotearoa; and

■ the standards regime does not regulate any relationship between the broadcasters and the Olympic committee (including any rules around the integrity of an ‘official medals table’)

we can see no reason to depart from the Authority’s previous decision (recognising the use of te reo as a matter for the broadcaster’s editorial discretion).

“In matters outside of broadcasting standards, you can provide feedback to the broadcaster so they’re aware of your concerns. We note you have already done this.

“We hope this assists. If you do have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.”

So: a polite brush-off, just as I expected. The BSA seeks refuge in legalistic prevarications for which its own self-serving policies provide ample scope. Loosely translated, its response says the BSA is tired of people grizzling about the use of te reo and just wants them to bugger off.

Incidentally, the email was anonymous, being signed simply “BSA”. Sky Open’s email was at least signed by a person, though I choose not to name her here because her identity isn’t relevant.

I was intrigued by the speed with which the BSA came back to me, so I asked whether my complaint had gone before a formal meeting of the authority or had been dealt with summarily, so to speak, on the basis of established policy. The BSA’s reply confirmed my assumption that the complaint didn’t go before the appointed members of the authority, explaining that this was in accordance with its policy not to accept complaints about the usage of te reo Maori. “However, the Authority will be advised of the complaint (and our response).”

All done and dusted, then. It all unfolded exactly as I foresaw. But just a couple of points:

The BSA sidestepped my point that The name of a country is a matter of fact, not one of editorial discretion. To officially list New Zealand as Aotearoa, particularly as it’s not the name recognised by the International Olympic Committee, is to step outside the general protection of “editorial discretion”. I therefore invited the BSA to find that the usage in this instance was inaccurate. Admittedly, breach of the accuracy standard wasn’t the ideal basis for a complaint, but it was the only one of the official broadcasting standards that seemed applicable. Predictably, the authority kicked for touch.

The BSA also used the justification (as did Sky Open) that Aotearoa was widely accepted as meaning New Zealand and therefore wasn’t likely to mislead anyone. I’m not sure that’s a valid defence either. If a TV newsreader referred to a certain former prime minister simply by the name “Jacinda”, for argument’s sake, everyone would know who that referred to, but nonetheless it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) happen.

It’s worth noting that I twice emailed the New Zealand Olympic Committee, asking whether Sky Open had sought permission to substitute Aotearoa for New Zealand in the official medals table and whether the NZOC approved. No reply on either occasion; not even the courtesy of an acknowledgment. A deafening silence.

In my experience, sporting administrators tend to be fiercely, nigglingly fussy about compliance with rules and conditions surrounding the right to broadcast. I find it interesting that in this instance, the NZOC appeared to be content for Sky Open to take upon itself the right to use a name different from the one officially approved. What does that tell us?

To summarise, I made my complaint purely as a protest gesture, with no expectation of success. But I feel a certain perverse satisfaction in recording that events unfolded exactly as I thought they would.

Do I object to Aotearoa as a name for New Zealand? Not at all, as long as New Zealanders decide that’s what they want the country to be called. I accept there are good arguments for changing the name, just as there are compelling arguments for leaving it as it is. But it’s worth noting that I don’t hear the name being used by New Zealanders (Aotearoans?) in everyday conversation, which surely tells us something.

What I do object to, strenuously, is the name Aotearoa being imposed on us by an elitist ruling caste – and here I include the media and the BSA – that either isn’t interested in whether the populace at large endorses it, or is too scared to put it to the test in a referendum, which is the only fair and democratic way of resolving the issue.

What Diderot might have said about traffic cones

What the hell took him so long? That’s the only question arising from Transport Minister Simeon Brown’s belated crackdown on traffic cones.  

I wrote about the traffic cones lunacy nearly three years ago. It was a racket and a disgrace that had long been obvious even then.

I devoted another post to it in March last year and identified the traffic management cult as a prime symptom of the precautionary principle, which risk-averse regulators use as moral justification for imposing costly, wasteful and intrusive controls that defy common sense.

All the while, the problem has grown more intolerable. And we meekly fall into line even while cursing the irritation and inconvenience because we are essentially a passive, compliant people.

There’s an ideological element in all this. The urge to control human behaviour is central to the mentality of the bureaucracy, even in a supposedly liberal democratic state.

Traffic cones are just another means by which people can be made to submit to authoritarian edicts for which there’s no rational basis. The Covid-19 lockdown, which by common consent is now regarded as having been needlessly oppressive and damaging, can be seen in the same light.

While Brown’s belated initiative may be welcome, it’s also disappointingly half-hearted.  He says the government will be introducing a "risk-based" approach to traffic management, which raises the likelihood that decisions will be left in the hands of the same control freaks who got us into this mess in the first place.

The bottom line is that New Zealand built a network of state highways without a single traffic cone and no one, to my knowledge, has ever advanced a cogent reason why that needed to change. 

The 18^th century French philosopher Denis Diderot famously said that men could never be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. He might have added: “… and the last traffic cone is buried in a landfill”.

Here's the news: life will go on

I’ve asked this question before, but it’s time to ask it again: do TV journalists have any idea how precious and self-absorbed they look?

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests they don’t. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve witnessed an unedifying orgy of self-aggrandisement as Newshub journalists and broadcasters very publicly and ostentatiously mourn the imminent loss of their jobs.  

Paddy Gower, Mike McRoberts, Samantha Hayes, Lloyd Burr, Eric Young and Melissa Chan-Green have all invited us to share their grief, although Chan-Green, holding back tears, at least had the self-awareness to acknowledge that other people have faced tough times too.

Young, who I’ve always respected as a newsreader, deserves special mention for his maudlin display on a video released today. “There’ll be no time for self-indulgence,” he says of his final bulletin. Just as well, because we’ve seen far too much already.

It has been a strange combination of self-pity and self-celebration. The Newshub team are appealing for public sympathy while simultaneously bigging themselves up in a manner that many ordinary New Zealanders will find risibly over-the-top and more than a little self-centred.

They’re behaving as if they’re the first people ever to experience the trauma of losing their jobs, but of course it happens all the time. Businesses constantly fail, often with far more damaging consequences for those affected.

Untold thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled New Zealanders have been thrown out of jobs by technological change or economic upheaval and faced a far bleaker outlook than the relatively small number of skilled and talented people affected by the Newshub closure, some of whom have already acquired new and presumably well-paid jobs.

The difference, of course, is that all those anonymous victims of redundancy had no public platform from which to draw attention to their misfortune. Newshub journalists do, either via their own medium or through others in the media (such as the Herald’s Shayne Currie, who has assiduously reported all the hand-wringing). I’m sure it’s not lost on the public that they are exploiting a privileged position.

Yes, losing your job must be tough. It's also problematical, from a public interest standpoint, that there will be one less competitor in the news arena. But the Newshub journalists would probably win more sympathy, and certainly more respect, if they took it on the chin, just as thousands of anonymous workers had no choice but to do when they found themselves surplus to requirements.

I wonder, what makes the Newshub employees so special that their fate warrants all this wailing and breast-beating? What makes them think they have more emotionally invested in their work than all those other poor stiffs who fell victim to the cruel caprice of changing markets? An obvious explanation is that television is a uniquely ego-stroking medium. It can create the illusion, at least within the bubble of those working in the business, that the lives of the people who report and deliver the news are themselves a matter of vital public interest. Fatally, they come to regard themselves as celebrities.

It’s worth noting that this overweening egotism and sense of entitlement doesn’t afflict all journalists. Hundreds of print journalists have lost their jobs in recent years, with serious consequences for the public’s right to know what’s going on in their communities. They went quietly, without public fuss. What is it that makes TV journalists think their role is so uniquely precious?  

Similarly, when the Evening Post ceased to exist as a title when it was merged with The Dominion in 2002, it marked its own passing with a one-off commemorative issue that was notably light on self-congratulations. Hardly a word was published about the individuals who produced the paper. It was largely left to readers and public figures to write about what the Post had meant to them and to Wellington. (And bear in mind, this was a newspaper that had been an essential part of Wellington life for 137 years. Newshub, by way of contrast, came into existence only 35 years ago and was never more than a secondary player in its market.)

Well, here’s the news, to coin a phrase: life will go on. A timeline of Newshub’s history, published today in the Herald, graphically demonstrates that TV news and current affairs programmes come and go and are soon forgotten. The timeline serves as a striking reminder that television is essentially an ephemeral medium. Many of the shows mentioned have long since faded from the public memory, along with the names of the people who presented them. The same will happen to the 6 o’clock Newshub News, and possibly sooner than many of its grieving employees imagine.

Footnote (appended July 7): On Muriel Newman's Breaking Views page, a commenter named Gaynor responded to this piece by wondering where the mainstream media were when good people were losing their jobs because they chose not to have the Covid jab. No sympathy for them. A good point that I wish I'd thought of.

A monumental piece of work

 

By anyone’s standards, my friend and long-ago employer Ian F Grant leads a very busy life, especially for an 84-year-old. But the past week has been exceptionally full even for him.

Last Thursday saw the launch of Pressing On – Volume II of his monumental history of New Zealand newspapers – at the National Library. Volume I, Lasting Impressions, covered the period from 1840 till 1920 and was published in 2018. The second book brings us almost to the present day.

I say “almost” because Ian wisely chose the year 2000 as his cutoff point. After that, things started getting messy in the print media and there would have been little point in charting subsequent trends and events, given the industry’s highly fluid state and uncertain future.

Lasting Impressions was a prodigious piece of work for the sheer depth and detail of Ian’s research into an aspect of New Zealand history that had previously been largely overlooked. Pressing On bears evidence of the same exhaustive research, but it’s probably fair to say that it has wider appeal simply because it covers newspaper titles and industry personalities familiar to current generations.

Lifelong newspaper enthusiast Sir Hugh Rennie (a co-founder, with Ian, of the National Business Review) and the retired political journalist Colin James addressed the gathering at the launch and there was an elegiac tone to their remarks – an acknowledgment that the book covers a golden age of New Zealand print journalism and that society and democracy will be much the worse for its decline.

By an apt coincidence, the launch was followed only days later by the announcement that Ian had been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and historical preservation. His inclusion in the King’s Birthday honours list followed similar recognition of his wife and publishing partner Diane 22 years earlier.

As founders and co-owners of Masterton-based Fraser Books, the Grants are prolific authors and publishers and show no sign of cutting back their workload. I keep urging them to slow down, partly because they make me feel wretchedly slothful, but they haven’t taken my advice in the past and I don’t expect them to do so now.

You can read a fuller account of the book launch here: Wellington.Scoop » Not dead, but …. 

Pressing On sells for $69.50. Copies are available from ifgrant@xtra.co.nz

Howling at the moon

(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.

The case for objectivity in journalism

The cover story in the latest issue of North & South, headlined A matter of opinion, takes up an issue raised by me twice in recent weeks. The story is subtitled Did John Campbell cross a line? and occupies eight pages.

The catalyst was my blog post of January 23, in which I said it was wrong that TVNZ, a publicly owned media outlet, provided a platform from which its highest-profile journalist was allowed to pursue a campaign against a democratically elected government. This was after the TVNZ website had published a series of trenchant opinion columns in which Campbell made it clear he thought New Zealand voters had made a grievous mistake by electing a centre-right government.

I wrote that Campbell, who has the vague and all-encompassing title of TVNZ’s Chief Correspondent (which presumably gives him licence to range over any subjects that take his fancy) should be sacked for abusing his privileged position by engaging in what I called a highly personal political mission. I said his columns should be seen as a gesture of contempt to all the deplorables who voted for a change of government because they didn’t like what had happened under Labour. I also suggested that the TVNZ directors should be invited to resign, since they were complicit in his misconduct.

Crucially – and this is a point often overlooked, I suspect wilfully, by critics of my piece – I have said that Campbell is entitled to his opinion about the government, and indeed anything else. As I wrote in an earlier post, my objection was to his views being promulgated on the website of a taxpayer-owned broadcaster which has an ethical obligation to observe editorial balance and political neutrality.  To put it another way, my argument was with his misuse of his status to promote personal opinions which, when all is said and done, have no more legitimacy in a democracy than those of a bank teller or bus driver. 

The central issue here is not that Campbell keeps attacking a centre-right government (of which, incidentally, I’m not a supporter, although I think it's a huge improvement on the last lot); it's that he has publicly expressed a political opinion at all. “I’m appealing,” I wrote, “for a return to traditional journalistic values of impartiality and balance, the decline of which can be blamed for steadily diminishing public trust in the media.”

I was in Australia in the weeks following my post so can’t claim to have kept close track of the reaction, but the column attracted attention both in mainstream media and online. Former New Zealand Herald managing editor Shayne Currie picked up on it in his Media Insider column and RNZ’s Mediawatch discussed it at least once. It was republished on the Bassett, Brash and Hide website, where it attracted more than 6500 views, and provoked an entertainingly splenetic rant on Martyn Bradbury’s The Daily Blog, accompanied by a string of comically inaccurate readers’ comments. (According to Bradbury, I’m a “brownshirt crypto-fascist”. He’s the equivalent of the court jester in a Shakespeare play, babbling incoherently most of the time but occasionally fluking an astute observation – just not in this instance.)

Now North & South has weighed in with a piece in which freelance journalist Jeremy Rose explores the tension between the principle of journalistic objectivity – which, broadly speaking, means impartiality, fairness and balance – and the supposed right of journalists to express their opinions.

As Rose acknowledges at the start of his article – in fact recounts at length over 22 paragraphs – he and I have something of a history, dating back to his time as an earnest leftie producer and presenter of Mediawatch in 2008, when I mentioned him in one of my very first blog posts. That there’s an element of score-settling going on here is apparent from his reference to me as a “provincial New Zealand version of Hedda Hopper – the Hollywood gossip columnist infamous for outing reds under the bed”.

But at least Rose disclosed his bias. And to be fair, once he gets past his apparent antipathy towards me, he presents a balanced picture of the issues and takes the trouble to present my arguments fairly and accurately. Most importantly, he has helped kick-start an overdue debate about the value of objectivity in journalism, which can only be good.

What's striking about Rose's piece is that several of the people he approached for comment about Campbell – people I might have assumed to be on the broadcaster’s side – voiced misgivings about the increasingly blurred line between fact and opinion in journalism.

Former RNZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh, for example, is described as being concerned by the trend to publish more comment masquerading as impartial news coverage. “Removing objectivity from journalism is a very dangerous trend in an increasingly complex world,” Cavanagh is quoted as saying. “I have no doubt that it’s the blurring of the lines between fact and opinion that is driving the growing distrust many now have of mainstream media.”

This is no crusty reactionary speaking. Cavanagh ran a left-leaning RNZ and previously served as head of news and current affairs for Australia’s impeccably woke SBS.

Rose also quotes his former RNZ Mediawatch colleague Colin Peacock, who says Campbell’s November 25 column savaging the new government “does kind of cross a line for me”. He accurately describes the column as “very condemnatory and very personal – the sort of thing you might see in Metro magazine rather than in the opinion and analysis section of a publicly owned broadcaster”. 

Victoria University media studies professor Peter Thompson (like those mentioned above, no right-winger) is another who sees a risk that TVNZ’s publication of strident opinion pieces by its most senior journalist could erode public trust. While noting that Campbell is a very capable journalist (which I don't disagree with), Thompson says there’s a conflict between his role as an opinionated commentator and his other function, which involves him in the production and presentation of news. This, he says, can lead to mistrust of the media and perceptions of bias.

You’d think TVNZ would be alert to this danger, especially given its fragile financial health, but there’s no sign that its bosses and directors are remotely concerned. I think they’re detached from reality.

Strangely, Thompson then muddies the waters by saying he doesn’t think Campbell’s columns are a very serious issue, because they’re clearly labelled as opinion. It’s an argument others have used and it misses the point entirely, which is that Campbell is misusing his privileged position as a public broadcaster. This imposes obligations of impartiality that Campbell and his employer either don’t recognise or fail to accept. As Ita Buttrose, the high priestess of the Australian media and chair of Australia’s (left-leaning) Australian Broadcasting Corporation, pointedly said in a lecture last year, “being a journalist means that you give up your right to be an activist”.


PARTICULARLY interesting, for me, are the comments in the North & South article by Al Morrison, RNZ’s former political editor (and before that, a writer of editorials and feature stories for The Dominion and chief reporter for the Evening Post) who went on to head the Department of Conservation and later took a high-powered job in the State Services Commission.

Al and I worked together at both the Dominion and the Evening Post and he was probably the first journalist I had met who rejected the idea of objectivity, a subject on which he and I civilly disagreed. Al, like John Campbell, had bypassed the traditional entry route into journalism, arriving in the newsroom after previously working as a teacher and then completing a post-graduate course in journalism at Canterbury University. 

He hadn’t served the customary newspaper cadetship and therefore hadn’t been inoculated with the view that journalists must set their personal views aside. He represented a new breed of university-educated journalists who brought to the job an intellectual and ideological framework that distinguished them from ordinary hack reporters who took the view that their job was to tell stories, report facts and convey other people’s opinions, but never their own.

Al pushed the now-fashionable view that all human beings have their own inbuilt and often unconscious prejudices that influence our decision-making and that it’s therefore impossible to make strictly objective judgments. Rose in his article takes a similar line, writing that “every journalist is somewhere on the left-right spectrum”. Yes, but generations of journalists were trained to keep their own opinions to themselves. Newspaper readers would have been hard-pressed, for example, to discern the political views of most leading press gallery reporters. I didn’t know myself, and I worked with some of them.

According to the “objectivity is impossible” argument, all decisions in journalism – which stories to cover, how much prominence to give them, what editorial angle to take, who to interview, what to emphasise in the headline and so forth – are subjective and thus at risk of being distorted by personal perspectives. Ergo, objectivity isn’t worth even attempting.

My response is that at every step in the editorial process, journalists can (and mostly do, even today) set aside individual biases. There are well-established rules and principles that ensure they do, in the same way that judges, police officers and even sports referees are expected to carry out their duties impartially (and generally do). Politics and ideology should never intrude in editorial decision-making and readers or viewers shouldn't be put in the position of wondering whether the news has been subjected to political spin. 

Journalists have understood and operated by these principles for decades. New Zealand has a Media Council (formerly the Press Council) to adjudicate in cases where journalists are alleged to have abused the rules. The very existence of a regulatory body charged with upholding principles of fairness, accuracy and impartiality is evidence that the rules are clearly defined and workable. But no one should be in any doubt that those principles are under sustained attack from within the media, and the assault on the supposedly unattainable ideal of objectivity is a key part of that.

Judging by his comments in North & South, Al hasn’t retreated from his views on the futility of striving for objectivity. Yet he concedes, rather contradictorily, that it’s “an ideal to be pursued”, just as long as you accept that it can’t be achieved. Tellingly, Al also acknowledges there’s a problem because “consumers of news” can find it difficult to distinguish straight reportage from a journalist’s opinions.

Exactly. I would argue that one leads inexorably to the other. Once you allow journalists to abandon the principle of objectivity, you open the door to a confusing melange of fact and comment that leaves viewers and readers scratching their heads, resenting the spin, distrusting mainstream journalism and turning to social media in the hope of finding the truth. (Good luck with that.)

Journalists of a previous generation didn’t incur this risk, because they stuck to clearly understood rules. The principle of objectivity is our only protection against politically motivated journalists spinning the news in whatever way suits their ideological agenda, which can only diminish media credibility and contribute to the further decline of a previously vital civil institution that should play a central role in the affairs of the nation. There are no winners here, apart perhaps from malevolent players in the shadowy online demimonde.


ROSE’S piece recalls a quote from Campbell, back in his Campbell Live days on TV3, in which he said: “I’ve never met a journalist who didn’t want to change the world and make it a better place. Without exception that’s why they get into journalism.”

Here he inadvertently pinpoints a generational change that has transformed journalism, and not in a good way. I entered journalism more than 20 years before Campbell, and I can’t recall any journalists then who thought they were on a mission to change the world. 

That’s an attitude that began to emerge in the 1970s, gathering momentum through the 80s and 90s to the point where it’s now entrenched. It coincided with the gradual academic takeover of journalism training, which had previously been done in the workplace. American ideas about the function of journalism, often promulgated by leftist sociologists, were highly influential in this process and have partially supplanted the British model that previously held sway.

It was in the late 1970s that I first encountered colleagues who saw journalism as a tool for the promotion of political causes, but the great majority of the hundreds of journalists I worked during my career simply wanted to tell stories. Many took pride in regarding journalism as a trade rather than a profession and bristled at the latter description. Politics and ideology rarely, if ever, intruded on their work and in most cases I had no idea of my colleagues’ politics. Those who did air their political views in the pub were mostly left-wing (hardly surprising, given that many journalists came from working-class backgrounds), but they never considered it their role to pursue political agendas on the job. What drove traditional journalism was a belief in the public’s right to know, which has nothing to do with ideology.

If there was a political dimension to their work, it was simply the belief that journalists had a duty to provide people with important and useful information about what was going in their  local communities, in the nation and in the wider world. Of course this sometimes involved reporting things that people in power would have preferred to keep secret. To that extent, news often had political repercussions, but that was a consequence rather than an explicit purpose.

The idea that journalism was all about championing aggrieved minority groups (aka identity politics) and challenging oppressive power structures came much later. The result, as I see every day in my local paper, is that we now have a generation of young journalists who are incapable of writing a simple, straightforward news story (this, after spending a year supposedly learning how to do it) yet feel competent to produce personal comment pieces masquerading as editorials.

As recently as 20 years ago, the exact reverse was true. Was the public better served then? I think so, but many younger journalists would disagree. Problem is, most of them didn’t experience that era, so wouldn’t know.

Watergate, which fostered the romantic idea that journalism was all about bringing down corrupt people in power, had a lot to answer for. The advent of journalists' bylines, often accompanied by their mug shots, exacerbated things by boosting reporters' egos and inflating their self-importance.

CAMPBELL, significantly, was not a product of the era when old-school chief reporters and sub-editors pulled ambitious young thrusters into line. According to his Wikipedia entry he received no journalism training, obtaining his first broadcasting job (in which capacity I first met him) after completing a BA with Honours in English literature.

Clever, charming and confident (all of which is still true), he was fast-tracked to celebrity status. I think his lack of any grounding in the traditional culture, ethos and discipline of journalism – yes, discipline – is reflected in his belief that his position at TVNZ gives him licence to pontificate at will. It’s possible he has become such a household name that he thinks he has escaped the constraints accepted as a matter of course by lesser journalists.

But as I said in response to a recent comment on my blog: “The moment someone like John Campbell accepts a very senior position in a publicly owned media organisation, he relinquishes his right to promote his personal views. He's still free to say what he thinks at a private dinner party, but it’s improper as well as arrogant to push his personal opinions (which is all they are – personal opinions) using a very powerful platform which, by well-established tradition and convention, is expected to be neutral.”

This is not just my view. In the aforementioned lecture last year in honour of a former ABC journalist, Ita Buttrose observed: “Good journalism is never about lecturing the public on what they should think. Good journalism is about reporting, just the facts – not opinion. It is about listening to community concerns and fashioning them into powerful stories that inform and illuminate; stories that are backed by evidence and take a fair and impartial point of view.” Note those crucial words: fair and impartial.

Coming from the woman who chairs a powerful media organisation (the equivalent of our TVNZ and RNZ combined) that’s regarded by conservative Australian commentators as overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Left, Buttrose’s statement had a particular resonance. And she’s not alone in her view that journalists should keep their personal views out of their work. In a recent furore over the sacking of an ABC host, even the ABC Alumni – an association of former staff – issued a statement saying it “understands and respects the principle that staff at the ABC should not allow their personal opinions to intrude on their work”. On this crucial issue, our Australian neighbours – even left-leaning ones – may be ahead of us.


I WAS pleased to hear that Emile Donovan, the new host of Nights on RNZ, seems to get this. Discussing my blog post on Midweek Mediawatch with presenter Hayden Donnell, Donovan gently challenged Donnell’s assertion that “you can’t insist that people [such as Campbell] don’t have opinions”. Donovan countered: “Isn’t that the skill set of the journalist – to hold personal opinions but to strive for the ideal of objectivity?” Precisely.

It was interesting to hear Donnell then subtly shift his ground even as he was having a crack at me. He ended up conceding that if a prominent TVNZ columnist criticised a left-wing government – a highly unlikely scenario – there would be an outcry from the Left. 

Donnell’s proposed solution to the tension between objectivity and the right to hold an opinion is that journalists should act as “fair brokers”, whatever that means. To that, I would say it’s surely better to have clear, sharp, unambiguous rules than to rely on vague, fuzzy terms like “fair broker” that journalists are left to define for themselves.

A few other points arising from the North & South article:

■ It quotes former Auckland Star editor and veteran journalism tutor Jim Tucker as suggesting, in the 1999 journalism textbook Intro, that objectivity in journalism was unattainable. But I’m sure that in his earlier days as an editor, Jim (who’s an old mate of mine) would have insisted, like all his contemporaries, on adherence to the principles of objectivity. I suspect that after he moved into academia he fell prey to the American influence that contaminated New Zealand journalism teaching. If so, he wasn’t the first. (Jim himself ended up getting an MA in media ethics.)

■ Rose highlights an old magazine interview in which Campbell ridiculed the notion that journalists should always seek the other side of the story. “At the liberation of Auschwitz, would you give the SS the right of reply?” Campbell asked rhetorically. I’ve seen this argument before and it’s pure sophistry, because it chooses the most extreme example imaginable (as Campbell more or less admitted). A more relevant analogy might be the 1981 Springbok Tour. Almost everyone accepts that apartheid, like Nazi genocide, was evil, but the question of whether New Zealand should maintain sporting contact with South Africa was far more nuanced. Would supporters of the tour be allowed their say today? Judging by the way the media have collectively agreed to shut down legitimate expressions of scepticism about climate change, I couldn’t confidently answer that question in the affirmative. (For the record, I marched against the tour.)

■ Both Rose and Donnell pounced on my statement that TVNZ is “the government’s most potent communication medium” and inferred authoritarian overtones, as if I were endorsing some sort of Russian or North Korean model of state control. I suspect they wilfully misread a rather clumsy choice of words. I wasn’t implying that TVNZ should function as a state propaganda arm; anyone who knows me would realise that’s absurd. What I should have said was that TVNZ is a potent communication medium owned by the government, which conveys a rather different shade of meaning.

■ A TVNZ spokeswoman quoted in Shayne Currie’s Herald article said that opinion pieces such as those on the TVNZ website “play a role in holding power to account, reflecting different perspectives and driving huge digital audiences”. She went on: “John’s pieces are doing that – they’re resonating with New Zealanders who agree or disagree with the perspective and driving huge digital audiences. Given du Fresne also engages in this style of reporting himself, the irony is not lost on us.” This is an example of false equivalence and I suspect the TVNZ spokeswoman knows it. I’m a private, unpaid blogger with no official standing and an average 2000-odd readers a day; Campbell is a highly paid national celebrity, the Chief Correspondent of a powerful, state-owned organisation, with formidable resources behind him and a massive potential audience reach. Besides, I don’t purport to “report” on anything. What I write is clearly my opinion and in contrast with Campbell, it risks no confusion with reportage. TVNZ compounded this dishonesty by telling North & South that its opinion columns “bring a broad range of perspectives to the forefront”, but I’ve yet to see it publish any opinion that could be described as remotely conservative. (Interestingly enough, at least two of Campbell’s most inflammatory anti-government columns seem to have disappeared from the TVNZ website. Is this an acknowledgement that the criticism is striking home and the objections to his naked bias are valid?)

■ Campbell responded to written questions for the North & South piece rather than being interviewed. His answers are rambling and replete with references to “right-wing, Pakeha men” and “cultural hegemony”. He cites, as an authority for his rejection of objectivity, an American journalist who wrote about editorial decisions being made “almost exclusively by upper-class white men”, which may have been true in the US but not, in my experience, in New Zealand, where I have never experienced an "upper-class" editor but have had the pleasure of working alongside some exceptionally competent female editorial decision-makers. It would be helpful if we stuck to examples that are relevant here. Campbell also makes the mistake of suggesting that because lots of other people write opinion pieces, he should be free to do so too – sidestepping the vital distinction, as highlighted by me and others interviewed for the story, that he’s employed by a public broadcaster.

To summarise the above, what we have here is a clash between two competing models of journalism – one that has endured for generations and another of relatively recent origins. I think I know which of the two models serves the public interest better and which is more likely to ensure the media’s survival. That is, if it’s not already too late.

Footnote: This is my last post, at least for the foreseeable future. I am placing my blog in indefinite recess. This has nothing to do with John Campbell or any other issue that I’ve written about. The truth is that after coming back from a recent holiday with family in Queensland, I realised that my heart’s no longer in it. This doesn’t mean I don’t feel as strongly about the issues I write about; rather, it’s the act of writing that I can no longer muster the energy for. Fortunately there’s now no shortage of other conservative (or should I say crypto-fascist?) bloggers, such as Graham Adams, to take up any slack. I extend my heartfelt thanks to all those who read me (more than three million views since I started blogging in 2008), and in particular to those who have taken the trouble to contribute often thoughtful and erudite comments. I can’t guarantee that nothing will happen to make me burst back into action, but for now I’m signing off. (The blog will stay online and any comments on this post will still be welcome.)