Marching blindly into the post-journalism era

Herewith, two unrelated (or perhaps not) examples of the insidious bias that pervades the mainstream Western media. Neither is necessarily of any great consequence on its own, but each is telling in its own way.

■ In a 470-word story on the jailing of former US senator Bob Menendez following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges, the BBC could find no room to mention that he was a senior Democrat.

You can be sure that if he was a Republican, i.e. a Trumpist, we would have been told in the first few lines.

The BBC’s story did mention that Menendez’s son was a Democratic congressman, but that was all.

Inadvertent oversight? Hmmm.

We were told that Menendez, who accepted bribes from foreign governments, notably Egypt, was a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – but still no mention of his party.

And if you clicked on a link to the BBC’s earlier story about his conviction last July, you learned that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Menendez to resign. But even then there was nothing to indicate that Schumer was talking about a member of his own party, and readers could have been excused for assuming Menendez was a Republican. 

The headline read Senator Bob Menendez found guilty in bribery scheme. It’s dollars to donuts that if he was from the other side of the aisle, it would have said: Republican senator found guilty in bribery scheme.

Only towards the bottom of that 687-word story was there any indication that Menendez was a Democrat, and even then it wasn’t explicit.  

There are two possible explanations here. One is that the BBC’s stories were written and edited by journalists so incompetent or amateurish that they didn’t think Menendez’s party affiliation was significant.

The other is that the BBC (which is taxpayer-funded and therefore has a special obligation to be politically neutral) decided the Democratic Party should be spared the embarrassment of being associated with a corrupt senator. Either explanation is unacceptable, but the second is the far more plausible one.

■ An Associated Press report refers to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and other technology companies “trying to ingratiate themselves” with the Trump administration.

I’m sure that’s exactly what the loathsome Zuckerberg and other tech titans were doing, but it’s not the function of an AP reporter to tell us. There should be no place in a straight, factual news account for a loaded word such as “ingratiate” unless the reporter is quoting someone. 

A competent reporter, by simply conveying the facts of the story, can leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether Zuckerberg is cravenly sucking up to the White House. Readers are capable of drawing their own conclusions and should be left to do so without being led by the nose. But news stories are now often fatally contaminated by casual, pervasive bias and the intrusion of reporters’ personal judgments.

To allege that someone is trying to ingratiate himself involves such a judgment. Such things used to be the domain of editorial writers and columnists expressing what was clearly identified as opinion. But in 2025, all reporters consider themselves editorialists and the dividing line between "news" and comment has been all but erased.

When I read any “news” story about American politics, my eye goes straight to the bottom to identify the source. If it’s from AP, the Washington Post or the New York Times I know not to assume that it’s balanced and accurate (and by “accurate”, I mean not distorted by the omission of any relevant facts or background information that might not align with the reporter’s perception).

The Washington Post and the New York Times are entitled to spin the news as they think fit and accept the consequences, even if they compromise their credibility in the process. Their subscribers can always opt out if they don’t like what they’re reading. But wire services such as AP operate in a different context.

Because they are usually co-operative enterprises that supply news to media outlets from all points of the political compass, wire services have traditionally been careful to avoid any hint of bias. New Zealand’s own much-lamented NZPA was always rigorous in observing editorial neutrality. But that rule has been jettisoned at AP, whose reporters clearly feel no compunction about feeding the news through an ideological filter. AP political stories come heavily larded with journalists’ own perceptions which are invariably hostile to the political Right.

Stories about Trump, for example, routinely refer to his “lies” and “falsehoods”. These are terms that previous generations of news reporters would never have used unless they were quoting someone. They would have presented the facts and left it to readers to decide for themselves whether the president had a flagrant disregard for the truth (which is clearly the case, but I’m permitted to say that because this is an opinion piece).

The frequent use of the disparaging terms "far right" and "extreme right", to denote all but the mildest and least threatening politicians on the conservative side of the spectrum, is another means by which leftist journalists reveal their ingrained priggishness.

The now-habitual intrusion of personal opinion into “news” coverage isn’t just a breach of traditional journalism rules. On a purely pragmatic level it’s crazy because it accelerates public distrust of an already failing media industry.

It appears not to have registered with American journalists that Trump won the presidency despite overwhelming media opposition. The message was clear: the US mainstream media have rendered themselves largely irrelevant.

When journalists have fallen so clearly out of step with the public mood, they need to re-evaluate themselves. But there’s no sign of that happening, and so journalism blindly continues its determined and suicidal march into the post-journalism era.

 

 

 

A journey into the hinterland

 

Hedley's Book Shop in Masterton was packed on Friday night for the launch of my friend Simon Burt's book Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown, published by Ugly Hill Press. 

It was actually a second launch, the first having been held two nights earlier in Waipukurau. Why the double launch? Because Waipukurau marks the northern end of Route 52 and Masterton the southern. They could hardly have an event in one town and ignore the other. Wars have been fought over lesser issues.

Once officially designated as a state highway but demoted when usage declined, Route 52 is the quintessential road less travelled, passing through the back country of the northern Wairarapa into southern and central Hawke's Bay and giving access to remote coastal settlements such as Akitio, Herbertville and Porangahau. 

I had the honour of speaking at the Masterton launch and this is what I said:

I’m not one to boast, but I reckon I’m unusually well qualified to launch a book about Route 52. I grew up in Waipukurau, where the road starts (or finishes, depending on which way you’re travelling) and I’ve spent the past 22 years living in Masterton, at the other end.

My ties to Waipuk, as we always called it, are permanently cemented by the fact that my parents and three of my brothers are buried in the cemetery there, within a few metres of each other. I also have a direct personal connection with something that’s mentioned briefly in Simon’s book. I refer to the torii, or traditional Japanese arch, that my father designed and built in the mid-60s on the top of the Pukeora Hill. It was put there to frame the superb view of Waipukurau that travellers saw as they came over the brow of the hill from the south – a view that’s rarely seen these days because the main highway was re-routed decades ago, although Dad’s torii is still there.

Not only do I have connections with Waipuk and Masterton, but I was born in Pahiatua. Strictly speaking, that’s not on Route 52, but it’s close enough to warrant a chapter in Simon’s book, which is good enough for me. Note that I pronounce it as Pahi-atua rather than Pie-a-tua, because my mother always insisted that that was the correct Maori pronunciation and I believe she was right.

Speaking of personal connections, I should note that Deborah Coddington was the perfect person to publish Simon’s book, because Deborah grew up at Wallingford in Central Hawke’s Bay, through which Route 52 passes, and she named her publishing company after the rural road her family lived on.

Like me, Deborah would have recognised many of the names in Simon’s book and would have personally recalled some of the people he writes about. And I suspect that also like me, the places where she spent her childhood left a permanent imprint on her, and the naming of her company, Ugly Hill Press, was a way of paying homage to her origins.

Anyway, on to Simon’s book. I think it’s a terrific book: part road trip, part personal memoir and part social history. Steve Braunias has described it as a psychogeographical travel book, which is an impressive word even if I’m not entirely sure what it means.

And although I’m sure Simon doesn’t think of himself as a journalist, the book also qualifies as an exemplary piece of journalism. I say that because it’s largely driven by Simon’s curiosity, and curiosity is an essential element – perhaps the essential element – of good journalism.

Simon was curious about the history of the places on Route 52 and the people who have spent their lives there, so he did what a good journalist would do – he set out to find out about them. He’s dug deep and done a daunting amount of research, but it never weighs the book down. It’s an easy and engaging read that you can dip into as the urge takes you.

One mark of good writing is that it flows so easily, it gives you no clue to the hard work that went into it. That’s true of this book.

Route 52 documents the social history of a remote part of New Zealand that we knew very little about. I can’t recall whether Simon actually uses this word, but his book is all about the hinterland, one nice definition of which is “an area lying beyond what is visible or known”.

I learned a lot from reading Simon’s book. I learned, for example, that the reason there’s a wide, park-like strip down the main street of Pahiatua was that the railway line was originally intended to run through the centre of town. I learned that the Wilder Settlement Road in Central Hawke’s Bay, which I was familiar with in my childhood, didn’t get its name because a settlement was built there; in fact the name came from a marital agreement under which land was made available to sons of the Wilder family as part of a dowry. That became known as the Wilder settlement. Who would have guessed?

I also learned that the claustrophobic, inky-black tunnel that my friends and I used to squeeze through in the hills near Waipukurau was created for an irrigation scheme that was later abandoned. And I discovered that Porangahau was once known as Coconut Grove because of the number of Rarotongans who lived and worked there to make up for a labour shortfall during the Second World War. Somehow I don’t think the name Coconut Grove would pass the PC test now.

It’s worth mentioning too that Simon has taken the trouble to delve into an area of history that remains sorely neglected. I refer to our pre-European history, and I was pleased to see that he devotes space to the superb information displays in Pukekaihau, which most people know as Waipukurau’s Hunter Park. These illustrated panels explain in rich detail the pre-European history of the Waipukurau district, and I recommend them to anyone passing through the town with an hour to spare.

Above all, Route 52 is a book about people – and I don’t mean well-known names or official poo-bahs or would-be celebrities who big themselves up on social media, about whom we already know far more than we want to know. Rather, it’s a celebration of New Zealand’s rural culture and a glimpse into the lives of farmers, shearers, shepherds and others, not to mention their resourceful and formidable wives, many of whom have spent their entire lives in the rugged and challenging landscape through which Route 52 passes. I was going to make the mistake of saying these are ordinary people, but many of them are anything but ordinary. A better word would be authentic.

Barry Crump used to write about such people, albeit in a fictional context, and so did Jim Henderson. The Christchurch Press journalist Mike Crean was another writer who had a talent for talking to ordinary people – sorry, I mean authentic people – and getting them to tell their stories.

Simon has the same skill and empathy, writing with a light and often whimsical touch but always respectful toward his subjects.  He has captured a part of New Zealand that is slowly but irrevocably disappearing – in fact, sometimes almost literally disappearing under a relentlessly spreading cloak of pinus radiata, which is a recurring theme in his book and gives it a slightly elegiac tone.

But that’s as much as you want to hear from me. Deborah asked me to keep my speech short, so it only remains to congratulate Simon on a great book and break an imaginary bottle of champagne – or perhaps that should be Tui – over its bow.

                                            Simon Burt