It will have come as a revelation to readers of the Dominion Post to learn today that Pahiatua is in the Manawatu-Whanganui region. But there it was, incontrovertibly in black and white, in André Chumko’s obituary for Zdzisław (Eric) Lepionka, a prominent member of Wellington’s Polish community who died in August.
Here was further evidence – not that we needed it – that journalists’ ignorance of their own country is even more woeful than their legendarily unreliable arithmetic.
Experienced sub-editors of past generations knew never to trust either, and there’s the problem. Newspapers got rid of sub-editors in the extraordinary belief that reporters could correct their own mistakes – but as I wrote recently, how could they be expected to correct something that they didn’t know was wrong?
My guess is that Chumko is one of that generation of journalists who rarely venture beyond the city limits. Pahiatua is where it has always been, in the northern Wairarapa and thus separated from the Manawatu and Whanganui districts by the Tararua and Ruahine ranges. I rang a mate who lives there this morning just to confirm it hasn't been moved. Older locals would identify the town as being in the heart of the region once known as Bush, from the 19th century name Seventy Mile Bush (which lives on in the names of the NZME-owned community paper the Bush Telegraph, based in Pahiatua, and the Wairarapa-Bush Rugby Football Union).
I would further guess that Chumko got his information from Wikipedia. If you look up that website's entry for Pahiatua, it mentions that the town is in “the far east of the Manawatu-Whanganui region”. But that doesn’t locate it geographically, because the Manawatu-Whanganui region in this context is essentially a local government construct. (The same is true of the illogical name Tararua for the district that’s centred on Dannevirke – illogical because it’s a long way from the mountain range of the same name and in much closer proximity to the Ruahines. My old journalism colleague Nick Hill, a long-time resident of Dannevirke and an unsuccessful candidate for the mayoralty in the recent elections, has campaigned to no avail for a name change.)
On a related note, I often see newspaper stories that erroneously refer to something happening in, for argument’s sake, Masterton when in fact it may have taken place 50 kilometres or more away from the actual town. This is due to a peculiar inability on the part of today’s journalists to distinguish between towns and local government entities that bear the same name.
It seems that as far as most reporters are concerned, if it happened anywhere within the vast rural hinterland covered by the Masterton District Council, it happened "in Masterton". I can’t begin to imagine the head-scratching that goes on among local newspaper readers when they see a reference to a fire "in Masterton” which, on further reading, turns out to have burned in a remote locality more than an hour’s drive away.
This is another consequence of the hollowing out of newsrooms which wiped out a cohort of older, more experienced journalists whose job was to save reporters (and the paper) from their own failings.
But back to that obituary. The reference to Pahiatua arose because Eric Lepionka and his wife Halina were among 732 Polish refugee children, the victims of appalling wartime suffering and treachery, who were brought to New Zealand in 1944 and placed in a former army camp just south of the town. Many, like Eric (whom I once interviewed for an article in The Listener), went on to build successful lives in New Zealand, but their generation is inexorably passing away. Earlier this year my wife and I attended the funeral of another “Pahiatua Pole”, the mother of an old friend, who was also obituarised in the Dominion Post.
Have I made too much of the obituary writer’s mistake this morning? Most people would think it harmless. And so it is, except in one vital respect. A newspaper’s reputation rests on credibility, and credibility in turn depends on accuracy. When readers can see that a journalist has got something so obviously wrong as the location of a town, they naturally wonder whether the story includes other inaccuracies that they’re not aware of. That’s why sub-editors were employed – as a vital defence against error.
We now have a generation of journalists who are trained to tiptoe ever so carefully through the minefield of identify politics - Chumko himself specialises in articles promoting the cult of diversity - but who often get facts wrong and in many cases give the impression of not even having mastered basic literacy. And the tragedy, at least in the case of the Dominion Post, is that no one seems to care anymore.
