Making it up as they go

I sent the following letter this morning to my local paper:

Two phrases bring out the cynic in me. One is “joined-up government”. The other is “wrap-around support”. Both are ideals that are more easily talked about than fulfilled.

Reading the extraordinarily vague and woolly explanation of how the new health system is supposed to work, I fully expected to see at least one of those expressions.

Sure enough, there it was: “For example, it will be easier for someone’s GP to work with their in-home care nurse and pharmacist so they receive the wrap-around care they need” (Health New Zealand “interim localities lead” Martin Hefford).

From my observation, “wrap-around care” rarely lives up to its promise. Reality usually gets in the way. But we have a generation of politicians and bureaucrats who seem to think that as long as they get the jargon right, everything else will fall into place.

All reformist politicians have an urge to re-invent the wheel and thus bestow their own legacy, but I think we should be deeply sceptical about the extravagant promises being made for the new system.

Based on what we’ve been told so far, it looks as if its creators are making it up as they go. Good luck with that, as they say.

Free Speech Union event; the only catch is that you have to listen to me

Readers of this blog who live in or near Wellington may be interested to know that the Free Speech Union, of which I’m a member, is hosting an event in the city next Thursday evening. 

I’m the speaker, but please don’t let that put you off attending. I can’t recall a time when the defence of free speech – a cause that cuts across the usual dividing lines between Left and Right – was more urgent.

The event will be held in Lecture Theatre 2 at the Pipitea campus of Victoria University (aka Rutherford House, the high-rise building immediately adjacent to the bus shelters near the railway station). I understand the doors will open at 5.45 for a 6pm start and it should all be over shortly after 7pm. Admission is gratis.

Hallucinatory moments of optimism

Notwithstanding everything I wrote on this blog site yesterday about contemporary journalism (none of which I resile from), there are days when, in insane moments of giddy optimism, I imagine that the tide might be turning after years of largely sycophantic media coverage of the government.

Take last night’s edition of Newshub’s 6 o’clock news, in which the first item put the heat on the government over the alarming and apparently uncontrollable surge in inflation. Here was a news outlet doing exactly what the media are supposed to do in a liberal democracy: namely, report on issues that affect the community and hold those in power accountable.  

That report was followed by politically damaging coverage of the government’s refusal to ease harsh MIQ requirements, with heartbreaking consequences for the thousands of people affected, even after Ministry of Health officials had advised that it was safe to do so.

Later came an item asking why the government was dragging the chain over the resumption of economically beneficial cruise ship visits when comparable countries, notably Australia, have given them the green light.

All this seemed to represent a striking change in tone from Newshub’s usual political coverage. Admittedly the channel has exposed politically embarrassing issues before – most notably the glaring discrepancies between the government’s glib assurances about the steps it was taking to contain Covid-19 and what was actually happening on the ground, as revealed repeatedly by special issues reporter Michael Morrah.

But otherwise in the four and a half years since Jacinda Ardern became prime minister, it’s been hard to shake the impression that Newshub’s political journalists, along with those in other media organisations, have consistently given the government an easy ride while mercilessly hounding some of Ardern’s opponents (shamefully in the case of Tova O’Brien’s pursuit of the hapless Judith Collins).

Though it may be hallucinatory on my part, there have been other occasions recently when I thought I detected a subtle change in the tone of political coverage overall. I get the impression the media generally are now more actively publishing news that reflects unfavourably on the government (such as the scandal over multimillion-dollar tourism grants that appear to have been handed out selectively to companies that didn’t need them) when previously they were disinclined to do so.

If that’s the case, it could be due to a couple of things. Perhaps media decision-makers have taken note of recent surveys showing a continuing decline in public trust in the media, which has never been high even at the best of times. Alternatively, the sheer weight and volume of anti-media comment online may have reached a level they can no longer ignore. There must come a point, after all, when the self-preservation instinct kicks in.

A caveat to all the above is that the media continue to let the government off the hook over Covid-19 in one very specific respect. In the early stages of the pandemic, a single death was headline news. Now deaths occur daily in double figures and the total figure creeps steadily upward – to 602 at latest count, although we still compare favourably internationally (110 deaths per million compared with 263 in Australia).

Given the country’s continuing fixation with Covid, the media fleetingly pass over the death toll in a strikingly matter-of-fact tone, almost as if it’s no longer of any consequence. We are given no details other than age bands and location by region; nothing to show how many deaths were due to Covid or merely happened to coincide with the presence of the virus, and nothing to indicate whether those who died had pre-existing conditions and if so, what they were.  

I’ve heard it speciously argued that this is a matter of respecting people’s privacy, but privacy rules apply only where individuals might be identified – not an issue in this instance, since no one needs to know the names of those who have died.

It seems nothing changes in politics and the bureaucracy. Just as the Official Information Act is still constantly thwarted after 40 years, so secretive officials continue to use the Privacy Act as an excuse to suppress information of public interest. So much for the open society.

Deaths from Covid are a matter of public importance. Why does the government appear to be drawing a veil over them, and why do the media let them get away with it?

 

 

 

Journalists then and now

It seems to be the season for journalism memoirs.

My old friend and former colleague Jon Morgan recently published Newspaper Man, a book covering a long career that culminated in a stellar turn as farming editor of the Dominion Post (a position that no longer exists, despite the paper’s wide rural distribution). Jon’s book initially had a very limited circulation list but I gather there’s a reprint on the way.

Now another old mate, Jim Tucker, former editor of the late, lamented Auckland Star and tutor to hundreds of journalism students, has weighed in with Flair and Loathing on the Front Page, Volume One of an intended three-volume memoir. (Only three, Jim? Surely you can do better than that.) Readers of this blog may have heard Jim interviewed by Kim Hill on her Playing Favourites segment last Saturday.

Both books are self-published and unlikely to be best sellers, but will be of interest to journalists and ex-journos of a certain age, along with the type of people who follow this blog and regret the passing of an era when journalism adhered to values and principles now too often considered a quaint hangover from what's patronisingly labelled "legacy" media.

Tucker and Morgan have both paid their dues, in American parlance. Their books capture the tone and ethos of a time when budding journalists entered the trade (as it was then commonly regarded) straight from school and learned on the job. They were trained to observe principles of fairness, thoroughness, accuracy and balance and if they fell short, were sharply pulled into line by bosses who today would almost certainly be fired for bullying. (Not all such bosses, incidentally, were male. Both Tucker and Morgan mention a legendary Taranaki Herald martinet named June Litman – Tucker in admiring terms, Morgan less so.)

Many became journalists for no better reason than that they were good at English in school, or at least better at English than any other subject (that was me), and thought journalism sounded more interesting than being a school teacher or bank teller, albeit not as well paid. They had no academic pretensions and wouldn’t have dreamed of inserting personal opinions into their work. That was strictly reserved for editorials.

The two books also capture a time when many reporters began their careers on provincial papers and even in branch offices, working in towns such as Hawera and Taumarunui. There was nothing remotely glamorous or exciting about reporting meetings of county councils or catchment boards, but that was what the job typically entailed, and it served the vital purpose of keeping communities informed on matters of local importance. Branch office reporters were expected to provide knowledgeable coverage of sporting fixtures too, since sport – and especially rugby – was a defining aspect of community identity.

No one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein then – and even if they had, no lowly reporter nurtured fantasies about bringing down governments or acting as an agent of political change. The days when aspiring journalists were taught that their mission was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" (a popular refrain among politically motivated journalism lecturers in a later era*) were yet to come.

The reminiscences of Tucker and Morgan also recall a time when newspaper newsrooms were, in some important respects, more diverse demographically than now. For one thing, there was a much wider age range. Ambitious young thrusters were counter-balanced by the influence of older, more mature heads. On the first papers I worked for, reporters’ ages ranged from teenage (I started at 17) to 60-plus. And while women were under-represented, it’s a myth that female journalists were confined to the ghetto of the women’s pages. Some occupied key news reporting roles or (as in the case of June Litman) worked on the "top table" or the sub-editors’ desk.

Reporters’ copy was subjected to unsparing critical scrutiny by sub-editors, most of them old hands, who checked for accuracy, clarity, balance and grammatical correctness – a vital form of quality control swept away in the 21st century in the fanciful expectation that reporters could edit themselves. Proof readers, the last line of defence against error, were declared superfluous too. We are now presented every day with abject evidence of how well that experiment turned out. (A small example from my local paper this morning: “edition” instead of “addition” in the first line of a news story. Oh, and "hair and hound" from Saturday's Dominion  Post.)

And here’s another thing. Many of the journalists I worked with during the first decades of my career came from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. Many grew up in state houses. They had limited educational qualifications (in some cases, none at all – not even School Certificate) and no academic aspirations. Indeed, they often took pride in journalism being described as a trade rather than a profession. 

It was the tail-end of the era of the self-educated, working-class intellectual, a good few of whom found their way into journalism. University degrees were rare and those who held them were viewed almost with suspicion. When I joined Wellington's Evening Post as a teenager in 1968, there were several dozen journalists in the newsroom and I can think of only one (Geoff Walker, who later became a leader of the anti-Springbok tour movement and a high-profile figure in publishing) who may have had letters after his name.

But from the 1970s onward, journalism training was progressively subjected to academic capture until eventually the traditional career path straight from school was cut off altogether. No one can guess how many potentially good journalists were put off because they didn’t fancy spending a year in the classroom, too often under tutors of poor quality who had little track record in journalism themselves.

If anything, the process known as credentials creep (i.e. the constant cranking up of the required qualifications) has become even more pronounced in recent years as vocationally-oriented one-year diploma courses are supplanted by full-blown degree courses with a more academic focus. Has there been a commensurate improvement in the quality of journalism? You be the judge. On matters of basic general knowledge and even in their command of the English language, many of today's reporters appear bone-ignorant.

By comparison with the past, and contrary to the prevailing fetish for diversity, today’s newsrooms (and I’m not talking only about newspapers) appear strikingly homogeneous, dominated as they are by journalists who are overwhelmingly youngish, university-educated and who come, I suspect, from predominantly middle-class backgrounds. Older journalists who brought balance, maturity and perspective to news coverage have been deliberately and methodically eased out. Old-school scepticism (another former colleague of mine, the late Frank Haden, reckoned journalists should “doubt everything with gusto”) has been replaced by bright-eyed idealism that is conveniently compatible with “progressive” politics.

This is not exclusively a New Zealand phenomenon, as American journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon makes clear in her recent book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and a Marxist, writes: “The story of 20th century American journalism is essentially the story of a status revolution. Journalism used to be a blue collar trade; it was a working class job that you didn't go to college in order to learn how to do. You picked it up on the job, and it was considered a sort of low status job. And journalists very much saw themselves as being outside the system, fighting for the little guy. But then journalists started to increasingly go to universities and climbed up the status ladder. Essentially today's journalists have become part of the system. They are part of the American elite. Journalism is now produced for and by elites as opposed to a journalism once produced by and for the working class.” (You can hear Ungar-Sargon interviewed by RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan here, in a rare example of the state broadcaster giving air time to someone who is implicitly critical of its own unabashedly elitist culture.)

Not enough has been written about this transformation and its profound impact on how public opinion is shaped. The “woke” takeover of journalism, as Ungar-Sargon characterises it, permeates almost every aspect of news coverage and commentary, from what the media choose to cover (and just as crucially, what they decide to ignore) through to the way the news is presented and the editorial tone in which it’s reported, all of which tends to reinforce prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

But the picture is not entirely bleak. The mainstream media are still capable of presenting us with exemplary journalism that tackles big issues thoroughly, impartially and fairly. Christchurch Press reporter Philip Matthews’ examination last Saturday of the Three Waters project was a case in point. It was all the more impressive because I believe the natural inclination of the journalist concerned (who occasionally pays me the great compliment of sniping at me on Twitter) is to lean sharply to the left.

Such stories happen often enough to keep alive the hope that traditional journalism values are still honoured – at least some of the time – and even that some people in the media, realising how much they have alienated their core audience, may now be trying to engage reverse gear. But whether they happen often enough to reverse declining trust in journalism is another matter.

*The expression originated with a fictional character and was used chiefly for humorous effect, but bizarrely came to be regarded as a serious journalistic maxim.

 

The steady march of American vernacular

On a scale of atrocities running from one to 10, misuse of the language usually warrants no more than a 2. Yet New Zealand English is a defining aspect of our unique culture and one I believe the media should try to honour and preserve.

One linguistic irritant that I see with increasing frequency is the American term “lawmaker”. Even when referring to the British House of Commons, New Zealand media now routinely refer to “lawmakers” as opposed to Members of Parliament.

It’s lazy form of journalistic shorthand that has gained currency because of the all-pervasive reach of American media. There are no MPs in the United States, so for the benefit of their domestic audience, American journalists writing about politics in other countries use the same term that they apply to senators and members of the House of Representatives. The word then finds it way into our news columns and bulletins via American news services.

There was a time when conscientious New Zealand sub-editors coming across “lawmaker” as a synonym for MP in overseas news stories would have changed it to conform to local usage, but media outlets no longer bother with such niceties. It’s probably only a matter of time before our own press gallery reporters, eager to appear ahead of the curve, start using the same terminology to describe our elected representatives (that is, if it hasn’t happened already).

The march of American vernacular is as relentless as that of American fast-food brands. Thus yachts become sail boats, walking and cycling tracks become trails, swimming tournaments become swim meets, biscuits become cookies, mates become buddies and trampers (a term that Microsoft Word doesn't recognise) become hikers. I’ve even heard the folksy “oftentimes” used as a synonym for “often”.

As I wrote in a column in 2013, New Zealand has developed its own rich, colourful and often highly inventive vocabulary – a variant of the English language that’s uniquely ours. We should do all we can to repel intruders.

Break out those Tui billboards

Well, hello. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer contains possibly the least surprising research findings so far this century. It confirms that New Zealanders are losing, or have already lost, faith in the media.

The barometer, which surveyed 36,000 people in 28 countries, found that governments and the media internationally are fuelling a “cycle of distrust”. Both institutions are seen as divisive, a finding unlikely to come as a revelation to any vaguely sentient human being.

Perhaps most significant is the finding, reported here by Pattrick Smellie of BusinessDesk [paywalled], that 55 per cent of New Zealanders regard the media as a divisive force, against 23 per cent who see it as unifying. The corresponding split globally is 46/35, meaning New Zealanders are far more likely than citizens of other countries to view their media as agents of polarisation.

This underlines a striking trend in recent years for the mainstream media in New Zealand to align themselves consciously and deliberately with causes that they must know alienate a large proportion of their readers, viewers and listeners. Call it slow-motion suicide.

The bigger picture is that the media have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect the society they purport to serve in favour of advocating on behalf of divisive and often extremist minority causes. By doing so they create a perception of New Zealand not as a cohesive, stable society made up of diverse groups with vital interests in common, but as one characterised by aggrieved minorities whose interests are fundamentally incompatible with those of a callously indifferent (or worse, deliberately oppressive) majority.  

Media outlets that once tried conscientiously to provide a platform for a range of opinions and ideologies now unashamedly attack, or just as insidiously ignore, views and beliefs that run counter to the narrative favoured by the leftist cabal that controls the institutions of power. The most obvious example is the collective undertaking by major media organisations to ignore any opinion, including those of distinguished scientists, that runs counter to the “approved” narrative on climate change or the effectiveness of policies intended to ameliorate it.

Such flagrant suppression of news would have been unthinkable not long ago. Now it’s official editorial policy.

The Edelman Barometer confirms that overall trust in the New Zealand media remains low at 41 per cent (although it’s up slightly on recent years) compared with 50 per cent internationally. Again, this is hardly a surprise when media independence has been fatally compromised by the industry’s acceptance of tainted government money via the Public Interest Journalism Fund, aka the Pravda Project.

This rort hasn’t gone unnoticed by the public. The latest findings of the Auckland University of Technology annual Trust in Media report, which are also reported by Smellie, reveal a continuing decline in trust – down from 53 to 45 per cent – and quote some respondents as saying the reason for their distrust is that the media are funded by the government and politically influenced by it.

One finding of the Edelman report that should particularly alarm media leaders (but won’t, because they are in denial) is that 64 percent of respondents thought New Zealand journalists purposely tried to mislead people by saying things they know are false or grossly exaggerated. This is a predictable result when journalists are given licence to use the news columns as platforms for their ideological agendas.

As an occupational group, journalists have long tended to lean to the left. Earlier generations of reporters countered this by restraining their natural impulses, knowing that media credibility hinged on public confidence that events and issues would be covered fairly, accurately and impartially. That professional discipline is long gone, along with the moderating influence exercised by editors who insisted on the now highly unfashionable principle of objectivity.

We are bombarded daily with politically slanted content masquerading as trustworthy and authoritative reportage. A recent example was an episode of the New Zealand Herald’s newly launched podcast The Front Page (which claims to “go behind the headlines” and ask “hard-hitting questions”), in which Herald journalists Damien Venuto and Georgina Campbell purported to examine the Three Waters project (which they reported in very positive terms) without once mentioning its most contentious feature – namely, the proposal for 50/50 co-governance with iwi.

“High-quality, trusted” coverage as promised by Herald managing editor Shayne Currie? It's time to revive the Tui billboards, surely.

Getting away from it all (well, almost)

My wife and I have been on a two-week journey of rediscovery around the South Island/Te Wai Pounamu.

I say rediscovery because none of the places we visited were new to us, though it was a few years since we’d been to some of them and I was curious to see whether they’d changed and if so, whether the changes were for the better.

We took our time, which meant we were able to detour to places of interest that we’d skipped before – for example, the memorial at the scene of the seven fatal shootings perpetrated by Stanley Graham in 1941 at Kowhitirangi, near Hokitika, and the Hokitika Gorge, which is conveniently located at the end of the same road.

Mist hung low over the bush-clad Doughboy Hill where the manhunt for Graham was centred, creating a suitably spooky atmosphere. Graham was dropped by a single shot from a police rifle as he emerged from cover. He died in Hokitika Hospital.

The memorial, erected in 2008, stands in front of the site of Graham’s home, where the mayhem started when the police tried to confiscate his rifles. The house was deliberately burned down soon after the event but the district hall, where the manhunt was based, still stands across the road and the sleepy farming district is little changed from when Graham (who is buried in the Hokitika cemetery under a headstone that simply says “Stanley”) went on his rampage*.

A much longer detour took us to Jackson Bay, which is as far as you can drive on the West Coast. We had lunch at the Cray Pot, a café that operates out of a shipping container on the water’s edge. I ordered whitebait and my wife had blue cod and chips, two dishes that travel writers would probably describe as iconic in this part of the world.

The West Coast towns presented a mixed picture. Some that we might have expected to be on their last legs – Reefton and Hokitika, for example – gave the impression of thriving, or at least doing okay. Both make the most of their colourful histories and are lively little places with loads of character.

Greymouth, on the other hand, was a dismal sight.  It looked drab, tired and in desperate need of resuscitation. Whatever elixir Reefton and Hokitika have ingested, Greymouth could do with some of it.

Franz Josef seemed to be holding on, but barely. The revival of international tourism can’t come too soon for towns full of motels displaying vacancy signs.

On the eastern side of the Haast Pass, it was a very different story. The Lakes District, encompassing Wanaka and Queenstown, is an area of rampant, runaway growth. I was staggered by the extent of the Five Mile development near Queenstown, very little of which existed the last time I was there only seven years ago.

Sadly but perhaps inevitably, developers appear to have done their best to eradicate any trace of New Zealandness around Queenstown. If you didn’t occasionally glance up at the Remarkables or Coronet Peak, you could be in almost any congested international resort town.

Te Anau was much more to our liking. There’s been a lot of growth there too, but the town is essentially unchanged. Long may it remain that way.

Our homeward leg took us through Dunedin (looking rundown, but still full of appealing southern character), Timaru (deathly quiet on a Thursday morning) and Christchurch (also eerily quiet in the CBD and still not fully recovered from the earthquakes, but with several funky eating and drinking precincts that were humming on a Friday night).  

What else to report? For one thing, mile after mile after mile of jaw-droppingly scenic roads that were mostly empty (great for drivers, not so good for the tourist trade). Oh, and bikes everywhere. There’s a new demographic cohort that I call oobs: oldies on bikes. Every second vehicle had a bike rack on the back or the roof and I’d hazard a guess that the owners were rediscovering the pleasure of cycling after a break of several decades. Most of the bikes were battery-assisted and their riders were accessoried up the wazoo (whatever that expression might mean).

Of course, one other great benefit of being on the road for a couple of weeks is that you can delude yourself that you’re insulated against all the vexatious things that confront you at home. But even on holiday you can’t completely escape the culture wars.

To take one tiny example, I heard RNZ’s early-morning host Nathan Rarere, whom I normally quite like (a statement that could be the kiss of death to his career), sneering at the use of the word “woke”. According to Rarere, “woke” has taken over where the phrase “political correctness gone mad” left off.  In other words, anyone using the term can safely be derided as just another angry old man shouting at clouds.

I happen to agree that “woke” is a wholly inadequate word for the wide range of noxious and divisive neo-Marxist ideologies that it seeks to capture, but until someone comes up with something better we’re stuck with it.

More to the point, it’s a classic tactic of the new Left, having vigorously (and so far, with media backing, very successfully) pushed ideas and policies that many New Zealanders find fundamentally repugnant, to then ridicule their opponents for adopting terminology – whatever terminology that might be – which attempts to alert people to the reality of what’s happening.

Language is central in the culture wars and if you invalidate the words that enable people to articulate their concerns, you strip them of an essential weapon. By characterising users of terms such as “woke” and “political correctness” as alarmist, out of touch and jumping at their own shadows, the neo-Marxist Left seeks to minimise the implications of its radical agenda. The perception that New Zealand democracy is being systematically dismantled as part of a grand ideological project can then be presented as a figment of fevered right-wing imaginations.

Conservative New Zealanders tend to be reticent at the best of times, and are even more likely to keep their views to themselves if they fear being ridiculed for using the wrong words. Some of these people may even listen to RNZ in the quaint misbelief that it exists for all New Zealanders. Does Nathan Rarere realise this? I’m sure he does.

*Manhunt: The Story of Stanley Graham, by Howard Willis (published in 1979) is an excellent account of the tragedy.