News and New Zealand Democracy

Written By: advantage - Date published: 8:59 am, March 9th, 2024 - 15 comments
Categories: accountability, broadcasting, Culture wars, Deep stuff, facebook, internet, interweb, journalism, Media, newspapers, Politics, Propaganda, radio, youtube - Tags:

How do we prevent the decline of broadcast tv news being a deep wound to our democracy?

The 2024 collapse of TV3 news, a rapid contraction in TV1 journalism, and the sustained decline of print newspaper news, underscores how much our entire political order relies upon the news.

New Zealand tv news journalists are famous in a small country. For five decades tv newsreaders were the primary arbiter of all national political expression. Those aged 40 and older will recall a time when the stentorian seriousness of Dougall Stevenson, Philip Sherry and ‘mother of-the nation’ calm of Judy Bailey actually reassured us that there were things called facts, and we ought to live by them as truth.

The NZHerald, Christchurch Daily Press and Dominion Post were simple definitions of what one ought to know on a daily basis, delivered straight to your door. It was quite common for a High School English teacher to simply pull their lesson straight out of that days’ edition. You didn’t have to know the faces of their reporters to accept that they were on balance an honest profession who were an essential check and balance to power itself.

Since the 2010s, the decline of advertising for both broadcast television and newspapers has seen the capital base to all of that assurance fall into rapid decline. Broadcast news indeed remains important for people over 70 but it requires volumes of taxpayer subsidy to be sustained.

The previous Labour government sought to amalgamate TVNZ and RNZ into a BBC-style entity strong and diverse enough to withstand the rapid decline in broadcast television and its news teams that remain so essential to balancing the pronouncements of Ministers or spokespeople alike.

Now, little protects them.

Trust in news has been rapidly declining for many years now.

On average we do still trust the news far more than citizens of the UK or USA, but it’s falling.

But here’s a measure towards a new future: we trust search engines about news far more than we do social media news.

In 2021 tv news could still command 41%, but the gap to the likes of Youtube is closing fast.

While some may rejoice that the 60+ age bracket still have 83% tv use and 65% radio, it’s the under 40s where 82% use online video daily. Their radio use is at 36% and TV at 35%. The tilt to the older bracket is so clear that state subsidy for broadcast news is increasingly looking like state subsidy for ballet.

The old days of broadcast and newspaper published newsrooms mediating how we understand policy impacts and the political order aren’t coming back.

Let’s just fast-forward this trend 10 years.

In 2034 New Zealand journalists are beings who are either fully subsidised like RNZ, or largely subsidised like TVNZ or Maori TV. There are no more than a few dozen of them in the country. Of the privately owned newsrooms, only the NZHerald and ZB still remain. Sure you’ll still get the weather and a few highlights if you’re stuck in traffic and still feel the need to resort to the radio, but actually most have digital feeds inside their cars or headphones.

The majority of New Zealanders, insofar as they think about politics and policy at all, get their news through specific online accounts tailored to what their own interests and dispositions are. There remains a long, thin ‘tail’ of elderly who still like to receive pre-chewed politics via political reporters and policy reporting.

So just imagine what life would be like without reporters.

We can look back on the arcane nobility of Newsroom as if broadcast journalists really were seeking to elevate the public collective mind beyond mediocrity.

We will actually look back and laugh at how rarely they ever did this.

We can wistfully remember the civic cohesion given to the UK through the formation of the BBC’s broadcast news over a century ago in The Hour.

Life for the informed 2034 citizen will be like where we are right now only much, much better.

Well, maybe. Unregulated information posing as news through X or Facebook or TikTok or whatever survives in 2034 is a completely atomised society. It is one in which, in the phrase of that awesome Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas, a complete restructure of the entire public sphere.

Habermas argues that democracy cannot survive in a digital media system without an inclusive public sphere and a deliberative process for the formation of public opinion and consensus. Consensus is critical to democracy because a growing gravity of opinion around reaction to a proposed or current policy is in reality the only way people can make sense of parties when it comes time for voting.

Haermas traces the many and varied threats and perils – from fake news to the commodification of the private sphere – that have arisen as a result of digitalisation. Habermas makes a powerful case that our democracies are in danger and details what we need to do in order to keep them alive and restore them to strength in the age of digitalisation.

A most unfortunate feature of New Zealand’s parliament and its relationship to broadcast media is that it doesn’t use the advantages of set-piece broadcast news at all well. We can still remember a few years ago when Prime Minister Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield steadying our world with daily doses of facts.

Imagine for example if Luxon didn’t just do a Speech from the Throne and manage as usual to suck the oxygen out of the nearest rock, but actually came prepared with a clear vision of where he wanted to lead the country. Something like the US State of the Union, for example.

What we now have to look forward to now, however, is a world where our next natural disaster will not be carried by TV3 at all. Or indeed we will find TV3 simply no longer exists. We will all instead simply get personalised alerts on our phone and we will decide what if anything whether we need to take any action at all.

But outside national emergencies – which are our sole remaining source of firm national collective solidarity – we won’t miss broadcast news at all. We will actually appreciate the unmediated information, and we will trust the greater sophistication of algorithms far more than we ever trusted journalists of the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s.

There will be myriad influencers about policy and politics by the tens of thousands. There will be a fractal flourishing of tiny “stations” There will be podcasts for those who still pine for longform investigations. There will be media owners who are larger than states.

There may still be some old people around who miss the idea of a strong public sphere in which you can form clear majority opinion over stable facts. We will resemble less a settled bay with a few big sharks to spook snapper, and resemble more a vast rolling ocean of information with a very few corporate whales who herd us krill with a few well-orchestrated bubbles and then just hoover us up by the tonne.

The realisation will come for the likes of Amazon and Youtube that political broadcasts can be exceedingly attractive broadcast material that truly do drive viewership. There need be no nobility about it.

When politicians feel the threat to their worlds that the decline of broadcast news and and broadcast journalism really represents, then perhaps they will find the will to persuade the digital behemoths into common realisation that there really is room for interdependency of content and politics into mutual affirmation. The popular digital kids can be nicer and better, and politicians can figure this out once broadcast news largely dies. We really have to get ready for Amazon and Google to take over the press gallery, and other unexpected partnerships that might need a bit of moral suasion from the old dorks who’ve long finished last in the audience attention metrics.

If we still want a political economy of news that supports a strong democracy in which public faith is strong and informed consensus thrives, we are going to support it very, very deeply with our tax dollars.

15 comments on “News and New Zealand Democracy ”

Comments are now closed

Mike the Lefty 1

9 March 2024 at 9:46 am

I think the roots of it go back to the 1980s, if not earlier, when the neo-liberal forces of the world – governments and institutes – began a campaign to gain control of the MSM and make the economic theories of Friedman and Hayeck the norm. Part of this was control of journalism, creating journalists and media organisations that repeatedly told the people what the neo-liberals wanted them to believe until it became accepted as fact.

I go back to my own experience. In 1977 I enrolled in a journalism course. Whilst doing it I worked part-time on various newspapers (no internet in those days) and learned that one of the critical things a good journalist had to do to be credible was to be politically neutral. Those that weren't were shunned by their comrades. The other very important thing I learned was that it wasn't important what YOU thought – it was what the people you spoke to thought. The pressure from the money groups was always there. On a paper I worked for, the editor was forced to withhold a story about alleged misconduct by staff members at TWO local high schools because of threats to the newspaper's staff's safety. For legal reasons I decline to disclose names and places and in any case it was so long ago and I was pretty young and naive in those days and didn't understand the gravity of it all.

How different it is today. Journalist relish their own identity, every two bit journalistic pretender thinks he or she is the next big thing in publishing. They are not there to get the views of people, they are there to push their own views which are almost invariably right wing. Anyone who doesn't do it that way doesn't last for long. Who does that sound like? a couple of names in NZ Newstalk spring to mind. In my day you started at the bottom and earned your way to the top, if you were good enough. Now they all expect to start at the top and the back stabbing that I hear goes on in some media organisations would make you quaver.

The gutting of Newshub and TVZ is perhaps just the next step in the chain to world dominance of the collective mind forces of the political right. Sounds ominously like George Orwell's 1984 except that Orwell assumed it would be done by the political left rather than the right.

PS. There is a lot of discussion/argument about the definition of journalism. I use it in the widest sense. Journalism is a word that covers a lot of different jobs – reporting, sub-editing, composition, advertising, presentation and more… Some people who present programmes on radio or TV claim to be "journalists" but some might not agree. I leave the question open.
- Tom Hunter 1.1
  
  9 March 2024 at 7:16 pm
  
  They are not there to get the views of people, they are there to push their own views which are almost invariably right wing.
  
  I see this constantly on Left-wing blogs and social media accounts so it seems an accepted truth.
  
  But were that true then right-wingers like me would still be attending to the MSM and mourning the loss of Newshub and these TV1 news shows. But as you can see on the comment threads of Kiwiblog and other right-wing sites they are almost unanimous in celebration, with many talking about how they'd dumped these sources over the years (in my case, TV1 in 2000, TV3 in 2004 and RNZ in 2015).
  
  Even if the focus is entirely on neo-liberal economic as the right-wing ideas being pushed I'd like to see some specific examples from NZ in the last few years (since obviously I can no longer comment on that).
Anne 2

9 March 2024 at 10:30 am

Journalist relish their own identity, every two bit journalistic pretender thinks he or she is the next big thing in publishing. They are not there to get the views of people, they are there to push their own views which are almost invariably right wing. Anyone who doesn't do it that way doesn't last for long.

I worked in the TV industry back in the 1960s ( 😮 ) and even then you could see where it was heading.

You are spot on MtL but I think it went back a bit further. Muldoon was the PM responsible for turning politics into a venal blood sport. He introduced the combative style of politicking and he is known to have employed some very shady practices when it came to dealing with his perceived opponents.

Both Key and Luxon are on record as being admirers of Muldoon.
Obtrectator 3

9 March 2024 at 11:12 am

I have a busy and rather complicated life that doesn't leave much time for extensive reading or deep analysis. So I'll just throw out these thoughts and leave it to others to do the picking-over.

It seems to me that in some ways we're regressing to a kind of pre-18th-century social order, with an atomised society most of whose members don't have (or feel they don't have) access to reliable information. This makes them vulnerable to any number of crazy theories about what's actually (sorry, Melissa) going on. As a result, it's comparatively easy to stir them into mischief of any kind, and, increasingly, to any degree.

We all saw how the occupation of Parliament grounds began in a fairly calm manner, but became ever more disorderly over the ensuing few weeks. A peaceful (if misguided) speaking event in Auckland recently was assaulted by a baying and hostile mob, and it was only through good fortune that no-one was killed.

With authoritative sources of information either much reduced (TVNZ) or disappearing altogether (NewsHub), we're likely to see a lot more of this kind of thing. Rumours will run riot, mobs will be roused, violence and death may well result. I don't think there'll be actual witch-hunts and burnings for some time yet, but who now can say for certain?
- Belladonna 3.1
  
  9 March 2024 at 6:16 pm
  
  I would say that in both of your examples (certainly the parliamentary occupation, and probably the trans protest at the PP event) – those involved do not regard the current news sources as authoritative. Their 'news' comes from social media – and from social media within their own little bubble.
  
  The traditional unbiased news sources, have become seen, as increasingly biased by growing sectors of the public (as evidenced above). I don't know how (or even if it's possible) to reverse this.
  
  Of greater concern are those who never read a paper or watch TV (95% of those under 30). Where does their information come from? Based on my own experience (my teen, his friends and younger work colleagues), it really does seem to be entirely from social media – and there is little awareness of the inherent biases of the sources. Of course, the social media algorithms are designed to give you more of what you already consume, so these biases are reinforced by similar information sources.
  
  Having doom and gloomed. Is this so different from the UK, for example, where newspapers are openly right or left wing? Do those who read the Daily mail, the Guardian, the Telegraph or the Times – ever cross-check the news against a different political perspective? Note: I'm not saying that any of these newspapers are openly biased, or report fake news – but often subtle bias is more effective.
SPC 4

9 March 2024 at 12:23 pm

It is fairly obvious being dependent on advertising revenue is a vulnerability with the modernisation (digital online) fragmentation of media.

And On Air funding was not set up to fund TV news/current affairs.

Maybe there needs to be 3 On Air Funds – one for public service broadcasting (news and current affairs), one for New Zealand content and one for documentary.

Labour could state a policy on the matter as to there being a future.

In the meantime, there is still the capacity to raise other funds.

1.Friends of TVNZ – $100 (100,000 people – $10M)

or Friends of Fair Go – why not funding from the Consumer Affairs Minister?

and Friends of Current Affairs (beyond the main news, they are still funding).

2.Sponsorships
3.Benefactors (go international if locals will not help).
- SPC 4.1
  
  9 March 2024 at 1:52 pm
  
  As an alternative, the trust proposed a digital services levy and that the Telecommunications Development Levy be lifted to previous levels. Such a model would also avoid claims of government bias, the trust said, by making media funding entirely independent of government.
  
  New Zealanders paid $44 per capita for public media in 2023 – substantially less than similar countries such as Australia ($60), Ireland ($73), the United Kingdom ($129) and Finland ($145), the trust said.
  
  It suggested removing advertising from TVNZ would also improve the programmes it produced, because less commercially driven content would lead to more independent news, current affairs and local content. The move would also benefit Newshub's parent company, Discovery, by forcing TVNZ's current advertisers to look elsewhere, the trust said.
  
  It said levies were already successfully funding public media in France, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa.
  
  https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/03/09/tvnz-cuts-better-public-media-trust-suggests-levy-funding/
- CharlieB 4.2
  
  10 March 2024 at 5:11 pm
  
  Maybe there needs to be 3 On Air Funds – one for public service broadcasting (news and current affairs), one for New Zealand content and one for documentary.
  
  Labour could state a policy on the matter as to there being a future.
  
  To answer this question you need to look back at how well the NZ On Air’s Public Interest Journalism Fund was received by the public and then spun by those with a vested interest in misinformation and other shenanigans.
barry 5

9 March 2024 at 1:46 pm

Even assuming that somehow journalists get paid enough for their work that we have a corpus of quality, objective news available, the question is how do we curate news feeds.

When we only had one source of news, there was no choice, but the whole country had a shared understanding of the world. We might look at the evidence and come to different conclusions, but from the same starting point. We have never had unbiased news, but on the whole, the news presenters didn't have overt biases.

The most dangerous way of getting news is a self-curated feed. that means we seek out news that suits our prejudices and believe stuff that meets our world view. This is self-reinforcing, and leads to us becoming intolerant of different points of view. In the internet age we all do this to some extent. I spend more time here than on kiwiblog for my own sanity, but I know that I am missing out on being challenged.

Even worse is when we let the algorithms curate our feeds. The algorithms are looking to increase our clicks and hold our attention, so not only do they feed us material that suits our biases, they also send us the most extreme, and outrage-inducing material they can find. This gets us down the rabbit hole even further.

Of course some people give themselves over entirely to the crackpots (like QAnon, RCR etc). These people are probably irretrievable damaged anyway (I am not talking about the people that go there occasionally).

The loss and/or downgrading of daily newspapers & TV bulletins goes beyond the reduction in quality journalism.
- Belladonna 5.1
  
  9 March 2024 at 6:22 pm
  
  The loss and/or downgrading of daily newspapers & TV bulletins goes beyond the reduction in quality journalism.
  
  But does it?
  
  It seems to be an accepted fact that the audience for print and broadcast journalism is dropping away – and dropping away fast. Usage is concentrated heavily in the 65+ age bracket – and is almost negligible in the under 30 group. [Who, BTW, almost universally let algorithms curate their feeds]
  
  I think this is a battle that the current news sources have already lost.
  
  Now, whether quality journalism (however that is defined) can be reinvented to use the social media channels where the growing majority of Kiwis get their information – is a very different question. And whether the current TVNZ is a useful entity to accomplish this, is another.
gsays 6

9 March 2024 at 10:21 pm

Can't help but feel there is more to the paragraph than the once over lightly feel of it's presentation.

"The previous Labour government sought to amalgamate TVNZ and RNZ into a BBC-style entity strong and diverse enough to withstand the rapid decline in broadcast television and its news teams that remain so essential to balancing the pronouncements of Ministers or spokespeople alike."

Squandered opportunity springs to mind. Complacency? Incompetence? What is minister former Faafoi and Jackson's excuse?
randal mcmurphy 7

10 March 2024 at 9:33 am

PRAVDA or TRUD anyone?
Jono 8

10 March 2024 at 11:01 pm

In the movie V ..Hugo weaving character is introduced by circumventing the national broadcasters security….eg the media is completely controlled by the completely corrupt govt…very 1984. Natalie Portmans character..evey..is needed to do this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chqi8m4CEEY&t=64s&pp=ygUVdiBmb3IgdmVuZGV0dGEgc3BlZWNo

The point is…a…information can either be legit or propaganda…the internet isn't under the same scrutiny….b…the govt can use media for its narrative..eg usa
SPC 9

14 March 2024 at 9:22 pm

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/what-you-need-to-know/511466/cuts-and-closures-in-new-zealand-s-news-media-industry-what-you-need-to-know
SPC 10

15 March 2024 at 1:11 am

https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350202492/what-role-does-government-have-saving-new-zealand-media