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.
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