Why trust in the media is declining
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2:09 pm, April 10th, 2022 - 47 comments
Categories: covid-19, Deep stuff, health, Media, Politics, uncategorized -
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Mike Hosking had this spectacular rant about the media this week. He said:
Not remotely surprised trust in media is falling. It’s falling, according to the authors of this week’s latest report into the industry, at “an alarming rate.”
This is the AUT Trust in News in New Zealand report. They mark various organisations out of 10. Over the past three years overall it’s gone from 62%, as in 62% of us trust the media, down to 52%.
That’s barely over half. In a year’s time, at this rate, the majority of us won’t trust the media.
State-run and funded media has been hard hit. Iwi Radio, Māori Television, and TVNZ dropped more than 10% from the previous year. That is an indictment and we have every right to ask some serious questions around neutrality and whether we are getting value for money.
Here is the frustrating if not depressing thing for me, a person who has plied his trade in this sector for over 40 years, it is all so predictable. This is not a surprise. It has, not only been coming for years, it is, in too many cases, encouraged.
Too much of the media is biased. The danger in it is not the fact they are biased, it’s the fact they claim they aren’t. They claim they are the defenders of the truth. In that is the con.
Two things emerge from his article. Firstly without a shred of self reflection Hosking claims that reporters who claim to be defenders of truth are a con. His own byline says that he is someone who “ask[s] hard-hitting questions of those in power”. Maybe it is time for him to get a new byline.
Secondly his clear view is that the ravages that Fox news and Rupert Murdoch have had on the media industry internationally are not to blame. It is that damned State media that is the cause of the problems.
What he does not say is that Newstalk ZB and the Herald, two media outlets he has considerable say in, have also seen their trust rating decline. Over the past two years Newstalk ZB’s rating dropped from 6.2% to 5.7% and in the Herald the decline was from 6.3% to 5.7%. RNZ’s trust rating at 6.2% is significantly higher than either rating.
The report his comments is based on is pretty weird and allows significant room for quotes from people who oppose State support for media. If the writers drilled down even more they could have come up I am sure with comments about George Soros and World Government and Agenda 21. I am not sure why they did not mention these views.
The reported comments included these:
- “The greatest danger to news media in NZ is government funds and grants, as they “buy” the journalists and editors. Another danger is allowing interview access only to compliant journalists.” – Male, 55-64 years, Other/European
- “I am disgusted that we are unable to trust the mainstream media, who are now just the propaganda wing of the government. In interviews no interviewer askes the hard questions for fear of losing funding from the government.” – Female, 65-74 years
- “NZ news is sadly in the pocket of government and therefore not balanced – very sad for our country.” – Female, 45-54 years, Pasifika
- “All media tends to put their spin on the news. It would be far better for the facts only. The government should NOT be funding news outlets in any way.” – Male, 55-64 years, NZ European/Pākehā
- “I have noticed since Covid began the media aren’t asking the government the tough questions, it feels like the media are in bed with the government and there is only one narrative being talked about. I don’t trust mainstream media a single bit!” – Female, 35-44 years, NZ European/Pākehā
- “I think the media needs to be way more balanced and far less opinion and controversy based. It is very damaging. Headlines should be less misleading as well. I hate it!” – Female, 35-44 years, NZ European/Pākehā
- “Less journalistic opinion, please. Give both sides of the story and let us work it out for ourselves. Over the last five years, many stories have been one-sided with any alternative voice being dismissed. That’s largely why I choose not to pay for print or online media.” – Female, 45-54 years, Other
- “New Zealand has far too many right-wing and or conservative commentators in its newspapers. There is no balance. I want authoritative responsible and ethical journalism. I don’t need or want to hear more privileged white male reckons.” – Female, 55-64 years,
Both sets of views show increasingly polarised views of the causes of the decline in people’s faith depending clearly on the interviewee’s world view. Social media has a lot to answer for.
The number of people claiming that the Government has somehow bought the media is interesting. The report says that 26% of the sample do not trust the media because it is funded by the Government. Clearly Rupert Murdoch and Fox News’s offerings are more to their taste although when you think that the anti vax movement, NZ First supporters and erstwhile Act supporters would form most of these people it is not so surprising.
What would be good is an empirical study to show what effect state funding has on media. My personal view is that it is the only way to start to address balance against corporate media whose world view is terribly myopic. Complaining about the likes of New Zealand on Air or Maori Television shows an intolerance on alternative views that belies expression of the need to present both sides of a story.
This is a deeply important subject. It deserves more than the likes of Mike Hosking throwing unbalanced barbs at the Government for failing trust in the media primarily linked to the polarisation caused by the likes of Fox News and Rupert Murdoch.
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It will be particularly dark if the newsrooms of TVNZ and RNZ merge into one.
Some of the decline in trust would be assisted if Biden generated a bipartisan bill to treat all social media corporations like a publisher and subject to the same regulator.
Musk's recent stake in Twitter is also a very dark signal that its' algorithms will be even more permissive.
even more permissive. ?
Is that bad ? give us it all please warts n all . Surely better the sanitation of sunlight than the festering in the dark .
Remember Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Bidens Laptop, Tara Reade, January 6 'insurrection', Nicholas Sandmann, Kyle Rittenhouse, Brett Kavanaugh, Epstein cover up
Yes its very surprising why trust in the media is declining
Not to forget The Guardian framing the Spotify/Rogan/Young brouhaha as Spotify choosing Rogan over Young. Instead of 8t being a case of Young demanding his songs be removed from the platform.
Not so fast .
Media Watch says the figure of 41% includes social media as part of the 'media'
When its asked about 'traditional media' the numbers become 58% trust
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018837570/measuring-trust-is-tricky-with-suspicious-minds
Its a bit vague about numbers in the survey and when. Then there is this
In analogue times there was a truism–“the freedom of the press belongs to those that own one” and in many respects that has not changed, moneyed up capitalist bastards, one way or another, own and operate many media channels.
Study upon study has shown how algorithms work, and that is what has changed in my view. From a definable pool of media outlets, regardless of class bias, and with some accountability, we now have the equivalent of a busted mirror–believe what you want or believe in nothing. Nihilism is becoming increasingly acceptable.
The goal for authoritarians and right wingers is the absolute opposite of truth seeking–it is the driving down of popular interest and participation in politics.
Good choice of topic. As usual, I'd rather go deeper though. The world that is disappearing into the dustbin of history is the one in which everyone took the msm at face value. Critical thinking has exited acadaemia & is now percolating thro society.
You can see that in those comments. Vox pops means voice of the people & in the TVNZ newsroom I noticed how journos routinely sought to integrate it into their stories. It was a new trend masterminded by Paul Norris, the departmental head in the early '90s, but was driven by globalisation of the latest fashion trend: photojournalism.
Since I went to work there due to disgust at their chronic failure to include kiwis in the news I was delighted of course! Even thro the '80s the default was reliance on US propaganda & Brit (so-called) objectivity for balance – the most we ever got from here was carefully selected authority figures as talking heads. That neocolonial status quo shifted.
So now there's a deeper shift under way, in which many folk are self-selecting their sources. Broadcasting has been replaced by narrowcasting. Niche marketing, if you want to view it from the corporate perspective. But the joy of a media consumer lies in the internet freedom residual from the days when the originators & creators were often cowboys in perennial evasion of control systems.
https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0712703D:US
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation
https://www.eff.org/about/history
The ethos that drove the early internet development was liberation from original US military control (DARPA), use of universities to network, then take it to citizen users.
So money didn't kick in until the early years of the new millennnium. That's why you can still find useful sites that don't require viewers to pay. Such providers tend to be motivated by altruism. Ethos is therefore the key. Young rebels offended by system providers will look elsewhere. They may see normal but they operate like free radicals.
Dennis – I sometimes get irritated by your talent for linguistic effulgence, but at times you leave me in admiration. This is such a time – in-depth food for thought.
Yep agreed. It is a heavy duty topic and our democracy relies on us sorting this out pretty quickly.
I wrote this post in a bit of a hurry. Dennis's comment dives considerably deeper. If he wants to make a guest post I would be happy to put it up.
Thanks for the offer. I'll contemplate the possibility awhile. The trend is escalating & I feel diffident about any take on where it's headed – so may be better to wait for events to precipitate a fresh take on it. Also, writing as a radical centrist here makes me feel diffident about being too declarative. Someone in middle age with a career in news media would be best to sound out currently…
But yeah, this shifting in our deep social context is a remarkable thing to contemplate. I'm sure there will be more instances indicative of the trend.
What does concern me tho is the tower of Babel motif that looms in our culture from the distant past. A metaphor (?) that seems set to become relevant again. Think it originated in a biblical term for Babylon where the jews were captive for 40 years. As a multicultural center of empire, perhaps they were impressed by the inability of ethnicities present to talk to each other in a common tongue.
The more diverse our sources of news media, the more competing narratives get generated, the greater the difficulty to discern common ground. People may end up spending lots of time arguing – or avoiding each other.
Nice word, effulgence, although I couldn’t help myself thinking of a better descriptor of my emotions when reading comments.
The rise of far right influencers and conspiracy theorists might have something to do with it.
That 'you can't trust the news media' and that 'all politicians are corrupt,' is a time tested far right strategy to undermine democracy.
I know the OP is about trust in the media, but the much bigger issue is that trust in general is and has been declining for quite some time. Trust in just about anybody, be it a so-called expert or authority or just a fellow human, has been eroding slowly. With declining trust comes declining respect and with that people stop listening to each other altogether.
Weka said yesterday “we are losing the ability to both form arguments and tolerate them” (https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-09-04-2022/#comment-1881976), and this is both a symptom and cause of the misery we find ourselves in. On this site, debate and strong argument are key, but it comes at the cost of losing sight of the person, i.e. the commenter. The art of having a conversation between people without point-scoring or winning the argument has been lost completely, it seems.
The above is the ‘kind’ version of my cynical jaundiced view of this dog-eats-dog world that we have created.
From weka’s comment:
I have the distinct impression there are some on this site who are playing an intellectual one-up-man-ship game which is as boring as sitting on a lawn and watching it grow.
Its a turn-off for many people who want lively debate – preferably with a bit of humour added from time to time – where everybody feels they can participate.
Humour here can be influenced by some participants' partisan nature, resulting in outright nastiness.
I was not referring to such humour unless a person has asked for it which does happen from time to time.
I recall at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020 there were some wonderful quips, cartoons and videos that were designed to bring smiles and laughter across the board. They were sometimes aimed at Covid deniers – including Trump and co. – but they deserved to be laughed at.
I agree, things have got a little grim around here too.
Who said that quick wit is the sign of a sharp mind? Doesn’t matter, but our minds seem to be dull & blunted by Covid, at least mine is
That was actually my comment
Some folks here indeed seem to have very little to no interest in the other person except as a target/opponent to take down and increasingly by whatever means it takes. The anonymity on the site means, of course, that we know very little about other commenters except for what they choose to share with us. This makes it easier and perhaps too easy to become non-personal; some have a go at Putin, for example, as easily as they have a go at another commenter aka adversary because both are just abstract names to them and not people they actually know well (although they might think so, in a mono-dimensional way, of course!). Just as with abstract art, there are no rules for interpretation and everything becomes subjective and individualised. Except that we all know that personal taste is not really up for discussion. It does, however, make a good topic of conversation
Anyway, we’re getting a little off-topic here with regards to the OP.
"That was actually my comment."
Yes I know. Couldn't be bothered with the minutia. 🙂
Agreed. One of the ideas I have been playing with recently is to introduce a whole extra layer into the debate. We have done reasonably well in requiring contested claims of fact to be backed up with a reference. The rule is not fixed in concrete, but it certainly is being used and invoked often enough to make a useful difference.
Next level idea is to require that before you are allowed to attack another commenters argument that you have to summarise your theirs first – to their satisfaction. Only then can you put forward your own opposing case.
I know what you’re proposing and it is a foundational principle of good debating. Unfortunately, in debate here sometimes commenters re-phrase or para-phrase what the other has just said and sometimes (!) this is done so badly that one wonders whether they really have misunderstood or they’re not debating in good faith. Nobody has the time to second-guess people’s motivations and nobody here is a mind reader, so it would help if people would just say what they mean (and mean what they say).
Absolutely there is nothing original about this idea – and I accept that implementing it would not be easy. But still it is something worth aiming for I reckon.
The tricky part is establishing good faith during the setup. But then failure would be diagnostic of motivations in itself.
Agreed. I think it would take more time & effort and I wonder how many current commenters would stay around and hang in there. This blog site is a bit of hybrid between social media such as Twitter and Facebook and more conventional blog sites with a comment section rather than free-flowing debate (aka rants). The beauty is that it offers something for ‘everybody’ but the downside is that it is not the optimal format for anything in particular, e.g. anything goes, more or less. This is not so much criticism but more an observation and my opinion.
Great idea Red, this is a step taken in conflict resolution. Great tactic before conflict arises.
Perhaps best for some of us to practice the concept to start impacting the culture postively.
It isn't of course my idea, but I think the first time anyone has seriously suggested trying it out on the TS comment threads.
Honestly I have no idea how it might work out in practice – but I guess starting with a baby step somewhere would be the way forward. I cannot see this technique being universal, but it could be very applicable to those longer exchanges between only a few people.
Didn't Mike Hosking think he was unbiased enough to host the leaders debate a couple of cycles ago?
Yeah but that was then and now, as the above picture shows, he's currently not in service. As in serving as host, I mean. Puzzling, since folks have referred to him as host of a ZB radio show. Since that radio station was once owned by the state, I wonder if it got sold off & if so when. Could be he's actually serving corporate owners and just wears that logo on his forehead to pretend he's independent.
Funnily enough, the people who think govt contributing some funding to media companies means those companies will run propaganda for the govt never seem to have the slightest qualms about media companies being owned outright by private corporations or billionaires.
Oh no! The private sector is pure in its lack of any kind of contamination. Profit is not a dirty word, and there is no such thing as a profit-gouger! Nor would private Boards of Directors ever think of influencing who was appointed Editor, and those who influence the way the media present the "news".
Moreover, anything funded by the state is obviously sinister, Marxist state ownership and control!
Who is actually propelling us towards 1984, Big Brother, and Brave New World?
Nice to see reasoned, intelligent respectful debate. Thanks team
If listeners and readers of Mike Hosking find him most trustworthy what does that mean?
If listeners and readers of Mike Hosking find him most trustworthy compared to other outlets and people in them, what does that actually say about those consumers?
Trust is now an empty word; philosophically, religiously, socially, politically and epistemologically speaking. Credence/credulity seems to have ‘trumped’ the acceptance of authority, itself ultimately ungrounded, in favour of the centrality of subjective ‘belief’. Hosking’s audience trust him to the extent that they want to believe that what he says is true. The will to believe, and not the grounds for belief, is the issue here.
Without taking a political stance on this topic, I think there are a number of reasons why trust in the media is declining:
Firstly, our media just isn't very good due to the limited amount of time available for news and current affairs. This means often very complex topics are covered in sound-bites. A lot of people are just too lazy to look much further than that.
Since taking an interest in the Ukraine situation, I have been incredibly impressed with the indepth news coverage of topics on stations such as France 24 and DW, which provide a continuous news services. We simply don't have the population base to allow for that depth of news coverage.
Secondly, as a product of the first point, our news has become more infotainment rather than news. This means the emphasis is blowing issues into scandals to try and grab viewer attention. This means grubby tactics such as taking a few words from an interview and broadcasting them completely out of context to create the impression of something that was never intended to be meant.
Thirdly, there simply isn't time on our news channels to explore the various sides and arguments on a topic. This means that topics tend to be covered in a very superficial way. Those of us who do actually bother to dig a bit deeper and read a bit wider often are aware of this, and hence become very skeptical of what we see on MSM.
Fourthly, there has been a major decline in print media over recent years. At one point it was common for people to be subscribing to their local newspaper and having it delivered every morning. Print media had the space to cover topics in more depth. These days people have to be motivated enough to go online and seek out coverage on the topics that interest them.
Fifthly, due to the general decline in media over recent years, I don't think journalism is that well paid these days. If pay rates are low, then the quality of people getting into the trade is also likely to be low. If the people producing the news don't have the smarts or incentive to understand the issues at hand, how can we expect them to produce high quality news productions?
So, taking all that together, I think a lot of the reason for declining trust in media is that our news has descended into sound-bites due to the lack of time available for issues to covered. And that many people seem much more interested in being entertained these days rather than informed. This means news needs to be made exciting and scandalous enough for people to bother watching. However, as issues start to unfold, it starts becoming apparent that the superficial attention media were giving issues painted a picture quite different to what people eventually see unfold.
I guess the reporting of the Covid crisis in NZ is evidence of that. It seemed that the news was simply regurgitating the government line with very little question. Perhaps that type of coverage led in part to the protests at parliament.
Having government funding of media isn't necessarily a bad thing so long as there is strong protection against political influence of the funding. So, an independent body to administer funding should ensure that. However, if a government were able to stack that body with government stooges, it would definitely be a problem.
the media is in the business of selling goods and doing what it is told. of course cracks are there in the media construction of reality but they get papered over soon enough before the next edtion.
Hoskings sings for his supper filling a void Faafoi should have already with a code of conduct that pings management not the shock jocks.
A broadcast licence carries social responsibility. The owned media hate public broadcasting as it's not subscription based and tends to be objective.
“This is a deeply important subject. It deserves more than the likes of Mike Hosking throwing unbalanced barbs at the Government for failing trust in the media primarily linked to the polarisation caused by the likes of Fox News and Rupert Murdoch”
It say volumes that Mickey Savage finishes his piece with that line….obviously completely oblivious to the outrageous hypocrisy that he has neatly packaged up in that one paragraph….
The Liberal Centrist class and their media are so polarised politically themselves, so deeply fundamentalist and dogmatic that they cannot see that they themselves are at least equally to blame for the current polarisation that infects politics/society as the Right and their media arm are.
Sure Fox might have begun this disgusting media environment of division, half-truths, misinformation and extreme biases…but Liberal media learnt fast..until here we are now…with no difference between Right and Liberal media.
Let’s take our own RNZ’s coverage of the Trump years…in all the years of his leadership I cannot remember RNZ doing even one positive story on him…in-fact it was worse than that, throughout that time RNZ seemed to only employ US correspondents who were openly hostile to Trump…is that not causing ‘polarization’?…or doesn’t it matter if the people you are excluding and vilifying are people who you disagree with your politics…seems a lot like that to me.
As pretty much all Liberal media come from the same Class, it should actually come as little surprise to anyone that it is filled to the brim with a closed circle of self-perpetuating, self-gratifying, deeply narcissistic people who have absolutely no interest in fairness and balance in reporting…and that is a serious problem for us all.
Looking at a lot of the comments here, the general opinion is that the media is heavily slanted to the right. However, most commenters on kiwiblog etc would claim that MSM is incredibly slanted to the left, and could provide plenty of examples to back up their points.
So, I am not sure that complaining about the political alignment of journalists is particularly helpful. I think it is better to look at the quality of our journalism. As, if our news media is doing its job properly, the quality and balance of what is being presented to us shouldn't really be overly affected by the political perspective of the media people.
Further to my comments above, I think a good example of the decline in serious, quality journalism and broadcasting can be seen by what has happened to the 7-7.30 slot.
That used to be the domain of reasonably serious, insightful journalism with the likes of Paul Holmes and John Campbell. But these days, we have Seven Sharp, which is now very light weight and much more at the entertainment level of the scale.
So, when there is such a decline in serious, investigative journalism, how can that enhance trust in the media?
You state " Over the past two years Newstalk ZB’s rating dropped from 6.2% to 5.7% and in the Herald the decline was from 6.3% to 5.7%. RNZ’s trust rating at 6.2% is significantly higher than either rating."
Those are not percentages. They are ratings out of 10 where 1 was don't trust at all. Can I suggest editing it to remove the % symbols?
Also the 'trust' in the media also included 'SOCIAL media
'The 41 percent figure is for all media, including social media. ' says media watch
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018837570/measuring-trust-is-tricky-with-suspicious-minds
It was 58% trust for 'traditional media'
In my view the biggest cause of a decline in public trust of the media is the deliberate blurring of editorialising with news to elicit a primarily emotional response, the promotion of personalities and certain journalists as celebrities in their own right and the subsequent promotion and use of comment and opinion of these high profile personalities as sources of both news and authoritative editorial content. The blurring, too, of the presenting of comment from ex-politicians and lobbyists as sources of information and the reliance of PR from understaffed news rooms further undermines the line between editorialising and news.
This is corrosive because journalists are not elected, yet seek to insert themselves into the political process for reasons of status and controversy (making rather than reporting the news, obvious to much of their audience) and because readers/viewers/listeners can pretty easily discern the political leanings of journalists and publications via their opinions and opinion pieces.
Since the MSM in general is completely unrepresentative of the general population – more white, more middle class (and thus supportive of the status quo), and (usually) more liberal – it easily alienates any segment of their audience that isn't part of the same class with them and makes it much easier for their audience to simply dismiss the news as the opinion of someone/group you don't like.
The net result is "last reader capture" – where increasingly strident polarisation, siloing and radicalisation of a declining audience is required to keep up engagement of a shrinking audience.
Why would anyone have faith in NZ media? Even our state broadcaster has weather presenters reporting news now and as superficially as "Russia is threatening the world with consequences it has never seen , but in our top story Kim Kardashian has broken the internet again with a racy selfie" it's embarrassing and peak cringe how superficially our journalists understand stories.
Unless there's a serious event going on noone under thirty is watching NZ media unless they work in media or can't afford the internet and even in time of disaster my generation will stream the press conference directly from the social media so we don't have to see any NZ commercials or previews for NZ programing. Ugh peak cringe
My generation are working, reading, gaming, streaming or memeing, we ain't watching the news , baby we are the news. A bunch of smug self important neoliberals superficially giving us their hot take ain't it for us.
And if getting comedians and influencers to speak down to us and use catchphrases could save NZ media spin off tv wouldnt have died. Cringe.
The govt needs to however actually on this an every issue stop letting other people take the narrative for them, they need to constantly remind the public as do media that the media relief package was to provide advertising revenue by buying ads for the COVID response. Those annoying ads weren't cheap. Advertising which is the only way media makes money, during a time when no retailers , hospo providers were buying advertising . It didn't buy media, in fact the media were nastier than ever screaming at the pm so much at the time the public got disgusted with media, Winston Peters who signed off on the package needs to be asked why he signed off on the media package if he didn't like it.
I never agreed with buying media. I said then and I say now that those neoliberal outlets who have spread propaganda and fear about unions, housing regulations, bashed every racial and sexual minority on the planet should have been left to sink or float on their capitalist beliefs
As for tax payer funded journalism I don't see how "the joys of an unplanned walk" "every biscuit in NZ ranked by taste and texture" and endless pathetic reports on jeggings , yoga and the countless brain farts from upper middle class idiots is an appropriate use of tax payers money. Cut it. Let the spin off survive on its own two feet.
As for tvnz again noone watches it unless there's a meme or were taking the piss out of it. I'll watch BBC or CBC because they have charters that tvnz doesn't have and the second it starts costing a cent more than it should privatize it too.
Why should my generation pay taxes for this crap? We don't watch it. We're already paying taxes for pensions for the cradle to the grave generation who stupidly voted to get rid of their own super plans in the 70s for a quick buck, who have opposed anything that would make housing more affordable, who pulled up every ladder they went up and have the audacity to think my generation is entitled and lazy, why should we fund boomers tv shows just cos half of them can't work out Netflix?
Stop funding crappy lifestyle reports on jeggings, stop funding neoliberal programming and while you're at it, if my generation are going to be locked out of pensions, home ownership, means test the pension.
'
The Fake News Casters
Fake News, False Narratives, Conspiracy Theories, Disinformation Campaigns, Useful Idiots, The Far Right and War.
[Too many links – deleted in full]
Mod note
'
Post-truth politics
From Wikipedia
But for real post-truth politics, instead of competing narratives, only one narrative is allowed.
[What is your point dredging up Mod notes from more than 5 years ago from a Mod who’s no longer a Mod here? Instead of again spamming the site with comments with too many links you’re now spamming a good Post with irrelevant nonsense that seems to suggest your fragile ego is still hurting after 5 years. Stop playing the victim, as nobody is interested in your personal baggage and feelings of how unfairly you’ve been treated here. You’re not even close to being some kind of freedom fighter or truth crusader on this site, so stop that pretentious behaviour too. You’re really testing my patience with this – Incognito]
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