The Prime Minister shared her views of the news media this week at Massey University’s Jeanz (Journalism Education Association of New Zealand) conference. What she had to say should be of importance, for journalists and many other people. Is there validity in her opinions of the media?
Work demands meant I was unable to attend. Normally the prime minister’s speeches are posted to her Beehive website but this one is not there. On asking her office for a copy, I was surprised to be told the only version was her hand- written notes. But this suggests it was a speech from her heart rather than a careful script from the Ninth Floor spin factory (Update December 16: Colin Peacock of National Radio’s Media Watch ran an item on it and described it as a thoughtful speech).
The DomPost took the offensive, its headline claiming it was a case of PM rips into journalists after ‘attacks’.
“Prime Minister Helen Clark has criticised the media, accusing journalists of lacking general knowledge and being too young to remember seminal events in New Zealand’s history,” the DomPost said, adding: “Miss Clark also criticised a newspaper campaign against the Electoral Finance Act. She said the Government had put up with weeks and months of full-blooded attacks from the New Zealand Herald.”
As someone with 20 years experience in political journalism, all I can say to the latter is: “Well what does she expect?” It is one of the media’s important functions to be a watchdog of the government, not a lapdog, to be the surrogate opposition at times rather than a simple purveyor of the doings and utterances of others. We need much more of it.
But there was clearly more to Clark’s speech than the DomPost’s predictable conflict angle. The university’s own Massey News headlined its account Journalists lack general knowledge, says PM.
This story portrayed a prime minister who shrugs her shoulders when shrugging is called for.
According to Massey News, she said politicians had to put up with a lot of attack stories, critical cartoons and editorials, but there was no point in complaining. “You say, that’s life, get on with it.” She argued the Government was more open to scrutiny by the news media than in the past and recalled former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon ejecting journalist and cartoonist Tom Scott from a Parliamentary news conference. “Can you imagine that happening today?”
Both reports described Clark as concerned with the lack of experience in today’s newsrooms. The political editors on the two main television channels were too young to remember seminal events like the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, the 1981 Springbok tour and the sending of frigates to protest against nuclear tests at Mururoa, she said. “Muldoon and David Lange are basically ancient history too and World War I and II are antediluvian.”
In this she raises a serious journalism issue which has concerned me for a long time. The redundancies, mergers, closures, takeovers and downdumbing of the mainstream media over the past two decades have stripped the industry of its experienced people and institutional memory.
Until the 1980s, news media owners generally saw themselves as providing an important public service as well as needing to make a profit. Today all but the pretence of public service has vanished. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television and now the Internet are seen by multinational corporates and private equity funds simply as vehicles to deliver audiences to advertisers for the biggest profit possible at the lowest cost to the shareholders.
The coincidental dumbing down of the news since about 1990 is a threat to the informed functioning of our democracy. Celebrity trumps politics every time unless the politics involves a celebrity, a scandal, a crime or all three. Most news outlets no longer even bother, for example, with routine reporting of local bodies, whose doings affect everyone on a more basic level than what is hatched in the Beehive. Almost everything is celebrity, crime, tearjerking and scandal. Hardly anything is published or broadcast that would help the average citizen make sense of the society around them.
Until relatively recently, newsrooms were staffed by a mixture of crusty old men with a cynical outlook on life but decades of journalistic experience; a middle layer of solid, dependable men and women in their 30s and 40s whose experience meant they excelled at important rounds like politics, local bodies, health and education; and a similar sized group of “young thrusters” in their 20s who made up for their lack of experience with the enthusiasm with which they worked the police desk and chased ambulances and fire engines.
Today’s newsrooms are staffed mostly by young women – very few men now take up journalism – fresh from journalism school who stay for a couple of years before departing for overseas, or public relations, or both. Indeed, many journalism course graduates now go straight to public relations without gaining any newsroom experience at all, because public relations is where the money is. The pay in journalism, which was good 20 years ago, is today pathetic. There are few reporters left with more than a few years’ experience, those on television are chosen mainly for their looks, and redundancies have removed most of the crusty roundsmen with life experience who actually knew who Muldoon, Kirk, Lange, Douglas and the many other key figures who made New Zealand what it is today were.
Were Helen Clark the cynical manipulator she is painted by editorial writers and the baying mob of talkback radio and the blogosphere, she would welcome this state of affairs, not be recognising it for the serious threat to the democratic process that it is.
The reporting of politics, and of almost everything else happening in New Zealand today, is shallow and facile. This helps nobody. Not the politicians whose doings deserve to be reported in context and in depth, not the public who are being fed pap, not the media owners who are destroying their product and losing audiences and advertisers in droves, and especially not the journalists who are prostituting their profession by serving up drivel.
Journalists who care need to make a stand and demand proper recognition of the role of the media from its owners and the establishment, demand that in-depth, contextual reporting gets space and airtime around the gloss and garbage, and demand salary levels sufficient to keep experienced journalists in the profession. But don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
18 Comments
December 12, 2007 at 10:44 pm
I must say, Poneke, it is a pleasure to read well-reasoned and lucid argument without the usual plethora of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which infest most blog sites.
Keep up the good work.
December 13, 2007 at 8:21 am
Thank you, Heathcote, however to keep myself in my place, were someone in my profession short in the spelling and grammar department, it would be a cold day in hell.
December 13, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I agree almost 100% with your comments. As one of the crusty old journos (starting out as a cadet reporter before polytech or university courses existed), I was made redundant from Radio NZ in its big cost-cutting round of the late 1980s. I still work in journalism, albeit in a niche market where experience and institutional knowledge is respected. The day TVOne led the 6pm news with Paris Hilton I realised Armageddon had come and no-one had noticed. I doubt the Second Coming will rate more than a paragraph on the entertainments page.
December 17, 2007 at 11:31 am
It is refreshing to find that I am not the only one searching for in depth comment in newspapers, television and radio. I feel that I am living in a vacuum. If there was as much analysis of the things that matter to us on a national and local level, the things that actually affect our lives, as there is for rugby, we would be living in a very lively environment indeed. It seems that journalists are happy to jump to ill-informed conclusions and judgements … perhaps because it is easier … and we all are the poorer for it.
December 17, 2007 at 12:42 pm
The solution is obvious. Give Paris Hilton the job of Prime Minister of New Zealand. “Lack of coverage” will then only apply to parts of her anatomy.
December 17, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Yes yes and yes.
December 17, 2007 at 1:01 pm
It’s the advertisers who control the news; the Paris Hilton story leads because its gets the audience the advertisers want to reach: the twentysomething demographic.
December 17, 2007 at 1:05 pm
On asking her office for a copy, I was surprised to be told the only version was her hand- written notes.
So transcribing handwritten notes or a tape recording is just one more skill they don’t teach at at journalism school nowadays? Clark is certainly a lot more relaxed than when she first became leader of the Opposition, and wouldn’t give an interview without a press secretary in tow taking notes. (And to be fair, I wouldn’t say her mistrust of the media at the time was pure paranoia when women politicians seemed to have more attention paid to their clothes than their work.)
And thanks, Mr. McNeil, for a reminder of the good old days when the laconic Kiwi reporter would never let apocalyptic hyperbole infect his copy.
And isn’t it fair comment to point out the irony of Clark taking an ephebiphobic sideswipe at the (relative) youth of some senior journalists, after appointing Darren Hughes (30) to Cabinet. I’d also expect a typically withering response if anyone tried to make an election issues out of the fact that the recently announced Labour candidates for Rimutaka and Epsom are in their mid-twenties.
If you want to talk about ill-informed conclusions, drawing some correlation between age and wisdom would have to come close to top of the list.
December 17, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Colin peacock had some scratchy audio on Media Watch – someone obviously taped some of the speech.
The big things I want from media are:
- not to treat everything as a two headed conflict and conclude that competing quotes equals balance
- just cos someone says it doesn’t make it so or a story ie test the hypothesis and if it doesn’t stand up then don’t turn it into a “john Smith denies…” story. That is lazy.
- following on from above, not all Kiwi battlers are always telling the whole story when it comes to their struggle street stories, and not all businesses are bad and heartless.
- don’t trust the numbers and claims in a media release just because of the source – check them (calculators, google and wiki can be a great but not unqualified help). Govts, business and unions have been known to fudge the details in pursuit of an end. That fudging is often a better story than reprinting a press release uncritically. Ask ‘why are they saying this?’ or follow the money.
- think local angle
- just cos the Herald/DomPost ran it doesn’t make it true or important. New is an important part of the word news (Radio live I;m looking at you…)
- (no offence) blogs are not always reliable news/commentary sources… Was Public Address’s self proclaimed ‘word of the year’ worth 5 mins of morning report? Will Kiwiblog’s poll on pollies of the year get similar given it is just as scientific and gets a similar audience?
- Also media organisations and journalists should be a bit less precious about their rights and any criticism of their performance. Yes you do make mistakes and show poor judgement and you would do your credibility a whole lot of good to actually up front admit it when you got it wrong, rather than having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the conclusion (cf the review of the PCC)
December 17, 2007 at 1:55 pm
A very interesting and measured opinion. I am concenred at the low quality of journalism in NZ and I wonder if a public service broadcaster (TV, net and radio) like the ABC or BBC may help to provide some useful quality training for cadet and journeyman journos, some standards of reporting overall and some incentive for the commercial media to improve their game. BTW – Craig R, I find it strange that you compare Darren Hughes (a junior Minister outside Cabinet) with Espiner and Garner (both political editors), now if the front bench was made up of 30 year olds you might have a point.
December 17, 2007 at 2:52 pm
BTW – Craig R, I find it strange that you compare Darren Hughes (a junior Minister outside Cabinet) with Espiner and Garner (both political editors), now if the front bench was made up of 30 year olds you might have a point.
Jono: I find it rather strange that some folks seem to think the newsrooms of this country are stocked with pimple cream and bottle warmers too. I know Darren and while I’d never vote for him, I don’t think that his youth is any more of an indication of his competence or otherwise to be an MP, or hold a ministerial warrant, than it was for Marilyn Waring (22 when she entered Parliament in 1975), Simon Upton (26 when he followed her in 1984, 32 when he entered Cabinet). I don’t recall Clark ever making the mistake of patronising either as know-nothing younglings, no matter how much she disagreed with them politically.
I’d also note that Clark’s own chief press secretary, Kathryn Street, was certainly a (ugh) ‘young thruster’ at Radio New Zealand; and when she ‘went over to the dark side’ of ministerial spin doctoring, the Press Gallery lost someone who was genuinely well-respected by her colleagues and across the political spectrum.
While sniffing about people’s ages is a useful distraction, I really thought the was the least substantive element of Clark’s address. It has the whiff of a stereotypical old fogey muttering about how police officers all look like children nowadays…
December 17, 2007 at 4:03 pm
As one of those who has left my beloved journalism for PR I must repeat what I’ve said elsewhere – I blame the publishing companies. The going rate for freelancers, 40c/word, means that you have to write thousands of words a week just to make ends meet. That isn’t a problem in and of itself, any of us I’m sure can bash out a couple of thousand words a day, but the problem is with the depth of it all. You simply don’t have time to interview, transcribe and think about more than one or two interviews per story.
Of course NZ journalism is shallow when that happens. Of course you end up with junior reporters who go unmentored turning in rubbish that just gets printed. The publishers do not care a jot for journalism – they’re more interested in the classified ads and always have been.
I’m enjoying my job in PR. It’s refreshing to work for a company that has money to spend on staff.
But not a day goes by when I don’t miss journalism and the deadlines. I have ink in my veins but sadly I also need to put food on my table. I have children and a mortgage to support and today’s pay rates for journalists just don’t cut it. Until they do, the era of journalism as fourth estate and governmental watchdog is likely to have gone the way of the dodo.
December 17, 2007 at 4:31 pm
We started reading the Dom and watching local TV upon return to Godzone after a quarter century overseas four years ago. Now we don’t read the Dom and we don’t watch the TV – except occasionally the news, which we refer to as the ‘crime & sport report’ and is so poorly done and plagued by advertising that it usually goes off as soon as any overseas news is finished. We listen to the Concert Program for music and news and turn to BBC World for international news. Thank God we can listen to the BBC World Service during the night – otherwise we’d really be living in a very parochial Kiwi world – while much of the rest of the world moves on. NZ journalism – generally – is a huge disappointment, amateurish and shallow.
December 17, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Something I’ve been wondering about is whether it would be feasible to establish a trust, the NZ Online Guardian if you will, that would actually fund a certain number of freelance articles every year for online publication.
December 17, 2007 at 5:43 pm
The things that really affect your life are the one paragraph news items that are obscurely buried amid the advertising in the middle and back pages of your newspapers, with no sensational photographs attached.
December 17, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Whoa! Ima declare Missa Blogwriterman is hit the wide part of the nail with the fart part of the hammer. Burried it with one strike, too. Haven’t seen that since ‘Karate Kid’.
December 18, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of the PM’s comments. I’m not surprised that she singled out Duncan Garner. He seems for some reason to want to find a particularly noisy place to deliver his nightly political comments, then delivers them in a street-barker’s shout, too often descending into facile sneering, with little attempt at balance. Is this the Tui-ad school of journalism?
March 29, 2008 at 9:02 pm
The link to the Massey News article on the PM’s speech is now dead (March 29, 2008).