This week, Minister of Racing Winston Peters announced the end of greyhound racing in the interests of animal welfare.

Soon after, a law to criminalise killing of redundant racing dogs was passed under urgency in Parliament.

The next day, the minister introduced the Racing Industry Amendment Bill to preserve the TAB’s lucrative monopoly on sports betting which provides 90 percent of the racing industry’s revenue.

“Offshore operators are consolidating a significant market share of New Zealand betting — and the revenue which New Zealand’s racing industry relies on is certainly not guaranteed,” Peters told Parliament in support of the Bill.

But offshore tech companies have also been pulling the revenue rug out from under local news media companies for years, and there has been no such speedy response to that.

Digital platforms offer cheap and easy access to unlimited overseas content — and tech companies’ dominance of the digital advertising systems and the resulting revenue is intensifying.

Profits from online ads shown to New Zealanders go offshore — and very little tax is paid on the money made here by the likes of Google and Facebook.

On Tuesday, Media Minister Paul Goldsmith did introduce legislation to repeal advertising restrictions for broadcasters on Sundays and public holidays.

“As the government we must ensure regulatory settings are enabling the best chance of success,” he said in a statement.

The media have been crying out for this low-hanging fruit for years — but the estimated $6 million boost is a drop in the bucket for broadcasters, and little help for other media.

The big bucks are in tech platforms paying for the local news they carry.

Squeezing the tech titans
In Australia, the government did it three years ago with a bargaining code that is funnelling significant sums to news media there. It also signalled the willingness of successive governments to confront the market dominance of ‘big tech’.

When Goldsmith took over here in May he said the media industry’s problems were both urgent and acute – likewise the need to “level the playing field”.

The government then picked up the former government’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, modelled on Australia’s move.

But it languishes low down on Parliament’s order paper, following threats from Google to cut news out of its platforms in New Zealand – or even cut and run from New Zealand altogether.

Six years after his Labour predecessor Kris Faafoi first pledged to follow in Australia’s footsteps in support of local media, Goldsmith said this week he now wants to wait and see how Australia’s latest tough measures pan out.

(The News Bargaining Incentive announced on Thursday could allow the Australian government to tax big digital platforms if they do not pay local news publishers there)

Meanwhile, news media cuts and closures here roll on.

The lid keeps sinking in 2024

“I’ve worked in the industry for 30 years and never seen a year like it,” RNZ’s Guyon Espiner wrote in The Listener this week, admitting to “a sense of survivor’s guilt”.

Just this month, 14 NZME local papers will close and more TVNZ news employees will be told they will lose jobs in what Espiner described as “destroy the village to save the village” strategy.

Whakaata Māori announced 27 job losses earlier this month and the end of Te Ao Māori News every weekday on TV. Its te reo channel will go online-only.

Digital start-ups with lower overheads than established news publishers and broadcasters are now struggling too.

“The Spinoff had just celebrated its 10th birthday when a fiscal hole opened up. Staff numbers are being culled, projects put on ice and a mayday was sent out calling for donations to keep the site afloat,” Espiner also wrote in his bleak survey for The Listener.

Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve has charted the economic erosion of the media all year at The Spinoff and on its weekly podcast The Fold.

In a recent edition, he said he could not carry on “pretending things would be fine” and did not want The Spinoff to go down without giving people the chance to save it.

“We get some (revenue) direct from our audience through members, some commercial revenue and we get funding for various New Zealand on Air projects typically,” Greive told RNZ Mediawatch this week.

“The members’ bucket is pretty solid. The commercial bucket was going quite well, and then we just ran into a brick wall. There has been a real system-wide shock to commercial revenues.

“But the thing that we didn’t predict which caused us to have to publish that open letter was New Zealand on Air. We’ve been able to rely on getting one or two projects up, but we’ve missed out two rounds in a row. Maybe our projects . . .  weren’t good enough, but it certainly had this immediate, near-existential challenge for us.”

Critics complained The Spinoff has had millions of dollars in public money in its first decade.

“While the state is under no obligation to fund our work, it’s hard to watch as other platforms continue to be heavily backed while your own funding stops dead,” Greive said in the open letter.

The open letter said Creative NZ funding had been halved this year, and the Public Interest Journalism Fund support for two of The Spinoff’s team of 31 was due to run out next year.

“I absolutely take on the chin the idea that we shouldn’t be reliant on that funding. Once you experience something year after year, you do build your business around that . . .  for the coming year. When a hard-to-predict event like that comes along, you are in a situation where you have to scramble,” Grieve told Mediawatch.

“We shot a flare up that our audience has responded to. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re really pleased with the strength of support and an influx of members.”

He was the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery NZ and oversaw the biggest and most comprehensive news closure of the year — the culling of the entire Newshub operation.

“It was heart-wrenching because we had looked at and tried everything leading into that announcement. I go back to July 2022, when we started to see money coming out of the market and the cost of living crisis starting to appear,” Kyne told Mediawatch this week.

“We started taking steps immediately and were incredibly prudent with cost management. We would get to a point where we felt reasonably confident that we had a path, but the floor beneath our feet — in terms of the commercial market — kept falling. You’re seeing this with TVNZ right now.”

Warner Brothers Discovery is a multinational player in broadcast media. Did they respond to requests for help?

“They were empathetic. But Warner Brothers Discovery had lost 60-70 percent of its share price because of the issues around global media companies as well. They were very determined that we got the company to a position of profitability as quickly as we possibly could. But ultimately the economics were such that we had to make the decision.”

Smaller but sustainable in 2025? Or managed decline?

Kyne did a deal with Stuff to supply a 6pm news bulletin to TV channel Three after the demise of Newshub in July.

He is one of a handful of people who know the sums, but Stuff is certainly producing ThreeNews now with a fraction of the former budget for Newshub.

Can media outlets settle on a shape that will be sustainable, but smaller — and carry on in 2025 and beyond? Or does Kyne fear media are merely managing decline if revenue continues to slump?

“It’s slightly terrifying because the downward pressures are going to continue into next year. Three created a sustainable model for the 6pm bulletin to continue.

“Stuff is an enormous newsgathering organisation, so they were able to make it work and good luck to them. I can see that bulletin continuing to improve as the team get more experience.”

No news is really bad news
If news can’t be sustained at scale in commercial media companies even on reduced budgets, what then?

Some are already pondering a “post-journalism” future in which social media takes over as the memes of sharing news and information.

How would that pan out?

“We might be about to find out,” Greive told Mediawatch.

“Journalism doesn’t have a monopoly on information, and there are all kinds of different institutions that now have channels. A lot of what is created . . .  has a factual basis. Whether it’s a TikTok-er or a YouTuber, they are themselves consumers of news.

“A lot of people are replacing a habit of reading the newspaper and listening to ZB or RNZ with a new habit — consuming social media. Some of it has a news-like quality but it doesn’t have vetting of the information and membership of the Media Council . . .  as a way of restraining behaviour.

“We’ve got a big question facing us as a society. Either news becomes this esoteric, elite habit that is either pay-walled or alternatively there’s public media. If we [lose] freely-accessible, mass-audience channels, then we’ll find out what democracy, the business sector, the cultural sector looks like without that.

“In communities where there isn’t a single journalist, a story can break or someone can put something out . . .  and if there’s no restraint on that and no check on it, things are going to happen.

“In other countries, most notably Australia, they’ve recognised this looming problem, and there’s a quite muscular and joined-up regulator and legislator to wrestle with the challenges that represents. And we’re just not seeing that here.”

They are in Australia.

In addition to the News Bargaining Code and the just-signalled News Bargaining Incentive, the Albanese government is banning social media for under-16s. Meta has responded to pressure to combat financial scam advertising on Facebook.

Here, the media policy paralysis makes the government’s ferries plan look decisive. What should it do in 2025?

To-do in 2025
“There are fairly obvious things that could be done that are being done in other jurisdictions, even if it’s as simple as having a system of fines and giving the Commerce Commission the power to sort of scrutinise large technology platforms,” Greive told Mediawatch.

“You’ve got this general sense of malaise over the country and a government that’s looking for a narrative. It’s shocking when you see Australia, where it’s arguably the biggest political story — but here we’re just doing nothing.”

Not quite. There was the holiday ad reform legislation this week.

“Allowing broadcasting Christmas Day and Easter is a drop in the ocean that’s not going to materially change the outcome for any company here,” Kyne told Mediawatch.

“The Fair Digital News Bargaining bill was conceived three years ago and the world has changed immeasurably.

“You’ve seen Australia also put some really thoughtful white papers together on media regulation that really does bring a level of equality between the global platforms and the local media and to have them regulated under common legislation — a bit like an Ofcom operates in the UK, where both publishers and platforms, together are overseen and managed accordingly.

“That’s the type of thing we’re desperate for in New Zealand. If we don’t get reform over the next couple of years you are going to see more community newspapers or radio stations or other things no longer able to operate.”

Grieve was one of the media execs who pushed for Commerce Commission approval for media to bargain collectively with Google and Meta for news payments.

Backing the Bill – or starting again?
Local media executives, including Grieve, recently met behind closed doors to re-assess their strategy.

“Some major industry participants are still quite gung-ho with the legislation and think that Google is bluffing when it says that it will turn news off and break its agreements. And then you’ve got another group that think that they’re not bluffing, and that events have since overtaken [the legislation],” he said.

“The technology platforms have products that are always in motion. What they’re essentially saying — particularly to smaller countries like New Zealand — is: ‘You don’t really get to make laws. We decide what can and can’t be done’.

“And that’s quite a confronting thing for legislators. It takes quite a backbone and quite a lot of confidence to sort of stand up to that kind of pressure.”

The government just appointed a minister of rail to take charge of the current Cook Strait ferry crisis. Do we need a minister of social media or tech to take charge of policy on this part of the country’s infrastructure?

“We’ve had successive governments that want to be open to technology, and high growth businesses starting here.

“But so much of the internet is controlled by a small handful of platforms that can have an anti-competitive relationship with innovation in any kind of business that seeks to build on land that they consider theirs,” Greive said.

“A lot of what’s happened in Australia has come because the ACCC, their version of the Commerce Commission, has got a a unit which scrutinises digital platforms in much the same way that we do with telecommunications, the energy market and so on.

“Here there is just no one really paying attention. And as a result, we’re getting radically different products than they do in Australia.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Many observers said this had been coming but few seemed to have a plan for it, including the government. 

Mediawatch looks at what viewers will lose, efforts to resist the cuts and talks to the news chief at Newshub which is set to close completely.

By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

On the AM show last Wednesday, newsreader Nicky Styris suffered a frog in the throat at the wrong time.

Host Melissa Chan Green took over her bulletin while Styris quickly recovered. Minutes later Styris had to take the place of no-show panel guest Paula Bennett.

Just before that, viewers saw co-host Lloyd Burr on his knees fixing the studio flat-pack furniture with a drill.

Three hours later they were at an all-staff meeting at which executives from offshore owner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) confirmed the complete closure of Newshub by midyear.

On TVNZ’s Midday news soon after, reporter Kim Baker-Wilson was live from the scene of the announcement of Newshub’s demise.

The previous day the roles were reversed, with Newshub’s Simon Shepherd outside TVNZ’s building reporting TVNZ’s Midday had been scrapped, along with the late news Tonight and Fair Go. 

On Wednesday TVNZ also confirmed flagship current affairs show Sunday will cease next month.

So as things stand, it’s the end of the line for all news bulletins on TVNZ other than 1 News at 6, though the news-like shows Breakfast and Seven Sharp survive because they accommodate lucrative sponsored content (“activations” in the ad business) as well as ads.

And TV channel Three will be entirely news-free for the first time in its 35-year history.

Senior journalists led by investigations editor Michael Morrah presented a proposal for a stripped-back and shortened news bulletin to keep the Newshub name alive (and some jobs) but while WBD took it seriously, it eventually turned the idea down.

Another media player to fill the Newshub void?
There have been rumours and reports that other media companies were talking to WBD about filling the Newshub at 6 news void.

Initially light-on-detail reports of lifelines suggested a possible sale of Newshub to another media company. Then there were reports of other media companies pitching to make news for WBD on a much-reduced budget.

Among the names mentioned in media despatches was NZME, which has radio and video studios and journalists around the country, though most of them are north of Taupo.

NZME told Stuff “it was not currently part of the process”.

The Herald’s Media Insider column reported on Tuesday that Newshub was “set to receive a lifeline” and understood Stuff was “among the leading contenders.”

However when Stuff itself reported on Wednesday that Stuff was “understood to be a likely contender,” a spokesperson for Stuff declined to comment to Stuff’s reporter on whether Stuff had been in talks with WBD — or not.

RNZ said it wasn’t in the frame for this. (It recently killed off the video version of its only daily news show with pictures, Checkpoint).

Sky TV has production facilities galore and its free-to-air TV channel Sky Open currently runs a Newshub-made news bulletin at 5:30 each weekday. Sky has only said it was an “interesting idea” — or words to that effect.

“At this point there is no deal,” WBD local boss Glen Kyne told reporters after confirming the closure of Newshub on Wednesday.

Kyne also said the company’s “door has been open to all internal and external feedback and ideas, and we will continue to be”.

But anyone opening that door clearly isn’t willing to do it in daylight — or  tell the rest of the media about it.

Lifelines likely?

If there is to be any kind of “Newshub-lite” lifeline, a key question is: what is WBD prepared to pay for the programme?

Presumably not much, given that they said they had no choice but to carve the cost of Newshub — amounting to tens of millions a year — from its bottom line in line with its reducing revenue.

So is it worth any major media company’s while to commit to making news in video for another outlet? And it would have to be done in a hurry because the last Newshub bulletins screen on July 5.

When Newshub’s owners first announced they wanted to get rid of it in late February, its former chief editor Hal Crawford told Mediawatch the problem with finding a buyer was that minimum viable cost for a credible TV news operation was greater than anyone here was prepared to spend.

Longtime TV3 news boss Mark Jennings (now co-editor of Newsroom) said any substitute service on the fraction of the current budget would have another problem — TVNZ’s 1 News.

“You’re up against a sophisticated TVNZ product so viewers will have an immediate comparison. Probably that won’t be favorable for Warner Brothers,” he told RNZ.

TVNZ has its own news production problems after the cuts they confirmed this week.

“We’re proposing to establish a new long-form team within our news operation, which would continue to bring important current affairs and consumer affairs stories to Aotearoa in a different way on our digital platforms.”

TVNZ declined Mediawatch‘s request to speak to TVNZ’s news chief Phil O’Sullivan about that at this time.

Newshub’s news boss responds

One who did though is Newshub news boss Richard Sutherland — appointed as interim senior director of news at Newshub in January.

It was his second spell at Newshub, during a career in broadcast news spanning four decades at almost every significant national news outlet in the country, including RNZ, where he stepped down as head of news a year ago.

In that time he’s experienced many a financial crisis in the business — but did he see this one coming?

“The last couple of weeks has been coming for quite some time. I think that the so-called legacy news operations have almost done too good a job of keeping the lights on and papering over the cracks. And we just got to a point [the industry] couldn’t paper over the cracks any longer.

“But when you look at audience behaviour and the fall off and revenue, particularly in the advertising market, then that doesn’t surprise me that we’ve got to where we’ve got to.”

But if the audience was big, the ad revenue would be too?

“It’s certainly by no means as big as it once was simply because people have other options available to them. The cliche is that you’re not in a war with the other media, but in a war for people’s attention.”

“It’s not so much the audience has changed so much as the dynamics of the advertising market that has really changed over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. The digital advertising — and the big two main players in that space, Facebook and Google — are eating everybody’s lunch.”

TV ad income on the slide
Annual advertising stats that came out this very week show media in 2023 attracted $3.36 billion across the whole of the media industry — about the same as in 2022.

But TV advertising revenue of $517 million in 2022 slumped to $443 million last year.

“That’s why what the TV industry has found is that can’t cut its costs fast enough to meet the falloff in the advertising income,” Sutherland told Mediawatch. 

Digital-only ad revenue rose by $88 million in 2023 — but it’s Google and Facebook which secures the vast bulk of that.

But if this has been coming for a number of years, as Sutherland says, has there been enough planning for it?

After the closure of Newshub was mooted by its owner last month, seven of Sutherland’s colleagues led by investigations editor Michael Morrah put together a transition plan to keep Newshub on air in a few days.

Shouldn’t this sort of transition planning have been done at high levels over recent years right across the television business?

“Every media company that I’ve worked for or have observed over the last few years has been trying to innovate and get to a more sustainable level. The revenue was just collapsing far faster than anyone ever anticipated.”

“It annoys me when I hear people say older media haven’t innovated enough. We’ve done a lot of innovation. That’s pretty lazy politics to just say: ‘You need to innovate.’

“It’s also lazy politics to say, the government should just come in and bail everyone out. New Zealand Incorporated needs to have a big conversation about what it wants to do with the media and how it wants to fund it.

“For the past few years the industry has been like so many rats in a sack, fighting with each chasing a smaller and smaller amount of ad dollars. We need to get together and work out how we get ourselves collectively out of the sack,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.

Shortly before TVNZ and Newshub announced their cuts, there was a meeting of chief executives including Newshub’s owners Warner Bros Discovery to discuss a shared new service. TVNZ rejected the idea.

“But a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And I would like to think that eventually we’ll get to a point where we can actually have honest and productive conversations about what we can do to help each other as well as maintaining a degree of competition, but also realising that if we just keep fighting with each other, we’re not going to have a sustainable industry,” Sutherland said.

Would Sutherland want to work for a low-budget alternative to Newshub stave off the complete closure? And would Kiwis want such a service?

“There is a segment of the audience that appreciates a very highly produced, well-curated news bulletin every night. And there’s large numbers of people who no longer see that as part of their media diet.

“The trick is to provide options so that people can get what they want when they want it.

“It’s not really for me to say what a possible replacement for Newsub might look like. I’m well away from those negotiations.

“If we reach a stage where the media scene here withers away to nothing, there’ll be no-one to tell the stories. The media uncovers a lot of shady stuff in this country.

“And the fear of media coverage prevents people in positions of power and authority at all levels doing a lot of shady stuff. So it is important to document the ructions of the New Zealand media scene just like we do in other parts of the country.”

Minister in a corner

The day the axe fell at Newshub and at TVNZ, New Zealand’s screen producers’ guild Spada said “while the newsroom cuts have dominated media coverage to date, it is actually the whole production sector being impacted”.

“While TVNZ and Three aren’t giving definitive numbers at this time, Spada has calculated that we are looking at around $50 million coming out of our sector,” said president Irene Gardiner.

Spada is also asking the government to exempt screen funding agencies from the percent public spending cuts and to force the international streaming platform to support local production.

Spada called for” swift and decisive action” from the government on this.

Should they be holding their breath?

When confronted by reporters for a response to the current TV news crisis, Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee said: “If only I was a magician, if I could actually just snap up a solution, that would be fantastic.

“But I’m not a magician, and I’m trying to find a solution to modernise the industry . . .  there is a process happening.”

But the media are not expecting magic — just a plan rather than assertions of a process with no timeline.

She has repeatedly said she’s preparing policy in a paper to take to cabinet, but refused to give any details.

On RNZ’s Checkpoint, persistent and pointed questions from Lisa Owen yielded few further clues.

Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis-Allan told Melissa Lee she was being “weird and shady” and the next morning ZB’s Mike Hosking told her she was using “buzzwords that don’t mean anything” and was doomed to fail.

Stuff’s Tova O’Brien reported that the need to consult coalition allies on policy means it can’t be progressed until after Winston Peters returns from overseas at the end of the month.

The under-wraps media policy is also not in the government’s recently-released quarterly action plan.

Meanwhile this week, our two biggest TV news broadcasters ran out of time.

Ex-minister leading resistance to cuts

After his unenlightening on-air interview with minister Melissa Lee on Thursday morning, Mike Hosking’s ZB listeners told him she reminded them of ministers in the last government.

Coincidentally, one of them was also one of few people who did speak out about the crisis while it was unfolding.

Michael Wood represented TVNZ journalists from the E tū union as its negotiations specialist.

E tū  is now taking legal action against TVNZ, claiming it failed to abide by the conditions of their employment agreement.

Could that reverse or wind back any of the cuts TVNZ has announced?

“That does remain to be seen. The collective agreement has very clear processes around what should happen if TVNZ wants to move forward and make changes. It requires [staff members] to be involved throughout the process, and for the company to try and reach agreement with them. Our very strong view is that that hasn’t happened.”

“Staff have said: ‘Look, five years ago, we came to you and said we want to do these things with our shows to make sure they have a sustainable future to make sure that they have a strong online platform.’ And [TVNZ] frankly has not demonstrated strategy and leadership around those things.”

“These are still shows that are very, very popular. Canceling them will reduce costs, but based on TVNZ’s own information that they’ve provided, it will reduce revenue by more.”

It’s been difficult to get any media company executives or even journalists at the two companies affected by these cuts to talk about them, even off-the-record.

Wood is one of the few people who has spoken frankly to broadcasters’ executives, albeit confidentially behind closed doors.

“There is a bit of a delicate dance which has to happen when media companies themselves are making these decisions. And media need to report on that.

“So I have some sympathy, but these aren’t just individual employment issues. This is a public policy issue . . .  about whether we have a functioning and vibrant Fourth Estate.”

Wood was until last year a minister in the Labour government which could have averted the TVNZ cuts.

It spent more than $16 million planning a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a not-for-profit public media entity — but then scrapped it weeks before it was due to begin.

“You’ve just identified one of the core things that we’ve got to deal with. TVNZ, in terms of its statutory form, is neither one thing nor the other. It has a commercial imperative and it also has some other obligations in terms of public good.

“News and current affairs should be at the heart of that — and that is something that we should be much clearer about.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It is a response to digital era changes in technology, viewing and advertising — but also the consequence of political choices.

“I can see that I’ve chosen a good night to come on,” TVNZ presenter Jack Tame said mournfully on his stint as a Newstalk ZB panelist last Wednesday.

The news that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning had just broken.

It was less than a week since Newshub’s owners had announced a plan to close it completely in mid-year and TVNZ had reported bad financial figures for the last half of 2023.

The following day — last Thursday — TVNZ’s Midday News told viewers 9 percent of TVNZ staff — 68 people in total — would go in a plan to balance the books.

“The broadcaster has told staff that its headcount is high and so are costs,” said reporter Kim Baker-Wilson starkly on TVNZ’s Midday.

On chopping block
Twenty-four hours later, it was one of the shows on the chopping block — along with late news show Tonight and TVNZ’s flagship weekly current affairs show Sunday.

“As the last of its kind — is that what we want in our media landscape . . . to have no in-depth current affairs show?” said Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo (also the host of the weekend show Marae).

Consumers investigator Fair Go — with a 47-year track record as one of TVNZ’s most popular local shows — will also be gone by the end of May under this plan.

If Newshub vanishes from rival channel Three by mid year, there will be just one national daily TV news bulletin left — TVNZ’s 1News — and no long form current affairs at all, except TVNZ’s Q+A and others funded from the public purse by NZ on Air and Te Mangai Paho.

Tellingly, weekday TVNZ shows which will carry on — Breakfast and Seven Sharp — are ones which generate income from “partner content” deals and “integrated advertising” — effectively paid-for slots within the programmes.

TVNZ had made it known cuts were coming months ago because costs were outstripping fast-falling revenue as advertisers tightened their belts or spent elsewhere.

TVNZ executives had also made it clear that reinforcing TVNZ’s digital-first strategy would be a key goal as well as just cutting costs.

Other notable cut
So the other notable service to be cut was a surprise — the youth-focused digital-native outlet Re: News.

After its launch in 2017, its young staff revived a mothballed studio and gained a reputation for hard work — and then for the quality of its work.

It won national journalism awards in the past two years and reached younger people who rarely if ever turn on a television set.

Reportedly, the staff of Re: News staff is to be halved and lose some of its leaders.

The main media workers’ union E tū said it will fight to save jobs and extend the short consultation period.

Some staff made it plain that they weren’t giving up just yet either and would present counter-proposals to save shows and jobs.

In a statement, TVNZ said the proposals “in no way relate to the immense contribution of the teams that work on those shows and the significant journalistic value they’ve provided over the years”.

Money-spinners
But some were money-spinners too.

Fair Go and Sunday still pull in big six-figure live primetime TV audiences and more views now on TVNZ+. Its marketers frequently tell the advertisers that.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell knows all about that. She was previously TVNZ’s commercial director.

So why kill off these programmes now?

Mediawatch’s requests to talk to O’Donnell and TVNZ’s executive editor of news Phil O’Sullivan were unsuccessful.

But O’Donnell did talk to Newstalk ZB on Friday night.

“I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows. And we need to find some ways to stop doing some things for us to reduce our costs,” O’Donnell told Newstalk ZB.

“TVNZ’s still investing over $40 million in news and current affairs — so we absolutely believe in the future of news and current affairs. But we have a situation right now that our operating model is more expensive than the revenue that we’re making. And we have to make some really tough, tough decisions,” she said.

“We’ll constantly be looking at things to keep the operating model in line with what our revenue is. Within the TVNZ Act it’s clear that we need to be a commercial broadcaster, We are a commercial business, so that’s the remit that we need to work on.

“Our competitors these days are not (Newstalk ZB) or Sky or Warner Brothers (Discovery) but Google and Meta. These are multi-trillion dollar organisations. Ninety cents of every dollar spent in digital news advertising is going offshore. That’s 10 cents left for the likes of NZME, TVNZ, Stuff and any of the other local broadcasters.”

Jack Tame also pointed the finger at the titans of tech on his Newstalk ZB Saturday show.

Force of digital giants ‘irrepressible’
“Ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs and local programming in a country with five million people . . .  is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off,” he told listeners.

But few countries have a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, disconnected from publicly-funded ones also doing news on TV and radio and online.

That makes TVNZ a state-owned broadcaster that serves advertisers as much as New Zealanders.

But if things had panned out differently a year ago, that wouldn’t be the case now either.

What if the public media merger had gone ahead?
A new not-for-profit public media entity incorporating RNZ and TVNZ — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM)  — was supposed to start one year ago this week.

It would have been the biggest media reform since the early 1990s.

The previous government was prepared to spend more than $400 million over four years to get it going.

Almost $20 million was spent on a programme called Strong Public Media, put in place because New Zealand’s media sector was weak.

“Ailing” was the word that the business case used, noting “increased competition from overseas players slashed the share of revenue from advertising.”

But the Labour government killed the plan before the last election, citing the cost of living crisis.

The new entity would still have needed TVNZ’s commercial revenue, but if it had gone ahead, would that mean TVNZ wouldn’t now be sacrificing news shows and journalists?

“Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change,” Tracey Martin — the chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running — told Mediawatch.

“I don’t have any problem believing that (TVNZ) would have had to change what they were delivering. But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality . . . was not the major driver (of ANZPM),” Martin said.

“That was where we started from. If Armageddon happens — and all other New Zealand media can no longer exist — you have to be there as the Fourth Estate — to make sure that New Zealanders have a place to go to for truth and trust.”

What were the assumptions about the advertising revenue TVNZ would have been able to pull in?

“[TVNZ] was telling us that it wouldn’t be as bad as we believed it would be. TVNZ modeling was not as dramatic as our modeling. We were happy to accept that [because] our modeling gave us a particular window by which to change the ecosystem in which New Zealand media could survive to try and stabilise,” Martin told Mediawatch.

The business case document tracked TVNZ revenue and expenses from 2012 until 2020 — the start of the planning process for the new entity.

By 2020, a sharp rise in costs already exceeded revenue which was above $300 million.

And as we now know, TVNZ revenue has fallen further and more quickly since then.

“We were predicting linear TV revenue was going to continue to drop substantially and relatively quickly — and they were not going to be able to switch their advertising revenue at the same capacity to digital,” Martin said.

“They had more confidence than we did,” she said.

The ANZPM legislation estimated it as a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.

TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”.

“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better,” the chief executive at the time Simon Power told Mediawatch in 2023.

“It was a very rosy picture they painted. They had a mandate to be a commercial business that had to give confidence to the advertisers and the rest of New Zealand but they were very confident two years ago that this wouldn’t happen,” she said.

In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described the merger as “ideological and insane” and “a solution looking for a problem”.

He wasn’t alone.

But if that was based on TVNZ’s bullish assessments of its own revenue-raising capacity — or a disregard of a probable downturn ahead, was that a big mistake?

“I won’t comment for today’s government, but statements being made in the last couple of days about people getting their news from somewhere else; truth and trust has dropped off; linear has got to be transferred into the digital environment . . . none of those things are new comments,” Martin told Mediawatch.

“They’re all in the documentation that we placed into the public domain — and I asked the special permission, as the chair of the ANZPM group, to brief spokespersons for broadcasting of the Greens, Act and National to try and make sure that everybody has as much and as much information as we could give them,” she said.

Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee said this week she was working on proposals to help the media to take to cabinet.

“I don’t give advice to the minister, but I would advise officials to go back and pull out the business case and paperwork for ANZPM — and to look at the submissions and the number of people who supported the concept, but had concerns about particular areas,” Tracey Martin told Mediawatch.

“Don’t let perfection get in the way of action.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Major media organisations all over the world are copping criticism for the way they’re reporting what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. Mediawatch has asked BBC news boss Jonathan Munro how they’re handling it — even when it’s coming from the UK’s own government.

“Palestinian health officials in Gaza say hundreds of people have been killed in an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. They’re blaming an Israeli strike on the hospital.

“But the Israel DefenCe Forces said an initial investigation shows the explosion was caused by a failed Hamas rocket launch.”

That was how RNZ’s news at 8am last Tuesday reported the single deadliest incident of this conflict so far — and likely to be the deadliest one in all of the five times Israel and Hamas have fought over Gaza so far.

The Israeli Defence Force also singled out Islamic Jihad for the atrocity — but the absence of hard evidence put the media reporting it in a difficult position.

“It’s still absolutely unclear. There are varying bits of information that are coming out for now. I don’t think anybody can quite say . . . it’s most likely to have been Israel,” the BBC Middle East editor Sebastian Usher told RNZ on Wednseday night.

“They said it seems like it might be a misfired rocket,”

Huge anger on streets
“We can’t say for now, but I don’t think  — in terms of the mood in the Arab world and the Middle East — that that really matters. People out on the streets are showing huge anger and they will reject any investigation, any Israeli claim, to say that Israel is not responsible,” he said.

Reporting those claims and counterclaims creates confusion among the audience. It’s also stoked the anger of those objecting to reporters’ choice of words.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward, for example, was criticised heavily on social media for mentioning the Israeli Defense Force claims — and then expressing doubt about them at the same time.

A video showing a pro-Palestinian protester calling Clarissa Ward “a puppet” has gone viral on social media. So did another falsely accusing her of faking a rocket strike.

The longer version of the video of Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zein confronting CNN reporter Clarissa Ward at the Rafah crossing. It’s raw, sincere, and powerful. Much respect for Rahma, she expressed our collective pain at the Western media’s dehumanization of the Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/yfB7zFYPwe

— Amro Ali (@_amroali) October 20, 2023

Her CNN colleague Anderson Cooper was also criticised online for referring to a huge civilian loss of life during the live report from Tel Aviv in Israel and repeating himself, but then without the word “civilian”.

Among those who, alongside expert investigators, tried to sift the available evidence and cut through the information war was Alex Thompson, correspondent for UK broadcaster Channel Four

“Israel and Hamas can tweet what they like. The truth of what happened here requires independent expert investigation — not happening,” was Alex Thompson’s bleak conclusion.

‘A fierce information war’
“Any doubt is due to a fierce information war that in truth matters little to the victims of the Gaza hospital tragedy,” another British correspondent — ITV Jonathan Irvine — said on Newshub at 6 last Tuesday.

At times, broadcasters have used the wrong words and given audiences the wrong idea.

Last week the BBC’s main evening news bulletin made a rapid apology for describing pro-Palestine protests in the UK as “pro-Hamas”.

“We accept that this was poorly-phrased and was a misleading description,” the presenter told viewers just before the end of the bulletin.

And earlier this month, people protested outside the BBC News headquarters in London about the BBC’s long-standing policy of not labeling any group as “terrorists”.

“You don’t seem to be particularly interested. If the BBC seems to refuse to call terrorists even though the British Parliament has legislated them terrorists — that is a question I haven’t heard the BBC answer yet,” UK government Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told the BBC radio flagship news show Today.

“Have you not seen any of the coverage on the BBC of the atrocities, the dead, the injured, the survivors?” the startled presenter asked him.

“How can you say that we’re not interested?” she replied, when Shapps said he had.

An obligation to audiences
The BBC’s deputy chief executive of news Jonathan Munro was at Sydney’s South by Southwest festival this week to talk about how the BBC delivers news from and about conflict zones.

“We’ve already seen journalists lose their lives in this country, working for organisations who are also facing the same dilemmas as we are,” said Munro, who is also the BBC’s director of journalism.

“We’ve got an obligation to audiences to explain what’s going on and that involves lots of people on the ground as witnesses to events, but also the analysis that comes with expert knowledge,” he told Mediawatch.

“Expertise is just invaluable. People like Jeremy Bowen (former Middle East editor and current international editor of BBC News) and our chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and correspondents who are based in that region,” he said.

“But the main story here is the catastrophic loss of life and the appalling conditions that people are living in and that the hostages are being held in — the humanity of that,” he said.

A lot of reporting people will see, hear and read will come from Israel. Reporting from Gaza itself is difficult and dangerous — and access to Gaza at the border is restricted by Israel.

“We have a correspondent in Gaza, but he’s moved from Gaza City to Khan Yunis in the south of the strip, a safer option. But he can’t report 24 hours a day, and he is looking after his family which is paramount.

Need for transparency
“So we do have to add to that [with] reporting from Israel and from London by people who know Gaza very well,” he said.

“We have to be transparent about that and tell the audience and then the audience knows that wherever it’s coming from, and you still hold editorial integrity.”

A lot of what people will be seeing from Gaza is amateur footage and social media content that’s very difficult to verify.

The BBC recently launched BBC Verify, dedicated to checking out this kind of material and vetting its use.

“There’s a huge amount of video out there on social media we can all find at the touch of a button. The brand of BBC Verify is a signpost that the material . . . has been checked by us using methods like geolocation and looking at the metadata,” he said.

Even when verified, there are still ethical dilemmas.

For example, BBC Verify used facial recognition software to analyse images of an individual in the Hamas surprise attacks on October 8. It identified one gunman as a policeman from Gaza.

Independently verifying claims
“It’s case-by-case — but something shouldn’t go out on the BBC without us knowing it’s true. There are occasions we would broadcast something and we would tell the audience that we’ve not been able to independently verify a claim . . . and we need to caveat our coverage of the reaction to it with the fact that we do not have our own verification of source material,” he said.

Major media outfits all over the world are copping criticism for the way they’re reporting what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. Mediawatch asks BBC news boss Jonathan Munro how they’re handling it – even when it’s coming from the UK’s own government https://t.co/gm8Fyv4ar1

— Mediawatch (@MediawatchNZ) October 21, 2023

Even before the Al Ahli hospital catastrophe amplified emotions, intense scrutiny of reporters’ work was adding to the stress of those reporting from the region.

“Every word you say is being scrutinised so closely and is likely to be contested by one side or the other more or both — and that definitely adds to the pressure,” Channel Four correspondent Secunder Kermani told the BBC’s Media Show last week from Gaza.

“In the Israel Gaza situation it is critical. Every word can be checked and rechecked and double checked for any implication which is either inferred or implied by accident.

“Because our job is to be impartial, tell the reality of the story, and most importantly, share the witnessing of that story by our correspondents,” Jonathan Munro told Mediawatch.

“That’s why we’ve got a significant number of correspondents in Israel and back in the newsroom in London are adding explanations and leaning into that scrutiny on language,” he said.

Adjectives ‘can be dangerous’
“We’re using expertise, our knowledge as an organisation and we’re making sure that at every stage of that every sentence, every paragraph is reflective of what we know to be true.

“But adjectives can be dangerous, because they may imply something which is more emotive than we mean. We have to be quite clean in our language in these circumstances,” he said.

“Of course, people can come on the BBC and express their views in language of their choice. All of those things help to keep our coverage straight and honest and ensure that correspondents on the ground aren’t in danger by slips or mistakes that are made in good faith elsewhere in the BBC output.”

Last week at its annual conference, senior members of the Conservative Party — which is in power in the UK — heavily criticised the BBC for alleged bias and elitism. Some — including home secretary Suella Braverman and former prime minister Liz Truss made a point of praising GB News — the new right-wing TV channel backed by billionaire Brexiteers — for disrupting the news.

“The criticism of the BBC from politicians is as old as the BBC itself. Just because they’re habitual critics doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but we’ve got a well developed set of editorial guidelines which have stood the test of time over many, many difficult stories,” Munro told Mediawatch. 

“The editorial guidelines are robust and public. You can go online and look at them. All of our journalism abides by those guidelines and if you have guidelines that you believe in as an organisation, that’s a significant defence to some of the less well-founded attacks that we sometimes find ourselves on the end of,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The New Zealand Herald copped criticism for publishing a front-page attack ad targeting the National Party leader this week — but it was far from the first time ads like it have appeared in print.

Meanwhile, questions were asked about other coverage that looked like it might be taking sides as the official Aotearoa New Zealand election campaign period begins.

“You’ve got to survive in the media. You got to take the ads,” Newstalk ZB morning host Kerre Woodham told listeners last Monday, explaining the the controversial Council of Trade Union ad labelling the National Party leader Christopher Luxon “out of touch and too risky”.

“You’ve got to survive in the media. You got to take the ads,” Newstalk ZB morning host Kerre Woodham told listeners last Monday, explaining the the controversial Council of Trade Union ad labelling the National Party leader “out of touch and too risky”.

It was clearly an election advocacy ad — and it was identified as such in the Herald. But as soon as the ad came through the NZME ad department, the senior editors there must have known devoting the front page to it would become a news story.

The afternoon host at the Herald’s NZME stablemate NewstalkZB, Andrew Dickens, certainly thought so.

“I think this is news. This is why I’m talking about it on the radio. I’m not involved with this decision.  . . but I think they need to write about it and say how they actually determine who gets the ‘wraparound’,” he told his listeners.

Blue sticker ads
The Herald top brass wasn’t keen on that, but election ads on the front page aren’t entirely unprecedented.

A former Herald editor, Tim Murphy, pointed out the Weekend Herald has allowed the National Party to add detachable blue stickers late in previous campaigns.

And once papers opened the door to wraparound front-and-back page ads for retailers (who paid a pretty penny for them during the covid-19 crisis), it was only a matter of time before someone selling political messages rather than fridges took up the space as well.

The CTU ad was within the rules for political promotion by third parties. As long as they registered, they can spend the thick end of $400,000 on ads doing down political opponents if they want to.

Gordon Campbell on scoop.co.nz said that apart from the front-page spot, there was nothing really novel about an ad criticising a party leader who was actively campaigning as the embodiment of his party’s policies.

And while the CTU’s campaign also appeared on billboards and social media platforms the same day, it was its appearance on the front page of a paper obliged to cover the campaign fairly which raised eyebrows.

“This will probably backfire on the Herald,” Andrew Dicken told his listeners, at the same moment one texted in to say he had cancelled his subscription to the Herald because of it.

‘False’ ads not acceptable
Andrew Dickens told his listeners NZME radio stations had rules too — and could not accept ads that are “false, wrong, or lies or defamatory.”

Newstalk ZB found that out back in 2019, when it ran a political ad in which Auckland mayoral candidate John Tamihere said no suburb would escape Auckland Transport’s “crazy plan” to cut the speed limits on Auckland roads.

The Advertising Standards Authority said that claim was false and the campaign ad, which had run for two weeks, should be dropped.

NZME told the Authority it had presumed the client’s script and figures provided were correct.

“Our team has been reminded to be vigilant when accepting advocacy advertisements to avoid this from reoccurring,” NZME said.

In other words, they promised to do fact checks before cashing cheques from people peddling political propaganda at election time.

But at that time, the Weekend Herald had just published another controversial political ad all about Christopher Luxon.

The half page ad showed former Prime Minister John Key morphing into Christopher Luxon in the style of Dick Frizzell’s famous “From Mickey to tiki” illustration.

Luxon was not even a member of the National Party at that point, let alone a candidate, but the client for that ad turned out to be property tycoon Steven Brooks, who really wanted Luxon to be the next party leader.

His involvement should have been declared on the ad, which had the appearance of unauthorised party political advertising.

Ads they didn’t want

While that’s all history now, Newstalk ZB listeners on Monday were also phoning concerns about ads that the Herald wouldn’t print in the recent past.

They were part of a campaign from the lobby group Family First, which our three biggest newspaper publishers all declined to run.

Family First leader Bob McCoskrie has accused them of colluding to cancel the ad, which had the slogan: “What is a woman?” and the website address for a campaign declaring it was “time to push back” against gender self-identification.

MoCoskrie said the ad departments of each publisher initially accepted the ad but editors subsequently decided they weren’t fit to print.

But while the paper publishers exercised their right not to print the ads, they did go up on billboards in public.

Last month the Advertising Standards Authority complaints board upheld a complaint about them, ruling the ad was “misleading and not socially responsible,” but only because the identity of the advertiser — Family First — wasn’t sufficiently clear for an advocacy ad.

From today, September 10, until the day before the election we are in the official election period overseen by the Electoral Commission.

During this time special rules and a separate dedicated code of broadcasting practice apply to what are known as “election programmes”, defined as radio or TV advertisements by or for a party or candidate which encouraged voters to vote in particular ways or for particular parties or people.

Broadcasters and publishers will be paying extra attention to balance and fairness now, with the watchdogs running a fast-track process for complaints about seriously misleading claims and serious allegations.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Nothing much changed in a 1News Verian poll released last Monday. However, some commentators treated the boring results as a blank canvas on which to express their creativity.

1News presenter Simon Dallow described the results of the newly named 1News Verian poll on Monday as a harsh verdict on the government.

“It is just under three months until the election and Labour seems to have been dented by a series of ministerial distractions,” he said as he introduced the story at the top of the bulletin.

Despite that effort to dress up the poll as a tough verdict on the government, it was mostly notable for how un-notable it was.

Few parties moved more than the margin of error from the last 1News poll in May, which also showed National and Act with the numbers to form the next government — just. National and Labour both dropped the same amount: 2 percent.

You might have thought the damp squib of a result would put the clamps on our political commentators’ narrative-crafting abilities.

Instead, for some it proved to be a blank canvas on which they could express their creativity.

‘Centre-right surge’
At Stuff, chief politics editor Luke Malpass called the poll a “fillip for the right” under a headline hailing a “centre-right surge”.

One issue with that: the poll showed a 1 percent overall drop for the right bloc of National and Act.

“Fillips” generally involve polls going up not down. Similarly, a drop in support doesn’t traditionally meet the definition of a surge in support.

The lack of big statistical swings wasn’t enough to deter some commentators from making big calls.

On Newstalk ZB, political editor Jason Walls said Labour was plunging due to its disunity.

“All [Chris Hipkins] has been really able to talk about is what’s happening within the Labour Party — be it Stuart Nash, be it other ministers who are behaving badly. Jan Tinetti. Voters punish that. And we’ve seen that from the Nats in opposition. They punish disunity.”

It’s uncertain what National’s equivalent 2 percent drop was down to. Perhaps voters punish unity as well.

Wider trends context
Mutch-McKay’s own commentary was a bit more nuanced, placing the poll in the context of wider trends.

On TVNZ’s Breakfast the day after the poll’s release, she said some people inside Labour couldn’t believe the results hadn’t been worse for the party.

Perhaps that air of disbelief also extended to the parliamentary press gallery.

After all, the commentators are right: Labour has had a terrible few months, with high-ranking ministers defecting, being stood down, being censured by the parliamentary privileges committee, facing allegations of mistreating staff, or struggling with the apparently near-impossible task of selling shares in Auckland Airport.

Maybe a sense of inertia propelled some of our gallery members to keep rolling with the narrative of the last few months, in spite of the actual poll result.

Or maybe part of the issue is that hyping up the significance of these polls is a financial necessity for news organisations which pay a lot to commission them.

“You’ve got to squeeze the hell of it. You’ve paid $11,000 or $12,000 for a poll, it’s got to be the top story. It’s got to be your lead. It’s got to have the fancy graphics,” Stuff’s political reporter and commentator Andrea Vance said recently on the organisation’s daily podcast Newsable.

‘Manufacturing news’
“It just feels like we’re manufacturing news. We’re taking a piece of information that’s a snapshot in time and we’re pretending that we know the future,” she said.

Vance went on to say these kinds of snapshot polls don’t actually tell us all much — but she said long-term polling trends are worth paying attention to.

It’s probably no coincidence then that the most useful analysis of this latest poll focused on those macro patterns.

In a piece for 1News.co.nz, John Campbell noted the electorate’s slow drift away from the centre, with Labour losing 20 percent of the electorate’s support since 2020 and National failing to fully capitalise on that drop-off.

He quoted Yeats line, “the centre cannot hold”, before asking the question: “What do Labour and National stand for? Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, this is a growing section of the electorate saying — you’re almost as bad as each other.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other commentators. In his latest column for Metro magazine, commentator and former National Party comms man Matthew Hooton decried the major parties’ lack of ambition.

“At least Act, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori aren’t insulting you with bullshit. Instead they offer ideas they think will make your life better, even if they’ll never happen. So here’s a better idea than falling for the big scare from National or Labour.

‘Reward ideas-based parties’
“How about using your ballot paper to tell them to f*** off and reward one of the three ideas-based parties with your vote instead?” he wrote.

And on his podcast The Kaka, financial journalist Bernard Hickey and commentator Danyl McLauchlan criticised our major parties for their grey managerialism.

“You kind of have to go back to the mid-1990s when so many people just hated the two major parties because they didn’t trust them,” he said.

“We seem to be going through a similar phase now. The two major parties are just these managerial centrist parties. They don’t have much to offer by way of a vision.”

Maybe it’s a little shaky to say anyone’s surging or flopping on the basis of a couple of percentage points shifting in a single poll.

But if you zoom out a bit, at least one narrative does have a strong foundation — voters saying, to quote Shakespeare this time — “a plague on both your (untaxed) houses”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

The comedians on 7 Days had a few laughs at RNZ’s expense against a backdrop of the Kremlin on TV Three this week.

“A Radio New Zealand digital journalist has been stood down after it emerged they’d been editing news stories on the broadcaster’s website to give them a pro-Russian slant, which is kind of disgusting,” host Jeremy Corbett said.

“You’d never get infiltration like that on 7 Days. Our security is too strong. Strong like a bear. Strong like the glorious Russian state and its leader Putin,” he said.

“I love this Russian strategy: ‘First, we take New Zealand’s fourth best and fourth most popular news site — then the world!” said Melanie Bracewell, who said she had not kept up with the news.

Just a joke, obviously, but this week some people have been asking if Kremlin campaigns played a role in the inappropriate editing of online world news.

It was on June 9 that the revelation of it kicked off a media frenzy about propaganda, misinformation, Russia, Ukraine, truth, trust and editorial standards that has been no laughing matter at RNZ.

The story went up a notch last weekend when TVNZ’s Thomas Mead revealed Ukrainian New Zealander Michael Lidski — along with 20 others — had complained about a story written by the journalist in May 2022, which RNZ had re-edited on the day to add alternative perspectives after prompting from an RNZ journalist who considered it sub-standard.

The next day on RNZ’s Checkpoint, presenter Lisa Owen said the suspended RNZ web journalist had told her he edited reports “in that way for five years” — and nobody had ever queried it or told him to stop.

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson, who is also editor-in-chief, then told Checkpoint he did not consider what he had called “pro-Kremlin garbage” a resignation-worthy issue.

“I think this is a time for us actually working together to fix the problem,” he said.

RNZ had already begun taking out the trash in public by listing the corrupted (and now corrected) stories on the RNZ.co.nz homepage as they are discovered.

Thompson said the problem was “confined to a small area of what RNZ does” but by the following day,  RNZ found six more stories — supplied originally by the reputable news agency Reuters — had also been edited in terms more favourable to the ruling regimes.

“RNZ has come out with a statement that said: ‘In our defence, we didn’t actually realise anyone was reading our stories’,” said 7 Days’ Jeremy Corbett.

That was just a gag — but it did actually explain just how it took so long for the dodgy edits to come to light and become newsworthy.

Where the problem lay
Last Wednesday’s cartoon in the Stuff papers — featuring an RNZ radio newsreader with a Pinocchio-length nose didn’t raise any laughs there either — because none of the slanted stories in question ever went out in the news on the air.

They were only to be found online — and this was a significant distinction as it turned out, because the checks and balances are not quite the same or made by the same staff.

“In radio, a reporter writes a story and sends it to a sub-editor who will then check it. And then a news reader has to read it so there’s a couple of stages. Maybe even a chief reporter would have checked it as well,” Corin Dann told RNZ Morning Report listeners last Monday.

“What I’m trying to establish is what sort of checks and balances were there to ensure that that world story was properly vetted,” he said.

That question — and others — will now be asked by the external experts appointed this week to run the rule of RNZ’s online publishing procedures for a review that will be made public.

On Thursday a former RNZer Brent Edwards made a similar point in the National Business Review where he’ is now the political editor.

“For a couple of years, I was the director of news gathering. I had a large responsibility for RNZ’s news coverage but technically I had no responsibility whatsoever for what went on the web,” he said.

“Done properly the RNZ review panel could do all news media a favour by providing a template for how online news should be curated. It should reinforce the importance of quality, ethical journalism,” Edwards added.

His NBR colleague Dita di Boni said “there but for the grace of God go other outlets” which have “gone digital” in news.

“I worked at TVNZ and there was a rush to digital as well with lots of resources going in but little oversight from the main newsroom.”

Calls for political action
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has made it clear he doesn’t want the government involved in RNZ’s editorial affairs.

David Seymour of the ACT party wanted an inquiry — and NZ First leader Winston Peters called for a Royal Commission into the media bias and manipulation.

Former National MP Nathan Guy told Newshub Nation this weekend “heads need to roll” at RNZ.

“If I was the broadcasting minister, I would want the chair in my office and to hold RNZ to account. I want timeframes. I want accountability because we just can’t afford to have our public broadcaster tell unfortunate mistruths to the public,” he said.

In the same discussion, Newsroom’s co-editor Mark Jennings reminded Guy that RNZ’s low-budget digital news transition happened under his National-led government which froze RNZ’s funding for almost a decade.

“This is what happens when you underfund an organisation for so long,” he said.

Jennings also said “trust in RNZ has been hammered by this” — and criticised RNZ chairman Dr Jim Mather for declining to be interviewed on Newshub Nation.

Earlier — under the headline Media shooting itself in the foot — Jennings said surveys have picked up a decline and trust and news media here.

“And the road back for the media just had a major speed bump,” he concluded.

How deep is the damage to trust?

While the breach of editorial standards is clear, has there been an over-reaction to what may be the actions of just one employee, which took years to come to light?

Last week the think-tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at Auckland University hosted a timely “disinformation and media manipulation” workshop attended by executives and editors from most major media outlets.

It was arranged long before RNZs problems arose — but those ended up dominating discussion on this theme.

Among the participants was media consultant and commentator Peter Bale, who has previously worked overseas for Reuters, as well as The Financial Times and CNN.

“I really feel for RNZ in this, for the chief executive and everybody else there who does generally a great job. The issue of trust here is in this person’s relationship with their employer and their relationship with the facts.”

Bale is also the newsroom initiative leader at the International News Media Association, which promotes best practice in news and journalism publishing.

The exposure of the “inappropriate editing” undetected for so long has created the impression a lot of content is published online with no checking. That is sometimes the case when speed is a priority, but the vast majority of stuff does go past at least two eyes before publication.

“I think it is true also that editing has been diminished as a skill. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a failure of editing here but a failure of this person’s understanding of what their job is,” Bale told Mediawatch.

“You shouldn’t necessarily need to have a second or third pair of eyes when processing a Reuters story that’s already gone through multiple editors. The critical issue for RNZ is whether they took the initial complaints seriously enough,” he said.

‘Pro-Kremlin garbage’?

There have been many reports in recent years about Russia seeding misinformation and disinformation abroad.

Last Tuesday, security and technology consultant Paul Buchanan told Morning Report that RNZ should be better prepared for authoritarian states seeking to mess with its news.

“This incident that prompted this investigation may or may not be just one individual who has certain opinions about the war between Russia and Ukraine. But it is possible that . . . stories were manipulated from abroad,” he said.

Back in March the acting Director-General of the SIS told Parliament: “States are trying, in a coercive disruptive and a covert way, to influence the behaviors of people in New Zealand and influencing their decision making”.

John Mackey named no nations at the time, but his GCSB counterpart Andrew Hampton told MPs research had shown Russia was the source of misinformation many Kiwis were consuming.

Is it really likely the Kremlin or its proxies are pushing propaganda into the news here? And if so, to what end?

“I think there’s been a little bit of ‘too florid’ language used about this. This person has inserted what are in some people’s views genuine talking points from those who . . . want to have expressed what the Russian view is. But it was very ham-fisted,” said Bale.

“There are ways to do this. You could have inserted the Russian perspective to highlight the fact that there is a different view about things like the Orange Revolution when the pro-Kremlin leader in Kyiv was overthrown,” he said.

Not necessarily ‘propaganda’
“I don’t think it is necessarily ‘Kremlin propaganda’ as it’s been described. It was just a misguided attempt to bring another perspective, I suspect, but it still represents a tremendous breach of trust,” he said.

“I write a weekly newsletter for The Spinoff about international news, and I try sometimes to show . . . there are other perspectives on these stories. Those things are legitimate to address — but not just surreptitiously squeeze into a story in some sort of perceived balance.

“I don’t think in this particular case that it is to do with the spread of disinformation or misinformation by Russia. I think this is a different set of problems. But I agree (there’s a) threat from the kind of chaos-driving techniques that Russia is particularly brilliant at. They’re very skilled at twisting stories . . . and I think we need to be ready for it,” he said.

The guest speaker at that Koi Tū event last Wednesday was Dr Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein center on Media and Politics at Harvard University in the US, where she researches and tracks the sources of misrepresentation and misinformation in the media, and the impact they have on public trust in media — and also how media can prepare for it.

At the point where 15 supplied news stories had been found to be “inappropriately edited” by RNZ, she took to Twitter to say: “This is wild. Fake news has reached new heights.”

Set against what we’ve seen in US politics — and about Russia and Ukraine — is it really that bad?

“Usually what you see is the spoofing of a website or a URL in order to look like you’re a certain outlet and distribute disinformation that way. It’s very unlikely that someone would go in and work a job and be editing articles without proper oversight,” said Donovan  — who is also the co-author of recently published book, Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy. 

“I think when it comes to one country, wanting to insert their views into another country — even though New Zealand is very small — it does track that this would be a way to influence a large group of people.

“But I don’t think if any of us know the degree to which this could be an international operation or not,” she told Mediawatch.

“What you learn is that their pattern is that they happen over and over and over again until a news agency or platform company figures out a mitigation tactic, whether it’s removing that link from search or writing critical press or debunking those stories.

“When I think about the fallout of it . . . using the legitimacy of RNZ in a parasitical kind of way and that legitimacy to spread propaganda is one of the most important pieces of this puzzle that we would need to explore more,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Once again Aotearoa New Zealand’s local elections were plagued by low voter turnout and a lack of engagement. Is the media coverage, or lack thereof, contributing to the problem — and what can it do to help?​

In dozens of campaign trail appearances, new Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told audiences he planned to get rid of board members on the council-controlled organisations Auckland Transport and Eke Panuku.

But just days after his election victory, employment lawyer Barbara Buckett gave RNZ’s Morning Report what appeared to be surprising news on that repeated promise.

“There are legal processes and procedures that have to be followed [with board members’ employment],” she said.

“While he can influence, he certainly can’t interfere.”

Buckett added that the governing body of Auckland Council would have to consent to any changes to the boards.

Interviewer Guyon Espiner seemed startled.

‘He doesn’t have the power’
“So he doesn’t actually have power to do this?” he laughed. “He’s campaigned on something he can’t do?”

That reaction was understandable.

Despite admirable efforts from Stuff’s Todd Niall, the Herald’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff and publicly-funded Local Democracy reporters, the promises and policies coming from mayoral candidates hadn’t received quite the same level of scrutiny they would have had if this were a general election.

If tough, fact-checking coverage was in comparatively short supply for the most high-profile mayoral election in the country, it was sometimes non-existent in ward races and less-heralded mayoral contests.

Pippa Coom, who lost her seat in Auckland’s Waitematā ward, told Mediawatch she didn’t see much coverage at all of her tight ward race against Mike Lee.

She said some media outlets didn’t publish their usual rundowns on ward races like hers, and as a result the “void was filled by misinformation and attack ads”.

“As a candidate I have to absolutely take responsibility for my own loss and for not reaching my potential supporters and not getting people out to vote,” she said.

“But the media coverage is such an important part of our democracy and our elections. So if it’s not there, it is going to … have an impact on election turnout and the result.”

Lack of coverage, engagement
The lack of coverage was matched by a lack of engagement from the public.

Turnout in this year’s election was around 40 percent across the country. In Auckland, it only reached 35 percent for the second election running.

Auckland Council carried out research where it quizzed non-voters on why they didn’t cast their ballot back in 2017.

The number one reason given was that they didn’t know anything about the candidates. Number two was that they didn’t know enough about the policies — and number three was that they couldn’t work out who to vote for.

In the weeks before the election, RNZ’s Lucy Xia vox-popped some Auckland students who told her that not only did they not vote, but they didn’t know the identity of the city’s mayor.

“I don’t really have an opinion,” one said. “Maybe for the prime minister next year. But for mayor? I don’t have views.”

The lack of engagement weighed on the mind of fill-in presenter John Campbell during last weekend’s episode of TVNZ’s Q+A.

Poorer suburbs lagged behind
In conversation with reporter Katie Bradford, he pointed to turnout in the poorer suburbs of Auckland, which — as usual — lagged behind richer areas.

“You have to say that a turnout below 20 percent in Ōtara is heartbreaking. It’s not good enough either,” he said.

“This is a dismal fail by someone.”

He went on to list some possible culprits for that — including central government, uninspiring local candidates and the election system itself.

There is some evidence pointing toward all of those.

In a BusinessDesk column, Pattrick Smellie said postal voting favours older homeowners, who are more likely to stick around at an address and to send letters than younger people and renters.

“It’s hardly news that no one under 40 has much experience of actually posting a letter. We’ve known for a while that postal voting skews local body voting to the asset-owning classes,” he wrote.

‘Boring’ consultation processes
Others criticised local government’s consultation processes, which are often boring and inaccessible for people with busy lives, along with the ratepayer roll which gives homeowners a vote for each property they own in different places.

But in response to Campbell, Bradford honed in on the media’s role in voter disengagement.

“I’m passionate about local government and there are lots of people out there who are. But how do we show people why it matters? It’s a frustration as a journalist,” she said.

Bradford told Mediawatch it was unclear whether the comparative paucity of media coverage on local government reflected a lack of public interest in the topic — or vice versa.

“It’s almost a chicken and egg situation. How much coverage the media does is so much based on what we think the public wants, and if people aren’t picking up the paper, or they’re switching off the radio or the TV when local government stories are on, they’re not going to run them,” Bradford told Mediawatch. 

TV and radio had particular difficulty producing interest stories about local government because council meetings aren’t renowned for creating interesting visuals or soundbites, Bradford said.

She thought it would help if stories explicitly connected council decisions to nationally-significant issues like the housing crisis or Wellington’s ongoing problems with its water and sewage.

‘Maybe media partly to blame’
“All of this stuff is so important and I think people think it’s always central government’s fault. They don’t necessarily think there’s council involvement and maybe the media is partly to blame for not explaining that stuff enough,” she said.

“But it’s not just our job. It’s also the job of Local Government NZ and councils to explain that.”

Bradford backed the idea of giving local government a similar amount of attention as central government, which is covered round-the-clock by teams of press gallery reporters.

But the economics of that move likely wouldn’t stack up for newsrooms, which are already experiencing significant financial constraints, she said.

She thought reporters could help by targeting the broken parts of the electoral system and shining a spotlight on the things that keep people from engaging with councils.

“This election shows that turnout didn’t get any better despite quite extensive coverage, despite a big campaign by LGNZ and others.

“Whatever we have right now is not working,” she said. “Something has to change.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Mediawatch talks to TVNZ’s Simon Power about that, and the culture clash symbolised by this week’s FBoy Island controversy.

The Herald on Sunday’s revelations about the unpleasant backstory of a contestant on a new reality show last weekend jolted TVNZ in more ways than one.

Is FBoy Island responsible — or reprehensible?

“The power in the programme is very much in the hands of the three women involved as contestants. It’s also part of a broader strategy for rangatahi which includes documentaries, factual programming and scripted programming,” Power told Mediawatch.

“I accept the title is provocative, but the show is essentially looking to create some very important conversations — and it may just help equip younger people with tools to navigate a new era of online dating,” Power said (… though most people’s online dates aren’t arranged by TV producers sending FBoys their way on tropical islands)

Some also said FBoy Island was a symbol of commercial culture at TVNZ which means the government’s arranged marriage at first sight with RNZ might end in tears (or on Heartbreak Island, perhaps).

Will the new public media entity air shows like FBoy Island to attract the ad revenue it will still need to supplement public funding?

“That will be a matter for the new entity as to how it wishes to interpret the charter. But for us, it’s an HBO Max format from the US with Dutch, Danish and Swedish versions created to attract younger audiences. It has been picked up by the likes of the BBC for that very reason,” he said.

I’m a commercial TV company. Get me out of here?
At the first of the select committee hearings about the creation of Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) earlier this month, the Broadcasting and Media Minister Willie Jackson said TVNZ needed to “change its attitude” to the public media entity project.

Some commentators speculated TVNZ was stalling, possibly hoping a change of government in 2023 might scupper the plan.

“No. We’re not even contemplating that. We understand who our shareholders are and that (they) wish to progress with the merger. As I’ve said publicly many times, TVNZ is very supportive and very enthusiastic about the opportunity,” Power told Mediawatch.

He also made that clear at this week’s Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee (EDSI) hearings at Parliament.

Much of TVNZ’s submission on the ANZPM legislation is about possible political interference or editorial influence if ANZPM is set up as an Autonomous Crown Entity (ACE)  — and Power’s claim that could enable “Muldoon-era control” made headlines.

“The ACE model is the wrong model. It allows for direction. The use of media is currency in politics — and the [tension] between media and politics is very different to some of these other (crown) entities,” Power told Mediawatch.

Independence, interference and financial vulnerability

But a more immediate problem is short-term funding. $109 million year was set in Budget 2022 — but only until 2026.

RNZ board member Jane Wrightson told the EDSI committee on Thursday that a commitment of at least five years was essential. Members of the E Tu trade union endorsed that subsequently.

Two previous attempts by Labour-led governments to deliver public service via TVNZ withered and died when funds ran out and the government changed. Opposition parties have repeatedly described ANZPM as wasteful spending which should be cut.

Power was a minister in the National-led government which repealed the TVNZ Charter and discontinued the funding of TVNZ’s non-commercial digital channels established under Labour.

Is history about to repeat?

“It’s for the government of the day to signal any permanency around that funding. That’s democracy at work,” Power said.

“If you want legislation to endure beyond governments, it’s really important you have cross-party understanding of what you’re trying to achieve — but more particularly that the model itself doesn’t allow any future leverage.”

New services? Give us a clue . . .
The FBoy Island controversy inadvertently highlighted a gap that a joined-up public media outfit could fill.

Earlier this year the Ministry for Social Development proposed engaging an offshore publisher for media content about safe relationships for young people. That angered local producers, including The Spinoff which broke that story.

If New Zealand had a public broadcaster that reached younger people, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to look elsewhere in the first place.

RNZ’s proposed youth service didn’t happen after a backlash over the impact it would have had on RNZ Concert in 2020.  A pared-back online service based on streaming music — Tahi — was later launched instead. TVNZ has an online service for a younger audience — Re: — but there is still no comprehensive national service for younger people.

When the select committee asked TVNZ’s head of content Cate Slater how she would deploy public funding if given a free hand, she identified that as the outstanding opportunity.

But the ANZPM Bill currently before Parliament does not oblige the new media entity to provide any specific services beyond the commercial-free ones already provided by RNZ.

That makes it impossible for the public to know what public service they’re likely to get from ANZPM — or what it will offer that commercial broadcasters cannot provide.

Yet TVNZ is calling for a “less prescriptive” charter.

“My view is that legislation works best when it’s principle-based rather than highly prescriptive, because it’s easy with prescription to omit by error. Whereas in a principle based approach, you end up debating at the margins rather than ‘what’s in’ and ‘out’.

“As things change, as markets change, as viewer trends change the way people use media changes. If the legislation is too prescriptive, it can become out of date,” Power said.

“It’s not RNZ or TVNZ that’s designed this legislation. We’re just trying to make it work. We’re doing our best to try and assist with getting the right tension in those discussions to make sure we get the right outcome.”

Power told the EDSI committee that ANZPM would “create a new culture” of its own. But media academic and public broadcasting advocate Dr Peter Thompson said in his submission the previous public service TVNZ Charter introduced in 2002 “was opposed by many within the company.”

”There is no obvious reason to suppose the ANZPM initiative will be different. Changes in organisational culture and identity requires more than legislation and a public charter stuck on the wall,” he wrote.

Commercial clout

Reporting of this week’s ANZPM hearings zeroed in on the main mutual concern of their own executives — the commercial clout ANZPM could carry.

The legislation does not limit the commercial activities ANZPM might undertake or revenue it might attract — and rival media companies fear it could corner the market in content, advertising and staff.

“The opportunity to be as commercially strong as possible is one that should be taken,” Power told Mediawatch.  

“The new organisation has been described as not-for-profit (but) that doesn’t mean an operating surplus wouldn’t be available — and there’s an opportunity to reinvest in local content, infrastructure and platforms that other listeners and viewers might use to access content from the new entity,” he said.

“If that at some point manages to help relieve the burden on taxpayers, then that’s something that the drafters of the legislation should think about,” he said.

TVNZ’s submission notes that when Budget 2022 was unveiled, the government estimated ANZPM to be a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.

TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”

“I’d be worried if somebody had worked that out in advance, because this should be a matter for the new entity to work out,” Power told Mediawatch.

Work in progress — or fait accompli?
“Advertising agencies and media agencies represent 900 businesses across New Zealand who have used TVNZ to access their customers to sell the goods and services to employ people and make a contribution to the economy. This is not something that you can just put a box around and put a number across,” he said.

That relationship is important to TVNZ staff. The recently-released annual report says 300 of TVNZ’s 733 full-time staff earn six-figure salaries.

But many Kiwis will care more about the public service they get from the state-owned media they pay for.

“I think that’s a slightly negative lens to put on the potential here. The legislation is clear that the primary driver of this new organisation is the public media outcomes,” Power told Mediawatch.

“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better.”

Another flaw in the plan came to light recently when the government’s broadcasting funding agency NZ on Air announced it was “urgently reshaping” its funding policies after being told on September 7 that more than half of its current budget would in future go to ANZPM.

This development had been foreseen long ago, and should have been highlighted by the consultants who worked on the business case and the minister officials overseeing the government’s Strong Public Media programme.

Dr Peter Thompson pointed out that the Joint Innovation Fund run by NZ on Air and RNZ in the past was a precedent that showed co-ordination was possible.

“I think the silence around NZ on Air is one of the things where clarification needs to be sought pretty quickly,” Power said.

The ANZPM plan was hatched behind closed doors and without public input — until the select committee process and this week’s hearings aired concerns.

Does TVNZ believe the government will make any significant changes to the legislation — or the plan cabinet has approved?

“I think all good policy makers  … want the public policy and legislation to endure. There are some changes that need to be made to the legislation to ensure that, and I sincerely hope those with the ability to influence that listen carefully and make some of those changes,” Power said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

There is mounting pressure on tech titans Google and Facebook to pay local news media to carry their news online.

Google has already done deals with some for its News Showcase, but other big names in news are still trying to get the platforms to pay — and the government is hinting it could force the issue soon.

“Are you putting the hard word on them to secure deals to pay for content? Are you going to legislate?” Newshub Nation host Simon Shepherd asked Willie Jackson last weekend, putting the hard word on the broadcasting and media minister.

“Are you putting the hard word on them to secure deals to pay for content? Are you going to legislate?” Newshub Nation host Simon Shepherd asked Willie Jackson a week ago, putting the hard word on the broadcasting and media minister.

“I’m trying really hard. I have said to them, [in] three months let’s see the deals in the marketplace,” the minister replied.

For years local news media have griped about getting very little from the platforms distributing their stuff to huge audiences  — and profiting from it.

The thing most likely to persuade the tech titans to pay local newsmakers is the likelihood of the government forcing the issue with legislation — and this was the first time that a government minister had set any kind of deadline publicly.

‘I want to see fairness’
“I want to see some fairness. I want to see all these Kiwi news organisations looked after . . and these big players have the funding and the resourcing to be able to do that,” Willie Jackson told Newshub Nation.

Some of the deals that have been done were revealed earlier this month when Google launched the local version of its News Showcase service, now available via Google’s websites and apps.

The first Kiwi outlets ever to get regular payments from Google for that include The New Zealand Herald’s owner NZME and its subscriber subsidiary BusinessDesk, RNZ, online sites Scoop and Newsroom and the Pacific Media Network. There is also a handful of local outlets too like Crux, which serves the Southern Lakes region, and Kapiti News.

“It’s part of our commitment to continuing to play a part in what we see as a very important shared responsibility to ensure the long term sustainability of public interest journalism in New Zealand,” Google’s local country representative Carolyn Rainsford told RNZ’s Gyles Beckford recently.

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson described that as “a good start, but not enough” — while the Spinoff’s founder Duncan Grieve was also underwhelmed.

He reckoned it was actually Willie Jackson that Google had in mind with the Showcase launch “to create a sense that Google is now a solid and public spirited ally to the news industry”.

For now, Google News Showcase is far from a comprehensive or compelling service for Kiwis. It offers nothing from our biggest national news producer Stuff or other big names in news like TVNZ and Newshub — or smaller outlets such Allied Press and The Spinoff.

Bargaining collectively
Several publishers — including Stuff — have banded together with the News Publishers Association to bargain collectively with Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook).

Earlier this year the Commerce Commission gave them permission to negotiate a deal for a 10-year period.

So how’s that going?

“We can’t comment much on the status, but we are engaging with the NPA,” was all Google’s regional head of partnerships Shilpa Jhunjhunwala would tell RNZ earlier this month.

A recent report by the Judith Nielsen Institute estimate Google and Facebook paid Australian media companies about A$200m last year.

“Unfortunately an interview won’t be possible,” Google New Zealand told Mediawatch last week (without explaining why).

Instead they gave us a statement attributable to Caroline Rainsford, country director Google New Zealand:

“We are proud of the launch of Google News Showcase and continuing our conversations with other local news media businesses.”

“We can’t give you any kind of commercial numbers because they’re all commercial and in confidence,” Google’s regional head of partnerships Shilpa Jhunjhunwala told RNZ’s Gyles Beckford earlier this month.

When pressed, she said Google’s global commitment to News Showcase was $1 billion over three years.

“But beyond that, we’re not able to share anything specific to New Zealand,” she said.

Why is there no deal with other New Zealand news publishers yet?

‘No serious offers on table’
“Those negotiations are underway, but neither of those companies have put any serious offers on the table,” Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch.

She said the Australian deals were their benchmark.

“What we produce is very similar kind of content and we operate in very similar markets. We’d be looking for payments that equate to more like NZ$40 million to $50 million a year into the industry here,” she said.

“I think the government and Minister Jackson have made clear that the government expect fair deals to be done — and that they are prepared to legislate in the near term to ensure that happens,” she said.

“The only way to materially address this is to create an environment where we can negotiate fair commercial payment from these giant multinationals who have built their businesses entirely off content created by other people,” she said.

“You could think of any search term and put it into Google and look down the results and see that a new story created by somebody is part of the results. What we are focused on negotiating a commercial payment for that content in the same way that you would for any other product,” she said.

“If you invested in a car and someone started running it as a taxi, you would expect them to compensate you for that — not to build their own business without recognising your investment,” Boucher told Mediawatch.

“Our problem is that these platforms are very reluctant to come to the table and have a fair negotiation. That’s why the sort of legislation has been needed in Australia and other countries and also here in New Zealand,” she said.

The tale across the Tasman.

For more than a decade, he chaired the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Australia’s competition regulator.

“It was fraught at times, but we presented the report to government in mid-2019 and they accepted the recommendation to have a News Media Bargaining Code six months later. It was legislated in February 2021. That’s pretty quick in terms of policy development in Australia,” Sims told Mediawatch.

“Google’s done a deal with essentially all media businesses. Meta has only done a deal with media businesses which that employ 85 percent of (Australia’s) journalists. It’s crucial that . . . it’s widely shared and you need legislation so that everybody has the ability to bargain.

“I know for a fact that the payments were well in excess of A$200 million — so NZ $40 million to $50 million sounds absolutely the right number to be spread across all media,” he said.

“Google and Meta were required to bargain with all eligible media businesses — and if they could not reach agreement, then arbitration would come into place. The threat of that evened up the bargaining power,” he said.

“The second component was that if Google and Meta did a deal with one media player, then they were required under law to do a deal with all media players. So their choice was either have no media content on their platform, or do deals,” he said.

“They chose to do deals with media companies because there’s value to them,” he said.

Arbitration threat needed
“I’m a bit concerned that in New Zealand you don’t have arbitration at the end of the negotiation period negotiations fail,” he said.

A Google officer once told me struggling news media pleading for “compensation” were like redundant drivers of horse-drawn carriages and rickshaws expecting today’s taxi drivers to pay them.

“No, that’s completely wrong. This is not like the car taking the place of the horse and carriage or smartphones taking the place of Kodak film because Google and Facebook don’t produce any journalism. So they haven’t taken the place of media, because they’re just not in the media business,” Rod Sims told Mediawatch.

“For Google to be a good search engine, it needs to bring in media into its search just about every time. But they don’t need any particular media company. So only by the News Media Bargaining Code could you even up the bargaining power,” he said.

“Unless we get payment for media that’s being taken and used for free, we’ll have a lot less media and less media harms society,” he said.

“It’s not up to me to tell the New Zealand government what to do, but my advice would be to pass the Australian News Media Bargaining Code,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Covid has now killed around 1700 people in New Zealand, but much of our news reporting and commentary has focused on how we’re moving on from the pandemic. Why is there such a mismatch between that media coverage, and the reality of a virus that’s inflicting more suffering and death than ever before?

On her show last week, Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan made a momentous announcement in an almost blithe, off-hand manner.

“The pandemic’s over for all intents and purposes but we’re still having to deal with this nonsense. Isn’t that ultimately why we’re feeling miserable because we all want a break? If I was in government what I’d do right now is ‘green setting guys, go for your life, party party, whatever’. Just for the mental break of it.”

The announcement that the pandemic is over would have been news to the families of the eight people reported to have died with covid-19 in New Zealand that day.

But du Plessis-Allan is far from an outlier in wanting to place a still raging pandemic in the rearview mirror.

Recently a senior Stuff executive sent staff a memo telling them their audience is “over covid” and has “actively moved on from covid content”.

It implored them to find cracker non-covid stories on topics including cons, crime, and safety, the cost of living, NZ culture, and stuff everyone is talking about.

Much wider group
Stuff’s audience is part of a much wider group that’s actively moving on from covid.

National leader Christopher Luxon just returned from a whirlwind overseas tour with the news that most people he met were no longer even talking about covid.

“It’s interesting to me I’ve just come back from Singapore, Ireland, and the UK. In most of those places we didn’t have a single covid conversation. In places like Ireland there’s no mask wearing at all.”

Luxon is right. Many places around the world have dropped their covid restrictions.

But even if we’re determined to ignore it, covid has remained stubbornly real, and is continuing to cause equally real harm.

In the United States, hospitalisations and reinfections are rising with the increasing prevalence of the BA.5 strain of omicron.

In the UK, about 13,000 hospital beds are currently occupied by covid patients. Hospitals are dealing with staff absences, exhaustion, persistent backlogs and problems discharging patients, and the UK government is considering bringing back restrictions if the situation gets any worse.

Same story as here
If that all sounds familiar, it’s because pretty much the exact same story is playing out here.

Association of General Surgeons president Rowan French delivered some dire news to RNZ’s Morning Report about hospitals’ current troubles with scheduling elective surgeries.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “We don’t say that lightly but I think it is the worst we’ve ever seen it, particularly with respect to our ability to treat our patients’ elective conditions.”

French said those issues were exacerbated by a wave of covid-19 and winter flu.

Covid patients were taking up a lot of the beds that would normally be used by people recovering from surgery, and he couldn’t see an end in sight to the crisis.

There’s a jarring mismatch between that kind of interview and the concurrent harping about the need to move on from covid.

That’s producing cognitive dissonance, not just in the public, but among media commentators, some of whom are now bobbling between berating our minimal remaining efforts to mitigate covid-19 and lamenting the damage being caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus.

Mental oscillations
In some cases, these mental oscillations can take place in mere hours.

On the morning of July 6, Newstalk ZB Wellington host Nick Mills had harsh words for the epidemiologists urging caution over covid.

“Michael Baker, let us get on with our lives. You go back to your lab. Do some intelligent work. Get paid truckloads of money doing it, and live in an extremely flash house. But for me, I don’t want to hear from you anymore. I want to get on with my life and our life.”

On du Plessis-Allan’s panel show The Huddle later that day, he had a different message about the severity of the latest wave.

“I’m absolutely terrified because it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” he said. “If we have to go back [to a red setting] – and it will all be based on hospitals gonna have to be overcrowded — these numbers are terrifying.”

Maybe if Nick Mills had listened more closely to Professor Michael Baker, his research on BA.5 wouldn’t have come as such a nasty surprise.

To be fair to these hosts, their contradictory approaches to covid are pretty relatable.

Sick of the sickness
Even without any hard data to hand, it’s safe to say many people are sick of the sickness, and some are prepared to live in a state of suspended disbelief to act like that’s the case.

But covid isn’t over, and now many leading experts are saying it may never be.

Last week The Project commissioned a poll which showed 38 percent of people agree with those experts. They believe covid is here for good.

Afterward presenter Kanoa Lloyd quizzed epidemiologist Dr Tony Blakely about whether those respondents were right.

“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s rolling on. Remember influenza in 1918, we still get influenza every year. This is a coronavirus. It could keep coming up every year.”

Dr Blakely is among a number of epidemiologists and healthcare workers who have gone to the media lately to deliver the message that there is still a pandemic on.

On last weekend’s episode of Newshub Nation, the aforementioned Professor Michael Baker compared covid to the “inconvenient truth” of climate change — a global threat that demands real change and ongoing action to mitigate.

Common sense safety
He went on to link covid precautions to another common sense safety measure.

“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family, you are going to be killing some people — just like drinking and driving,” he said.

At The Spinoff, microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles stuck with the driving metaphor, imploring people to make popping on a mask as natural as clicking in your seatbelt.

This recent flurry of cautious messaging stands in stark contrast to much of the media coverage over the last few months.

Despite the fact 10 to 20 people per day have been dying of covid-19, that is had a muted response outside of the pro-forma coverage of the Ministry of Health’s 1pm press releases.

When covid-19 has been covered, the death toll has usually been superseded in the news by complaints from businesses about the few restrictions that remain.

Maybe that’s not such a surprise. News organisations have a powerful commercial incentive to give their customers what they want, and as Stuff’s executive said, audiences have moved on.

Like drunk party guest
But, like a drunk party guest at 3am, coronavirus does not care that you’re tired of it and you want it to leave.

A month ago, Newsroom’s Marc Daalder made that point in a prescient piece headlined “Covid isn’t over, it’s just getting started“.

He said the media needed to adjust from covering covid as a crisis to seeing it as an ongoing concern like the road toll or crime.

“It’s no longer temporary. It’s here to stay with us. And I don’t think that journalists have really figured out how to cover it as a daily issue, just like we cover all of the other daily issues that are really problematic,” he said.

“In some respects, it’s a bit bigger because it has a much more serious burden in terms of deaths and hospitalisations and long covid than something like the road toll, but just because it’s not a temporary crisis anymore, doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring it.”

Daalder said reporters could reorientate their coverage, writing more human interest stories on issues like the impact of long covid, and looking forward at how the virus and the fight against it will evolve.

“I think we are poorly served by media coverage, after the peak of the first omicron wave, in which there was no looking forward to what’s going to be happening in the short term or the long term.

Omicron peaked … and then?
“There was just this all this focus on what would happen when omicron peaked, and then it did, and, and nothing filled the void after that. And so I think it’s quite natural for people to assume that covid is over.”

Journalists could also apply more pressure to the government over the continuing levels of preventable suffering and death being caused by cmicron’s spread, Daalder said.

He has advocated for the return of the alert level system, which he believes was much more simple and comprehensible than the traffic light system implemented late last year.

“There’s not really very much accountability journalism that looks at holding the government accountable for essentially abandoning vulnerable people to the whims of the virus,” he said.

“You have this sort of very strange juxtaposition in the [parliamentary] press gallery where the covid minister will be asked by one person: ‘Are you concerned about BA.5? It’s starting to spread in New Zealand. Should we be increasing our restrictions?’

“And then in the next breath, the question is ‘Why aren’t we in green? When will we ever get to green?’.

Better balancing
“I’m not sure that either of those get to the heart of the present issue, which is that the current settings aren’t aren’t even aligned with a non-BA.5 world.”

Daalder said news organisations should find ways to balance their commercial incentives and the public interest role of journalism when it comes to important, but not always clickable, stories like covid or climate change.

“There’s an extent to which you should follow what audiences want. And you shouldn’t necessarily be trying to force something down their throats that they don’t want.

“But with something like covid, where it’s such a huge, important thing that’s happening, and that’s going to keep happening, regardless of whether you write about it or not.

“I think that’s where you know that that mission of journalism to tell the truth really comes in and overrides maybe some of the audience imperatives.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In 2017, the New Zealand media featured 14,349 stories that included the word Islam – nearly 13,000 of those stories mentioned either terrorism or Islamic Jihad.

The stats are from an academic article in Pacific Journalism Review by Auckland University of Technology’s senior lecturer and Pacific Media Centre board member Khairiah Rahman and Azadeh Emadi of Glasgow University:

READ MORE: Representation of Islam and Muslims in New Zealand media

LISTEN TO MEDIAWATCH

The pair wrote that the paper was necessary because:

“there appears to be a growing misconceived hatred for a faith supported by 1.5 billion of the world’s population, but more importantly, this destructive trend is promoted by the media, consciously or not, and has the potential to ultimately cause an unnecessary and irreparable rift in civil society.”

And they wrote:

“The media can rectify their misrepresentations of Muslims by adopting intercultural dialogue. The outcome would present a holistic story that uses the voices of those involved respectfully.”

In the days since the mass murder at the mosques in Christchurch Muslim voices are finally being heard. It’s beyond tragic that it’s taken an act of such murderous evil to bring that about.

Unsurprising to Muslims
If there’s been a unifying theme among many of the op-eds published in recent days it’s that as shocking as the white supremacist attack was – it wasn’t surprising to Muslims.

Waleed Aly, a co-host of the Australian version of The Project, began last Friday’s programme with an editorial. He said:

“Of all the things I could say tonight, that I’m gutted and I’m scared and I feel overcome with utter hopelessness, the most dishonest thing, the most dishonest thing would be to say that I’m shocked. I’m simply not. There’s nothing about what happened in Christchurch today that shocked me. I wasn’t shocked when six people were shot to death at a mosque in Quebec City two years ago. I wasn’t shocked when a man drove a van into Finsbury Park mosque in London about six months later and I wasn’t shocked when 11 Jews were shot dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue late last year or when nine Christians were killed at a church in Charleston. If we’re honest, we’ll know this has been coming.”

The video has been shared 12 million times and seen Prime Minister Scott Morrison threaten Network 10 with a defamation case.

Writing on the Vice website lawyer and chairperson of the Khadija Leadership Network Pakeeza Rasheed wrote:

“I am sad that this happened but I am equally angry that little had been done to address the issues leading up to this event. As Muslims we have been told our anger is dangerous, our anger is unacceptable. … For so long we have been told to be quiet, to be invisible, to know our place and apologise for our very existence. To be grateful that we were allowed to be a part of a utopian paradise. But let’s not fool ourselves. We have never really been a part of New Zealand. We have merely been allowed to exist—never embraced, never included, never accepted. Muslims have been in New Zealand since the 1800s but we are still treated as outsiders.”

‘We ignored it’
Donna Miles-Mohab writing on Newsroom said:

“Islamophobia: you cannot tackle it if you don’t acknowledge it exists. Let’s face it; we ignored it. We chose to look away. We chose to refuse to acknowledge that Islamophobia is a problem in New Zealand. It’s a hard pill to swallow, I know – especially now that most of us feel so devastated by the news and feel so shocked that such an evil act can happen in a country full of love and tolerance. But to many Muslims, especially hijabi Muslim women, the hate that gave rise to this evil act is not entirely unfamiliar.”

And she noted: “An informal survey of 100 young Muslim women conducted by the Islamic Women Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) showed 80 percent were harassed or discriminated within the previous year.”

On RNZ’s website Saziah Bashir wrote:

“Muslims have been dehumanised and demonised in the media the world over since 9/11. The failure to include Muslim voices in this narrative has left unchallenged the stereotypes painted of us, as if we are a two-dimensional monolith, a single monstrous Other.”

And she had some suggestions…

“Share on social media the commentary from Muslims who are sharing their thoughts and experiences and if you are white then share the immense platform you are often privileged to occupy.”

Plenty of sharing
There’s been plenty of sharing going on. The Manukau Police posted a video on Facebook of Inspector Naila Hassan – New Zealand’s highest ranked Muslim police officer – addressing a vigil marking the tragedy.

In a profile of Inspector Hassan published by Stuff last year, she revealed that it had taken her 20 years to admit to her colleagues she was Muslim – clearly it’s not just the media that at times has felt less than welcoming to Muslim views.

Green MP Chloe Swarbrick used her Facebook page to let her friend Mukseet to tell his story. The post has been shared 10,000 times.

Mukseet writes candidly about growing up in a racist country and then shares this anecdote: .

“I watched my mum bursting with pride as she recounted to my aunty in Bangladesh the story of how she went for a walk this morning, and a white woman came up to her, greeted her as a friend, took her hands and said ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’.”

He continued: “Your messages mean a lot. Your support means a lot. They have brought me to tears, helped to keep me grounded, and brought me back from some really dark places. But if I’m to be honest; they’re not enough. Action is so much harder than apathy. But look where apathy and complacency got us.

“In these times when hate and bigotry no longer have to hide in the shadows; listen to minorities, talk to those around you, if you hear someone spouting hate, call that shit out.”

Earthquake shelter
Dr Anwar Ghani of the Federation of Islamic Societies was asked on TVNZ’s Marae on Sunday about that lack of surprise at the attacks but he had other things he wanted to say first:

“This particular mosque at Deans Avenue was a place for shelter when we had the earthquakes and they used to serve meal to three to four hundred people every day. And the community made a point of going the provide at least whatever they could. That was their sense of doing community good.”

And then Dr Ghani answered the question about why the attack hadn’t come as a complete surprise to Muslims.

“While we are not surprised but we are certainly shocked that it could happen at this level, this magnitude. We are lost for words. We also know that New Zealand stands together. We have seen at the vigil in Hamilton – such a small community but six seven thousand people came and showed solidarity.”.

One of the biggest challenges coming up for the media is how to deal with the upcoming trial of the man responsible this crime. Anjum Rahman, of the Islamic Woman’s Council, was asked on TVNZ’s Q and A programme about the accused mass murderer’s plan to represent himself in court.

She replied that he would represent himself and like all New Zealanders he had that right but the media had a responsibility not to report everything just for the sake of it. “I would be asking all media to show extreme restraint in terms of which of his messages they choose to put out to the public. Don’t let him play the game.”

If Anjum Rahman was looking forward to the media reporting responsibility, the Spinoff’s Duncan Grieve was looking at how the media was handling some of its less edifying efforts from the past. In an article titled: ‘The quiet deletion of the Islamophobic archives,’ Grieves pointed out that a photo Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking holding up a tee-shirt with the Okay symbol that is popular with white supremacists had been removed (Hosking has said he was unaware of the symbol’s associations with the alt-right); and that an article by fellow ZB host Chris Lynch that asked “Does Islam have any place in public swimming pools?” had also been removed.

On-air apology
Mediawatch hasn’t read the the scrubbed op-ed but presumably it objected to women only hours – often popular with non Muslim women as well – on the grounds it was buckling to Islamic demands.

Lynch made an on-air apology.

Newsroom’s Thomas Coughlan took a look at the recent history of politicians criticising Islam and Muslim immigration to New Zealand. (He spoke to Bryan Crump about it on Monday night on Lately.)

He pointed our current foreign and deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters is a repeat offender. Peters is quoted as saying: “They say – ah yes – but New Zealand has always been a nation of immigrants. They miss a crucial point. New Zealand has never been a nation of Islamic immigrants…” .

Coughlan’s list was far from comprehensive. In 2002 Richard Prebble – then the leader of the ACT Party – warned of the dangers of people from desert cultures and advocated taking in white farmers from Southern Africa instead – who he described as real refugees.

The comments barely rated a mention with Scoop and Australia’s Green Left Weekly being the only places online with articles mentioning the press release.

Didn’t rate a mention
And in his self-published 2014 autobiography Don Brash dedicated a whole chapter to the question fundamentalist religion.

Most of the chapter is made of an article that Brash wrote while he was the leader of the National Party but was never published because his colleagues at the time warned him that it would confirm people’s impression that he was a racist.

In it he quotes approvingly from a paper by a former Australian Treasury secretary – “not some kind of extreme right-wing nutter,” according to Brash – which advocated bringing Muslim immigration to a virtual halt because, he claimed, Islam was a culture that “for the past 500 years or so failed its adherents as its inward-looking theocracy has resulted in it falling further and further behind the West”.

Brash’s book was the subject of quite a few interviews but as far as Mediawatch is aware his support for massively restricting Muslim immigration didn’t rate a mention.

This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

Journalists in the Philippines take their life in their hands doing their job. What was already one of the world’s riskiest places to be a reporter has become even more difficult under President Rodrigo Duterte and his “war on drugs”, reports RNZ’s Mediawatch.

In today’s Mediawatch programme featuring the executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Malou Mangahas, who spoke at “Journalism Under Duress in Asia-Pacific”, a summit marking the 10th anniversary of Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre, presenter Colin Peacock reports:

When the Philippines appears in the news here these days, it’s not normally good news.

Most stories focus on the maverick president Rodrigo Duterte – nicknamed The Punisher – who is often compared to Donald Trump. Many of those stories also refer to the bloody crackdown of his ‘war on drugs’ launched after he took power last year.

READ MORE: Journalism under duress in Asia-Pacific – an introduction

Thousands of people have been killed by vigilante-style policing since mid-2016.

PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas (centre) at the Pacific Media Centre with RNZ’s Johnny Blades, Pacific Media Watch’s Kendall Hutt and PMC’s Del Abcede. Image: David Robie/PMC

-Partners-

In her APEC visit to Manila last month, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the deaths “require investigation . . at the very least” – and in a rather awkward-looking press conference, she also made a point of telling the president New Zealand’s police are unarmed.

The culture of impunity allowing police to kill suspected drug users and sellers in the Philippines is also putting journalists under severe pressure – and in some cases getting them killed too.

The extra-judicial killings are often officially explained as self-defence or the results of shoot-outs. But sometimes media reports show otherwise.

This week, Reuters news agency published a startling multi-media report called Operation Kill detailing the extra-judicial killings of three men and how the circumstances were covered up by police officers.

“The Philippines has one of the most free presses in Asia, and it also one of the rambunctious in its exercise of freedom,” said Malou Mangahas.

“The drug problem is very serious and that is accepted across the country. It is the method of the war on drugs is what has divided it.”

https://podcast.radionz.co.nz/mwatch/mwatch-20171203-0912-reporting_risks_grow_under_the_punisher-128.mp3

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz