Stuff Digital Edition

Pressing perception problems for media

Journalism has a perception problem. The news media has had trust issues for a long time, but those issues have got worse – and the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund hasn’t helped.

By Kelly Dennett and Stewart Willy.

Over the phone, journalism trust researcher Dr Merja Myllylahti is reading aloud a common criticism of New Zealand journalism as it pertains to the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF).

‘‘All applicants must show a clear and obvious commitment to the Treaty and te reo; no exceptions,’’ reads the complaint. ‘‘So much for journalistic integrity. This is nothing short of shameful.’’

The comment has come from an anonymous man in his 60s, who was one of 1085 people surveyed by Myllylahti’s team at the Auckland University of Technology’s journalism, media and democracy centre. The survey showed trust in mainstream media had dropped to 45%, reflecting global trends.

The drop in trust was no surprise to Myllylahti, but the strong comments singling out the Public Interest Journalism Fund were.

‘‘These answers were throwing us.’’

A day earlier, over Zoom, New Zealand On Air’s head of journalism, Raewyn Rasch, appears exasperated. ‘‘I’m actually going to pick up the guidelines, because I think there has been quite a lot of misinformation about exactly what we’re asking.’’

She pulls out the fund’s principles and guidelines and reads a highlighted passage.

‘‘We often get quoted back at us ‘the media are being asked to promote the principles of partnership [under the Treaty] but, actually, if you read the guidelines, which some people obviously haven’t, the PIJF must achieve all of these. These are all the things that our fund, we, need to achieve. That’s on us.

‘‘In terms of what the media are asked to do, and it’s one of nine criteria, just one of all these things that we are looking for, applicants can show a clear and obvious commitment or intent for commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including a commitment to te reo Ma¯ ori. We don’t actually require anything specific. We’re not telling them how to do that. We’re just asking them to consider it.

‘‘Could you be critical of Te Tiriti? Of course you can. But you’d still need to stick with what the main and core criteria of the PIJF are, which is that you maintain the tenets of journalism which are fairness, balance and accuracy.

‘‘If someone came to us with a proposal to have a critical look at Te Tiriti, as long as it was fair, balanced and accurate, then there would be no reason why we wouldn’t fund it, but no-one has come to us with that proposal, so it’s all kind of hypothetical. In reality, we have had from the media no complaints, no concerns raised, at all, on this point.’’

Dial back to December 2019, and Minister for Broadcasting and Media Kris Faafoi was under pressure. Pre-pandemic, newsrooms were in a critical state. Media giants Stuff and NZME had repeatedly failed to get the Commerce Commission’s permission to merge, and community newspapers were closing.

The ‘‘too big to fail’’ mantra was echoing around newsrooms and the Beehive. In The Broken Estate, published at the time, journalist Melanie Bunce wrote, ‘‘. . . journalism is too important. Its failure would be disastrous for the wider political system on which everything else is built.’’ The Government was urged to intervene, but what would a bailout imply to the public?

The following year saw the storm worsen: The onset of Covid-19 resulted in layoffs and some shutting their doors. Stuff, whose Australian owner Nine had been shopping for a buyer for some time, was also on the brink of closure. In a final bid to save it, chief executive Sinead Boucher bought it for $1.

The precariousness of the media couldn’t have been overstated by the time Faafoi announced a $55 million cash injection for media over three years, a golden egg brought about by Covid. The Public Interest Journalism Fund would be administered by New Zealand On Air, which had already been supporting public interest broadcast journalism since 1999 (and through the Broadcasting Commission before that).

Newshub boss and consultant Hal Crawford was brought in to chat with stakeholders and put scaffolding in place. Among ideas floated and mooted were that newsrooms’

content creation software or technology could be funded, and other non-editorialspecific ways to sustain newsrooms. But media generally sang the same tune: They needed more reporters, and recognised the need for diversity. The resulting threepronged fund allowed media to apply through multiple rounds, across three categories: content/ project-based reporting, new reporting roles, or things that would create a sustainable news model, like training schemes.

Eligibility criteria includes the aforementioned Te Tiriti and te reo commitments. Others include a commitment to NZ content, making funded content freely available online in an ‘‘acceptable form’’ (the fund uses the example of uploading a PDF online as inappropriate), and adherence to media standards. Off limits is funding for national political coverage, entertainment content, high-profile crime or celebrity news, and opinion.

Industry experts expressed concern that the requirements created a narrow interpretation of public interest journalism, that it reinforced the perception that media must kowtow to government narratives, that funding could have been directed at things that helped kept the lights on, while leaving the journalism to the newsrooms, and that the funding’s prescriptiveness meant newsrooms were scrambling to create projects over and above their bread and butter – at newsrooms’ expense.

Loitering in the background is the prevalence of anti-media views that are becoming more mainstream, not simply rhetoric perpetuated by fringe groups. The claim that the Government is bankrolling media to further its agenda appears to be widely circulated, and believed.

For the New Zealand Centre for Political Research last year, freelancer and former editor Karl du Fresne wrote the public should be ‘‘deeply suspicious’’ of the fund, saying it was laden with ideology, while broadcaster Sean Plunket said, ‘‘... New Zealanders are suddenly consuming a media which has been coerced, or willingly embraced, a vision of New Zealand which is totally at odds with the reality of their lives.’’ Politicians Judith Collins and David Seymour have publicly questioned the fund and former political editor Stephen Parker wrote for Newsroom, ‘‘What is helpful now [for media] could be a headache later.’’

Covid didn’t help. The prolonged crisis reporting informed the narrative that media were simply megaphones for the Government.

For those surveyed by AUT, ‘‘The public funding is the problem,’’ says Myllylahti, ‘‘and then it’s, the media is seen as part of the elite – that journalists are not working for us, they are working for them. This has been coming up in all surveys: biased, politicised, opinionated views of the journalists. I don’t think that’s a specifically NZ problem, it’s a problem for the whole of the media.’’

Myllylahti points out that commercial funding of media, through advertising, has long been accepted by the public, and she suggests underpinning these views is possibly a limited understanding of how media is traditionally funded. For example Radio New Zealand (RNZ) continues to rate slightly higher in terms of trust, despite being government funded. The past week’s Budget included $327m to support the new entity created out of RNZ and TVNZ.

‘‘A lot of people don’t understand that RNZ and TVNZ are publicly funded, or don’t want to remember it.’’

There was also a skewed perception about the fund’s allocation. Myllylahti says most of the money has gone to job creation, and a lot has been directed at independent media. While behemoths Stuff, RNZ and NZME were funded for more than 50 roles between them, smaller independents like Kiwi Media Publishing, which publishes The Indian Weekender, and The Gisborne Herald, were each allocated funding for new reporters.

Content-wise, BusinessDesk was allocated more than $150,000 for an investigation into the charity sector, while Shepherdess Magazine was allocated $292,000 for a series of stories on rural women’s perspectives. Kowhai Media, which publishes NZ Geographic, was funded $146,000 for features and stories about the ocean.

Funding was also allocated for children’s news, on-the-job training at Ma¯ ori Television, a current affairs podcast by Newshub Nation and a Newsroom investigation into going carbon-free. One of the training schemes, Te Rito, was the first Ma¯ ori and diverse voices journalism cadet programme. Readers may also recognise the Local Democracy Reporting scheme, which plants more local government reporters in regional communities.

Jeremy Muir, editor of the Gisborne Herald, needed the fund to fill a crucial gap in his nineperson newsroom. ‘‘We applied for a kaupapa Ma¯ ori reporting role. Our previous Ma¯ ori issues reporter had left to go to RNZ and we had been unsuccessful in trying to recruit. NZ On Air saw that it was at-risk journalism for us and accepted our case for funding for two years.’’

Muir said the only accusations of bias he had seen were in an anti-mandate context around vaccination and Covid-19 policy. Overall the extra funding had been positive.

‘‘[Business] is really challenging and it’s great to have this support. And it’s targeted in good areas. It has been a real boon for us.’’

Raewyn Rasch says while $55m is eye-watering, for struggling media it’s ‘‘a drop in the bucket . . . It’s spread very thinly. It’s hardly enough to turn their heads, let alone bribe them.’’

Te Ma¯ ngai Pa¯ ho, a Crown entity that funds journalism and particularly promotes Ma¯ ori language and culture, has partnered with the fund. Its head of content, Blake Ihimaera, says while plurality of voices has been its aim for many years, ‘‘We’re not here to say, no, your commitment [to Te Tiriti] isn’t strong enough, but actually encouraging mainstream media organisations, and even the smaller ones, to include more references to the Treaty of Waitangi, in their media – it’s a good thing I think, for all New Zealanders.’’

Says Myllylahti: ‘‘I think it’s well intentioned and addresses those structural problems we have in the news industry. Those [criteria] are there of course, [but] the whole problem there is, how do you define what is in the public interest? And that differs between news organisations, we don’t all agree what that looks like.’’

‘‘It’s hard to get the trust of the public when noone will bloody talk to them, or is allowed to talk to them. That’s been a huge shift in the 20 to 30 years, the routine censorship of everything.’’

James Hollings

‘‘New Zealand media has got to be careful to make sure it’s acting for ordinary people,’’ says the leader of Massey University’s journalism programme, associate professor Dr James Hollings.

Hollings was a journalist for 18 years and helped establish the New Zealand Centre for Investigative Journalism. He’s on the fund’s advisory committee. He’s seen huge changes to the practice and says while journalists can broadcast across more mediums than before, they face working in newsrooms with budget constraints, and in an environment where both public and private sector groups have perfected PR spin and become adept at suppressing information.

‘‘It’s hard to get the trust of the public when noone will bloody talk to them, or is allowed to talk to them,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s been a huge shift in the 20 to 30 years – the routine censorship of everything.’’

That said, Hollings says journalists tend to be middle class. ‘‘That’s OK, that’s fine, I just see important issues in communities that aren’t being covered. A lot of what we do is really important and really great [but] it needs to be constantly trying to rethink and engage and reach and capture the interest of so many communities.’’

He uses the example of the now defunct The Truth newspaper, an anti-establishment tabloid. ‘‘It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was incredibly popular, and did some very good journalism and what we call ‘click bait’ these days, but it was unashamedly on the side of the ordinary working person. The mainstream media has got to be careful to make sure it’s doing the same thing. Otherwise it’s going to be identified as part of the elites.’’

That theory – of a combined government/media elite – was seen at the anti-mandate, anti-vaccination occupation at Parliament, which spilled over into anti-government, anti-media rhetoric, the protest becoming an outlet for those who’d long felt ignored.

‘‘I want to make sure we are creating journalism that editors and journalists think is appropriate and want to do, rather than meeting some criteria that is attached to a funding round.’’

Mark Stevens Stuff’s editorial director

But experts say genuine critique of media has given way to vehicles of misinformation.

And it’s not as simple as the fund simply wrapping up and going away, says Myllylahti. Of concern is a lack of media studies in schools and universities, or general education about media – anything that could put in place a framework to dispel the notion of a conspiracy. While even globally there are industry movements for increased transparency about how journalists operate, ‘‘a lot of things need to change. It is deeper, perhaps, than we think.’’

Despite frequent claims online of people cancelling their subscriptions or boycotting media en masse, there is no evidence to suggest audiences are automatically switching off in response. Stuff, owner of a stable of newspapers including the Sunday Star-Times, has a core goal of building public trust, and its editorial director, Mark Stevens, says while measuring that is difficult, there were no metrics suggesting people have stopped reading or engaging because of the fund.

‘‘There is definitely quite consistent feedback and obviously something like circulation is volatile, but I don’t think you could draw a direct line between audience impact, either in print or digital,’’ he says. ‘‘My biggest concern is that feedback leads to belief and narrative that grows. Any misinformation or disinformation that grabs hold and starts to permeate in the mainstream, that makes our job more difficult.’’

While some trust can be measured through the number of returning readers, or their engagement – there is other work going on in the background – Stevens notes that abuse of journalists has ratcheted up ‘‘significantly’’ from vile online comments, to assaults or threats. NZ wasn’t immune to a global anti-media sentiment, and the fund, while well intentioned and much needed, had played into the hands of those who perpetuated misinformation.

Stevens says while Stuff has benefited from the hire of journalists, its newsrooms were now being ‘‘much more judicious’’ about what it was applying for, partly because of perception, but mostly because of the logistics and strains it was putting on newsrooms to brainstorm and apply for projects. Now, instead of trying to spearhead new projects, it tries to match work already under way and see if it’s appropriate to seek funding for it.

‘‘I want to make sure we are creating journalism that editors and journalists think is appropriate and want to do, rather than meeting some criteria that is attached to a funding round.’’

That sentiment is shared by Westport News editor and co-owner Lee Scanlon, who said getting the paper out five days a week was increasingly difficult, but that applying for funding was simply too time consuming and bureaucratic.

‘‘It did look reasonably tough. At the moment we are trying to run a very small marginally profitable business in very difficult times. And we’ve had other things to focus on. It could also hook us into a lot of accountability measures.’’

Four reporters cover a patch that stretches from Westport out to Reefton and Karamea for the newspaper that has operated since the early 1870s.

‘‘We like to paddle our own canoe,’’ says Scanlon. ‘‘If we’re using our own money and we’re accountable for our own spending, we’re more comfortable with that than seeking funding from the public purse. I’m reluctant to put my hand up for government handouts.’’

The fund runs dry next year, with Kris Faafoi saying the injection was only designed to provide interim support for short-term Covid relief, and longterm work on the sustainability of the industry. There is no guarantee the roles created under the fund would continue. Mark Stevens says natural attrition may create space for those journalists to stay on board. ‘‘Our goal would be to keep them but when the funding dries up there is certainly no guarantee.’’

Since the fund’s inception it has allocated $40m to 139 roles, 11 training programmes, and 45 projects across 49 media entities. Data provided by New Zealand on Air showed 4.7m page views by

2.2 million unique users on digital content it had funded. Those visitors had high engagement – spending nearly five minutes on content. A large proportion were outside Auckland.

Faafoi deemed the fund a success. On questions of collusion, he said New Zealand On Air was an independent entity at arm’s length from Government.

The Broadcasting Act also made it illegal for the Government to give NZ On Air any direction in respect of content, including news and current affairs.

‘‘NZOA cannot give editorial direction to media organisations which receive NZ On Air funding, including from the PIJF.’’

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2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281848647214739

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