Karl du Fresne: The incredible disappearing journalists

Over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of journalists. To all intents and purposes, most have vanished from sight.

Some have gone quietly into retirement, but many are still active – just not in journalism. People whose bylines were once familiar to newspaper readers have effectively gone underground, along with the sub-editors who massaged their copy into shape. They have mostly been absorbed into the nebulous world of public relations, or comms as it’s now known in the trade.

The digital revolution inflicted huge damage on the print media, precipitating a hollowing out of newsrooms and an exodus of skill and experience into the comms business. According to the Sapere report commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the number of journalists fell by 52 per cent between 2000 and 2018.

Some of these refugees were snapped up by the private sector, where there has been a proliferation of PR and government relations (for which read lobbying) consultancies, the latter of which have recently come under justified critical scrutiny. But I would guess that an even greater number migrated to the public sector.

As the mainstream media shrank, so the government comms racket expanded almost exponentially. In the vernacular, it was known as going over to the dark side.

The trend has become even more pronounced under Labour. RNZ reported this morning that the number of comms staff in the core public service has risen 50 percent since Labour took office in 2017. Figures provided to RNZ show that 532 comms people were employed in the year to June 2022, up 7.5 percent on the previous year.

It’s odds-on that people employed in comms work across the public and private sectors now far outnumber those in journalism. Even 14 years ago the then Commissioner of Police remarked to me, with what I thought was a hint of smugness, that he employed more trained journalists than most newspapers did. I had no reason to doubt him.

I’m sure this wasn’t unique to the police. It has become de rigueur for every organisation with a public profile, whether it’s the local district council, a charitable organisation, a sports body or a government department, to have a comms manager and a team – often a large team – of comms advisers.

Health Minister Ayesha Verrall recently revealed in response to Opposition questioning that Te Whatu Ora, the national health agency, employs 173 comms people and a further 26 contractors working in the same field. This would be outrageous at the best of times but looks even worse when the health system is crumbling and desperately short of actual health professionals. It suggests seriously skewed priorities.

I’m reliably informed, meanwhile, that Wellington City Council employs 60 comms people across all its departments. If the effectiveness of an organisation’s comms staff can be gauged by its public image, you’d have to conclude that the comms people at both Te Whatu Ora and Wellington City Council are doing a spectacularly poor job.

Paradoxically, the expansion of comms departments hasn’t facilitated better communication with the public. Quite the reverse: many journalists will tell you that generally speaking, the ease of obtaining important information from government organisations tends to diminish as more comms people are employed.

When I started out in journalism in the late 60s, I could probably have counted on the fingers of my hands the number of fulltime PR people in Wellington. But what was previously a select and rather mysterious little club – mysterious because I could never quite figure out exactly what they did – now forms a powerful and steadily expanding tier in both the corporate and public sectors.

As an aside, not all my former colleagues made the transition into comms. A few re-invented themselves as academics and in the process, ended up a very long way from the world of plain English that journalism valued. I was amused recently to see that one former reporter of my acquaintance had become a university lecturer in marketing and acquired a PhD. According to his professional profile, his published research focuses on “market boundaries from a social practice perspective, approached from an abductive hermeneutic methodology and philosophical basis”. I would have loved to see him try to get that gibberish past a cranky, cardigan-wearing sub-editor.

But it’s comms, in all its varied permutations, that provided most of my old workmates with an escape route from a shrinking (some would say dying) industry. People who did useful and often admirable work as journalists now market themselves as content strategy advisers or communications and engagement leads, whatever that may mean.

I don’t entirely blame them. They have to make a buck, and they’re almost certainly earning a lot more than they did in their former career, though I bet they’re not having as much fun as they did when they worked in newsrooms.

I lament this enormous loss of skill and experience. You can see the results not only in the massive expansion of the comms sector, but more sadly in the greatly diminished quality of journalism.

The growth in the number of political press secretaries and media advisers, who wield more power than is healthy, is a striking manifestation of the trend.

Political press secretaries at the top level are more than mere functionaries. They are key influencers, practitioners of the dark arts: the equivalent of powerful courtiers in a royal palace. They often control the narrative when by rights it should be determined by the people who employ them.

I’ve seen it suggested recently that one reason Christopher Luxon isn’t getting more traction is that his media minders dictate the message when he would probably come across as more genuine and more spontaneous if he ignored their advice and trusted his own instincts.

Back at the media coalface, a shrinking but honourable minority of working journalists remain committed to telling important stories and upholding traditional values of fairness and impartiality. They should be regarded as heroes. Others still do their best to ensure a wide range of opinions are published in letters to the editor columns.

Unfortunately such people are now outnumbered by university-educated social justice activists posing as journalists who consider it their mission to correct the thinking of their ignorant, bigoted or misguided readers. This would be marginally more tolerable if they could write, but many of them can’t.

In the comms war, meanwhile, the balance of power has long since shifted from those trying to get information to those controlling it. They are unseen influencers whose role is invisible to everyone other than the people they work with. This has serious implications for democracy and transparency.

It must be acknowledged that there’s a legitimate and even vital role for comms people. Cyclone Gabrielle was a useful reminder of the importance of making accurate, up-to-date information available to the public.

But there are comms and there are comms. There’s a crucial difference between straight, unembroidered information – factual information that’s openly disclosed and which people can use – and political or corporate spin that’s used to make organisations look good, to promote vested interests or to bury potentially embarrassing issues of public importance. The type of comms, in other words, that seeks to exert influence on public affairs without disclosing who’s pulling the strings and why.

To finish, a couple of crucial questions: is the quality of government better as a result of all these unseen “strategic” comms advisers in government departments and agencies? Most people would almost certainly say no. Do the public get more and better quality information? Again, probably not. The thing to remember is that the comms business is ultimately about control – and nowhere more so than in the political realm.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.