Penn Raine: R.I.P. Investigative Journalism?

Back in the day, if I queried a news story my old mum would say, ’Well, they wouldn’t be allowed to print it if it wasn’t true.’

 The mainstream media had reasonably earned the trust of my mother’s generation when journalists’ jobs were to report verifiable facts and to offer balanced commentary. The editorial, of course, was likely to promote a certain point of view and there would be a recognisable op-ed that did the same thing.  Then dawned the Information Age when social media platforms and You Tubers hustled excitedly into the info space and the fan base of the trusted TV news, daily newspapers and national radio stations began to bleed out.

Audience boredom was not surprising. The approach of legacy media was not as compelling, febrile, or naughty as that of the newcomers and the haemorrhage did not slow down as the novelty wore off. In 2020, our Government announced the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) which offered $55 million over three years to 122 new journalist roles over media organisations and companies to provide support through and following the pandemic. Although, the slump in numbers away from these media was already picking up speed long before this, and the sweetener coincided suspiciously with a raft of previously ungazetted new Labour policies.

As we now know there was a catch. When recipients such as NZ Herald and their regional papers, Stuff, RNZ, Māori Television, the Otago Daily Times, Newsroom, The Spinoff and Newshub accepted the money in return they had to “actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner.” Many irritable commentators, such as Sean Plunket, have since questioned the editorial ethics of promoting political propaganda: ‘So, a whole lot of 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,” a comment that has earned him a slew of lazy insults from people who don’t want to discuss the subject.

Topics on which the public might have expected balanced and careful journalistic research include Ardern’s climate change policies, the Polytech merger, and Julian Batchelor’s co-governance resistance movement. 

The media’s adulation for the former PM’s ‘this generation’s nuclear-free  moment’ missed an opportunity to take a deep dive into the real extent of anthropogenic climate change, and what NZ can do to adapt rather than boast to the world on policies that would damage our economy without making an iota of difference to world carbon emissions. We’re still waiting for this neutral research from mainstream journos.

There has been no intelligent journalistic analysis of what has happened at Te Pukenga, the new centralised polytechnic system. We know that costs have blown out, that heads have rolled, and that staff are frustrated. This all has the makings of a catastrophe that would once have had six pages in North and South, but now, silence.

The public media-aided hysteria that Julian Batchelor has met on his tour to discuss co-governance would be funny if it were not so juvenile and shameful. If co-governance is ‘nothing to be afraid of’, as we have been told why not give him some media space to debate the topic? Nobody, much less respected investigative journalists, should dodge the issue if their arguments bear scrutiny. Batchelor is at least trying to provide some clarity on the matter, something Hipkins promised he would do, although perhaps this definition is beyond him in the same way that he struggled with the notion of an adult human female.

You can’t really blame the higher-ups in these organisations for accepting the political bribe. Tough times, dodgy bedfellows. Those more independently minded organisations possibly hoped that the windfall would result in a business turnaround and that readers/listeners/viewers would feel the love again. Those who were comfortable with the level of virtue-signalling that they were now urged to display probably hoped that Labour would continue in power, and the state and the media could stay cosy together with no one the wiser. Or at least with no one having any agency to change the arrangement. 

The PIJF ran out last month and Willie Jackson has not yet said whether it will be renewed. When Jackson’s plans to merge RNZ and TVNZ were made public there must have been many journalists who, having drunk the Kool Aid, were suddenly wondering whether their PIJF job protection was illusory and whether they would after all be sacrificed on the altar of fiscal expediency. Even more so now the fund has run out. Oops.

Jackson, bless him, claimed that the currently mothballed media merger would be the big fixer-upper for the ailing sector, largely because of its increased ‘local content’, his words, not mine. We must suppose that he meant more Māori content. But the reasons I hear for people cancelling their subscriptions and switching off generally fall into two areas: the media do not examine Government incompetency, acting instead as their news agency (like Pravda and TASS), and that Te Reo is being forced on them. If I were to ask Gen Zers they would say, ‘Yeah nah, it’s just boring,’ but that’s entirely another article.

NZ Herald to its credit does allow a few opinion pieces from guest writers and a commentary thread on certain articles. In the last five years the thread’s moderators have been allowing increasingly resentful remarks about political players in the Wellington beltway, which seems a bit sly considering the deal they’ve signed up to. However, Government sponsored media continue to promote Te Reo road signage at the same time as the Road to Zero programme. In countries where I have travelled and there are two languages spoken, I have never seen the language which is less spoken given signage prominence. Do the media think we going to see fewer road fatalities because the language more than 90% of us speak is relegated to minor positions? Just asking for a friend. 

In another example where media support of Labour initiatives lacks logic is its puff pieces around the decolonising of the new school curriculum. Has it not occurred to any of our intelligent journalists for whom we assume language proficiency must have been a key in their successful professions, that dumping any teaching of formal grammar and its toolbox of terms (noun, adjective, subject/verb agreement, singular, plural etc) will make the learning of compulsory Te Reo so much more difficult? If so, I’ve yet to be aware of  their concern. 

Now that the trough of the PIJF is empty I am curious to know whether our previously responsible journalists will come out from behind the shed and start asking the questions they have been ducking since 2017.

Yesterday I watched a video of a debate between Douglas Murray claiming public mistrust of the media, against Malcolm Gladwell, hugely respected journalist of the New York Times. Before the debate the audience were 52% in support of trusting the media.  At the end of the debate 67% decided that they were no longer so trusting. I hope that if my mum were still around that she would be quick to agree with Murray’s sombre quip that the media is now Government’s ‘amen chorus’.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.