I doubt it. They are too self-absorbed.
Right now, members of the parliamentary press gallery are feeling peevish. After feasting for years on a rich banquet of political news and sensation, they suddenly find themselves on starvation rations. And they’re not taking it well.
Post-election, everything has come to a dead halt. We are in the customary hiatus period when the leaders of the successful parties disappear from public view to conduct their horse-trading.
As an aside, this is one of the downsides of MMP that no one talks about. Ironically, an electoral system that was supposed to encourage transparency had the reverse effect.
When coalition talks begin, all bets are off. The politicians disappear behind closed doors and all the pledges and promises solemnly made on the campaign trail are up for negotiation. Voters can’t see what’s going on and have no influence over the outcome.
Inscrutability comes with the territory. It’s what we voted for in the early 1990s when we decided to punish politicians - you may permit yourself a rueful grin here - for breaking promises and not being honest about their intentions. But it frustrates the hell out of the media.
Thus we get moments of exquisite preciousness from people such as NewstalkZB’s Jason Walls, whose pride was wounded when Christopher Luxon said he wouldn’t indulge in “parlour games” with the media over the substance of coalition talks.
This, Walls pronounced with no trace of self-awareness, was “terrifically offensive … it’s actually called reporting the news to the New Zealand public.”
Er, no it’s not. You can’t report news when there is none. When the details of a formal coalition arrangement have been hammered out, we’ll be told. Until then the players are bound to play their cards close to their chests. It’s not an ideal set of circumstances, but that’s the way it is.
It's not, however, what the media are accustomed to. They’re conditioned to expect that politicians will bend over backwards to humour them (Winston Peters being a standout exception), and for once, just for a few weeks, the shoe is on the other foot.
Walls’ indignation indicates his apparent failure to accept that after being schmoozed by politicians for the past three years – and never more intensively than during the election campaign, when the need for favourable public exposure is greatest – the media are suddenly unimportant. The politicians don’t need them right now; in fact the media just get in the way.
It’s a tough adjustment for political journalists to make, but do I feel sorry for them? No, and I doubt there’ll be much public sympathy either. (Incidentally, where did Wells get that weird accent? It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard.)
TVNZ’s Jessica Mutch-McKay was another who pompously played the journalists-as-noble-guardians-of-the-public-interest card. Shayne Currie reports today that Mutch-McKay lectured Luxon at a media stand-up, telling him: “You talk about your negotiations and you’ve done a lot before [sic].
“This is very different because you are an elected prime minister. We are the Fourth Estate that represents the public and it feels like you’re treating us like we’re the ones that are hyped up.
“We’re not, we’re the ones asking on behalf of the public, who have [an] interest in what’s going on. Can you see where we’re coming from?”
This appeal to Luxon’s sense of public obligation might have some moral weight if (a) he had anything substantive to announce and (b) if all members of the press gallery were consistent and conscientious about fulfilling their own obligation to inform the public fully and fairly on matters of public interest. But the media have squandered whatever moral authority they might once have enjoyed through a pattern of partisan, highly selective and often embarrassingly petty political reportage.
That the election has disrupted the normal relationship between politicians and the media was evident in other ways too – almost comically in the case of veteran West Coast Labour MP and cabinet minister Damien O’Connor when he was ambushed by a media pack eager to know whether the party leadership was likely to change.
Accosted on his way to the toilet during a Labour caucus meeting, O’Connor told a reporter to f**k off. I wonder how often MPs from both sides of the House have desperately wanted to say that, or a variant thereof, when bailed up and asked asinine questions.
On this occasion the normally amiable O’Connor, doubtless feeling out of sorts after losing his seat, didn’t hold back. On RNZ’s Midweek Mediawatch, Hayden Donnell noted the irony that for once, a politician gave a heartfelt response to a question rather than rehearsing formulaic, pre-prepared lines, and copped a media backlash as a result.
If only more politicians could be so viscerally honest occasionally. I don’t think the public would think less of them. If anything, quite the reverse.
Astonishingly, O’Connor was stopped again on his way back from the dunny. This illustrates a striking characteristic of the press gallery media pack: a sort of dull, brutish insensitivity and sense of entitlement that’s manifested in oafish rudeness and a failure to recognise that continuing to ask the same questions, when a response is clearly not forthcoming, is stupid as well as pointless. The pack mentality takes over and common sense takes flight.
We saw the same phenomenon when reporters pursued Peters through Wellington Airport, peppering him with fatuous questions that he obviously wasn’t going to dignify with an answer.
Of course it’s often the case in such instances that reporters are far less interested in obtaining a genuinely useful morsel of information than in simply provoking a reaction. TV viewers watching the news realise this, which does nothing to lift journalists off the bottom rungs of the public respect scale. I don't think political journalists realise just how cynically they are regarded by the public. They are immune in their bubble.
Another testy exchange took place between Newshub’s Amelia Wade and Helen White, the new Labour MP (for the time being, at least) for Mt Albert. Wade was gratuitously provocative, asking White whether she was embarrassed by the result in her electorate (where Jacinda Ardern’s 22,000 majority in 2020 was cut to a mere 106 on election night) and more bluntly, “How did you do so badly?”
This appeared to be a classic case of a question being asked in the hope that it will sting the respondent into an injudicious (and therefore bulletin-leading) response. I suspect Newshub’s political journalists are under standing instructions to take this approach.
The confrontation between White and Wade illustrated another immutable verity of political journalism. When you’re a predator, all wounded politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, make irresistibly tempting prey. In that respect, if in no other, political reporters tend to be impeccably even-handed.
This in turn points to an even bigger truth: the media always win. They just shift their targets as circumstances dictate.
Unlike politicians who must submit themselves for re-election, journalists are not held accountable and almost invariably escape punishment when they get things wrong. They have no skin in the game and nothing personally at stake. They create their scandals-du-jour and move on, rarely pausing to look back.
Power without responsibility, the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously called it (although credit for the quote is given to his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). Or to paraphrase a cynical British writer: journalists hide in the hills while the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.
That being said, it’s important to state that not all political journalists are egotistical, feckless sensation-hunters. The harm is done by those who hunt as a pack, and more especially by those who play the alpha predator at media stand-ups and thus tend to be most in the public eye. To those more traditional political reporters who are conscientious and committed to the values and principles of good journalism, I apologise now for slurring them by association.
As an aside, this is one of the downsides of MMP that no one talks about. Ironically, an electoral system that was supposed to encourage transparency had the reverse effect.
When coalition talks begin, all bets are off. The politicians disappear behind closed doors and all the pledges and promises solemnly made on the campaign trail are up for negotiation. Voters can’t see what’s going on and have no influence over the outcome.
Inscrutability comes with the territory. It’s what we voted for in the early 1990s when we decided to punish politicians - you may permit yourself a rueful grin here - for breaking promises and not being honest about their intentions. But it frustrates the hell out of the media.
Thus we get moments of exquisite preciousness from people such as NewstalkZB’s Jason Walls, whose pride was wounded when Christopher Luxon said he wouldn’t indulge in “parlour games” with the media over the substance of coalition talks.
This, Walls pronounced with no trace of self-awareness, was “terrifically offensive … it’s actually called reporting the news to the New Zealand public.”
Er, no it’s not. You can’t report news when there is none. When the details of a formal coalition arrangement have been hammered out, we’ll be told. Until then the players are bound to play their cards close to their chests. It’s not an ideal set of circumstances, but that’s the way it is.
It's not, however, what the media are accustomed to. They’re conditioned to expect that politicians will bend over backwards to humour them (Winston Peters being a standout exception), and for once, just for a few weeks, the shoe is on the other foot.
Walls’ indignation indicates his apparent failure to accept that after being schmoozed by politicians for the past three years – and never more intensively than during the election campaign, when the need for favourable public exposure is greatest – the media are suddenly unimportant. The politicians don’t need them right now; in fact the media just get in the way.
It’s a tough adjustment for political journalists to make, but do I feel sorry for them? No, and I doubt there’ll be much public sympathy either. (Incidentally, where did Wells get that weird accent? It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard.)
TVNZ’s Jessica Mutch-McKay was another who pompously played the journalists-as-noble-guardians-of-the-public-interest card. Shayne Currie reports today that Mutch-McKay lectured Luxon at a media stand-up, telling him: “You talk about your negotiations and you’ve done a lot before [sic].
“This is very different because you are an elected prime minister. We are the Fourth Estate that represents the public and it feels like you’re treating us like we’re the ones that are hyped up.
“We’re not, we’re the ones asking on behalf of the public, who have [an] interest in what’s going on. Can you see where we’re coming from?”
This appeal to Luxon’s sense of public obligation might have some moral weight if (a) he had anything substantive to announce and (b) if all members of the press gallery were consistent and conscientious about fulfilling their own obligation to inform the public fully and fairly on matters of public interest. But the media have squandered whatever moral authority they might once have enjoyed through a pattern of partisan, highly selective and often embarrassingly petty political reportage.
That the election has disrupted the normal relationship between politicians and the media was evident in other ways too – almost comically in the case of veteran West Coast Labour MP and cabinet minister Damien O’Connor when he was ambushed by a media pack eager to know whether the party leadership was likely to change.
Accosted on his way to the toilet during a Labour caucus meeting, O’Connor told a reporter to f**k off. I wonder how often MPs from both sides of the House have desperately wanted to say that, or a variant thereof, when bailed up and asked asinine questions.
On this occasion the normally amiable O’Connor, doubtless feeling out of sorts after losing his seat, didn’t hold back. On RNZ’s Midweek Mediawatch, Hayden Donnell noted the irony that for once, a politician gave a heartfelt response to a question rather than rehearsing formulaic, pre-prepared lines, and copped a media backlash as a result.
If only more politicians could be so viscerally honest occasionally. I don’t think the public would think less of them. If anything, quite the reverse.
Astonishingly, O’Connor was stopped again on his way back from the dunny. This illustrates a striking characteristic of the press gallery media pack: a sort of dull, brutish insensitivity and sense of entitlement that’s manifested in oafish rudeness and a failure to recognise that continuing to ask the same questions, when a response is clearly not forthcoming, is stupid as well as pointless. The pack mentality takes over and common sense takes flight.
We saw the same phenomenon when reporters pursued Peters through Wellington Airport, peppering him with fatuous questions that he obviously wasn’t going to dignify with an answer.
Of course it’s often the case in such instances that reporters are far less interested in obtaining a genuinely useful morsel of information than in simply provoking a reaction. TV viewers watching the news realise this, which does nothing to lift journalists off the bottom rungs of the public respect scale. I don't think political journalists realise just how cynically they are regarded by the public. They are immune in their bubble.
Another testy exchange took place between Newshub’s Amelia Wade and Helen White, the new Labour MP (for the time being, at least) for Mt Albert. Wade was gratuitously provocative, asking White whether she was embarrassed by the result in her electorate (where Jacinda Ardern’s 22,000 majority in 2020 was cut to a mere 106 on election night) and more bluntly, “How did you do so badly?”
This appeared to be a classic case of a question being asked in the hope that it will sting the respondent into an injudicious (and therefore bulletin-leading) response. I suspect Newshub’s political journalists are under standing instructions to take this approach.
The confrontation between White and Wade illustrated another immutable verity of political journalism. When you’re a predator, all wounded politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, make irresistibly tempting prey. In that respect, if in no other, political reporters tend to be impeccably even-handed.
This in turn points to an even bigger truth: the media always win. They just shift their targets as circumstances dictate.
Unlike politicians who must submit themselves for re-election, journalists are not held accountable and almost invariably escape punishment when they get things wrong. They have no skin in the game and nothing personally at stake. They create their scandals-du-jour and move on, rarely pausing to look back.
Power without responsibility, the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously called it (although credit for the quote is given to his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). Or to paraphrase a cynical British writer: journalists hide in the hills while the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.
That being said, it’s important to state that not all political journalists are egotistical, feckless sensation-hunters. The harm is done by those who hunt as a pack, and more especially by those who play the alpha predator at media stand-ups and thus tend to be most in the public eye. To those more traditional political reporters who are conscientious and committed to the values and principles of good journalism, I apologise now for slurring them by association.
Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz. - where this article was sourced.
15 comments:
I note that Peter Wilson from the Press Gallery has been conspicuously absent after the election by not filing his regular “Week in Politics.” What happened Peter, nothing to say that suits your politics?
Jason walls was on zb on sunday after the election with francesca and you could tell he was really upset about the election result. He was grilling the labour person- what is your opposition plan on getting back into power? And the labour rep said to give them a chance as they had only just lost. Then he sniggered with james shaw about the new govt. He is openly a leftist marxist.
The first thing the coalition must do is cut spending on the media. Paid govt dept advertising, and financial support must stop. This funding screwed the scrum, allowing failing media to retain their place. TV1 and 3 news are a joke, propped up by govt money. We need quality, not pandering.
Simon Walls is just one of a myriad reasons why adsquawkZB is unlistenable.
Sorry, that should be Jason Walls of course. Maybe I was getting confused with that other intellectual giant and legend in his own lunchtime, Simon Wilson.
In that one moment, for the first and probably last time, I respected O'Connor.
I like creating comment, to what Karl du Fresne has diligently, researched, and then written, which for those "who have no faith in the NZ MSM" will read understanding we are being "handed the gospel of written truth", that even Simon Wilson of the NZ Herald would ever dare present. -
The one issue that I wish to procrastinate on, more as an insult, and I refer to - (quote) “This is very different because you are an elected prime minister. We are the Fourth Estate that represents the public and it feels like you’re treating us like we’re the ones that are hyped up"(end quote).
This is copied from Karl's commentary, the speaker was Jessica Mutch-McKay, to Chris Luxon.
Where "in the hell does Ms Mutch-McKay get the idea that she represents the NZ Public"?
To me "the Fourth Estate" gathers News, interviews those who can/would contribute, research's same, compiles into written word (or for TV the verbal elements for presentation) - their story and has the Editor "approve" for print and /or dissemination to the Public.
Such printed (and verbal) material should be free of ANY bias, be informative and clear in message, for the Public to be advise so WE can make a decision.
There is much I would like to add, but no doubt those "words" could/would be mis-construed, to simply say sadly Ms Mutch-McKay I have never been a "fan" of your reporting style - I see a condescending attitude, that what you say has the appearance of "You do not care, we do not matter".
Thanks Karl, for bringing said Truth to our attention.
Another excellent piece from Mr du Fresne.
Without exception the people in my business and social groups distrust and despise the so-called mainstream media to a point where they refuse to read Stuff, most main newspapers or watch the network news programs (TVNZ and Newshub).
Of course, some of the media behavior and bias can be directly linked to the bribery of the media by the Labour Govt.
Thank goodness for Breaking Views, Muriel and Frank Newman, Leighton Smith (and his guests), NewstalkZB and Al Jazeera.
Anonymous 2:28 as W.C. Fields said :"Remember only dead fish float downstream live ones swim upstream'.
The stupidest thing you can do is persecute the truth. This just gives it more life fighting back.
If This site and the others mentioned became MSM they could very well lose their vibrant nature and become soft and flabby .
"This in turn points to an even bigger truth: the media always win. They just shift their targets as circumstances dictate."
This may have once been true Karl, but not anymore, in my view. The MSM are not winning because hundreds of thousands are like myself ---ignoring the MSM and that is why the MSM companies are financially, in a huge hole.
Another great article from Karl. Sadly, as proof of the point that the MSM is out of touch, our household rarely watch any TV news given its style of delivering opinion, half-truth, lies, or agenda, and rarely simple facts. We know we don't miss out; we don't have to sift through the dross that's served up, each day. This is why the MSM is struggling financially as it drowns in its own increasing irrelevance - only this week we learned that The Project, on TV3, is likely to vanish - surprised? No.
Yes, and about time for a little more balanced comment out there and perhaps also more scrutiny on who and what taxpayers money is being spent on? Since when did the trend occur that NZers apparently need several media outlets to spin streams of propaganda at us all -and then pay a lot of money for it?Might be time we use web based sources and some of the so called NZ journalists found more productive jobs? Thanks Karl,
From a medis background, I'm ashamed at the pathetic bunch of left wing, young, naive bunch of people who report and present msm news. Afew exceptions like Hosking give us some hope.
Government spending or handouts must cease on msm, Maori radio and Television and NZ on Air. Then tackle the institutions who train or indoctrinate the new wave of journalists
Any lingering respect I may have had for most journalists went out the window with their acceptance of the PSIF bribe. Once a prolific "letters" writer I had nothing published since I questioned the Treaty. Tiring of casting pearls before swine I have left it to others to ask the questions and this has been done superbly in this publication. It deserves to reach a wider audience but breaking through the crust of public ignorance created by public media is no easy task. Keep trying.
The media have failed this Coalition Government. They see their role as promoting the views of nut bars, wackos who disagree. Rather tiresome and eventually it will come to an end. By publishing the letter to the Commissioner of Police effectively shut the door on media questions. A brilliant strategy. They now need to sack left wing Permanent Heads, pro Māori Permanent Heads and the Head of TV One. The majority voted to get NEW ZEALAND (not Aotearoa) “back on track”.
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