When Patrick Gower was asked by Mike Hosking last week what he would say to the many Newstalk ZB callers who allege the Labour government bribed media with $55 million of taxpayers’ money via the Public Interest Journalism Fund — and that journalists “sucked up” to the government — Gower’s response was brusque: “I’ll tell them pretty much this, mate: Get stuffed.”
It seemed a curiously contemptuous response from a broadcaster who had just told Hosking that taxpayers’ money dispensed by NZ on Air might be his best chance of making another television show after Newshub’s demise.
Gower added: “Yes, there was some money flicked around by the [Labour] government and I think most people would agree now that that had a branding problem for all of us but at the end of the day I’m not going to sit here and listen to people like that say that kind of thing after I’ve slaved my bloody guts out, alongside my colleagues, for 25 years, in my case, putting damned good news out there.”
The self-importance and self-pity on display was astonishing. So too was the evident lack of respect for taxpayers who might soon find themselves providing him with an income through NZ on Air.
To Gower, the more than $2 million that was “flicked” by the PIJF to Newshub/Discovery was presumably inconsequential. And its requirement to present and promote the Treaty as a partnership between iwi and the Crown has, in his mind, resulted in nothing more significant than a “branding problem”. You’d have to assume that serious questions about editorial independence, trust and integrity are above Gower’s (no doubt considerable) pay grade.
He is not the only senior journalist who has reacted defensively to accusations that the PIJF has seriously harmed trust in the media — which an AUT survey published last week showed has plummeted by 20 percentage points since 2020, with only a third of New Zealanders saying they trust the news.
In response to these dismal results, NBR senior journalist Dita De Boni asserted on X / Twitter that the blame for the collapse in trust was because “the Atlas Network and its proxies around the world pour money into discrediting mainstream media, like they do in New Zealand. What we see [in the survey] is simply the fruits of their propaganda campaign and nothing to do with the PIJF or anything else.”
When it was pointed out to her by commenters that the Atlas Network had spent only $62,000 last year across both Australia and New Zealand, she dismissed them as gullible for “believing a lobby group’s figures” — despite the fact they are independently audited each year.
De Boni asserted correctly that NBR had not received any money from the PIJF but incorrectly that her employer had received no taxpayers’ cash at all. She is presumably unaware that a “Subscriptions Initiative”, administered by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, granted $1.55 million to nine selected media organisations — and Fourth Estate Holdings, owners of NBR, received the biggest cash injection. It was awarded $271,120 as part of a media support package for “the advance purchase of news subscriptions for 36 government agencies for 2020/21”, as the ministry described it, “to provide immediate cashflow”.
In fact, so much taxpayers’ money was “flicked around”, as Gower so cavalierly put it — including millions to buy ad space for government departments — that even senior journalists seem to have little idea of how much was spent or where it went. They also seem to have virtually no interest in assessing just how much value taxpayers got for the tens of millions shelled out.
Journalists do, of course, regularly focus on how government agencies spend taxpayers’ money and how wisely — but not with a similar vigour, it would seem, when discussing grants made to the media under the PIJF.
Just this week, for instance, the readers of the NZ Herald learned that an OIA request had revealed the Department of Corrections had “spent $432,966 on international travel in the 2022/2023 financial year”. It focused on one trip by officials to London to meet suppliers delivering new electronic monitoring systems — including drawing attention to “Corrections managers hobnobbing… at the Royal Air Force Club in Piccadilly”.
However, we have never seen comparable coverage, say, of the $395,000 granted by the PIJF to Te Korimako o Taranaki, an online radio station in New Plymouth. In announcing the results of the fifth round of PIJF grants in September 2022, NZ on Air billed it as “a nine-month local journalism cadetship programme to nurture five Māori journalists with the aim of growing the Māori journalism sector more broadly, especially in the Taranaki region.”
On November 28, 2022, the station advertised urgently for suitable candidates for what was now described as “a seven-month, full-time, paid te reo Māori journalism training programme [which] will cover accommodation and travel for the cadets.” The course was scheduled to run from December 12, 2022, to 30 June, 2023.
It subsequently became apparent from a NZ on Air statement that four cadets had been hired for the programme. What isn’t apparent is why nearly $400,000 was set aside to school a handful of cadets for much less than a year.
As a comparison, the unsubsidised fees for an international student enrolled full-time in a Bachelor of Communications degree at Auckland’s AUT are $34,000 per year. If the five cadets initially envisaged had been enrolled at AUT, they would have paid a total of $170,000 between them for a year’s full-time tuition.
It is not clear whether the PIJF paid for the cadets’ travel and accommodation or whether that was the responsibility of the radio station. When I asked NZ on Air for that information this week — as well as the total of the money drawn down — I was advised the questions would be treated as an OIA and would be “responded to within the statutory timeframe”.
Yet these are only two of the questions the news media might legitimately ask about the grant. As one social media commentator asked this week: “Was the [Te Korimako o Taranaki] course NZQA approved and moderated? What qualification did they achieve? Were the teachers qualified? What was the employment outcomes? So many questions for eager journalists...”
There may be very sound explanations why $395,000 was awarded to the station (and all of that amount may not have been drawn down) but we are yet to hear them.
NZ on Air has been quick to remind anyone questioning the apparently extravagant sums dished out that “the funded amount for roles” can include all sorts of overheads. Apart from salaries, they may include equipment, for example, that is required to employ someone productively.
Nevertheless, the sums of money granted in some contracts have raised eyebrows among those experienced in how news media operates. The first PIJF funding round in July 2021 announced that North & South magazine had been granted “up to $42,500” for “an investigative long-form text story” on failures in state care. Yet, a payment of even $10,000 for a story — no matter how much research was involved — would be an extraordinary payday for a journalist. And given the intended writer is likely to have been a freelance, the publisher presumably wouldn’t have had to pay for equipment or office space. It appears the project was abandoned but why did NZ on Air agree to anything near such an eye-watering sum in the first place?
Again, there may have been good reasons for its decision, but journalists have paid very little attention to such questions. And NZ on Air declines to give cost breakdowns in individual cases. When I asked why The Spinoff was granted $111,000 for a basic subediting role for a year given that a subeditor at that level would be paid significantly less than that, NZ on Air replied:
“Applicants are responsible for quantifying and justifying the amount they seek for any project or role. However, NZ on Air also created some benchmarks by calculating the average full-time base salaries (minus KiwiSaver, sick pay, etc) across bands (junior, intermediate and senior), comparing the resulting mid-points to industry-standard base pay rates sourced from the E Tū Union. Independent assessors brought an industry perspective to every round.” It wouldn’t say what salary was actually paid to the subeditor employed under the scheme in order to protect their privacy.
The agency has defended its generosity in general by saying: “The nature of the short-term contracts on offer also have to be factored in [to the fee paid] as publishers were concerned they would not be able to recruit staff.” It seems a reasonable conclusion that NZ on Air splashed the cash to ensure the PIJF succeeded.
The effects of the fund’s extravagance were noted by consultancy Sapere in February 2022, in a report commissioned by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. It remarked: “[Some senior journalists] observed that due to the relatively limited pool of journalists in New Zealand, the PIJF was creating a ‘giant game of musical chairs’ and was leading to salary inflation rather than building new capacity.”
There has also been very little media scrutiny of how NZ on Air itself checks on the money it has dispensed.
When I asked: “Does NZ on Air monitor or audit (in any way) how money dispensed under the Public Interest Journalism Fund is spent?”, a comms adviser replied: “Yes, we do. Funding is announced as an ‘up to’ allocation, but is drawn down in stages upon completion of various milestones and provision of reports detailing the actual costs incurred. Under every PIJF funding agreement, NZ On Air also has the option of auditing the costs that are reported on.”
I was later informed that only “one external audit of a PIJF project was completed in the 2022/23 year… and that two are currently scheduled in this financial year [ending June 30, 2024], subject to confirmation.”
In response to my query: “When will information about these audits be available to the public?”, NZ on Air replied: “We do not publish audits.” It is worth noting that the PIJF funded 73 journalism projects, 219 roles and 22 industry development programmes in total.
In short, NZ on Air mostly marks its own homework and when it hires external auditors for projects the results aren’t made public. And since many media organisations are still beneficiaries of the government’s largesse via the PIJF — and will be until it finally ends in 2026 — it seems extremely unlikely that mainstream journalists will start scrutinising just how well NZ on Air handled the multimillion-dollar fund any time soon.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
The self-importance and self-pity on display was astonishing. So too was the evident lack of respect for taxpayers who might soon find themselves providing him with an income through NZ on Air.
To Gower, the more than $2 million that was “flicked” by the PIJF to Newshub/Discovery was presumably inconsequential. And its requirement to present and promote the Treaty as a partnership between iwi and the Crown has, in his mind, resulted in nothing more significant than a “branding problem”. You’d have to assume that serious questions about editorial independence, trust and integrity are above Gower’s (no doubt considerable) pay grade.
He is not the only senior journalist who has reacted defensively to accusations that the PIJF has seriously harmed trust in the media — which an AUT survey published last week showed has plummeted by 20 percentage points since 2020, with only a third of New Zealanders saying they trust the news.
In response to these dismal results, NBR senior journalist Dita De Boni asserted on X / Twitter that the blame for the collapse in trust was because “the Atlas Network and its proxies around the world pour money into discrediting mainstream media, like they do in New Zealand. What we see [in the survey] is simply the fruits of their propaganda campaign and nothing to do with the PIJF or anything else.”
When it was pointed out to her by commenters that the Atlas Network had spent only $62,000 last year across both Australia and New Zealand, she dismissed them as gullible for “believing a lobby group’s figures” — despite the fact they are independently audited each year.
De Boni asserted correctly that NBR had not received any money from the PIJF but incorrectly that her employer had received no taxpayers’ cash at all. She is presumably unaware that a “Subscriptions Initiative”, administered by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, granted $1.55 million to nine selected media organisations — and Fourth Estate Holdings, owners of NBR, received the biggest cash injection. It was awarded $271,120 as part of a media support package for “the advance purchase of news subscriptions for 36 government agencies for 2020/21”, as the ministry described it, “to provide immediate cashflow”.
In fact, so much taxpayers’ money was “flicked around”, as Gower so cavalierly put it — including millions to buy ad space for government departments — that even senior journalists seem to have little idea of how much was spent or where it went. They also seem to have virtually no interest in assessing just how much value taxpayers got for the tens of millions shelled out.
Journalists do, of course, regularly focus on how government agencies spend taxpayers’ money and how wisely — but not with a similar vigour, it would seem, when discussing grants made to the media under the PIJF.
Just this week, for instance, the readers of the NZ Herald learned that an OIA request had revealed the Department of Corrections had “spent $432,966 on international travel in the 2022/2023 financial year”. It focused on one trip by officials to London to meet suppliers delivering new electronic monitoring systems — including drawing attention to “Corrections managers hobnobbing… at the Royal Air Force Club in Piccadilly”.
However, we have never seen comparable coverage, say, of the $395,000 granted by the PIJF to Te Korimako o Taranaki, an online radio station in New Plymouth. In announcing the results of the fifth round of PIJF grants in September 2022, NZ on Air billed it as “a nine-month local journalism cadetship programme to nurture five Māori journalists with the aim of growing the Māori journalism sector more broadly, especially in the Taranaki region.”
On November 28, 2022, the station advertised urgently for suitable candidates for what was now described as “a seven-month, full-time, paid te reo Māori journalism training programme [which] will cover accommodation and travel for the cadets.” The course was scheduled to run from December 12, 2022, to 30 June, 2023.
It subsequently became apparent from a NZ on Air statement that four cadets had been hired for the programme. What isn’t apparent is why nearly $400,000 was set aside to school a handful of cadets for much less than a year.
As a comparison, the unsubsidised fees for an international student enrolled full-time in a Bachelor of Communications degree at Auckland’s AUT are $34,000 per year. If the five cadets initially envisaged had been enrolled at AUT, they would have paid a total of $170,000 between them for a year’s full-time tuition.
It is not clear whether the PIJF paid for the cadets’ travel and accommodation or whether that was the responsibility of the radio station. When I asked NZ on Air for that information this week — as well as the total of the money drawn down — I was advised the questions would be treated as an OIA and would be “responded to within the statutory timeframe”.
Yet these are only two of the questions the news media might legitimately ask about the grant. As one social media commentator asked this week: “Was the [Te Korimako o Taranaki] course NZQA approved and moderated? What qualification did they achieve? Were the teachers qualified? What was the employment outcomes? So many questions for eager journalists...”
There may be very sound explanations why $395,000 was awarded to the station (and all of that amount may not have been drawn down) but we are yet to hear them.
NZ on Air has been quick to remind anyone questioning the apparently extravagant sums dished out that “the funded amount for roles” can include all sorts of overheads. Apart from salaries, they may include equipment, for example, that is required to employ someone productively.
Nevertheless, the sums of money granted in some contracts have raised eyebrows among those experienced in how news media operates. The first PIJF funding round in July 2021 announced that North & South magazine had been granted “up to $42,500” for “an investigative long-form text story” on failures in state care. Yet, a payment of even $10,000 for a story — no matter how much research was involved — would be an extraordinary payday for a journalist. And given the intended writer is likely to have been a freelance, the publisher presumably wouldn’t have had to pay for equipment or office space. It appears the project was abandoned but why did NZ on Air agree to anything near such an eye-watering sum in the first place?
Again, there may have been good reasons for its decision, but journalists have paid very little attention to such questions. And NZ on Air declines to give cost breakdowns in individual cases. When I asked why The Spinoff was granted $111,000 for a basic subediting role for a year given that a subeditor at that level would be paid significantly less than that, NZ on Air replied:
“Applicants are responsible for quantifying and justifying the amount they seek for any project or role. However, NZ on Air also created some benchmarks by calculating the average full-time base salaries (minus KiwiSaver, sick pay, etc) across bands (junior, intermediate and senior), comparing the resulting mid-points to industry-standard base pay rates sourced from the E Tū Union. Independent assessors brought an industry perspective to every round.” It wouldn’t say what salary was actually paid to the subeditor employed under the scheme in order to protect their privacy.
The agency has defended its generosity in general by saying: “The nature of the short-term contracts on offer also have to be factored in [to the fee paid] as publishers were concerned they would not be able to recruit staff.” It seems a reasonable conclusion that NZ on Air splashed the cash to ensure the PIJF succeeded.
The effects of the fund’s extravagance were noted by consultancy Sapere in February 2022, in a report commissioned by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. It remarked: “[Some senior journalists] observed that due to the relatively limited pool of journalists in New Zealand, the PIJF was creating a ‘giant game of musical chairs’ and was leading to salary inflation rather than building new capacity.”
There has also been very little media scrutiny of how NZ on Air itself checks on the money it has dispensed.
When I asked: “Does NZ on Air monitor or audit (in any way) how money dispensed under the Public Interest Journalism Fund is spent?”, a comms adviser replied: “Yes, we do. Funding is announced as an ‘up to’ allocation, but is drawn down in stages upon completion of various milestones and provision of reports detailing the actual costs incurred. Under every PIJF funding agreement, NZ On Air also has the option of auditing the costs that are reported on.”
I was later informed that only “one external audit of a PIJF project was completed in the 2022/23 year… and that two are currently scheduled in this financial year [ending June 30, 2024], subject to confirmation.”
In response to my query: “When will information about these audits be available to the public?”, NZ on Air replied: “We do not publish audits.” It is worth noting that the PIJF funded 73 journalism projects, 219 roles and 22 industry development programmes in total.
In short, NZ on Air mostly marks its own homework and when it hires external auditors for projects the results aren’t made public. And since many media organisations are still beneficiaries of the government’s largesse via the PIJF — and will be until it finally ends in 2026 — it seems extremely unlikely that mainstream journalists will start scrutinising just how well NZ on Air handled the multimillion-dollar fund any time soon.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
8 comments:
I've waited until I've taken my second blood pressure pill for the day.
These people are beyond irresponsible with other people's money and distributed on a genetic basis.
Do they care about the long term damage they are doing to democracy in N Z ?
How do we remove these government servants from their power and restore common sense ?
Gower, and others of his ilk, live on a parallel and separate planet, breathing different air, and believing in themselves above all else, and all others.
It matters not a jot (in my book at least) what he has to say about his role in what he calls his job. He is immaterial in the new-normal.
Take note Mr Gower, you and your opinions about what is good and right for NZ’ers are no longer relevant.
Very very interesting. His lack of awareness and self awareness is pretty typical of lefties. I hope karma is going to strike him sooner than later.
Excellent article, Graham. We are constantly told the recent loss of journalists' jobs is 'bad for democracy'. Nonsense; it is the blatant bias in our media that is the danger to democracy. It was journalists that remained silent when Jacinda Ardern said that her government was the 'sole source of truth'. This sinister statement came close to admitting her government was totalitarian, yet apart from reporting what she had said, there was virtually no comment.
As for Gower, it was he who conducted that train-wreck of an interview with those two Canadians, Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, who were well-informed and orders of magnitude brighter than Gower. Fear of rational discussion was on such public display that I felt embarrassed to be a New Zealander
From discussions on msm I often wonder how many actually read the PIJFund conditons. The likes of RNZs Peacock certainly spoke as if he had not.Yyet the wording was absoluteley blatant.
Martin, Yes, "the interview with those two Canadians, Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern," was indeed a train wreck. I watched it again a week ago. It's around 13 minutes long and you can see around the seven-minute mark first Lauren and then Stephan suddenly realise that Gower is pretty ill-equipped for an intellectual discussion. They can barely keep their grins off their faces as NZ's (apparently) finest intellectual squares off against them.
Gower obviously wasn't used to having his viewpoint on "hate speech" challenged at all so he was totally unprepared for people who don't think entirely in platitudes like him.
How ironic that it is stuff that will probably be funding Mr Gower's future work. He is stuffed in more than one way...
Gower and his arrogant comments are the epitome of the broadcasting fraternity's opinion of themselves, and the obvious reason why the public who pay them have had a gutsfull and want to be rid of them. The old saying that "arrogance is directly proportional to ignorance" has been proved once again.
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