Dr Michael Bassett: Our lack-lustre mainstream media

Have you noticed the growing irritation with our mainstream media? Last week Radio NZ was under scrutiny with suggestions it was biased, and statistics showed its listeners were departing in droves. TV3’s main news announcer has been doubling as the weather girl, albeit after a quick change of costume. While its news during weekdays is as good, or bad as ever, it becomes almost non-existent at the weekends. TV One lumbers on, anchored by the redoubtable Simon Dallow, but rumours circulate about his possible departure.

Our newspapers seem to be in a state of collapse. The New Zealand Herald is a pale shadow of its former self. I’m old enough to remember when it, and the Auckland Star, were quality papers: the Star was the spokesman for business and city affairs, the Herald reflective of wider provincial interests and the city’s rural hinterland. Both took a close interest in government, explaining legislation and carrying coherent accounts of the reasoning behind it. Despite there being more than 30 local authorities in and around Auckland before 1989, the papers managed to report significant amounts of news from many councils. Now the Herald can’t even be bothered to report what our one big council is doing unless some kind of crisis occurs. What about all the expensive schemes Auckland Council spends our rates on? Nothing. Excessively expensive road works like the ones that have been going on for months at the top of Kupe St in Kepa Rd, Mission Bay, where it is nigh impossible to see any work ever being done. We get daily evidence of the laziest possible journalism. The sort that can be produced when an unreflective reporter interviews his/her computer and doesn’t stir out of a chair.

Take what has passed for the “news” over the last few days. On Tuesday the ever-so-weak Jamie Ensor’s long article about how Crown board increases in remuneration aren’t being provided for in budgets, amidst assorted loose assertions that services would be seriously cut as a result. Five seconds of reflection would have told him that these small monetary amounts, the first for a decade, would, as the Minister responsible told him, be able to be managed within the large relevant departmental budget. The reporter dribbled on for about a thousand words to impart his inconsequential bulls wool. Today, Friday, the Herald’s lead item is an assertion that high rise plans for Auckland will lead to schools being “swamped” with extra children. Really, what a puerile claim! The high rises will take a long time to materialise. Time to plan extra classrooms. Not building up higher means spreading the boundaries of the city further out, which means new schools and much greater spending on roads and transport. The reporter Ben Leahy gave the issue scarcely a second’s thought. Two pages on, the Herald served up a footling story that a new McDonald’s for Newmarket will be about half a kilometre away from several schools. So?? Then the hapless Jamie Ensor struck again, with a story about MPs’ office rentals in their electorates. No background info about how office rentals have been being paid by the taxpayer to enable better services for the public for the last 40 years, or that the rules don’t seem to have changed!

Increasingly, desk-bound journalists tap out official information requests to ministers and government departments, looking for any sign of advice from public servants and others that runs counter to what a minister or the government has decided to do. Then up goes a cry of stinky fish, whether the counter assertions make any sense or not. Journalists have nearly always been left-inclined politically, and anything that can be manufactured against this Coalition Government is irresistible to many of them. But they need to remember that keeping newspapers relevant to what is going on in society is what will get them read in the long term.

In a few days’ time, ballot papers are going to be mailed out to voters for the local elections. Has Murray Kirkness, the Herald’s editor, not heard about this? Wouldn’t it have made sense for his paper to be debating local issues? What is motivating the large number of contestants for the Auckland mayoralty? Surely a couple of his reporters could have been prised away from their desks to find out?

Newspapers the world over seem to be struggling, although some like the Australian, the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian thrive. They have remained relevant to their readers. Increasingly, New Zealanders are having to get their news from sources other than our newspapers, radio and television. If that ultimately sees papers like the Herald collapse then their staff have nothing else to blame but their own sloppy standards. But we will have lost friends that did a good job in their heyday.

Historian Dr Michael Bassett, a Minister in the Fourth Labour Government. This article was first published HERE