Cracked Optics

People are once again talking about the New Zealand media being broken and wondering what it will take to fix it. I’m as disillusioned as anyone with the way our local politics is covered and people are rightfully concerned, but we should be wary of sweeping generalisations. We don’t have broad agreement in the community on what is broken and there isn’t a simple fix.

Budget and resource squeezes lead to a proliferation of copypasta across multiple mastheads. Factual accuracy, depth of investigation and quality of analysis varies wildly. Press releases get recycled into headlines without interceding editorial input that explains underlying agendas. Oil companies and car companies insert their sponsored presence into the content delivery of climate change stories. Pundits indulge in hubristic projections about ‘what the median voter thinks’ and policy as persuasion rather than planning. Mendacious opinion columns burn like garbage fires in 50 gallon drums, emitting toxic fumes that damage the reputation of whole newsrooms.

All of this has been going on for years and is hardly new or surprising. It’s arguable that things have actually improved somewhat, with more attention going into higher quality brand and editorial design and public interest journalism funding supporting a wider range of newcomers to the industry writing about culture, society and local government issues than we have seen in a generation. As a point of comparison, a particular low water mark was in March 2019 when various outlets quietly went through their archives deleting articles with damaging fear mongering stereotypes about Muslims. We have come some way since then.

The fervor of the moment always ebbs and flows. We get apologies to Māori and a stated commitment to redressing historic harms which seems to garner broad industry-wide consensus. Then there’s a spate of violent crime, and the tone and tenor of headlines drifts back to retributive punishment rhetoric in service of conservative political goals without seriously engaging with the factual reality of the devastation for Māori these policies have historically caused.

Whether you agree with the analogy of media as a megaphone for the powerful or as a mirror casting back prejudices and unexamined widely held views in society, the entrenched ideas and social constructs being reflected run deep. Very few people will be comfortable with the overall cost, complexity, extent of social change and disciplined organising needed to make a substantial difference to this status quo.

Perhaps it’s less a case of the media being broken, and more that our spaces of public discourse and commercial broadcast media are being routinely used and abused by corporate and political forces and that this is by design. Counter to the laughable and pathetic far right delusion of ‘wokism’—which is, if nothing else, a sign that a more diverse range of perspectives is present in some way—there is a very real imbalance in power and influence between the right and the left which has confounded genuine political debate since the original liberal sins of the New Zealand colony.

We have to acknowledge that a lot of the ‘voice of the business lobby’ stuff that people get so frustrated by is not new at all. Publications like the New Zealand Herald and the Dominion Post trace their heritage directly back to colonial bankers and land grabbers wanting to dominate politics and justify invasions. Not to mention the more recent heritage of promoting Rogernomics, asset sales and the 1990s public choice theory social engineering that manufactured consent for beneficiary bashing and austerity, with critics framed as lone isolated voices opposite the letters page, with final right of reply always given to the Business Roundtable.

The professionalisation of political campaigning has brought with it a secondary sphere of operations where parasitic political commentators and partisan griefers do their best to launder harassment and political attacks into discourse, framed as ‘just describing actions’ and exploiting the limits of newsworthiness. The motivation or purpose of trying to turn someone into a main character for the news cycle is rarely reflected on or justified beyond generic arguments about accountability.

In 2011, Nicky Hager implored journalists to treat the public relations industry as a beat, but it wasn’t until 2014 when Dirty Politics was published that the internet-enabled ratfucking aspect of it became widely known to the broader public.

Countering this level of political domination by organised right wing strategic communications requires mobilising resources on a scale not previously seen since the days of mass political party and union membership.

It requires an entire stratum of think tanks, research programs, economics and social policy working groups putting out ongoing press releases (with varying and complex gradients of political affiliation and demonstrably limited capture by political parties, foreign governments, Silicon Valley and other corporate interests). In addition to credible longer term research, people need to be available by phone and email 24/7 to provide opportunistic comment, context and counter-narratives. They need to rep organisations that are mainstream enough to refract through the media’s credibility filters while remaining radical enough to actually have a constructive message.

It requires ongoing professional level efforts to counter and disrupt coordinated messaging campaigns and get in before political activists and corporate-funded operatives poison the well on an emerging controversy, new policy initiative or ongoing matter of importance. To be wholly effective it would possibly even require illegal and extremely dangerous corporate espionage or white/gray hat hacking to expose and confront manipulations and extra political organising by oil companies and other destructive forces that currently threaten the future of the entire planet (counter to what those extra political forces already do with private investigators and goons targeting environmental groups and activists).

Every news website, trade publication and politics influencer on social media in New Zealand and more broadly in the region needs to be monitored in realtime. Credible people need to be available behind the scenes to put media organisations on blast with formal complaints and legal threats within minutes of misrepresentations and harmful mistakes being published.

Too much criticism of the media and political journalism I see is more focused on shooting the messenger than transforming the ecosystem that shapes the messaging. The most salient critiques that do aim at journalism tend to be those that engage more deeply with the profession’s seeming lack of reflection on frame-making through semantic and lexical choices in headlines and contextualisation of quotes, questioning the underlying messages this presentation reinforces.

Sadly, perhaps because of so many poorly-articulated defences of objectivity and accountability put forward in response to this criticism, people too often dismiss the push for accountability as egotism and trophy hunting for scalps. While it’s certainly true that the implicit shame-based theory of change that drives headlines and social media outrage functions as a vibe-based proxy for accountability rather than genuinely holding power to account, it does not follow that accountability is unimportant or that fourth estate journalism should be cynically dismissed outright.

Accountability is perhaps the biggest political challenge of our time, intricately entangled with harms caused by corporate malfeasance, poorly regulated markets and bad public policy that is driving climate change, inequality and the global systems crisis. In a truly democratic society, this accountability must apply to the media too, as it should for any organisation, institution and individual wielding significant power and influence.

Yet it may be unwise and unrealistic for us to expect commercial news media to affect too much of consequence here. It’s a much larger democratic issue. One that requires participating rather than spectating, and setting our sights on much more ambitious targets for political and social change.


Mark Rickerby is a writer, designer and programmer in Ōtautahi–Christchurch.