Like sand through an hourglass* - trust leaks away
Media in New Zealand has a trust problem shared with most of the rest of the world and politicians are ready to exploit that but media needs to get real too.
Trust erodes in New Zealand media - a worldwide trend
Trust in the New Zealand media and the percentage of people who want to engage with the news at all has plummeted in the past four years in a trend that is evident across most of the Western world and which media is struggling to understand.
As too often many in the New Zealand media declined to look inwards in response to the latest trust in media report from the Auckland University of Technology. That is despite the twin crises of trust and economics that are surely connected.
The AUT JMAD report — based on the same methodology as the well-established international trust survey of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows a stark deterioration of faith in news media by both the general public and people who say they follow the news avidly, as well as increasing exhaustion with news.
Go to the report for the details but overall trust in media has fallen nearly 40 percent over the past four years — perhaps no coincidence that it covers Covid and Trump.
New Zealand media is far from alone in facing these problems yet the industry struggles to openly reflect on what it might be able to do itself to listen to audiences and consider changes that might rebuild trust. It is also true, however, that a wave of political leaders and those who might gain from sowing doubt about the media has infected New Zealand discourse at least as much as it has the United States.
This seemed a shitty post from ACT on the day hundreds of journalists lost their jobs.
Trump-like claims of “fake news” and media agendas and narratives have grown in intensity over the past four years as the country grappled — remarkably successfully — with a global pandemic with intense lockdowns that tested social cohesion. Covid tested the news media as much as it tested politicians and medical experts.
The established New Zealand media - in which publicly owned BBC-like organisations dominate television news and national radio news — with a diverse national and regional text-led media all broadly swung behind government and health official messaging about Covid, partly because it was cogent and media outlets felt a duty to inform. Scepticism was in short supply partly because the government messaging made sense compared with the chaos of Trump and Boris.
The government also responded to fears of the damage to the local media industry from Covid with an imaginative $75 million fund to support public interest journalism. However, it backfired spectacularly from a PR point of view with a nasty and skilful campaign from the right and sceptics of Covid lockdowns and vaccines saying that it showed the “mainstream media” had been bought by the government.
Having been involved in conceiving the Public Interest Journalism Fund literally as a pool of money intended to support “at-risk journalism” I am aware that it shifted from that objective in ways I felt departed from its original intent and made it more likely to become a target for those who wanted to diminish the standing of news media.
The fact, rightly in my view, that the money was also contingent on respect for The Treaty of Waitangi, made the PIJF a target for the “anti-woke” mob who claimed a left-wing media was in the pocket of the government and doing its bidding on Covid and much more. The attacks hit hard and right-of-centre politicians — especially now deputy prime minister Winston Peters — seized on it as evidence of media duplicity.
The media whether collectively or individually failed to defend itself or the PIJF. The debacle has done damage according to the JMAD survey, adding to a sense that the established news media is in cahoots with government and not representing readers.
That isn’t the case of course but the damage is done and the media needs to fix it fast.
One small step cropped up on Tuesday, The New Zealand Herald announced a new look for its website and apart from a new non-serif font which only the cogniscenti will note, it said it would do far more to distinguish between news and comment. Long overdue but really important when readers say they find comment everywhere and struggle to distinguish it from straight news.
The news business does have to reflect on why it has lost the trust of consumers and it can’t blame them for it so reflexively with an “it’s not us, it’s you” response. It may be a hard road to repair lost trust at a timed of immense competition, the power of social media to create different realities of information, and changes in social attitudes where political polarisation has made citizenry less ready to listen to or accept an assembly of facts from media groups.
Several simple devices — which I have been involved in helping with from time to time — are in the US-based Trust Project which has eight key steps that media organisations can apply, with thought, care and commitment, to build trust. My suggestions align very much with those indicators: distinguish between news and commentary, greater vigilance against bias or perceived bias (even on liberal shiboleths), statements of ethics (like the Reuters Trust Principles), answer the “why” question in news (Why is this happening?), fairness (is my story fair to all involved?). I could go on and almost certainly will at some stage).
Go deeper on this subject
Duncan Greive from The Spinoff has been solid on the crisis in the media for years and this week ran a series of pieces and his The Fold podcast with New Zealand industry leaders canvassing the issues that face journalism in Aotearoa. Stuff, The Spinoff, Newsroom, SYSCA and NZ Geographic on the media crisis
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust, by NPR senior editor Uri Berliner is provoking introspection at the charitably funded US radio broadcaster which might be applicable to Radio New Zealand. I am not sure I entirely agree but the level of assumed political bias in the newsroom is concerning
As so often, the parody account New York Times Pitchbot gets it about right
Very interesting and thoughtful reporting on that essay by NPR itself.
One solution to distrust in the media: Show your working, by former Stuff political journalist Henry Cooke is a pretty good set of rules for journalists.
Also, I admit to liking Paddy’s chutzpah on this though we do need to understand why so many people — with shrill and sometimes powerful voices — despise media: Patrick Gower defends Newshub from ‘keyboard warriors’ after confirmed closure
Footnote: I know media people talking about media people and media can be self-indulgent or certainly appear that way. They issue is that they give a damn about what they do and what it means to bear witness, to hold power to account, and to inform people. It isn’t a priesthood but it is a trade that is a calling to many who do it - however imperfectly.
* I was thinking of the soap opera Days of Our Lives when choosing that headline but the Internet suggests it may originate with St Augustine or Socrates. Maybe.
Ends/pgb