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.
Sorry wall of text, I needed to write it but you don't need to read it.
I’m a plant biologist so excuse me if I waste space with an analogy from my field. For the longest time plant breeding companies did surveys with consumers to find out what tomatoes they liked. They collected huge amounts of data. And when they looked they found the common feature was sugar. Quite simply most people liked sweet tomatoes. So they bred for sweetness. To be fair they also bred for size and ability to transport and store.
And sales dropped. Everyone said tomatoes taste terrible now, tomatoes tasted better when I was young, heirloom tomatoes are so much better etc etc.
What the breeding companies had missed was while most people liked sweetness that wasn’t what they loved. But the problem was, a flavour one group of people loved, another group didn’t love and instead loved a different flavour. So when you looked at the averages the only common liking was sweetness. It’s only recently that breeding companies have realised that a tomato that 10% of people love is better than a tomato that 80% of people merely like. And yes now they are breeding multiple varieties that specific groups of people love.
That’s what has happened to our media. The 6 pm news and the front page is about news that won’t really offend, the weather is good we can talk about the weather or rugby or polls without getting complaints. But when you fill the media with things that aren’t offensive and that folks “like” a bit then you don’t provide news that people really care a lot about. There is rarely anything about The Russian war so I go buy an heirloom media source for my news, there is no real in depth science news so I go to a specialist science news source, the political news is all polls and "can the gallery reporter trip up an MP" so if I want to understand policy I go elsewhere.
Essentially our media chose the bland harmless middle ground and lost everyone.
And yes I know there are real problems with international streaming which our government refused to legislate to control and I know that funding is brutally tight and I’ve read Duncan Grieves excellent analysis of the structural problems.
But I’m still left with the feeling that much of our media failed to serve the public by going for the bland sugar instead of the more difficult flavour. They went for the 80% like and as a result lost all the 10% loves and when you lose enough 10%s you have no-one left watching or caring.
And the really sad part is we have amazing journalists doing great hard work to research and develop news stories that are important – and they get a 30 second slot just before the rugby, er I mean sport news. Those journalists have been failed by the media management.
That is such an interesting metaphor and I fear there is a lot of truth in it. One of the issues maybe that, unlike FMCG companies like Nestle or pasta or tomato sauce firms, the media companies don't adequately listen to the lessons from other industries. (That is certainly my experience, that we think it is so special. I learned that lesson big time joining Microsoft.)
That is a really interesting metaphor and a fair point, and there's truth to it, as Peter says, but it's not the whole story. The structural problems that Duncan Grieve wrote about are fundamental. The problem is less one of collapsing demand than the collapse of the traditional business models. Some of these publishers that people are saying have turned everyone off actually still have massive audiences, maybe bigger than they ever had, but the economics of digital media are so different that they can no longer financially support the sort of large-scale, national, cover-everything, universal access newsrooms that we're used to. This isn't a defence of the media companies, who mostly have adapted terribly over a long time, but even if the main players had done everything you would've wanted them to do to have kept the 10% of loves happy the news media would still probably in much the same predicament economically.
Or if you want to round out the metaphor, let's also consider that the way that people get tomatoes has completely changed and the return that growers get has collapsed to 10 cents on the dollar. How do we create a new system that provides tomatoes that are nutritious and tasty at a scale that can feed the whole population when the economics now might only support one or two massive commercial producers and a whole bunch of tiny artisanal lifestyle growers?
Well actually :). For tomatoes the solution has been researchers using genomics and genetic engineering to understand how the various features of tomato flavour are made and then use that knowledge to breed new cultivars. I'm not sure but I think using that approach to breeding new journalists and new media company managers might be viewed with suspicion.
It's absolutely true that media companies, for the most part, haven't been innovative enough in the face of these headwinds. On the other hand, not even Jeff Bezos has been able to figure it out.
I'd definitely say the problem I've highlighted is not the whole problem. Just that by choosing the middle, bland inoffensive ground most of the media companies have lost so much audience that advertisers just wont pay what they used to. I totally agree there are other structural and legislative issues that others have noted much better than I could. Personally I have no idea how it will all play out, my response has been to directly support the journalist and media I follow where possible, but that approach is fraught as well.
But the point I was trying to make is that that's not necessarily true: They've lost audiences in the formats that their newsrooms were build around (newspapers, TV, magazines, radio) and replaced that with, in some cases, bigger audiences online, where audience behaviour is different (more choice, less transient, less brand loyalty, etc) and the ability to generate revenue is totally different. Advertisers aren't paying less to publishers online than they did to advertise on TV because their audiences have collapsed, it's because it's just a totally different business and in that space advertisers can reach bigger audiences more directly by putting their money with Google, Facebook, or whatever else. Even if a legacy publisher builds a massive audience online with amazing journalism they're still a minor player in that space. A lot of publishers belatedly realised that and this is why you've seen a move towards subscription models/paywalls, because a direct relationship readers is more resilient than digital advertising, but that will mean newsrooms being smaller and more focused, on a far smaller cost base, and not everyone will be able to access their work.
Does AUT also regularly report on how trusted specific political parties, insurance companies, drug brands or mega churches are? It would be interesting reading.
Gonna go out on a limb and say "loss of faith" by the populace is actually not as unique or peculiar to media brands as AUT seems determined to keep telling everyone it is.
What IS possibly unique, and definitely peculiar, is why the media keeps gleefully reporting on this survey, over and over like clockwork, in some sort of self-flagellating destruction from within?
Gonna also go out on a limb and say that a graph showing declining trust in media brands should not automatically be taken to mean that any one of those brands is any more or less worthy of trust than it was before... the graph is revealing "the rise in people who don't trust". Anything. Or Anyone.
I would like to see a "growth in nutjobs who do their own research" survey published alongside these stories going forward please.
Thanks. That is an interesting idea and I suspect there is something in what you say. I should, perhaps, have made clearer that this is the AUT journalism and media school. It is also true, as you may have heard me suggest on the Hoon tonight, that there is an interesting correlation in the Reuters Institute data between countries that have a high level of regard for the integrity of governments and media. I suppose that is one reason I am drawn often to the "why do people want to erode confidence in media/experts/institutions.).
Yes indeed, I did hear you raise that on the Hoon too. And nice work there, BTW - I always find what you and Bernard are doing there very informative and fun!
I am sure that erosion crosses into most industries. But it feels like it's only journalism that gets the trust stories written. It just absolutely plays into the hands of ACT, and the conspiracy nuts. Why does journalism do this to itself?
What I particularly find so strange is that it's AUT's media school who do this. An institution whose main reason to exist, surely, is to attract, train and encourage the next generation of journalists. And they are the ones telling not just those new kids, but everyone else who's interested, that nobody trusts them... it risks becoming self-fulfilling prophecy. Arguable it already has.
Can anyone recall hearing the AUT culinary school publicly detailing which beer generates the most drink driving convictions or ranking restaurants by the increase in number of customers saying they got the sh*ts afterwards? Sorry to end on that note.
Thanks Peter, I was looking forward to your thoughts on the matter.
I think the dearth of local and working class journalists are major contributors to the values and beliefs gaps between those who watch and those who prepare the news.
The cultural drift is so severe that the curators of the news actively withhold stories of interest- not a single written peep today on the Cass review as another example. Any questions to the former health ministers ‘holding those in power to account?’ Of course not.
They openly sneer at the ‘cookers’ without the humility to put their hands up and apologise when they make supposedly good faith errors opining on contentious issues as settled fact.
When all their good faith errors are in one direction(present company excluded) , they co mingle of news and Opinion whilst ‘framing’ the news to shape a narrative it’s a surprise the trust is so high.
The future is ideological fragmented news and expert content that people will pay for alongside an enfeebled public broadcaster producing occasional great tv but lots of mediocre sound bite crap for the tik tok generation.
Thank you. I did notice that RNZ, it seemed to me, did a pretty good job of covering the implications of the Cass review both globally and in NZ. It is only a start. I suspect that you may see more evaluation over the next couple of days, I certainly hope so, as what her analysis does (as you say) is challenge an argument that is already well entrenched and sort of built on claims of fairness and not isolating minorities. You are absolutely right, of course, about the class implications and some of that is linked to money and privilege. Thanks and there is so much to say on all these subjects, not all of which I have a view or skill on.
I initially trained in the US in journalism but was told on my return to NZ in the mid-80s that my degree would price me out of the job market and (the Herald) didn’t want some hot-shot know-it-all coming in and upsetting the status quo. Seems times have changed.
As an ex-publisher (consumer guides to building and a trade publication) and ex-TVNZ marketing at the birth of the Internet in the mid-90s, I both watched with delight the inception of the Internet, presented to ad agencies of the implications, but always believed strong news brands like the BBC and Reuters would remain seen as reliable sources. No one predicted the double whammy of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, and certainly not coming after the insidious weeds of distrust had long been sowed by Rupert Murdoch.
Journalists have always been seen as both despised and believed, but the scandals of the Murdoch press in the UK and the unrivalled success of Fox in the US has increased one and diminished the other. “It’s the duty of every publication to reflect the prejudices of its readers” is a quote I picked up by Rupert Murdoch, though I have since been unable to verify it. Never mind-it has an excellent amount of truthiness to it.
Murdoch has always blurred the lines between opinion and news reporting and refined it in the lead up to, and during, the presidency of Trump. And since then Bannon has actively worked with RW populist politicians to undermine public trust in news media even more.
The Covid years in NZ served to eventually accelerate that as weariness of battling a disease that wouldn’t go away, the conviction of the cookers, the tacit support of a couple of well-placed self-serving politicians helped combine growing disappointment in our then govt for their perceived lack of achievement in areas other than Covid, a belief that maybe that last Auckland lockdown wasn’t necessary, certainly not at the cost to economic life and certainly not when the weather was shit, and perhaps there may be some truth in the unhinged vaccine and chemtrail conspiracies.
Throw in ad agencies being encouraged to increasingly throw their spending online by clients for whom the final click-thru was always more important than the initial attribution. Never mind the brand, feel the clicks.
I believe there are things our news media could have done better, but knowing some journalists (and a few politicians, too), I’ve always had a higher opinion of them than many.
Mass media increasingly isn’t mass, advertising money goes to sales, not brands, and the culture gap between tertiary-educated and those not increases to grow. There are no easy answers.
I believe they are pushing doubt of our trusted MSM media to fuel social media disinformation, worldwide, on behalf of Atlas Network & the nasty MegaCorp & oligarch members - led by BigOil & Tobacco.
I also believe our trusted MSm media has been infiltrated by Atlas players, many placed at the top - to help push the Overton Window their way.
Sorry to be the weirdo who's late to the party, but reading you article reminded me of the old TVNZ7 channel(not sure if you were in NZ during those years Peter) around 2007-2010(?).
I was in my early 20s & had sweet "FA" idea of what I was going to do with my life.
The channel had numerous documentary series about science as well as Kiwi produced informative shows like: Media 7, Back Benches & The Court Report(just to name a few). There were even shows about Kiwi artists & NZ history.
I remember religiously watching these shows. It tickled my curiosity about our country & how the world works in a way that school never did. I know it wasn't everyone's taste(sort of like the Tomato comment previously) but I loved it. To this day I still mourn the loss of TVNZ7.
Whilst I recognize the media is NOT innocent in this new zeitgeist(as acknowledged by most others) I also think it takes two to tango.
It is NOT a coincidence that the increase in distrust in media also coincides with the growing attitude of anti-intellectualism & anti-woke.
People don't understand that while politicians are for the most part out of touch, they are oddly very in tune with our prejudices & will foster that prejudice(in this case distrust of the media) if it means they(politicians) are less likely to be held accountable.
I think what worries me the most is the deficit of information & the indifference of some(a lot) Kiwis have of this issue.
Sorry wall of text, I needed to write it but you don't need to read it.
I’m a plant biologist so excuse me if I waste space with an analogy from my field. For the longest time plant breeding companies did surveys with consumers to find out what tomatoes they liked. They collected huge amounts of data. And when they looked they found the common feature was sugar. Quite simply most people liked sweet tomatoes. So they bred for sweetness. To be fair they also bred for size and ability to transport and store.
And sales dropped. Everyone said tomatoes taste terrible now, tomatoes tasted better when I was young, heirloom tomatoes are so much better etc etc.
What the breeding companies had missed was while most people liked sweetness that wasn’t what they loved. But the problem was, a flavour one group of people loved, another group didn’t love and instead loved a different flavour. So when you looked at the averages the only common liking was sweetness. It’s only recently that breeding companies have realised that a tomato that 10% of people love is better than a tomato that 80% of people merely like. And yes now they are breeding multiple varieties that specific groups of people love.
That’s what has happened to our media. The 6 pm news and the front page is about news that won’t really offend, the weather is good we can talk about the weather or rugby or polls without getting complaints. But when you fill the media with things that aren’t offensive and that folks “like” a bit then you don’t provide news that people really care a lot about. There is rarely anything about The Russian war so I go buy an heirloom media source for my news, there is no real in depth science news so I go to a specialist science news source, the political news is all polls and "can the gallery reporter trip up an MP" so if I want to understand policy I go elsewhere.
Essentially our media chose the bland harmless middle ground and lost everyone.
And yes I know there are real problems with international streaming which our government refused to legislate to control and I know that funding is brutally tight and I’ve read Duncan Grieves excellent analysis of the structural problems.
But I’m still left with the feeling that much of our media failed to serve the public by going for the bland sugar instead of the more difficult flavour. They went for the 80% like and as a result lost all the 10% loves and when you lose enough 10%s you have no-one left watching or caring.
And the really sad part is we have amazing journalists doing great hard work to research and develop news stories that are important – and they get a 30 second slot just before the rugby, er I mean sport news. Those journalists have been failed by the media management.
That is such an interesting metaphor and I fear there is a lot of truth in it. One of the issues maybe that, unlike FMCG companies like Nestle or pasta or tomato sauce firms, the media companies don't adequately listen to the lessons from other industries. (That is certainly my experience, that we think it is so special. I learned that lesson big time joining Microsoft.)
Heh the big Ag and food companies do really stupid stuff too, especially failing to learn from other industries because “our industry is special”.
I do think there are special features to every field but there are a lot of things that repeat in some form or another.
Oh and if you’re really interested in breeding and engineering tomatoes for flavour the papers from Harry Klee’s lab are awesome
This is the pasta sauce story. A man figured out you need lots of types instead of one perfect one
There’s more than one kind?
That is a really interesting metaphor and a fair point, and there's truth to it, as Peter says, but it's not the whole story. The structural problems that Duncan Grieve wrote about are fundamental. The problem is less one of collapsing demand than the collapse of the traditional business models. Some of these publishers that people are saying have turned everyone off actually still have massive audiences, maybe bigger than they ever had, but the economics of digital media are so different that they can no longer financially support the sort of large-scale, national, cover-everything, universal access newsrooms that we're used to. This isn't a defence of the media companies, who mostly have adapted terribly over a long time, but even if the main players had done everything you would've wanted them to do to have kept the 10% of loves happy the news media would still probably in much the same predicament economically.
Or if you want to round out the metaphor, let's also consider that the way that people get tomatoes has completely changed and the return that growers get has collapsed to 10 cents on the dollar. How do we create a new system that provides tomatoes that are nutritious and tasty at a scale that can feed the whole population when the economics now might only support one or two massive commercial producers and a whole bunch of tiny artisanal lifestyle growers?
Well actually :). For tomatoes the solution has been researchers using genomics and genetic engineering to understand how the various features of tomato flavour are made and then use that knowledge to breed new cultivars. I'm not sure but I think using that approach to breeding new journalists and new media company managers might be viewed with suspicion.
It's absolutely true that media companies, for the most part, haven't been innovative enough in the face of these headwinds. On the other hand, not even Jeff Bezos has been able to figure it out.
I'd definitely say the problem I've highlighted is not the whole problem. Just that by choosing the middle, bland inoffensive ground most of the media companies have lost so much audience that advertisers just wont pay what they used to. I totally agree there are other structural and legislative issues that others have noted much better than I could. Personally I have no idea how it will all play out, my response has been to directly support the journalist and media I follow where possible, but that approach is fraught as well.
I admit to sometimes using the brewing industry as a metaphor and noting the rise of the artisanal brewing places.
But the point I was trying to make is that that's not necessarily true: They've lost audiences in the formats that their newsrooms were build around (newspapers, TV, magazines, radio) and replaced that with, in some cases, bigger audiences online, where audience behaviour is different (more choice, less transient, less brand loyalty, etc) and the ability to generate revenue is totally different. Advertisers aren't paying less to publishers online than they did to advertise on TV because their audiences have collapsed, it's because it's just a totally different business and in that space advertisers can reach bigger audiences more directly by putting their money with Google, Facebook, or whatever else. Even if a legacy publisher builds a massive audience online with amazing journalism they're still a minor player in that space. A lot of publishers belatedly realised that and this is why you've seen a move towards subscription models/paywalls, because a direct relationship readers is more resilient than digital advertising, but that will mean newsrooms being smaller and more focused, on a far smaller cost base, and not everyone will be able to access their work.
Does AUT also regularly report on how trusted specific political parties, insurance companies, drug brands or mega churches are? It would be interesting reading.
Gonna go out on a limb and say "loss of faith" by the populace is actually not as unique or peculiar to media brands as AUT seems determined to keep telling everyone it is.
What IS possibly unique, and definitely peculiar, is why the media keeps gleefully reporting on this survey, over and over like clockwork, in some sort of self-flagellating destruction from within?
Gonna also go out on a limb and say that a graph showing declining trust in media brands should not automatically be taken to mean that any one of those brands is any more or less worthy of trust than it was before... the graph is revealing "the rise in people who don't trust". Anything. Or Anyone.
I would like to see a "growth in nutjobs who do their own research" survey published alongside these stories going forward please.
Thanks. That is an interesting idea and I suspect there is something in what you say. I should, perhaps, have made clearer that this is the AUT journalism and media school. It is also true, as you may have heard me suggest on the Hoon tonight, that there is an interesting correlation in the Reuters Institute data between countries that have a high level of regard for the integrity of governments and media. I suppose that is one reason I am drawn often to the "why do people want to erode confidence in media/experts/institutions.).
Yes indeed, I did hear you raise that on the Hoon too. And nice work there, BTW - I always find what you and Bernard are doing there very informative and fun!
I am sure that erosion crosses into most industries. But it feels like it's only journalism that gets the trust stories written. It just absolutely plays into the hands of ACT, and the conspiracy nuts. Why does journalism do this to itself?
What I particularly find so strange is that it's AUT's media school who do this. An institution whose main reason to exist, surely, is to attract, train and encourage the next generation of journalists. And they are the ones telling not just those new kids, but everyone else who's interested, that nobody trusts them... it risks becoming self-fulfilling prophecy. Arguable it already has.
Can anyone recall hearing the AUT culinary school publicly detailing which beer generates the most drink driving convictions or ranking restaurants by the increase in number of customers saying they got the sh*ts afterwards? Sorry to end on that note.
PSA: Don't KFC and drive.
Thanks Peter, I was looking forward to your thoughts on the matter.
I think the dearth of local and working class journalists are major contributors to the values and beliefs gaps between those who watch and those who prepare the news.
The cultural drift is so severe that the curators of the news actively withhold stories of interest- not a single written peep today on the Cass review as another example. Any questions to the former health ministers ‘holding those in power to account?’ Of course not.
They openly sneer at the ‘cookers’ without the humility to put their hands up and apologise when they make supposedly good faith errors opining on contentious issues as settled fact.
When all their good faith errors are in one direction(present company excluded) , they co mingle of news and Opinion whilst ‘framing’ the news to shape a narrative it’s a surprise the trust is so high.
The future is ideological fragmented news and expert content that people will pay for alongside an enfeebled public broadcaster producing occasional great tv but lots of mediocre sound bite crap for the tik tok generation.
Thank you. I did notice that RNZ, it seemed to me, did a pretty good job of covering the implications of the Cass review both globally and in NZ. It is only a start. I suspect that you may see more evaluation over the next couple of days, I certainly hope so, as what her analysis does (as you say) is challenge an argument that is already well entrenched and sort of built on claims of fairness and not isolating minorities. You are absolutely right, of course, about the class implications and some of that is linked to money and privilege. Thanks and there is so much to say on all these subjects, not all of which I have a view or skill on.
I initially trained in the US in journalism but was told on my return to NZ in the mid-80s that my degree would price me out of the job market and (the Herald) didn’t want some hot-shot know-it-all coming in and upsetting the status quo. Seems times have changed.
As an ex-publisher (consumer guides to building and a trade publication) and ex-TVNZ marketing at the birth of the Internet in the mid-90s, I both watched with delight the inception of the Internet, presented to ad agencies of the implications, but always believed strong news brands like the BBC and Reuters would remain seen as reliable sources. No one predicted the double whammy of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, and certainly not coming after the insidious weeds of distrust had long been sowed by Rupert Murdoch.
Journalists have always been seen as both despised and believed, but the scandals of the Murdoch press in the UK and the unrivalled success of Fox in the US has increased one and diminished the other. “It’s the duty of every publication to reflect the prejudices of its readers” is a quote I picked up by Rupert Murdoch, though I have since been unable to verify it. Never mind-it has an excellent amount of truthiness to it.
Murdoch has always blurred the lines between opinion and news reporting and refined it in the lead up to, and during, the presidency of Trump. And since then Bannon has actively worked with RW populist politicians to undermine public trust in news media even more.
The Covid years in NZ served to eventually accelerate that as weariness of battling a disease that wouldn’t go away, the conviction of the cookers, the tacit support of a couple of well-placed self-serving politicians helped combine growing disappointment in our then govt for their perceived lack of achievement in areas other than Covid, a belief that maybe that last Auckland lockdown wasn’t necessary, certainly not at the cost to economic life and certainly not when the weather was shit, and perhaps there may be some truth in the unhinged vaccine and chemtrail conspiracies.
Throw in ad agencies being encouraged to increasingly throw their spending online by clients for whom the final click-thru was always more important than the initial attribution. Never mind the brand, feel the clicks.
I believe there are things our news media could have done better, but knowing some journalists (and a few politicians, too), I’ve always had a higher opinion of them than many.
Mass media increasingly isn’t mass, advertising money goes to sales, not brands, and the culture gap between tertiary-educated and those not increases to grow. There are no easy answers.
You’ve heard of the “Merchants of Doubt”?
Pushing Tobacco, fossil fuel & climate change lies?
You’ve heard of BOTS on FB, X etc?
…You’ve probably only heard the half of it!
I believe they are pushing doubt of our trusted MSM media to fuel social media disinformation, worldwide, on behalf of Atlas Network & the nasty MegaCorp & oligarch members - led by BigOil & Tobacco.
I also believe our trusted MSm media has been infiltrated by Atlas players, many placed at the top - to help push the Overton Window their way.
“DOUGHT”
https://youtu.be/YhDacrl1aSA?si=nx8htxyfmzn0xkZm
Sorry to be the weirdo who's late to the party, but reading you article reminded me of the old TVNZ7 channel(not sure if you were in NZ during those years Peter) around 2007-2010(?).
I was in my early 20s & had sweet "FA" idea of what I was going to do with my life.
The channel had numerous documentary series about science as well as Kiwi produced informative shows like: Media 7, Back Benches & The Court Report(just to name a few). There were even shows about Kiwi artists & NZ history.
I remember religiously watching these shows. It tickled my curiosity about our country & how the world works in a way that school never did. I know it wasn't everyone's taste(sort of like the Tomato comment previously) but I loved it. To this day I still mourn the loss of TVNZ7.
Whilst I recognize the media is NOT innocent in this new zeitgeist(as acknowledged by most others) I also think it takes two to tango.
It is NOT a coincidence that the increase in distrust in media also coincides with the growing attitude of anti-intellectualism & anti-woke.
People don't understand that while politicians are for the most part out of touch, they are oddly very in tune with our prejudices & will foster that prejudice(in this case distrust of the media) if it means they(politicians) are less likely to be held accountable.
I think what worries me the most is the deficit of information & the indifference of some(a lot) Kiwis have of this issue.