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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.