News on the news
Craig Shearer - 4 March 2024
In the news this past week has been the announcement of the potential closing of Newshub at the end of June this year.
Newshub as it’s now known, run by international media giant Warner Brothers Discovery, started life as TV3 way back in 1989, as the first privately-owned TV channel. Indeed, I remember watching its first broadcast back then, and it certainly was a challenger to the entrenched TVNZ.
Veteran broadcaster, Phillip Sherry reads the first TV3 news
The potential closure and likely loss of around 300 jobs is being blamed on a drastic fall in advertising revenue. Obviously, the media world has suffered drastic upheaval in the past decade, with many people turning towards online alternative sources for their news.
It does seem that many people no longer tune in for the 6pm news, and TVNZ will be feeling this too. They have seen a drastic fall in their profit, mainly due to worsening economic conditions.
So what do we have to fear from a news organisation going out of business? While the 6pm news slot probably appealed to an older demographic (myself excluded!), these news organisations do support vital journalism. We may complain about the quality of the journalism at times, and there often seems to be an emphasis on driving “clicks” or “eyeballs”, it’s still professional journalists doing the work of uncovering stories. And it’s not just the journalists affected, but there are large numbers of people behind the scenes who are needed to create professional news content.
We’ve seen much criticism over the past few years about the “mainstream media” or MSM as it’s known. With increasing polarisation of political views, in my belief largely driven by social media, we’re seeing people wanting their news to echo their own beliefs - that the news presented would be like their own social media newsfeed, telling them the stuff they want to hear. It’s certainly true that many people think the media has a “narrative”, and is pushing a particular agenda, with the complaints I’ve heard that “it’s too woke”!
There’s certainly a particular political view that organisations need to be able to pay their own way, and if unable to do so, then they should be left to wither. This obviously ignores the public benefit derived from having an active fourth estate, who can hold the politicians to account, and inform the public of things that are important.
Back during the pandemic, the Labour government created the Public Interest Journalism Fund. The $55M fund, administered independently by NZ on Air, was used to support the news media during the COVID-19 downturn.
According to the NZ On Air site:
“The PIJF was a specific ring-fenced fund that was designed to provide targeted, short to medium-term support for roles, projects and industry development.”
They claim that as of April last year, the fund has supported more than 60,000 pieces of news content, with a total of 134 million views.
And while the fund was administered independently by NZ on Air, that hasn’t stopped opportunistic politicians from trying to promote the perception that the journalism produced by the fund was somehow tainted and biassed in favour of the government. During the election campaign last year, Winston Peters taunted Jack Tame, stating “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery, cannot defend $55m of bribery. Get it very clear.”
Even more despicable (in my opinion) people such as the likes of Chantelle Baker and Liz Gunn and many others paint the perception that the mainstream media doesn’t report on supposed controversies such as the Covid vaccine “injuries”. And these people have been openly celebrating the news, and dancing on Newshub’s grave (perhaps a little prematurely) trying to blame its closing on it not reporting on controversial topics like vaccine injury.
I wonder whether there should be some on-going fund that is set up to support the vital journalistic roles in society. Unfortunately, news organisations are reliant on commercial revenue to keep them afloat, largely from advertising. The advertising market has become much more diverse over the past couple of decades with the advent of the internet. And, as we’ve seen, many people get their news off social media sites such as Facebook. The veracity of such news is certainly not guaranteed, and much more susceptible to propaganda influences than professional journalism is. Unfortunately, the likes of Facebook and Google, who profit off the content generated and provided by news organisations, don’t seem willing to pay for that content, and the current government doesn’t seem keen on making them.
Ironically, people like Chantelle Baker and Liz Gunn, and the hosts of Reality Check Radio (not to mention the awful CounterSpin Media), claim to be doing investigative journalism. Unfortunately, they are not professional journalists and haven’t been trained as such. They’re the ones who we can fairly confidently say are pushing an agenda, and being driven by clicks and eyeballs.
The late Carl Sagan had it right in The Demon-Haunted World, when he stated:
“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Those were Sagan’s thoughts back in the mid-90s. One wonders what he’d think of today’s environment. Were souls and an afterlife real, I suspect he’d be spinning in his grave!