Tracy Watkins

“We may still make mistakes. Our Truth is about holding ourselves to account when we do.”

As a working journalist for most of the past 35 years, I find Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯tou – the Stuff series probing our own role in perpetuating negative stereotypes and contributing to racism in New Zealand – makes for uncomfortable reading.

As a political reporter for Stuff during some turbulent years in race relations – Don Brash’s hugely divisive Orewa speech in 2004, the Foreshore and Seabed Act, and the birth of the Ma¯ori Party – it’s just as important for me to question whether my own work stands up to scrutiny.

A cursory look back has already given me that answer: not always, no. I found a clickbait story I wrote, for instance, about how Pa¯keha¯ might be able to claim customary rights under the Foreshore and Seabed Act. It doesn’t really matter that I wrote it off the back of a Winston Peters media statement. We journalists have access and privileges that others don’t enjoy and we use that to hold the powerful to account. That privilege includes the power to throw their nonsense in the bin sometimes.

I was also at the Orewa speech. It was a hot, humid night and sweat rolled down the National leader’s face as he delivered one of the most polarising speeches in years. The audience, an older crowd of mostly Rotarians, looked half asleep in the heat. It certainly didn’t feel at the time like a race-quake.

But the speech landed like a bomb with our readers; the calls started at 3am the next day and over the following 24 hours the newsroom fielded more than 2000 emails and phonecalls. Much of the reaction was ugly and National shot up the polls off the back of it.

I’ve been asking myself this week whether my coverage of the speech that day and in the following weeks helped throw fuel on that fire.

It was a story that, of course, we had to cover; Brash’s attempt to win power off the back of a speech designed to pit Ma¯ori against Pa¯keha¯ could hardly be ignored.

But I can’t pretend that some of the angles I pursued, or the headlines we ran – and, just as crucially, the angles we ignored – wouldn’t have helped stoke the race relations backlash.

Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯tou Pono, is about acknowledging our power as journalists to shape a debate, and about questioning whether we have always wielded that privilege justly when it comes to our coverage of Ma¯ori.

The answer we came to was no.

So as a long-time reporter, I can’t stand apart from Stuff’s apology for its coverage of Ma¯ori, any more than I can hold myself above the actions of my predecessors in my current role as Sunday Star-Times editor.

The Sunday Star-Times and its forerunners have a proud tradition of fearless, agenda-setting journalism.

But as Michelle Duff writes in today’s Sunday Star-Times, the pressure on Sunday newspapers to find exclusive angles, and set the agenda, meant that we also ran stories – and promoted deliberately inflammatory columnists – that drove a wedge in race relations.

Other times, we were hurtful out of ignorance by looking at issues through a largely Pa¯keha¯ lens.

We may still make mistakes. Our Truth is about holding ourselves to account when we do. And acknowledging that we need to work a lot harder to gain the trust of all our readers.

We may still make mistakes. Our Truth is about holding ourselves to account when we do.