Rawiri Taonui
Our Truth, Tā Mātou Pono, is a Stuff project investigating the history of racism. This week has focused on Stuff and its newspapers, and how we have portrayed Māori. National Correspondent Michelle Duff looks at the history of the Sunday papers.
“When you’re a Māori writer you are writing in an environment of relentless racism. I was well aware I was one tiny brown corner in a Pākehā organisation.’’
When one of our greatest sportsmen, George Nēpia, died in 1986, a confronting photo of him appeared on the front page of the Sunday Star. Nepia is clearly seen, lying in his coffin. More than three decades later, Nēpia’s daughter-in-law, Ramari Taiahuru Nēpia from Ngāti Porou, still remembers when the photographs were being taken as her father-in-law lay in state on Hinepare marae in Rangitukia, on the East Cape.
The whānau understood the public interest in Nēpia’s death in 1986, and the media was given access to photograph the tangihanga (mourning process).
Keeping a constant vigil over the beloved tūpāpaku (body), touching the deceased person, and sharing a range of emotions and cultural practices with all those who gather, is an integral and very intimate part of tangihanga.
The family did not know the photographer had captured a whānau member kissing Nēpia’s face and it would be published for all the world to see.
‘‘Coming from a Māori perspective, there would have been a lot of us upset about it, but we were grieving,’’ the 81-year-old says, from her home near Ruatoria.
‘‘There’s an element of insensitivity that comes into it too. Would they have done that with a Pākehā family? That’s the question.
‘‘They shouldn’t be taking photos of our dead people, whether they are famous or not.’’
A national rugby and rugby league representative, George Nēpia was considered, by many sports pundits, to be one of the great All Black fullbacks and Māori sportsmen of all time.
The Sunday Star was less than a year old then, and the editor was Jim Tucker.
He recalls a call from the photographer to say he had the shot. ‘‘I said, ‘Hell, do we have permission to run a picture of George in an open coffin’?’’ says Tucker, now retired in Taranaki. ‘‘And he said someone had said yes, so we ran it on the front page.’’
This is not how marae protocol works, says Nēpia.
‘‘It is a disrespect of Māori tikanga. Our people have certain roles on the marae, and you have to consult with those people, there are protocols. We were grieving, and we were not aware of all of the things that were happening.’’
The Sunday Star-Times has chosen not to publish the front page in question.
Tucker didn’t realise the offence he’d caused until more than a year later, on his first visit to a marae. There, speaker after speaker rose to castigate him for the insult.
‘‘I got up and said ‘I’m appalled that we would do that, I had no idea, we got permission.’ And they said ‘Who by?’ and I said ‘the photographer asked someone.’ Later I realised of course it’s not just one person.
‘‘I said ‘I never heard a complaint, I never heard a word from you, what happened?’ And they said ‘That would have been a waste of time’.’’
Tucker says that incident changed his life. He left newspapers soon after and dedicated the next 25 years to teaching journalism, including learning tikanga, encouraging diversity with former race relations commissioner Joris de Bres, and securing scholarships for Māori students.
‘‘I realise looking back that we did very little for Māori, we had no idea. We were all middle-class Pākehā who didn’t understand. It wasn’t a conscious decision to exclude Māori, it was just there.
‘‘I look back, and I was an absolute failure as a journalist and an editor.’’
For its Tāe Mātou Pono, Our Truth investigation, Stuff has audited more than 160 years of its journalism to understand how it’s covered Māori. On Monday, the company issued an apology to Māori, for failing its own journalism practices by perpetuating stereotypes, social stigma and racism.
Research into Stuff’s Sunday titles has found an obsession with conflict, crime and ‘‘agendasetting’’ stories detrimental to Māori.
The nature of a Sunday paper is different to the dailies. Journalists have to work hard to break exclusive stories, or find new angles that haven’t been explored.
With fierce competition, and pressure to set the news agenda, sensationalism was a feature of the Sundays since Sydney newspaperman John Norton started the NZ Truth in June 1905.
The first available edition of the NZ Truth dates from July 1906. That paper carried two stories which mention Māori. One, entitled ‘‘Maoriland Memories,’’ is a dispassionate discussion of how a young Māori man’s head was traded.
Underlying much of our coverage, as evidenced in a 1926 piece headlined ‘‘Māori morals’’, was the idea Māori were intellectually inferior, and the settlers’ way was right.
Just like the findings of other papers in our investigation, the default perspective of the Sundays was also Pākehā.
The Sunday Times merged with the Sunday Star to become the Sunday Star-Times in 1994. There are a number of examples throughout its history of editorials – the voice of the paper – being written with anti-Māori themes, such as this one, in 1999: ‘‘The Maori language is dead, starved into the grave by its owners, who no longer had any use for it once they got their hands and tongues on English.
‘‘It exists today only as an exhumed corpse, laid on a slab and subjected to the indignities of attempts to revive it by massive injections of taxpayers’ money.’’
Several past Star-Times editors or journalists spoken to for this story said they’d either been told or made to understand ‘‘brown faces don’t sell papers’’.
Gallery reporter Joel Maxwell recalls it was part of his in-house training at Stuff, by an external consultant, many years ago.
Former deputy Sunday News editor David Kemeys, who did a short stint at the helm of the Star-Times, says he would often clash with senior management on editorial decisions.
‘‘It would be repeated quite often that you didn’t put a brown face on the front page of the paper in Christchurch, or sales would tank.
‘‘I didn’t care, I did what I wanted, but that was made clear.’’
Kemeys, who is Ngāti Maniapoto, says because people didn’t know he was Māori they would feel comfortable about making anti-Māori comments in front of him. He found the monocultural newsroom unsettling.
While he commended Stuff’s apology, he expressed reservations. ‘‘This stuff has been going on really, really recently, and probably still does.’’
In our investigation, we found that when Māori did make the headlines it often reinforced Once Were Warriors- style stereotypes or whipped up Pākehā anxiety around crime, Treaty of Waitangi claims, political conflict and more.
There was also a tendency to group similar events together, creating themes that didn’t exist.
For example, National Correspondent Charlie Mitchell found Stuff and its newspapers including the Sundays, made Māori the face of child abuse and minimised the harm being perpetuated against Pākehā children.
‘‘When you’re a Māori writer you are writing in an environment of relentless racism. I was well aware I was one tiny brown corner in a Pākehā organisation.’’ Rawiri Taonui, inset right
From 2000 to 2013, we gave a megaphone to Michael Laws who, from our audit, appears to be one of the most prolific and vitriolic purveyors of negative stereotypes in the papers.
The former Whanganui Mayor and MP used his unrestrained and lengthy tenure, under several editors, to attack a range of individuals and minority groups including Mā ori, for whom he coined the term ‘‘feral underclass’’.
Headlines during that time included: ‘‘Cases make it a week for the ferals’’ and ‘‘Hold the front page; ferals wreaking havoc’’.
He said there were thousands of feral kids currently living in New Zealand, and the district court was ‘‘part playground, part marae’’.
In one column he wrote, ‘‘They have core characteristics that distinguish them: poor education, transience, a dependence upon drink and/or drugs, a criminal history, a welfare lifestyle and they are disproportionately Maori.
‘‘The latter is important to note because that culture does provide a tolerance other cultures do not . . . they breed like rabbits and they have become this country’s contagion.’’
Laws’ columns did not exist in a vacuum. His rants were sometimes turned into news stories giving the impression his views were factual.
He was finally let go from the paper after making offensive Facebook comments about Down syndrome.
Laws rejects the racist label.
‘‘I never wrote anything racist in my columns for the SST. I simply wrote opinions based upon available fact,’’ Laws said.
‘‘I would resile from nothing and deeply regret that Stuff now sees itself as an apologist rather than as a proactive agency to protect vulnerable children in New Zealand.’’
He also noted the popularity of his column with previous editors and advertisers: ‘‘They informed me that my column consistently polled as the best read in that publication . . . They would often highlight those columns in advertising their paper. That was their editorial decision, not mine.’’
Massey University journalism lecturer James Hollings thinks in general it’s important to air different points of view, even if they are disagreeable.
‘‘I’d rather hear them than not, and take them on. If you just silence them they go somewhere else.’’
But he does not consider free speech a defence for airing them with impunity.
‘‘There comes a point where a news organisation has to say, ‘Is this worth it, is this what we stand for?’ I think people knew at the time what he was like. To say ‘We didn’t know,’ is disingenuous.’’
Hollings says newsrooms need to increase diversity to ensure they’re not just reflecting one viewpoint. Writer and academic Dr Rawiri Taonui was one, if not the only, Māori opinion writer in our papers at that time.
He often went head-to-head with Laws – and while Laws used news stories as springboards for his views – Taonui was often a lone voice speaking out against the way events were being reported, such as the anti-terror police raids in 2007.
Taonui says it took a great personal toll.
He had a ‘‘hate mail’’ box beside his computer, where he would regularly throw letters calling him a ‘‘black c...’’, or telling him his ancestors were animals.
‘‘When you’re a Māori writer you are writing in an environment of relentless racism,’’ he says.
‘‘I was well aware I was one tiny brown corner in a Pākehā organisation.’’
Massey University’s Dr Meihana Durie says the challenge for all media will now be to produce ‘‘mana-enhancing’’ journalism, telling Māori stories respectfully.
Stuff’s apology is significant, he says.
‘‘I’m incredibly optimistic that what has come out in recent days will pave the way for a new platform on which stories about Māori are told,’’ says Durie.
‘‘There’s potential to reconceptualise what journalism looks like in Aotearoa, leading us into to a positive, flourishing future.’’