‘Brown people aren’t our target audience
Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯tou Pono is a Stuff project investigating the history of racism. So far it has focused on Stuff and its newspapers, and how they have portrayed Ma¯ori. Today, Joel Maxwell, from Te Rarawa, reflects on his time as a reporter at the compan
There’s one news day involving aMa¯ori man, four years ago, I sometimes wonder about. What would’ve happened if someone was outside the house on Kokiri Cres in Porirua, that day, in April 2016?
When the first shot went off from upstairs, the cop burst out from the second floor, plunged to the ground, snapping his wrist and hurting his shoulder as he hit the dirt.
I wondered, if someone had been on the footpath, how they would’ve reacted to the unexpected horror of it all.
Upstairs, aman called Pita Te Kira, 29, on the run from police, had shot a german shepherd police dog called Gazza. Later, Gazza would be wrapped in a New Zealand flag at his private funeral. Curled up, head tucked in, he looked like he was calmly sleeping. That is always a relief at any funeral, animal or human, I guess.
The house was still intact when Sergeant Jono Westrupp stumbled off, injured.
When the whole tragedy was over, someone burnt the house down.
I remember being at the fire scene, in the middle of the night, with a photographer.
There was amobile fire command centre – a logistical box on wheels – with light spilling out its side door, parked up outside, as trucks and firefighters circled the house.
Water poured down the gutters, hoses criss-crossed the grass and concrete; neighbours stood on the footpaths, bathed in firelight and the blue wash of cellphone screens.
Knots of residents, hushed by the destruction, stood under the pall of filthy smoke crawling through the darkness.
It was as though someone wanted to put a definitive full stop on this incident and burn away the bad memories.
The initial shooting of the dog was only the start of a standoff between Te Kira, who locked himself in a house down the end of the street, and police.
After 26 hours holding police at bay, he was found in an empty room, with messages written on the walls, his gun, and body.
Throughout the ordeal, reporters waited at the cordons down the street.
Reporters who made it into the area before the cordons were raised waited in homes with families of complete strangers, peeking over fences, ringing out information to editors. Reporters ate dinner supplied cheerfully by locked-down wha¯nau.
The reporting from Stuff during this time was excellent, and thorough, and had to negotiate awickedly terrible set of circumstances, and physical and emotional challenges.
But for me the case is a perfect example of the simple moral question at the heart of my job, one that we face every day.
We take a host of first-hand and second-hand experiences and relate them, third hand, to you the reader.
We use our palette of writing skills to convey the pictures, capture the truth. Hopungia nga¯ ahua katoa o te¯nei whenua, nga¯ mea po¯uri, kino, ra¯nei – hei whakaatu ki te katoa.
Or to put it bluntly, is it right that we take your stories, even the most horrifyingly sad, like Te Kira’s, and share them with the world?
The purpose of this essay is to explain what it has been like as aMa¯ori reporter working at Stuff.
It’s part of Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯tou Pono, a project looking at the history of racism, by first looking at Stuff and its newspapers. The company has apologised to Ma¯ori for its misdeeds, such as racism and marginalisation, and plans are underway to better represent all communities in Aotearoa.
But what about its treatment of Ma¯ori, among its reporters?
I was peripherally involved in the final hours of Pita Te Kira and the aftermath of the gutwrenchingly sad death of this Ma¯ori man.
Iknow what you’re thinking, was this a turning point in my career, a key moment of dissatisfaction, amoment of forced compromise perhaps?
This is, after all, one of the problems we have in news media in Aotearoa: Ma¯ori have been the butt of the communal joke, cast as villains, the criminals, in their own story.
Journalists face turning points every day because the moral questions never stop. This story – of Te Kira – always recurs to me because it shows most clearly the stakes and the questions and the consequences of our work.
Journalism is finding and disclosing new information that is of interest and useful to the public. In the many years I’ve been a journalist, this goal, methods and rules that govern the job have changed very little.
New technology might have switched delivery from a folded swatch of newsprint in your letterbox to the digital realm, but underneath the endless, rapid, all-cocoon-no-butterfly transformation, the same general kaupapa beats on.
My complaints against journalism are mostly as an everyday Ma¯ori person and are broadly directed at all media organisations. The contempt for te reo Ma¯ori, the seizing of the easy angles that feed prejudice. The willingness to throw Ma¯ori under the bus for readership, subscriptions – more lately, to juice up hits.
I guess it’s not surprising that, from the outside, there is mistrust of the media, and people might think there’s conspiracy among journalists.
There is no conspiracy, not between companies, not within companies, not between journalists. I don’t dispute that journalists wield extraordinary power over our shared world. We have nothing really, if not the ability to shape reality. But there’s very little comprehensive planning involved.
And here perhaps is the crux of one of the few bad memories I have of life in Stuff as aMa¯ori reporter, from a number of years ago now, and at least a couple of corporate owners in the past.
Journalists were asked to go to a training session for writing and sourcing stories. Things went well till the tutor, not from within the company, a contractor, brought up the subject of, well, subjects.
We were told not to bother with stories about brown people, poor people.
They might be interesting to us, but they probably wouldn’t
make the front page – they were not our target audience of readers.
The worst part of this anti-pep talk was that we, ourselves, were disabused of any thoughts about our own class heritage and how it might compel us to focus on the less-fortunate. You’re all middle class anyway, wewere told.
It would be nice if it was true.
The truth is that I grew up in a house where my father worked seven days aweek, 365 days a year, for years. We kids were forced to work alongside him in a low-paid farm labouring job.
It seems a lot of people who grow up from hardship get cheated out of some fundamental personal stability, an internal gyroscope, that is usually replaced inside your heart with nothing. For me, the worst part was being told I didn’t even have nothing any more.
I wonder now what that tutor thinks about what they told us. How utterly wrong that advice was.
People do care, people do want to know what is happening with the poor, and the brown – and good, compelling stories attract eyes, regardless of whom they’re about.
As part of the Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯tou project, former Ma¯ori journalists who worked at Stuff were asked about their experiences.
Moerangi Vercoe was the only Ma¯ori reporter at The Dominion in Wellington, from 1989 to 1991.
‘‘I have a feeling, I remember at one stage looking around, I was the only Ma¯ori reporter working in ametropolitan paper,’’ she says. She learned about the power of angling when she filed aMa¯ori-related story that ran on page 10, which was later picked up and reworked by amale colleague with a ‘‘negative slant’’ and the same information ran on page one, weeks later.
‘‘He wrote it from the perspective that it was a bad thing. Iwrote it from the perspective of it was a good thing. None of our factual information was different.’’
At other times she had to work around the house style at the newspaper, which still added an s to the end of Ma¯ori words, even though te reo Ma¯ori has no s. The editor refused to budge on the issue, despite outcry from Ma¯ori leaders over its continued use.
‘‘I tried to get them to change that, with absolutely no success. I remember I’d try to write my copy in away that it didn’t need to be pluralised ... that’s kind of one of the strategies I employed to get around that.
‘‘There were a lot of great people on The Dominion at that stage, especially the women. But you feel a little bit like you’re by yourself. It’s great now there’s a lot more Ma¯ori working in media, and there’s still a few issues, but not as many as there were then.’’
Current 1News reporter, and former Waikato Times journalist, Yvonne Tahana can see more appeal for Ma¯ori to work in Ma¯ori news organisations.
‘‘And by that Imean the support: you’re not alone. I can walk over to Te Karere and have a chat, workshop some ideas, help each other and work together. That is something that’s been happening for nearly 40 years.’’
Tahana says the challenge, particularly for Stuff and NZME, is to drive change at managerial level.
‘‘There have been attempts at cultural diversity, but it’s come in and out of fashion.’’
She says there is no shortage of ‘‘bright young reporters’’ who want to cover Ma¯ori issues, ‘‘but you have to have that middlemanagement or higher, whether that be Ma¯ori or non-Ma¯ori, for support and understanding’’.
Jonathon Howe, of Nga¯ti Maniapoto, was likely the first Ma¯ori editor of the Manawatu¯ Standard.
While there was no specific Ma¯ori affairs round that Howe could remember – just as there isn’t now – reporters picked up stories where they could, but it felt tokenistic, he says.
When Howe became editor, the paper was undergoing major transitions from an evening to a morning paper and juggling a series of restructures.
But that’s no excuse, Howe says. He regrets he didn’t do more in the Ma¯ori affairs space while he had the opportunity.
And so let us come back to the Te Kira story. To me, over the past years, it has been the bellwether, showing where my heart is going on this one.
Is this job still right for me? Is there a day when I find what we did, capturing this man’s final hours and the responses of the community in Porirua East, wrong?
Not yet. But I truly acknowledge others might not agree and don’t like this, or other coverage of things Ma¯ori, or Ma¯ori people. As aMa¯ori journalist in Stuff what I value most, what has largely been given to me over the years, is the ability to do what I’m currently doing.
To have that overhyped, overused, overblown but still gorgeous thing called freedom of speech.
To have the ability to express myself creatively and to stand up and ask irritating and, yes, sometimes stupid questions, and to cover, with a heavy heart but a commitment to truth, terrible events like those on Kokiri Ave.
I amaMa¯ori person, a reporter who is Ma¯ori, a
Ma¯ori reporter, and in the end, just a reporter.
If one day the End Times actually arrive, and that meteor blasts down out of the sky and slams into our planet, melts rocks to gooey syrup, fries oceans and turns forests to dust, then I hope there’s still one of our kind, cockroach-like, alive to stand up, lock eyes with God and ask him: ‘‘How do you feel?’’
Koira ta¯ku ake pono. Nga¯ mihi.