Time to take back and support what is rightfully ours
demonstrated many times.
The so-called banana republics of Central and South America had their origins in the late 1800s when the United Fruit Company invested heavily establishing plantations and associated roads, railways and ports.
These small nations never received enough from those developments to establish the sophisticated infrastructure they needed to survive in the modern world, and they still struggle today.
More recently Ireland’s economic boom and bust between the late 1980s and 2008 was created by huge investment by information technology corporates attracted by deregulation, low tariffs, low wages and low corporate taxes.
When wages finally increased, and the Euro strengthened, the foreign-owned corporates simply left town and relocated to Poland.
Unemployment soared, the corporate tax base shrank, the Irish economy nose-dived and is still recovering.
At home we saw the same pattern when the once iconic New Zealand Railways was sold off to foreign investors in 1993.
The new owners then redirected profits away from essential maintenance and upgrades to shareholder dividends. The neglected and rundown wreck of the company was repurchased by the New Zealand Government 15 years later.
Various attempts to breathe new life into our railways have not returned it to what it once was and probably never will.
Like all professional news media platforms, Stuff has struggled with diminishing profits for several years due in part to competition for shrinking advertising revenue by a variety of social media outlets and Google. Covid-19 came as a near fatal shock.
Social media platforms can be, and have been, declared news organisations, and their operators journalists without any professional training or understanding of what news is.
Many use news articles already published by professional journalists and simply add an opinion without attribution or a fee. That must change with new copyright rules which require any platform which republishes news reports to pay for it.
It can take several years, ideally under the tutelage of editors, chief reporters and experienced senior professionals, for trained journalists to develop a sense of what genuine news is. There is as much difference between them as there is between a newly qualified solicitor and a High Court judge.
It is these journalists who play an essential role in our democracy by reporting accurately and reliably on all levels of government from the high-profile machinations of Parliament to the tedium of district and regional council meetings.
They are also an indispensable part of our system of justice by reporting on court proceedings where accuracy and a thorough understanding of their role and the principles of law are essential.
An untrained blogger can’t do that job and are no more a journalist in the professional sense than colour therapy and tarot card readings are part of modern medicine.
While the immediacy of television and radio can have breaking stories in front of the public within minutes they don’t come anywhere near explaining complex issues with the accuracy and detail of print journalism.
One of the most important corner stones of modern journalism was, until recently, unbiased objectivity.
That all changed with the development of celebrity front men and women on television ‘‘news commentary’’ shows.
The transformation began about 30 years ago when television interviewers responded to aggressive politicians like Prime
Minister Rob Muldoon by becoming increasingly interrogatory in their questioning.
Many are now no longer objective observers but active protagonists in political contests.
They have a powerful position in that they not only take the role of combatants, but they also set the rules for engagement.
These media contrived gladiatorial contests serve no useful purpose in informing viewers and have become instead second-rate presidential style contests in bad manners.
The return of Stuff print journalism to New Zealand ownership is a welcome and commendable development which will need financial support from government in the short term and the loyalty of readers long term if it is to succeed.
As Cambridge economist John Gascoigne wrote in a recent paper on foreign investment, ‘‘Development effort has to come from New Zealanders themselves.
The cargo-cult argument that we need foreign capital and migrants to create jobs and bring value to New Zealand is totally implausible’’.
Sinead Boucher’s initiative is proof of that.