30 years in a brutal industry

2021 Reporter of the year Alison Mau

The media business, as you’ve no doubt been told before, is brutal. So brutal that people in other industries often think you’re making it up.

I’m just one example, but not a particularly unusual one. In a 30-year career I’ve been made redundant four times. In the first of those (in the early 90s), the abusive newsroom boss tried to get me out the door without paying a cent of the contract he claimed he had not signed. I went to the GM, who, with extraordinary candour, told me my boss was already being sued by a colleague for sexual harassment and that the company knew it was ‘‘sitting on a powder-keg’’.

The GM paid out my contract several days later.

The second time, at Prime

TV in 2006, I asked a mid-level manager to help with a serious bullying issue in the newsroom. Although I was neither the bully nor the victim, alarm bells rang when the manager cancelled successive meetings, until I realised they had no intention of addressing the issue.

I’d learned by now how quickly these things can go, ah, bosoms-up, so I sought the assurance of a senior executive that my job was safe. He told me it absolutely was. The following Saturday a Sky board member phoned to tell me not to come back to work. I was not given a reason.

In 2013, I learned from a gossip columnist (while on my way to work) I was about to lose my job at TVNZ. You’d think I’d know by now, but I was naive enough to hang up on her after saying something snarky about – oh dear – needing better sources for her stories. When I arrived at work I found out my routine review had been cancelled for the second time without explanation. An, ahem, ‘‘heated’’ impromptu meeting in a senior executive’s office ensued, where he admitted he had made the decision to terminate me (no warning or reason needed) but had not wanted to let me know, for reasons he did not feel like explaining.

And finally, two working days before Christmas in 2017, a MediaWorks executive interrupted my weekly supermarket shop, with a call to tell me ta-ta. He seemed to believe that a 20-second chat in the produce aisle was a completely adequate, done-and-dusted process (as a footnote, it later emerged he’d scrapped my radio show, so he could install a lineup featuring such broadcasting luminaries as Sean Plunket and Peter Williams. What a genius).

Why am I spilling the tea here? Well first, the above experiences (which have given my hard-nosed media lawyer plenty to shake his head about over the years) demonstrate how disposable some people in media are (but not others). It also shows how management are just not very transparent at times – even when the business they’re managing is journalism. And so we come to NZME’s current pickle over broadcaster Martin Devlin.

I hope Devlin is getting the intensive help he has needed going back decades. I hope he’s not allowed around a newsroom until he does. But now it’s not so much about him, but about the company’s response.

Devlin’s swing at a young colleague sparked an internal investigation. Devlin says that was conducted by senior manager Wendy Palmer and was ‘‘fair, independent and kind’’. Well, independent it was not (an internal review by the ultimate boss of both parties simply can’t be considered independent) and fair to whom? The young man has since expressed his dissatisfaction with it and is in ongoing talks. NZME admitted needing an external investigation. A lack of willingness to answer specifics means that is the only information we have.

We have plenty of platitudes. NZME says, in rather tangled syntax, ‘‘at all times, providing a workplace that is healthy, safe and inclusive remains our ultimate duty of care to all of our people, and we have robust processes and policies in place to support this’’.

Let’s examine that, against what we do already know. We know Devlin sent inappropriate messages to female colleagues, one of whom complained to her manager and was told HR would get involved. She claims she never heard from HR. Media reports say the woman’s manager dealt with it, and ‘‘confirmed with her the actions that were undertaken as a result of the complaint’’.

I wonder whether those ‘‘actions’’ were confined to a chat with the perpetrator over a beer? Either way, that woman left and three years later, appears to also feel her complaint was not handled adequately.

You can’t claim to be upholding your responsibility to provide a safe workplace if you have knowledge of previous transgressions by an unsafe person and allow that person to transgress again. Treating each complaint as a ‘‘one-off’’ to be solved can mask decades of harm and toxic behaviour. It’ll come back to bite you in the end.

Two, you can say you’re committed to whatever you like – without the action to back it up, it does nothing to keep your staff safe or improve their employment experience.

All the statements NZME has sent to other media outlets about the Devlin issue contain the phrase ‘‘does not comment publicly on any employment matters’’.

This is what the lawyers tell you to say, so it’s not so much management’s fault. But it’s a very sad day really when a young person’s physical and emotional safety and ability to enjoy their job is reduced to ‘‘an employment matter’’.

And it’s very concerning when the violent and/or inappropriate behaviour of senior and powerful figures towards staff is treated that way.

I hope Devlin is getting the intensive help he has needed going back decades. I hope he’s not allowed around a newsroom until he does.