Is there still trust in the public service?

There have been some strange goings-on between the State drugs funder Pharmac and the media lately.

According to reports by Mediaworks journalists, notably veteran broadcaster Rachel Smalley, Pharmac has blacklisted its journalists and its newsroom.

The reason? Apparently, it was angry that Smalley got the jump on a story about Pharmac finally agreeing to fund a cystic fibrosis drug that’s been gold standard treatment in other countries, including neighbouring Australia, for some time now.

Seemingly, Pharmac’s objection wasn’t that the story was wrong, but that Mediaworks had trumped its planned exclusive with TV3.

What’s troubling is Smalley’s account of how Pharmac first tried to dissuade Mediaworks from publishing the story by suggesting it wasn’t true, then took retribution when Mediaworks ignored them by blacklisting its journalists.

Clearly it was true, because people only had to watch the tearful, stage-managed announcement 48 hours later on TV3 to see that Pharmac was indeed funding Trikafta after an agonisingly prolonged approvals process that merely extended the suffering of many. It wasn’t just TV3 – other media, including Stuff, were also given an early heads up.

But that’s all by the by. The important thing, after all, is that cystic fibrosis sufferers will finally receive life-saving treatment. Who cares who got the story first?

Except it’s troubling. We’re all used to cynical PR tactics; I’ve had similar experiences to Smalley over the years.

But Pharmac is a Government-funded agency, with one of the most serious mandates possible – deciding which life-saving drugs should and shouldn’t be funded. There is no place for political stunts in an agency like this. Yet this was a deliberate attempt to manipulate the news agenda in order to paint itself in the best possible light.

By Pharmac’s own admission, Trikafta can extend the lives of cystic fibrosis sufferers by decades. So it has done nothing to deserve the hugs of cystic fibrosis sufferers denied this lifesaving treatment until now.

Yet that’s how it played out on television, with grateful hugs and tears all round.

This wasn’t happenstance. Making a media event out of the announcement, and putting the chief executive officer out there to break the news personally to a cystic fibrosis sufferer, was a stunt that took some planning. Public service chief executives are risk averse – there would have been meetings to discuss what could go wrong. Media plans weighing up the pros and cons. There would have been concerns about the chief executive being ambushed with a Corngate-style grilling. But outweighing all those risks was the upside of putting a human face – in particular a warm, generous face – to an agency that is more generally seen as cold, impersonal, even cruel, in the way it administers the lottery of State-funded drugs. In other words, the goal wasn’t to announce a drug-funding deal, but to make Pharmac – and by extension the Government – look good.

Old school public servants would be turning in their graves.

Why does it matter so much? It undermines the neutrality of the public service. It provides the sort of instant, dopamine hit that will encourage Pharmac to replicate the strategy – the risk is that politically popular drugs will look far more appealing than boring ones that don’t have the same public cut through.

It’s troubling because this is another step down a path by which the Government and its public servants increasingly bypass traditional media anyway for the unquestioning and unfiltered world of social media, a world where carefully curated photos, professionally filmed videos, and glossy brochures show the face they want to put to the world, rather than the reality.

It’s a world where feel-good stunts and clever memes are the goal of an ever-growing army of spin doctors. Consequently, it’s a world where it’s easy to blacklist one of the country’s biggest media organisations because they feel confident they don’t need them any more.

At a time when public trust in the public service is higher than in either the media or the Government, that’s a slippery slope that it will be hard to crawl back from.

Pharmac is a Government-funded agency, with one of the most serious mandates possible.