Trust and trouble in the media
The media risks looking self-aggrandising and defensive when it writes about itself. For all the understandable angst about the end of Newshub and the closure of longrunning TVNZ shows Fair Go and Sunday, that amounts to 362 jobs in total. Compare that with more than 1500 jobs going from the public service, which are much less mourned. And there will be more to come.
This is not to diminish the media job cuts, which are devastating for all involved. But while interviewers virtually demanded underperforming Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee display some empathy towards the media’s casualties, we saw little political sympathy for those who will soon tidy up their desks at the Ministry for Primary Industries or the Ministry for Pacific Peoples.
You will hear that the media is vital for the functioning of a democracy. That is true, but the same could be said about the Department of Conservation’s Chief Science Advisor, whose role is reportedly under review. It helps the media’s case that its spokespeople for its vital social role are the same people we already trust to deliver important daily news to us, even if fewer of us are inviting them in.
But another piece of bad news for the New Zealand media does remind us of its importance.
The Trust in News in Aotearoa New Zealand 2024 report was released on Monday. It is the fifth annual survey put together by the AUT Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy since 2020.
The headline was that New Zealanders’ trust in the media is plummeting. While journalists have always ranked near the bottom in surveys about trusted professions, alongside politicians and advertising executives, these figures were startling. While 53% of New Zealanders said they trusted the news in general in 2020, that figure has fallen to 33%. Individual news brands such as TVNZ, Newshub and Stuff experienced corresponding declines in trust.
Although this survey appeared in the same week as bad news about Newshub, Sunday and Fair Go, adding to a wider sense of catastrophe, no real connection can be made. Those closures and job losses follow advertising collapses and changes in viewing habits. It would be hard to imagine that Fair Go and Sunday were not highly-trusted programmes.
As the authors of the report have pointed out, the survey measures perceptions of trust and bias rather than reflecting viewer behaviour or analysing print and broadcast journalism over the preceding 12 months.
There are interesting contradictions. There are still high levels of interest in news in New Zealand yet there are also high levels of news avoidance. And news avoidance is not always driven by views about trust and bias in the media. Respondents said it was equally caused by the news being “too depressing” or “too overwhelming with the horrific situation in Gaza etc”.
The idea that there is too much bad news in the news is itself old news, but it must be especially pronounced now, with two major wars, climate change, job losses and a cost-of-living crisis. Who can blame viewers for switching off?
As for bias, there was a sense from respondents that the media skews left, yet one respondent said the media is “almost entirely owned and/or controlled by outspoken right-wing interest groups and people with strong links to them”. Journalists are used to hearing claims of bias from both sides.
In both Turkey and Hungary, media distrust seemed to increase when political “strongmen” openly criticised the media. Readers may know of local examples.
While the New Zealand media can and will take lessons from the trust survey, an international understanding is illuminating. The AUT report touches on it, but more could be said about how and why our results compare to those in the Reuters survey it is based on. The 2023 Reuters Digital News Report showed that media trust correlates with political polarisation. The US, the UK, Argentina, Hungary and Greece have all seen trust decline as polarisation increased. And while trust climbed again slightly in the US when politics became less divisive under President Joe Biden, those countries all have lower or similar levels of media trust than New Zealand.
In both Turkey and Hungary, media distrust seemed to increase when political “strongmen” openly criticised the media. Readers may know of local examples.
No-one can deny we have seen a rise in polarisation in New Zealand since the Covid pandemic. Former Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman is among the experts who warned us about it. Despite a change of government, the social cohesion we knew before Covid has not been restored.