Cataclysmic week for Fourth Estate as its failings catch up with it
Media has always been an intensely competitive business but now the competition on which it once flourished is killing it, as what those in the trade call “mainstream media” are replaced by newer, shinier models in the form of Facebook, Google, even TikTok.
Two cataclysmic events this week proved what had long been suspected – that veteran media, while not yet dead, is on critical life-support with little hope of survival as news consumers’ trust in it slips away.
TVNZ CEO Jodi O’Donnell and Warner Bros Discovery’s Glen Kyne can whinge about “economic and structural challenges” all they like, but the loss of 68 jobs at TVNZ and 294 Newshub staff can only be sheeted home to them.
The state broadcaster’s $100 million war chest, destined for the transition to digital, is too little, too late and will no doubt have to be used to prop up operational expenses.
The new long-form team being created within news and current affairs, to replace Fair Go and Sunday, will be but a hollow shell of what it once was because the dollars aren’t there. Two essential ingredients of long-form current affairs are time and money, and in the age of frenetic news cycles both have disappeared.
Both O’Donnell and Kyne appear oblivious to what their sliding ratings were telling them: that while they may have intended to make the jump to digital, the rest of us were already there consuming news online throughout the day.
And the fact that TVNZ chose to exterminate Fair Go and Sunday and risk losing its social licence, instead of Seven Sharp, which has no news value whatsoever, speaks volumes.
It's. All. About. The. Money.
It’s also about how digital has made us into metric-driven rabbit-hole-diving crazies, especially media organisations.
Which provides some clues about this week’s second cataclysmic event. The 2024 AUT Trust in News in Aotearoa New Zealand report inventoried a plummeting public trust in media that the report’s author called “shocking”.
Five years ago, 53% of those surveyed trusted the news. Now only 33% do, which is on a par with the UK and only a point above the US.
For the first time New Zealanders’ trust in media is below the international average of 40%.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon, but New Zealand stands out because our decline is steeper than elsewhere.
We’re also a world leader, for all the wrong reasons, in the numbers who now avoid the news. A staggering 75% in this country actively avoids news coverage when the international average is 40%.
And paradoxically that news-avoidance figure is nearly matched by the more than 70% who claimed some interest in news.
The AUT report sheeted home the reasons for that plunging mistrust, with 87% stating that the news was biased and unbalanced, 82% concluding that the news reflected the political leanings of the newsroom, and 76% thought news contained too much opinion and too little information.
Which should be deeply troubling for anyone working in a newsroom today. But instead of blaming misinformation, social media, and the public’s lack of media literacy, as one newspaper editorial did, media must now engage in the greatest period of collective problem-solving they have ever known because their very survival depends on it.
The report’s findings led to inevitable cries about media displaying a left-wing bias which, frankly, is bollocks. I’ve floated in and out of newsrooms for the best part of 50 years and while age doesn’t confer wisdom it does provide a perspective.
Those inhabiting newsrooms have always leaned left politically in a comforting-the-afflicted-and-afflictingthe-comfortable way.
What has changed – drastically so – is that newsrooms are much less diverse places than they used to be. Very few of them train their own, leaving that responsibility to the country’s polytechnics and universities. Pretty much every journalist now has a degree of some kind or another which produces a groupthink entirely of its own.
What’s more, the ongoing demands of the endless news cycle mean there’s less opportunity for kanohi-ki-a-kanohi (eyeto-eye) meetings. Journalists are being asked to do far more than they once were, which makes relationship building, the essential ingredient for any good yarn, very difficult to achieve.
They now work in an industry obsessed with the analytics that drives clickbait stories, which emphasises opinion pieces over factual news because it’s cheap.
The AUT report confirms that media have become disenfranchised from the audiences they have an ethical obligation to serve. Yes, social media, misinformation and the spectre of AI ravaging journalism even further are relevant issues, but pointing the finger elsewhere, rather than looking at your own shortcomings, shows how disenfranchised media have become.
Instead of the analytics largely driving stories, editors need to step up. The Journalist’s Creed, written over a century ago talks about “the public journal is a public trust”. And “the acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of that trust”.
Right now, that trust is betrayed. It’s time we got it back.