Bring back the Great Wall that once protected the news

It is time to bring back the Great Wall. No, not the one that protected China’s emperor from nomadic hordes on the Eurasian Steppe, nor the one that kept civilising Romans safe from the dreadful Picts: I’m talking about the one that separates news from advertising.

I can sympathise with media organisations scratching for revenue while their traditional business model is showing durability akin to the wall that once cut Berlin in half. However, that search for earnings carries considerable risk when it threatens the traditional barrier between journalism and commercial interests. It’s all about trust and I will return to that.

I have never liked advertisements that look like news stories but have bowed to the inevitable so long as they carried a clear label that they are just that – advertisements. And that label must be obvious to anyone who sees or hears it. I prefer ADVERTISEMENT top and centre, but I accept PAID CONTENT in the same place.

What you won’t hear me calling it is ‘native advertising’. There is nothing native about it. ‘Native’ means indigenous and ‘native advertising’ is a bad example of colonisation. It is the phase used by advertising executives in polite conversation to justify the format, but it never appears on what they produce. Their current preferred label appears to be (in lower case or sotto voce) ‘partnering with….’ although ‘sponsored content’ may be a publisher’s preference. Too often, however, the label is the last thing you see, if you notice it at all. ‘Job done”, says the advertising executive, because the content and the brand are imprinted before the provenance.

I find this sort of advertising at best irritating and at worst misleading. However, I suppose I have reluctantly learnt to live with it.

What I have not accepted – and will not accept – is the use of bona fide journalists to purvey this sort of content. I do not care whether their bosses have some form of conscience-salving agreement over ‘editorial control’: It crosses a line that I do not believe should be crossed.

I am not saying this because I think the journalists have misled or told lies. I have seen no evidence that they have done so, and I am certain they would not allow themselves to be so misused. I say this because the practice flies in the face of a journalist’s strongest weapon – objectivity or, more precisely, public perceptions of objectivity.

MediaWatch’s Colin Peacock, broadcasting from the sanctity of state-funded RNZ, last month gave numerous examples of commercial media outlets’ use of sponsorship and paid content. He instanced TVNZ’s Seven Sharp ‘partnering with’ My Food Bag. The weeknight show isn’t exactly in the same league as the BBC’s HARDtalk, but it did engage the hosts in what was a very soft interview with Nadia Lim on something of limited news value but worthwhile commercial value. I felt uncomfortable.

However, I am more concerned when journalists who are expected to ask searching questions are used in the same manner. For example, last week I watched TVNZ Breakfast’s Matt McLean conducting a thoroughly professional interview with Otago University parasitologist Bruce Russell on the cryptosporidium outbreak in Queenstown. A couple of weeks ago I watched him grilling finance minister Grant Robertson on the show. Yet this journalist was also assigned to cover a story ‘in partnership with’ Breakfast sponsor Ryman Healthcare that gave an advantageous view of facilities in one of its villages while talking about dementia prevention (disclosure: My wife and I have an apartment in a Ryman village). A few weeks before, he had been sent to the Waikato to cover the faux dramatic revealing of the name of the sponsor’s new village in Cambridge. Again, TVNZ was ‘partnering with Ryman’ to bring the ‘news’ to viewers.

 But did the stated commercial association register with those viewers? If it did not register, did the segment at least raise an eyebrow? If it did register, how many in the growing low-trust brigade regarded it as an example of the media being bought?

Of course, naysayers will believe what they want to believe irrespective of evidence, but even more thoughtful members of the audience might wonder where the line is now drawn. After all, they had also seen current affairs journalists John Hudson and Jack Tame appearing in sponsored content screened in commercial breaks.

I should note that they’re not the first to do so. My much-missed friend Gordon McLauchlan was a highly respected freelance journalist and public relations consultant when he was asked to front a series of television commercials related to the government’s sale of Telecom. In his memoir Life’s Sentences he explained he had been chosen “because surveys showed I was a figure whose integrity was respected, and I was an experienced television hand”. He was vilified by people who thought he had sold out by supporting the privatisation.

McLauchlan was unrepentant to the last – he stated in the memoir that he pushed for New Zealanders to buy shares. However, I still believe he made an error of judgement, not over what the commercials contained but in failing to fully recognise the perception of a journalist crossing the line to commercial advocacy.

I can hear the ethereal voice right now, telling me that he had a foot in both camps – journalism and public relations. Sorry Gordon, old friend, perception is everything.

It is time to re-erect the wall between editorial and commercial departments. That goes for all media. Television journalists are in the unfortunate position of being the most prominent and publicly promoted, but print and radio editorial departments also have commercial associations that are not always obvious. Real Estate stories in the New Zealand Herald that carry the logo of its property advertising arm OneRoof are, in my view, tainted by the commercial association.

We need a prohibition on using serving journalists to produce news or news-like content for commercial sponsors. The same goes for the use of news space for purportedly neutral stories that are, in fact, commercially-linked.  Where there is sponsorship-in-kind on feature articles such as travel stories, there should be full disclosure of the relationship. There also needs to be a standardised form of labelling on other paid-for content, labels that do not indulge in euphemisms and obfuscation.

At stake is trust in journalism.

Last week the Reuters Institute at Oxford University produced the results of a four -nation survey of the effectiveness of strategies for building trust in news. The four countries surveyed were Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The latter two have media systems closest to our own so I will limit my comments to those.

Transparency was among the strategies they examined. One of the five dimensions of openness they considered was the separation of news from advertising in editorial content. First, however, they noted that most of those surveyed said efforts to be more transparent were likely to increase their trust.

Separating news from advertising registered high in the trust stakes. More than half the respondent in the U.K. and almost two out of three in the U.S. said they were more likely to trust media organisations that clearly separated news from advertising.

However, neither country was performing particularly well. Less than half the British audience thought media were doing ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ well in separating news from advertising and the figure across the Atlantic was not much higher at 53 per cent.

These low levels of trust are clearly linked to overall perceptions of news organisations. The survey showed that a quarter of Americans believed media put their commercial interests first and the figure was even higher in the U.K. (31 per cent). Less than 20 per cent in each country thought media put the public interest first.

The Reuters Institute report also concluded that most place blame for problems in news coverage at the management and ownership level. They also view advertising more suspiciously than other funding models. Most significantly, individual journalists are often perceived as doing the bidding of owners and leaders who are guided byulterior commercial or political agendas. It is safe to assume that at least some of these same perceptions are reflected in the New Zealand mediascape.

Therefore, using journalists to perform what are essentially commercially linked tasks, and media organisations indulging in practices that downplay commercial links in the news space, will ultimately end up costing far more than they put in the company coffers.

I make a plea to resurrect the Great Wall between editorial and commercial departments because the corrosion has already started. I was chatting to a friend – a retired pilot – recently about mixing advertising and news. His response scared me: “Doesn’t worry me. They’re all the same thing.”