BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE (BEING SUCKED AWAY)

First there was Dracula, followed by Nosferatu. Buffy the Vampire Slayer despatched a few, but then we were shown What We Do in the Shadows. However, for the cold-hearted realities of vampirism, nothing beats that on-going series The Advertising Standards Authority’s Advertising Turnover Report.

In a chillingly sangfroid fashion, its latest episode indicates that yet again the transnational platforms have sunk their fangs ever deeper into the media’s jugular.

I have been charting the ad revenue fortunes of the New Zealand media almost since the birth of the Advertising Standards Authority in 1990 and have been paying particular attention to statistics since 2007. That was the year that newspaper and television ad revenue peaked and also the year we started to see digital platforms posting exponential increases in their annual take.

In 2007 those platforms – the likes of Google and Facebook – attracted a relatively modest $135 million. Last year their share of the advertising spent was $2.171 billion. By comparison, the newspaper share has dropped from $826 million to $274 million while television had dropped from $654 million to $490 million. In total, the digital-only spend last year was almost twice that spent on all other advertising. Let’s put that is some perspective: The last time New Zealand media recorded a total as low as what they earned last year ($1.1 billion) was thirty years ago.

Only radio has been holding its own in advertising revenue, but it has been basically flat lining for the past decade. It has bumped along at between $260 million and $280 million a year, apart from the COVID dip experienced by all local media (but not the digital-only platforms). It was up $5 million in 2024, but $4 million below the $276 million it recorded in 2022. Allowing for inflation, even radio is not in the best of health.

Admittedly, the digital-only gain for 2024 was slightly down on the previous year – up a mere $59 million against the previous year’s $87 million. That could mean there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing. Alternatively, it could be only a sign of the economic times and recovery will signal a return to exponential growth.

Either way, the lifeblood is being sucked out of most of the media on which we depend for our news.

Imagine if our health system was largely privatised and the bulk of revenue – not just profit – was being sent offshore with little or no re-investment in this country. How would we react if our hospitals and primary care were being forced to continually downsize and, in some cases, close their doors?

The question, of course, is rhetorical. We would be screaming blue bloody murder and demanding that the Government do something NOW. And that something could not be tinkering at the edges. The public would be demanding fundamental change.

Unfortunately, New Zealanders (and they are not alone) now have a perilous disregard for journalism and the role that it plays in a participatory democracy and in sustaining social cohesion.

The reason for this disregard is multi-faceted and complex. In part, it is due to declining trust in institutions generally. The just-released Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer shows that, once again, public trust in New Zealand business, NGOs, Government, and the media have dropped over the past year. The decline for media was, in fact, the lowest at one per cent but that is small comfort – it has the lowest level of trust of the four institutions measured, at an alarming 35 per cent (compared to 45 per cent for Government).

Another cause is fragmentation brought about by the anarchic nature of digital engagement. And some is the result of news media scoring own goals as they chase their tails in search of the audiences they once claimed. Perhaps that is one reason why trust in our media is so far below the global average of 52 per cent.

Added to that is the fact that the digital environment is the great seducer. Not only is it tailor-made for sexual predators – Michael Morrah set out social media’s awful New Zealand record in an excellent piece in last weekend’s Herald on Sunday – but people have been fooled into thinking its engaging elements have replaced journalism. They have not.

One would have thought the latest ASA figures would have traditional media screaming about the growing disparity between their fortunes and those of the multinational platforms. I searched in vain on their websites for even the most basic reporting of the ad spend statistics, but came up empty handed. Did I miss something?

Was it embarrassment at the increasingly poor turnover traditional media are recording?  One might understand that they do not want to, ahem, ‘advertise’ the fact that they are losing the war. Or do they wish to avoid upsetting the vampires, in the hope that they will send a little of the blood supply in the direction of the news producers?

And what of the Government? Did it have a view on whether the latest statistics should be the catalyst to reboot the stalled Fair Digital Bargaining Bill or the Digital Services Tax Bill? Like the mainstream media, it too was as quiet as the grave.

Perhaps both camps were showing signs of quiet resignation. After all, there is no chance that Donald Trump will tolerate any move to stem the flow of money filling the pockets of his country’s tech giants.

On his first day in office, President Trump pulled the United States out of the OECD framework that this year would impose a minimum tax (15 per cent) on transnationals in the countries where their revenue was earned. New Zealand is a signatory to the framework but Trump’s action – together with the structural ingenuity of the transnationals – means we would be on a hiding to nothing if we tried to use it to correct the laughably small tax take from the digital-only group. And any movement on the stalled Bills before our Parliament would doubtless trigger punitive tariffs in retaliation.

Perhaps over the course of the Trump presidency (or in the third term, he said yesterday, he is capable of engineering) he will fundamentally change international attitudes toward all things American. The shine may come off the platforms.

In the meantime, the brutal truth is that we will have to find other ways to sustain our country’s journalism, but sustain it we must. In this column in 2020 I advocated holding a summit meeting to reorder the media landscape to ensure the survival of that journalism. I called the summit Bretton Woods #2. I took the name from the 1944 conference that determined how international financial systems would be reordered after the Second World War. The choice of title was deliberate because we need to rethink our media landscape at a fundamental level.  The summit hasn’t happened, but it should: The need has become greater, not less.

If the public is blind to the role that journalism plays in our democracy, perhaps they might be moved by a more parochial argument that brings home the fact that we are suffering a massive bleeding of money to offshore interests.

The best way I can illustrate that is with this chart based on those ASA statistics I have been collecting for years. It speaks for itself, and I hope you will share it far and wide.