Our news media had a tough call to make over the weekend on whether or not to report a bomb threat. Did they get it right?
The incident in question related to a trans-Tasman Air New Zealand flight from Wellington that was held on the tarmac at Sydney Airport for an hour over what a passenger described as “a bomb threat”.
Radio New Zealand reported the incident as a bomb threat (after Australian media first did so) and the RNZ report was reproduced by other New Zealand media including NZME, Stuff, and TVNZ. OneNews carried a report on its 6pm bulletin that made no mention of bomb threats but the TVNZ website continued to run with the RNZ story.
The RNZ story quoted a passenger on the flight, who said that the pilot had reported “a slight problem” but 10 minutes later another passenger showed her a news report saying there was a bomb threat. The passenger went on to state the reaction of passengers and offered a theory on the threat: “There may have been a note on the plane – that is what caused this – so we all sort of gathered the note had been picked up on the plane.”
For its part, Air New Zealand simply issued a statement saying it was aware of “a security incident” on the flight and that “standard security protocols” were followed.
There was a delay of about an hour in disembarking and processing the passengers, and the return flight was cancelled. However, the operations of the airport do not appear to have been otherwise affected.
The question is: Should the incident have been reported as a bomb threat?
There is a long-held belief that reporting bomb threats can lead to copycat hoaxes. They have to be treated as legitimate threats and therefore cause further disruption. I recall a spate of such threats when I was a young reporter after a “bomb threat” story had been carried by media.
The copycat possibility does not, of course, justify a blanket ban on reporting. However, it does mean a judgement call.
In making that call, editors need to consider a number of variables.
- Do we know the nature of the threat?
- Was the threat credible?
- Was there confirmation of the threat?
- Did the threat result in significant disruption?
In this case, the only source for the nature of the threat was a passenger whose knowledge appears to have been derived from another passenger. Her reference to a note appears to have been the result of a question put to her.
There was no official confirmation that the security issue was a bomb threat, and the only disruption appears to be an hour of inconvenience for the plane’s passengers and the cancellation of a flight.
However, the aircraft was met on landing by official vehicles including police and fire services.
A story was justified but the nature of its content was a matter of judgement. At most, I would judge it a line call.
Had the decision been mine, the absence of significant airport disruption would have led me to report it briefly as a security incident that delayed disembarkation. I would not have referred to a bomb threat, particularly in the absence of any corroboration of what appears to have been conjecture among passengers.
The possibility of copycats was bad enough in the days of telephones. That risk is exponentially greater in the age of smart phones, social media, and institutionalised stupidity.
Therefore, any references to bomb threats should be treated with great caution.
Even at a time when bomb threats in Northern Ireland were very real, media in the United Kingdom took great care in reporting them because the possibility of copycat hoaxes was equally real.
There was an established procedure. There were code words that were changed periodically by agreement between the Provisional IRA and the security forces. Chosen codenames were given by a member of the IRA to the Gardai in Dublin. They in turn passed it on to the RUC Special Branch in Belfast, and from there it was disseminated to forces on the British mainland. There was also liaison with a number of news organisations. Because of the sheer number of IRA factions in Northern Ireland, up to half dozen codenames could be in use at any given time.
There is no need for codewords here but making judgement calls might be a little easier if – in addition to a bland public statement – the relevant authorities were able provide news executives with the answers to the four questions listed above. Perhaps there should be an addition to the Terrorist and National Security Event Media Protocols (agreed between New Zealand media and government) to cover hoax incidents.
News avoidance
Research has confirmed New Zealand has the highest reported rates of news avoidance in the world, but don’t expect our media organisations to seriously rethink the way they practice journalism.
A paper by three academics from Victoria and Otago universities has confirmed findings published in April by AUT’s Merja Myllylahti and Greg Treadwell. Although the latest figures are not quite as high as the AUT statistics, they show this country outstripping all nations covered by an authoritative world survey by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University.
The latest research by Alex Beattie, John Kerr and Richard Arnold shows 60 per cent of New Zealanders ‘sometimes’, ‘often’, or ‘almost always’ avoid the news. AUT’s research put the numbers higher at up to three-quarters of the population. You can read the latest paper here.
The earlier work was part of a wider survey, but the latest study is specifically directed at news avoidance. It investigated both selective news avoidance – where news users choose to limit their news intake – and consistent avoidance with no news consumption over sustained periods of time. It draws on a large sample of 1204 participants that are representative of the population over the age of 18.
It leaves no doubt that this country shies away from what our media produce. It found New Zealanders (13.2 per cent) outstrip the rest of the world in consistently avoiding the news. A further 16.5 per cent often do so.
On RNZ National’s Mediawatch on Sunday, the New Publishers Association’s director of public affairs, Andrew Holden, gave reasoned answers for why news may be avoided. None of those responses was wrong but nor did they leave the impression that the research was seen as a wake up call.
It should have been.
The AUT research was embodied in its work on trust in news – a complex subject that cannot be divorced from a more generalised loss of institutional trust – but the latest paper is directed specifically at news avoidance. Not only does it quantify such audience habits, but it also delves in detail into the reasons for such behaviour and who is most likely to avoid the news. Participants were offered a choice of nine different reasons.
It leaves no doubt that there is something about our news coverage that needs to change. We are not so different from the rest of the world that the results need to be qualified by the nature or needs of the local audience to the extent that they are justifiable.
Negative effect on mood has been cited internationally as the major reason avoidance and it is manifest in the New Zealand survey. A third said it was the reason they avoided the news.
And the are provided with negative news in abundance. The front page lead stories in our metropolitan daily newspapers attest to that. I have been logging those headlines since the beginning of 2000 and the 7500 entries I have accumulated over almost five years display an almost unrelenting overdose of negative stories. Death and crime receive particular prominence.
The second most popular response related to news quality. Thirty per cent think it is untrustworthy or biased, and a quarter believe it is sensationalised. That confirms causes found in the AUT research.
However, the latest paper is far more nuanced: It uses statistical modelling to tease out those statistics and suggests that, in seeking out younger audiences, the media may be losing their traditional supporters. Those over 45 cite sensationalism as a driving factor in avoidance or, as the paper’s authors put it:
“The use of alarming headlines, clickbait, or other editorial decisions to attract the audiences’ attention is a valued business tactic to attract or retain audiences and compete with social media platforms in the so-called attention economy (Christin 2018). Ironically, it could be the efforts of New Zealand media to retain their audiences that are driving them away.”
Political extremes are only too ready to brand as ‘untrustworthy” or “biased” anything that does not match their worldview. However, it would be unwise for our news organisations to dismiss these criticisms for that reason. The extremes may represent lost causes, but it is the ‘sometimes’ group that should worry them. There is a remarkable consistency across the political spectrum for periodic news avoidance and almost a third of the ‘sometimers’ cite trustworthiness and bias.
The researchers believe the results could be indicative of frustration with the quality of New Zealand media.
The Aotearoa New Zealand media sector has been in a funding crisis for the last two decades, and in 2024 over 200 media employees were made redundant and major news organisations closing or moving their operations offshore. A loss of advertising revenue to platforms such as Google and Meta have created resourcing issues, with cuts on specialist reporters and loss of coverage of science and/or local issues. New Zealand news audiences are dissatisfied with the rise of opinion-based articles in the news which are cost-effective for news organisations to produce and another sign of the commercialisation of the New Zealand news media.
One survey that finds the country is a world leader in news avoidance might be dismissed. But when a second survey not only confirms that alarming status but dissects the reasons, it is time for our news organisations take stock…and to change.
The authors of the paper acknowledge a range of causative factors and the need for further study, as researchers do. Further research will be forthcoming, but our news media should not wait for that. The causes and effects are clear enough for them to change what they offer and how they offer it.
Yes, some things may require resources they will struggle to find but others are far more straight-forward.
The clear separation of reportage and commentary would be a useful start, as would be turning clickbait from a virtue into a black mark.