Newshub bell is tolling but who can hear it?

I had two visions when the imminent demise of Newshub was announced last week. One was comical and the other spiritual. Both carried a message.

The initial government reaction to the news that a significant portion of the country’s journalism could disappear at the end of June was comical. It brought to mind the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur cleaves the knight’s limbs from his body, and the knight responds: “Tis but a scratch!”

It came to mind because neither Prime Minister Christopher Luxon nor his communications minister Melissa Lee seemed to grasp the significance of a decision made in New York that will reduce this country to one mainstream – and state owned – television news service and take out a sizeable percentage of New Zealand’s journalists and news crew.

Lee suggested there was plenty more where that came from, and the prime minister fell back on his lexicon of business school phrases, the most dismissive of which is ‘market forces’.

Coalition partner David Seymour brought only confusion to the table with his suggestion on how to even out those market forces. His solution – the logic of which escapes me – was to look at making the loss-making TVNZ pay a dividend. And the opposition had no meaningful suggestions either.

Only the other coalition partner Winston Peters seemed to grasp the impact that such a culling would have on a functioning democracy. Given Mr Peters’ long-standing combativeness toward journalists and their employers, he couldn’t resist an after-thought on media ‘wokeness’. Nonetheless, his recognition of the impact on democracy was a welcome reality check.

Most of the political reaction was tragi-comical (so I forgive myself for a pythonesque analogy to the loss of so much of our journalistic resource), but the vision of the armless and legless Black Knight shouting “Come back and get what’s coming to you – I’ll bite your legs off” soon gave way to more sober reflections.

First, a limbless knight unable to stand and hold a sword was an allegory for a profession that could no longer do what society expects of it.

Then I reflected on a meditation that the poet and cleric John Donne wrote after he had recovered from a serious illness in 1624. It is a piece of prose that contains the following famous lines:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

“If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less” is the line that the Newshub announcement first brought to mind. The more I reflected, however, the more relevant the full quotation became.

The Newshub announcement must not be seen in isolation, but nor should we under-estimate the effect of these cuts. The total resource available to fulfil journalism’s public interest role in a democracy is being diminished and it will affect all of us.

But I also hear the bell tolling for me personally. No, I am not in imminent danger of meeting my Maker, but I have a growing sense of urgency over a project I am leading at Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures where I am an honorary research fellow.

Koi Tū, the University of Auckland think tank headed by Sir Peter Gluckman, has set itself the task of determining what policy settings are required to provide a sustainable environment for pluralistic public interest journalism in New Zealand. Sir Peter announced we would be accelerating the project in light of last week’s announcement. There is an urgent need for a broad-spectrum review across the whole range of policies affecting journalism and its future.

The likely closure of Newshub with the loss of up to 300 jobs is one pointer to the dire state of the industry, but it is only one plank in a raft of issues facing news media here and elsewhere. Another is the oxygen-depleting effect that search and social media platforms have on media revenue. A third is the fact that the legal and regulatory environments are no longer fit for purpose.

However, perhaps the most pressing issue is the fact that the public – and I suspect most politicians – fail to grasp both the importance of journalism in a democracy, and the civic and social consequences of its depletion or extinction.

When I have mentioned the imminent Newshub shuttering to people, their response has been no different to the reaction they would feel when 300 people lost their job when a freezing works closed or a construction company went under. They felt sympathy but they had little or no concept of consequences beyond hardship for those out of work. They certainly did not have democratic deficits in mind and when told of that impact they said: “Oh, yes, that too.”

We are in trouble if there is no concern for the fact that the pluralistic nature of our media systems is about to be eroded, and an effective monopoly created in television news. We are in serious trouble if the importance of journalism in speaking truth to power is no more than a prompted after-thought or, worse, an irrelevance.

An equally concerning lesson from the past week is a sense that television news has already lost its relevance. Melissa Lee was dismissive: “People no longer sit down to watch the news on television”. So, too, was Heather du Plessis-Allan in her Herald on Sunday column:

“There is no point trying to save Newshub’s newsroom. Throwing money at it is only wasting money because the number of viewers will just keep dropping until it closes again. Saving it will only delay the inevitable. It will eventually close, just like the video shop.”

I couldn’t help but add a mental footnote that the same would inevitably happen to the newspaper in which her column appeared.

Both Lee and du Plessis-Allan are right in saying there is a finite life to linear broadcast television. Both fail, however, to acknowledge the fact that such newsrooms produce a higher volume of visual content – often with significantly better production values than that emanating from print or audio oriented equivalents. That video content is shared on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Hence, effectively halving domestic mainstream television news means a nett loss of professionally curated news content on the social media accessed particularly by younger New Zealanders.

Mark Jennings, the former head of TV3 News, has suggested ways Newshub may be rescued and his conversation with Duncan Greive on The Spinoff offered some (admittedly tenuous) hope of reprieve. That is unlikely to come from owner Warner Brothers Discovery, for whom the die is almost certainly cast. A fire sale buyer could, however, make a difference if it is a media company and not an opportunistic but ignorant private equity enterprise.

Unfortunately, news media buyers are not thick on the ground. None need reminders of the perils they already face and the Newshub announcement will have sent a chill wind through their corridors.

Those dangers have yet to fully impress themselves across the public sphere or the confines of Parliament. Winston Peters’ view of the closure as “a disaster for this country’s democracy” would have been echoed and amplified if there had been greater awareness of the consequences.

Few people have read more than those much-quoted lines from Donne’s meditation that I quoted above. Later in it, he talks of the way tribulation can make us stronger. The bell signalling another’s plight may make us more aware of the dangers we, too, face.

So be in no doubt about for whom the Newshub bell tolled. It tolled for thee.