I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad

Last week I was lying in my sickbed recovering from a painful allergic reaction and, as you do, I let my mind wander. It began to ponder a question that has preoccupied me ever since: Why is there so little good news?

It seems the world is filled with the bad and the ugly and precious little of the good stuff. At least that is the impression I get from my daily diet of news.

I looked back over the lead stories of New Zealand’s five metropolitan dailies for the past month. Of the 130 stories I counted, 98 had a negative tone. Only 16 were positive and the remainder were neither one thing nor the other.

I have been tracking these newspapers’ lead stories since 2020 and there is an almost unrelenting sense of gloom, and sometimes doom, although I admit the Covid pandemic accounted for some of that negativity. It did a couple of years ago, but not now.

My introduction to the day’s news yesterday via the country’s news websites was a smorgasbord of gloom and copycat gloom at that – the same topics repeated across outlets. It didn’t improve into the afternoon when there was blanket coverage of the return of the three strikes law for repeat offenders.

Mind you, our overseas counterparts weren’t any better. The Sydney Morning Herald gave me “Eighteen minutes of terror” as it retraced the movements of the Bondi Junction mall killer. The New York Times pondered the “mountain of evidence” against Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal took me inside the “White House scramble” to avert a Middle East War. The Daily Mail said Tories were accusing Labour of “appearing to hate Britain” and the BBC and Deutsche Welle both told me Netanyahu vowed to reject sanctions against an army unit for human rights violations. Only The Guardian had a glimmer of good news over military aid for Ukraine (good news, that is, if you’re not Russian).

Why are journalists so drawn to bad news? Continue reading “I have news for you, Sunshine: It’s not all bad” →

Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism

In the wake of the announcements on Newshub’s closure and TVNZ’s cuts, I received an email from Pat, who lives in the Auckland suburb of Orakei. The email asked a simple question: “Is there anything a member of the public can do to register shock and horror at the loss of current affairs programmes and the talented people who make and present those programmes?”

I replied, suggesting Pat join the advocacy group Better Public Media. More importantly, I believe people like Pat must speak up in defence of what I now call democratically significant journalism.

‘Democratically significant journalism’ describes the sort of journalism that serves the interests of those living and interacting within a public sphere. It enables individual communities to know about themselves, and for communities to collectively share information to inform a broader consensus. In the past I would have said ‘public interest journalism’ but that phrase has been so maligned by people with agendas that benefit from destroying trust in journalists that I have stopped using it.

Pat’s dilemma is shared by all ordinary New Zealanders sensible enough to see the importance of journalism in a democratic society: How do they make it clear that they value it? Continue reading “Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism” →

NZ media’s lab test results spell bad news

Three primary indicators of the health of New Zealand news media will be published this week and, if the first is anything to go by, the industry needs to be moved to the Intensive Care Unit.

AUT’s JM&D Trust in News Survey, the Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer, and the annual breakdown of advertising spend by the Advertising Standards Authority are all due this week.

The JM&D report – based on methodology developed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University for its survey of global trust – was released yesterday (two days early). It shows overall trust in news has dropped dramatically in the past year.

Two-thirds of people do not trust the news. Surely to God that sends a message to all mainstream, media that their approach to journalism has to change.

The overall level of trust has dropped by a staggering 38 per cent in the five years the AUT study has been carried out. Even trust in the news people use has declined by more than 27 per cent since 2020 and now fewer than half of us trust those sources.

We now rank alongside the UK in the low proportion of people who trust most news most of the time. Only the United States posted lower rates.

We also ranked highest in news avoidance in a comparison with the Reuters international survey. In New Zealand, three-quarters actively avoid the news to some extent.  Greece ranks next with about 58 per cent and the international average sits below 40 per cent. Continue reading “NZ media’s lab test results spell bad news” →

Trans-Tasman imbalance in court suppression orders

We all see the merit in Justice’s blindfold that speaks of all being equal under the law, but isn’t it high time we re-examined the gag on her mouth? The number of court suppression orders is inordinately high.

That assessment is based on a comparison of suppression data collected by the New Zealand Herald and by the Melbourne newspaper The Age.

Data assembled by the Herald’s data editor Chris Knox and revealed in Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column on Saturday shows that name suppressions have risen by 47 per cent in the past decade and last year stood at 1616 orders. That represents 2.5 per cent of all people charged, up from 1.3 per cent a decade ago.

The fact that suppression has risen almost by half since 2014 was worrying enough, but what made Knox’s figures all the more disturbing was a story I had read in The Age a couple of weeks ago. Continue reading “Trans-Tasman imbalance in court suppression orders” →