All elections have targets. They include anyone or anything that might be perceived as a threat. I have a nasty feeling that in the 2026 New Zealand general election our news media will be one of those targets.
My premonition is driven by two factors. The first is the emboldening effect of the American president’s unremitting and debilitating war against journalists who do not kowtow. And the second is the growing belief that various forms of social media and AI-driven search engines have diminished the politician’s need for news media to reach constituents and they are therefore dispensable.
Attacks on the media by politicians are nothing new and they can be part of a healthy contesting of ideas and views. News media are – and rightly should be – as accountable as those they hold to account. However, when those attacks diminish or undermine the role of journalism itself, politicians and would-be politicians risk damage that extends well beyond their own self-serving aims.
Until now, politicians and journalists have lived in a symbiotic relationship. Symbiosis does not denote love and friendship. It simply means co-dependence. Although sometimes decidedly uncomfortable, they have needed each other. By definition, that relationship founders if one of them – correctly or otherwise – believes it no longer needs the other. It is imperilled if one then sees the other not as part of a whole but as a threat.
The twenty first century is being increasingly characterised by a conviction that if you are not for us, you are against us. It was emerging before Donald Trump first took up residence in the White House but his second term as US president has taken the mantra to the level of (un)holy scripture, transcending all else.
Last week, Columbia Journalism Review interviewed a Minneapolis journalist named Georgia Fort over the use of excessive force by ICE officers. In that interview, Fort said: “You cannot be neutral about the dismantling of our democracy and still expect to be protected by it. If the Constitution fails to protect US citizens, it will fail to protect the media, the free press. It’s not like there is a reality where constitutional rights don’t exist for American citizens but they continue to exist for the press. That’s not how this is going to go.”
Days later, Fort was arrested at her home by federal officers after she attended a protest – as a journalist – at a church service where an ICE officer is a pastor. A federal grand jury has indicted her (and former CNN anchor Don Lemon) on a charge of disrupting a church service. She was not the first journalist arrested by the US government and she will not be the last
Trump has used the federal system to do his bidding. He has used the withholding of funds and accreditation, civil lawsuits, questionable (or illegal) search and seizure, criminal prosecution – alongside excoriating personal attacks – to limit, block, intimidate and coerce media. Alarmingly, some media owners have acquiesced, requiring their editors to ‘tone down’ their coverage, or look away. His attacks have not been limited to his own country’s media. The BBC faces a civil action over the editing of a Panorama documentary which, although ill-judged, was certainly not worth the $US5 billion he is seeking.
It is difficult to see a leader or potential leader of another western democracy trashing constitutional constraints as Trump has done, but there is no doubt that his campaigns against the news media have emboldened others to take a far more confrontational and intimidatory stance with journalists. We need only look at the proliferation of the term ‘fake news’ to see the cultural shift he has generated. Equally, Trump’s unbridled use of misinformation and disinformation has given perverse ‘credibility’ to a tactic that was once seen as the modus operandi of totalitarian regimes.
We had a foretaste immediately after the 2023 general election with NZ First leader Winston Peters’ labelling of the Public Interest Journalism Fund as “bribery” – the previous Labour-led government had paid news media to be kind to it. The clear inference – in spite of no evidence of news coverage that backed the claim – was that our news media was corrupt and therefore could not be trusted. It was alarming how quickly the bribery claim took hold and how persistent it became.
I doubt that it is mere coincidence that the Trust in Media survey conducted by AUT’s JM&D Centre the following year recorded the sharpest decline of the past six years. Between 2023 and 2024, public trust in news dropped by nine percentage points – from 42 per cent to 33 per cent. The previous three surveys had recorded consistent drops of three percentage points each year, and the 2025 survey recorded a single point decline to 32 per cent.
The use of a similar tactic by a party or candidate during the forthcoming campaign – perhaps to discredit journalists who may be pursuing inconvenient truths – could have devastating long-term effects. Imagine a situation in which fewer than a quarter of New Zealanders believed our news media were credible. News organisations have a hard enough task restoring the trust that already has been lost, without it being further eroded for cynical political purposes.
Low levels of trust feed what social scientist Dan Ariely calls misbelief – a distorted lens through which people see the world. The distortions are communicated, amplified, and augmented through social media.
Yet, increasingly, politicians see social media platforms as the means by which they can communicate directly with the public, without bothersome mediation by journalists. A survey published by Stuff last October attested to the high use of social platforms by political parties and politicians. Their engagement ranged across all popular platforms from Facebook and Instagram to X, YouTube and TikTok.
On Facebook alone, the Labour Party has 337,000 followers and National 207,000. ACT’s David Seymour has 113,000 Facebook followers. Te Pāti Māori has 167,000 Instagram followers and party leaders make extensive use of that platform. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has 253,000 Instagram followers (and 168,000 on TikTok) while the Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has 226,000. NZ First leader Winston Peters has 90,000 followers on X. The ACT Party has advertised regularly on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms, spending up to $45,000 a quarter.
These statistics, and rising numbers of followers on various platforms, show our political parties make ever-increasing use of this medium. It allows them to communicate on their own terms, without interrogation of the validity or utility of what is being said. It is an increasingly attractive conduit, fed by comms staff but giving followers the perception of personal connection.
Add to this the effect of enabling artificial intelligence in online search engines that now provide neat summaries of what they have searched. The result of that innovation is that referrals back to news sites has dropped and are predicted to plummet over the next three years.
So, should politicians really care about the future of news media? After all, they are trusted by a minority, often avoided by about a third of the country (according to the 2025 JM&D survey), and can be circumvented for direct contact with the public. And they can be a bloody nuisance when they ask awkward questions or do deep dives into political affairs.
The convenient answer is “no, don’t need ‘em”. It may also be why we have seen no meaningful legislation to compensate news organisations whose content is routinely plundered by search and social media. Indeed, it may be why we have seen virtually no meaningful legislation in the current term aimed at sustaining news media and the country’s journalism.
It may, too, be why Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sees commercial news media simply as businesses like any other. When Newshub closed and TVNZ and Whakaata Māori reduced staff and news programmes, his reaction was simply “why aren’t they able to build sustainable business models?”
Statements like that betray an ignorance of the civic role that journalism plays in an inclusive society. It suggests journalism is seen only as a commodity and not a public good. Lack of concern over its future also suggests a belief that social media and AI-enabled search obviate the need for women and men trained and collectively enabled to seek out truth, hold power to account, and provide the means by which individuals can be fairly given voice in a contestable marketplace of ideas.
Dan Ariely, in his recent book Misbelief, wrote about the handicap principle by which good signals come at a cost. He used the example of the male peacock that must carry a very heavy tail to signal his worth to mate. In the case of news media, cost includes heavy financial investment in their newsgathering. He also wrote of the fundamental failures of social media networks, which were not developed to fit natural human communications methods – they carry no cost to the communicator – and consequently produced some very undesirable results. He went on:
Social media platforms essentially violate the basic rules of natural communications and as such they are incompatible with the evolutionary instincts we have developed to treat and react to information. In our evolutionary history, we’ve learned to expect honest signals that are associated with a cost and as a consequence we have developed intuitive trust in the information we receive. After all, if the information is mostly accurate, trusting it is a good strategy. And then social media emerged, and the cost of communication disappeared. The reality is that we can no longer trust all or even most of the information we get online, but we still have the same evolutionary instincts that lead us to intuitively trust the information even when it no longer deserves to be trusted.
News media need desperately to act collectively to persuade the public that real trust is based on truth, and not on what partisan thinking wants to be true. Therein lies the real reason for declining trust. Social media, communal stress (exacerbated, if not created, by the Covid pandemic), and polarising politics have interrupted the evolutionary cycle and left us prey to illusion.
If parties and political candidates use the news media as expendable targets, either to deflect legitimate criticism or to divert attention, they risk undermining and inflicting perhaps irreparable damage on an institution that, in reality, neither they nor the country, can do without.
From Jim Tucker:
A mini version of what you describe has been playing out in New Plymouth, where the council elections last year were greatly influenced by what went up on social media. The irony is, now that the inevitable flaws of a new mayoral reign show up, it’s the traditional news outlet, the newspaper, that is being used by some influential citizens wanting to protest at what they perceive to be wrong moves. It seems to be accepted by most people still interested in local politics that the newspaper represents the ultimate credibility…and the power. Those producing journalism of quality – in traditional terms – may have a rapidly decreasing audience, but it’s still the audience that counts. They are people tuned in to what really matters and they are highly sensitive about how they are perceived. The two main social media “news” platforms in Taranaki are run by real estate agents with no credible news media experience or training, but good instincts about what the “average” citizen wants to read about – floods, road crashes, crime, fires, etc, the kind of news all communities gossip about but whose attributes don’t challenge intellects. It’s mainly “hard” news that comes and goes relentlessly and is forgotten almost instantly. Letters to the editor still survive in the newspaper, but are dominated by an aging audience that will soon be gone. Oddly, death notices still reign supreme as the ultimate means of spreading a respectful message that someone has gone. If anything has been neglected by newspapers, it’s the vast potential of paying tribute to people’s lived lives, the stories that contain our history and will inform those growing up that there was once a world without cellphones…and social gossip in digital form.
Jim Tucker – editor, writer, publisher JimTuckerMedia New Plymouth