Olivia O’Malley is a former press secretary to a Leader of New Zealand’s Opposition and a long-time Conservative staffer. She currently works in public affairs.
BBC bias. Is GB News really news? Has anyone at Channel 4 ever voted Tory? In Britain, there is a channel – radio or TV – for almost every viewpoint, a newspaper for the same and a podcast ready to provide rapid reaction the moment a politician missteps.
Say what you will about the media landscape in the UK, but one thing it can’t be criticised for is a lack of competition. If anything, there is sometimes a sense that there is too much news, and a general air of impossibility about being able to read it all, which is why newsletters which bring the major stories together are so valued.
New Zealand’s media landscape is very different, as you would probably expect from a tiny country in the South Pacific. It is in a parlous state.
In February, major news provider Newshub announced its closure. It will shut its doors on 5 July, leading to the loss of 300 jobs in a tiny media ecosystem.
The loss is huge, both in the number of jobs lost (many reporters won’t be re-employed in journalism in New Zealand as the market is simply too small) and in the stories that will no longer be reported due to a lack of capacity and budget.
Catering to five million people rather than 70 million, New Zealand’s media is inevitably only a fraction of the size of the UK’s. Furthermore, job losses and channel closures aren’t especially unusual; media outlets battling declining revenues is a global problem.
What is a problem for New Zealanders who care about the health of their democracy is that Newshub is one of only two primetime English-language news channels in New Zealand. The other is TVNZ, New Zealand’s equivalent of the BBC, but without the licence fee and punctuated by ads.
It would also have marked the end of an era: Newshub has been running a six o’clock news programme since 1989, when Three (New Zealand’s first private channel) was launched, heralding the beginning of a more competitive (and frankly better) standard of reporting.
But a deal between Newshub’s owner, Warner Bros Discovery, and local outlet Stuff has been struck to provide a continuous 6pm news bulletin and a much-reduced version of Newshub.
This is broadly good, though far from ideal. It means more consolidation (Stuff is one of New Zealand’s two main print media conglomerates), as well as potentially more duplication (outlets already regularly reproduce and share a significant amount of each other’s content). We are not out of the woods yet.
TVNZ is not in the rudest health either, with government funding not immunising it against budgetary pressures. At the same time as Newshub announced it was closing its doors, the channel announced swingeing cuts. Staple programmes such as Fair Go, a mix of consumer affairs with investigative journalism that has been running since 1977, and Sunday, a local successor to 60 Minutes, have been axed.
Across the board, the news capacity of the country is rapidly shrinking.
Partly this is down to a wider trend. While TVNZ is government-funded and will never be scrapped even if it is cut to the bone, Newshub’s survival is dependent on advertising revenues, which dropped during the pandemic and have not recovered. News is expensive to produce and New Zealand is a small, capital-constrained market.
This is something that should concern the new government. There are pitfalls with stories about the media, largely that journalists care about them even when others very much do not. The proposed merger of Radio New Zealand and TVNZ under the previous Labour government was one such example.
But anyone who cares about having a New Zealand with vibrant democracy and debate, and good access to high-quality information in an era of rampant disinformation, should worry.
Furthermore, New Zealand is in a recession. The new government’s first budget later this month is expected to announce major cuts to civil service roles in Wellington. Other companies have announced redundancies. So the overall mood is one of pessimism.
There is political risk in the ongoing media issues too. One media minister, Melissa Lee, has already been swiftly moved on after several laughable interviews in which she refused to acknowledge the existence of a Cabinet paper to save New Zealand’s media ecosystem and expressed that her ability to do anything to save Newshub was limited.
Lee was technically correct, being neither allowed to speak about the Cabinet process in any great detail, nor likely to come up with funding to save Newshub. But her failure to provide any confidence or even a smidge of detail about what the government’s (or lead government party, National’s) media policies are has only fuelled unease about the future.
Without a way to make news reporting more financially viable and encourage new competitors to enter the market, New Zealand’s democracy will suffer.
The post Olivia O’Malley: New Zealand’s ailing news media should remind us why Britain is lucky to have Channel 4 and GB News appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Olivia O’Malley
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