For most people our age, political journalism is just another unwatched segment on the nightly news. For a slightly smaller demographic (chiefly including those party-hacks you’ve probably seen around, who fortunately often come colour-coded for your convenience/easy avoidance…maybe even you), it’s the bread-and-butter of current events coverage. Comparing it to the sports section in function certainly helps to get across the way we use it to keep track of how our “teams” are doing … but the passion of the politico for his chosen sport and club easily rivals the devotion and psychic investment of your average ballgame fan; possibly because we get to think of ourselves as active players on the field (however minor) rather than mere passive spectators on the couch.
A select few of us, however, don’t just watch the news. We feature on it from time to time.
And the first thing you notice once you pass via the camera lens through that ineffable barrier of the Fourth Wall en route to your transitory quarter-hour of glory … is that the relationship between what’s portrayed through the media with the actual course of events being reported on is frequently less arms-length than arm-wrestle. While it’s certainly true that *any* exercise in reporting – particularly when it comes to a subject as vicissitudinal and vitriolic as politics – is going to be prone to editorial slant or even allegations of deliberate malfeasance; recent developments in the field leave an inescapable feeling that stories dripping in subjectivity, sensationalism, and an often outright slovenly commitment to factual accuracy are now the trademark rather than the exception.
The obvious example for all of this from the last Parliamentary term was the litany of attempted Coups By Media the Parliamentary Press Gallery tried against then-Labour Leader David Shearer.
You’d think, given the favourite past-time of Labo(u)r parties the world over appears to be Leader-Rolling that they’d have been content to just sit back and let nature take its course … but no, like the nature documentary-maker who insists on wounding a gazelle so the lions have something to messily play with on camera, our theoretically “neutral” political reporters often seem to have this irrational obsession with *making* the news rather than merely reporting it. How else to explain leading political journalist Duncan Garner breathlessly claiming a Letterof No Confidence against David Shearer was being circulated through Labour, outright stating that TV3’s Patrick Gower was going to present said letter on thatevening’s Nightline broadcast … and then coming up completely empty-handedwhen neither of these things occurred.
More recently, I watched with frank amazement as several mainstream media outlets breathlessly reported Aaron Gilmore (you may know who he is)winning an uncontested election to his local National Party electorate committee as thefirst public step in NZ’s best known part-term list MP’s grandiloquent andquite possibly vainglorious plan to secure a 2017 comeback to Parliament. It didn’t seem to matter that Gilmore had clearly denied this was his intent, or that the likelihood of his re-entering Parliament at the next election was somewhere lower than the odds of Peter Dunne acquiring a 2nd MP and a Youth Wing. To the political correspondents penning the stuff, the pageantry and titillation to be had (whether for their audiences or themselves) in dredging up one of the most schadenfreude-inducing political sagas of recent memory in order to present us a with near-universally reviled revenant-villain to jeer at, was obviously a much more important concern than any pretense of accurate reporting. How else to explain this incredibly outlandish situation of a swathe of otherwise nominally serious journalists stooping to cover the story of a local man taking on a relatively insignificant role within his local party organization. I literally cannot recall any other instances of an individual joining an electorate committee generating nation-wide media attention at any point in our political history. The only even semi-plausible rationalization I can offer is that one of Gilmore’s more influential detractors in National still despises him enough to bother expending influence with the media to call in a bombardment of embarrassing press every time he pokes his head above the parapet with a view to hounding him out of the party or something.
Interestingly, between most of those Gilmore stories first running on February 17th and the time of writing, strategic edits have been made to remove most of the string of quotes from an unnamed National Party insider which were the only real source for the 2017 Parliamentary Comeback part of the story in the first place. That kind of post-facto alteration is customarily the result of either threats of legal action from somebody close to the story; or direct intervention Malcolm Tucker style (i.e. threats or cajoling, often delivered at high volume and accentuated by a profusion of profanity) by a party’s Press Secretary. See what I mean about the-truth-as-you-read-in-the-newspapers being more of a mutually-agreeable meta-reality than an actual record of facts?
For a minor and yet somehow more insipid instance of press interference in reality … try this. Back in 2010 (while New Zealand First was still out of Parliament and fighting desperately for media oxygen to fuel a comeback), Winston managed to create a media opportunity for himself by telling the press he was about to use his Gold Card for the first time. Dutifully, the reporters turned up to grab a soundbite and a photo for a human interest story on Winston the Senior Citizen catching the ferry back from Waiheke. I was standing on the wharf with him as TV3’s Kim Cho conducted an “interview” that basically consisted of Cho asking him somewhere up to a half-dozen times whether he was intending to run for Auckland’s Super-Mayoralty later that year. To which Winston responded in the negative, and with ever-increasing ire. By the time Cho actually started asking about his Gold Card, the metaphorical veins in his forehead were bulging, and smoke was billowing from his nostrils. Which is pretty impressive considering he hadn’t even lit a cigarette.
It occurred to me then that what I was witnessing was less an interview than an elegant act of sabotage. The reporter in question had absolutely no interest in letting Winston get a nice easy bit of positive coverage out of his ferry-trip; and had instead decided that if she absolutely *had* to be party to a camera being aimed at him, then she’d do her level best to make sure it was an angry, embittered and vindictive Winston that appeared on that evening’s 6 pm news rather than the gregarious and relatable image he was attempting to project. The continual and irrelevant stream of repetitive and stupid questions she’d deployed before finally making a cosmetic effort at getting the Gold Card quotes she was supposedly there for was evidently a cunning ploy to rile him up and allow her to portray him as she wanted – in the least favourable terms possible.
These three examples ought to demonstrate the way our journalists frequently and cynically manipulate the flow of political reporting in service of personal agendas. Making up a story, a la Garner on Shearer, can help to shape the course of events so as to render the political landscape more in keeping with a commentator’s preferences. Due to the difficulties inherent in interviewing somebody else’s keyboard, it also tends to lead to exclusive scoops on interesting “stories”. Honing in on material that might not otherwise make it into the media like last month’s Third Coming of Aaron Gilmore journalist-jamboree affords pressmen the authorial rush of being able to exert the narrative power of creating villains and victims – and also allows them to trade in influence with the powerful by performing political hits or providing positive public press as favours. And as evinced by the conduct and outcome of Kim Cho’s exercise in political bullfighting with Winston, they’re quite crafty when it comes to injecting personal biases if not outright vindictiveness into their coverage. Even the theoretically what-you-see-is-what-you-get medium of a video recording isn’t immune to distortion.
Now, to be fair, reporters are only human – and, like university students, are often at the mercy of tight deadlines, not insignificant blood-alcohol content, and the travails of trying to make frequently boring if not downright arcane information seem vaguely interesting.
It’s therefore entirely unfair to suggest that every instance of dodgy political reporting by the media is exclusively due to malfeasance on their behalf. Some of it’s down to journalists being willfully, willfully blindly – or, on occasion, apparently actually obliviously – co-opted as the pawns and bishops of grand and sweeping political conspiracies.
That, incidentally, is the other explanation occasionally advanced for Duncan Garner’s Chicken-Coup tweet about the impending overthrow of David Shearer. Instead of the Parliamentary Press Gallery attempting to manufacture a coup against Shearer so as to give themselves something vaguely interesting to report on concerning the MP whose tenure leading Labour appears doomed to go down in popular memory as both red herring and fish in (or possibly at the bottom of) a barrel … some Labour MP may have fed Garner the story of an imminent ouster so as to destabilize Shearer’s leadership and spur an *actual* caucus-room coup as a result.
And while there’s certainly something both insidious and insipid about a lone media pundit (possibly working with a single disaffected MP) being able to create a story out of thin air like this – then witnessing the outcome they prophesied actually transpire a little under a month and a half later thanks at least partially to their efforts; this pales in significance and gravity of consequence when compared to a far more perniciously pervasive exercise in mass-media manipulation that’s been going on right here in New Zealand for much of the 21st century.
I’m talking about the National Party’s skillful use of WhaleOil as revealed in #DirtyPolitics.
Despite the way it’s been spun, this isn’t simply a case of a few Nat high-ups staying up late txtng one of the country’s best-known bloggers. If it were, there’d be very little to get outraged about. That’s just how the game is played. Politicians have always cultivated close relationships with pressmen to further their agendas; and while the 21st century has brought new sophistication to this seduction, the only serious questions remain – as they were a hundred years ago – the extent to which the media is willing or able to be co-opted, and how far politicians are willing to go by betraying their colleagues or even breaking the law to keep “their” pet journos fed.
But where this usually just entails politicians surreptitiously meeting with pressmen in bars and coffeeshops to quietly slip them manila envelopes of leaked material (or, in Peter Dunne’s case, going for the “hide in plain sight” approach by covertly flicking Andrea Vance material about our intelligence services while overtly staking out her Twitter like an enthusiastic teen newly armed with a smartphone) #DirtyPolitics turned out to be something more akin to a horrifying combination of Perez Hilton and the Watergate break-in.
If you’re a politico, then you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with many of the ins and outs of National’s cyclopean (or, perhaps, myopic) covert communications edifice as revealed in Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics book. If not, a short synopsis entails that ever since National got into government nearly seven years ago, they’ve creatively (mis-)used the resources of state to furnish a hugely successful partisan blogger who’s somehow turned himself into an unimpeachable mainstream media fixture with otherwise privileged information designed to attack, discredit, or smear political opponents. Thanks to the way political journalism now works in this country, this allowed National to play our media like Minesweeper.
One of the most egregious examples of this whole conspiratorial contrivance inaction comes from the 2011 Election. Earlier in the year, then-Labour Leader Phil Goff stated that the SIS had not briefed him on Israeli espionage activities taking place in Christchurch. This was then turned into an attack on Goff’s credibility by John Key when a copy of the SIS briefing which had previously been given to Goff on the issue turned up on WhaleOil. At the time, Goff’s claim that this indicated the state’s domestic intelligence agency must have been in active collusion with the National Party to facilitate their re-election campaign seemed the stuff of conspiracy theory. However, we now know that John Key’s office deliberately set out to discredit Goff by selecting, declassifying and even editing for effect previously classified SIS material for political gain. This was then passed to WhaleOil for publication by telling him precisely which documents to request via OIA in order to construct the story (and, as a point of interest, apparently disclosing sensitive material to him before he’d even OIA’d for it) , while fast-tracking his OIA so that a process of disclosure which would ordinarily take at least a month for any other citizen was somehow completed inside 24 hours. As soon as WhaleOil had blogged about it, other more conventional media outlets were able to pick up and run with the story – to Goff and Labour’s ongoing and escalating detriment.
Phrased another way … National pretty much directed our state intelligence apparatus to help publicly discredit the leader of the Opposition during an election year; and bent the rules well beyond breaking-point in order to disseminate compromising and otherwise classified information out into the media and public sphere (and therefore, influence voters) through its premier online mouthpiece. All while being able to maintain a pretense of clean hands by concealing the extent and instrumentality of Beehive collaboration with WhaleOil; even as his blog was being actively used to steer and weaponize an incredibly large swathe of the New Zealand media by effective remote-control.
More recent strikes have made use of said blogger’s cultivation of a fairly broad-ranging network of stooges, sycophants and servile supporters scattered throughout this country’s news media and blogosphere (including a pulsating if not pustulating preponderance of pavonine papyrocrats phalansterized over at the New Zealand Herald). Apart from the obvious utility a surreptitious “voice at the table” brings in terms of being able to covertly advance one’s interests by influencing reporting and editorial decisions at some of the country’s largest media outlets; these operatives have also been deployed as an alternative “clean hands” vector for some of WhaleOil’s attacks in a manner not entirely dissimilar to how National itself uses Whaleoil.
The best example of this from #DirtyPolitics was his use of Rachel Glucina’s gossip column in the New Zealand Herald to publish information alleged to have once again been sourced from our spy agencies which suggested Winston Peters had met with Kim DotCom three times in the run-up to the 2014 election. By using the Herald to disseminate this (and specifically a gossip column rather than the politics section) WhaleOil not only managed to add credibility to his attack, but ensured it would be read by a far broader swathe of the electorate than just his own (admittedly expansive) blog-following. He then used Glucina’s column to support baseless and demonstrably false accusations that NZF’s political independence was compromised due by Winston negotiating some sort of deal with DotCom to get him to fund our election campaign. (I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to confuse Winston with Hone…)
When you look at all of this together, it isn’t very hard to see why WhaleOil represents something both fundamentally revolutionary and revolting in our politics. There’s nothing particularly new about politicians maintaining tame journalists; or even abusing their position and powers in order to discredit opponents. With PRAVDA firmly in mind, there’s even established (if geographically and politically remote) precedence for using partisan and clearly party-affiliated media outlets to try and dominate a nation’s political press and public sphere. The guys behind THAT one *also* made a habit of using their state’s domestic intelligence agency to help the government of the day take care of political opponents.
Now in the (former) USSR, a trilateral confluence of Party, State Apparatus, and proudly Partisan Press would represent business as usual and an expected status quo perfectly in line with the way their political culture has organized itself for decades if not centuries beforehand. The only raised eyebrows about National’s conduct from our Soviet strawman’s perspective would be at the comparatively non-lethal results of political neutralization; our quaint national preference for the obligatory show-trial to be carried out in the Court of Public Opinion rather than in front of an actual member of the judiciary; and the curious observation that we haven’t had to overtly abjure democracy in order to turn out political process into one that sometimes resembles a virtual one-party state. (Actually, I take part of that last statement back. The inclusion of the Maori Party in National’s coalition means there’s at least one and a quarter parties in our present government.)
But despite our rampant alcoholism, massive over-reliance on an expensive liquid to prop up our export sector, privatization-produced private fortunes (think Alan Gibbs), and glorious history as a command economy … we are not a post-Soviet autocracy. Even though our government plays politics in a manner quite literally within only semi-spurious-analogy range of a stereotypical Eastern European dystopia, they remain a broadly popular government.
The fact that #DirtyPolitics failed to change the government despite dropping more revelatory bomb-shells than an entire flight of B-52s Rolling Thunder over Vietnam isn’t the result of National corruptly stealing an election. It’s because the Right is simply the best game in town when it comes to political communication. They know that complex barrages of facts (particularly in book form) don’t really reach – much less sway – anyone who isn’t a boffin, hack, or bureaucrat; and long ago learned that the gut, rather than the brain, is most people’s seat of political decision-making. Therefore, instead of trying to persuade voters with detailed, rational arguments; they just go straight for simple statements and emotive appeals. This is summed up beautifully in one of Cameron Slater’s cardinal rules of politics – “Explaining Is Losing”.
Even though we’ve spent the best part of a decade being constantly confronted with and/or confounded by the demonstrable efficacy of this approach, many left-wingers still struggle with – or outright reject – this concept. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because many Lefties seem to hold a loftier view of the intelligence and attention-span of the average voter than their right-wing counterparts; or, as I’ve often suspected, because long and detailed explanations play into an unfortunate need to show off how clever we think we are (looking at *you*, author of this TL;DR article!). If we’re serious about fostering democratic engagement – or even, heaven forbid, winning elections – then it’s a lesson we need to learn.
I’m personally looking forward to The Daily Blog’s 2015 political coverage helping to fulfill both aims.
Curwen Ares Rolinson was once, thanks to the Prime Minister, memorably investigated by the counter-terrorism branch of the NZ Police’s Special Investigations Group as a potential “Threat to National[‘s] Security”. He also blogs regularly at a variety of outlets; and heads up NZ First Youth. He might therefore be just a *teensy* bit biased when it comes to politics and the media.
This piece originally appeared as the centerpiece in CRACCUM Magazine’s Politics And The Media issue.
Curwen, I fear you are spending too much thought on possibilities, the actual reason for the state of affairs is, the media hacks have just become totally lazy, cannot bother doing much homework and research, and are for the rest disconnected to the real situation that exists at the bottom in society below where they see themselves.
They count themselves to the upper end of the middle class, and the ones that matter will be the longer serving media persons, who earn rather well, are reasonably secure in their job, and who have at least one or two properties of their own, and some income to play around with.
So they are the better off, live in places like Auckland in Eastern Suburbs or the North Shore, have little close contact with the South of Auckland, and with people living in low paid, marginal jobs, or even on benefits.
When “visiting” or “meeting” those people, it is to them a bit like a visit to the “exotics” in the ZOO, to be honest. They may pick the odd story about hard-ship or injustice, to get some “good” selling story, a bit “emotive”, and get ratings. Otherwise they are firmly pre-occupied with going to places, to parties and clubs, where the better side of town hangs out. They send their kids to “better” schools, they rub shoulders with the ones working in big business, the leaders of business, and with the political players represented in Parliament.
So they live a life that is detached from the harsh lives of many, even the many middle class members struggling to keep up.
These people may occupy the nine to five slots, they also occupy other slots, and having followed even remaining programs like Q+A for years, and “The Nation”, and the obligatory news on both major Free To Air channels, I always detect things that tells me, they live in another world, the newsreaders and news-gatherers and the hacks, call them “media personalities”, “broadcasters” or whatever.
They worry about petrol prices, about real estate values, about the weather for their week-end outings, about sports, about the best fishing, about who is in and out in film and music, but care very damned little about matters of bigger substance.
And you realise this, when they present persons of “exotic” nature, that they call a “Housing NZ” tenant on the supposed “sickness benefit”, which is a benefit that does not even exist anymore, since two years now. They know nothing about the benefit system and how Housing NZ operates.
This is what goes on, and it reveals, they are totally out of touch, with the bottom of society, the growing bottom, to which they (luckily) do NOT belong, and so they present such “zoo visit news”, thinking, hey, I know and see, how “tough” it is down there.
When they cannot even get the facts right, know nothing about Housing NZ rules and standards, that having a minimum temperature in a home means NOTHING, to consider it “suitable” for living, then they show they are totally OUT of touch. And that is the fact, Housing NZ considers homes “fit” to live in, as long as there is some form of running water, a power source, and a roof that does not leak, not much more.
The MSM media people are a sick joke, a totally sick joke, not worth to be in a job, that is most of them.
Look this up. Our media outlets are owned by friends of politicians.
They each have a link, like a chain. It is true that the media report stories in their own interests for better ratings.
“TV3’s Kim Cho conducted an “interview” that basically consisted of Cho asking him somewhere up to a half-dozen times whether he was intending to run for Auckland’s Super-Mayoralty later that year. To which Winston responded in the negative, and with ever-increasing ire. By the time Cho actually started asking about his Gold Card, the metaphorical veins in his forehead were bulging, and smoke was billowing from his nostrils.”
This is another example to keep boycotting TV3… But as you say, she would have wanted him aggressive looking for better ratings… I remember that story though, I thought he played it cool.
Its hard to believe or trust anyone in the media these days,in fact it hard to trust anyone in the political world either.
The Herald says the TPP is probably going to be fast tracked next Wednesday along with other trade agreements,Grosser claiming it will be good for NZ, I very much doubt that it will. regardless of wether the public want it or even know whats in it,
It will be pushed through.
The people of NZ don’t get a say in much ,its John Keys world, lies included,hes a globalist and willing to sell us out ,so the MSM just report what he tells them to.
So no trust anymore ,any wonder NZ is a very anxious depressed country,we are impotent,and either appathetic or waiting for someone else to change things. Sad state of affairs.
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