GUEST BLOG: Sam Oldham – The Mike Hosking Model

The ascendance of Mike Hosking as a dominant media personality, combined with the demise of John Campbell and the return of Paul Henry, has generated public concern about a rightward drift in news media commentary.

So it should. But the elevation of right-wing political views among dominant media voices is not a recent trend. Rather, it is a more consistent outcome of the institutional factors that shape the functioning of the mass media. It should follow logically that media corporations, sponsored through corporate finance and closely integrated with the system of private enterprise generally, will operate with a bias towards these interests in their products.

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), suggest a “propaganda model” for understanding the phenomenon. News media content is determined by major institutional and systemic “filters”, including “the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms” and “advertising as the primary income source of the mass media”.

Media corporations are fully integrated into markets. Many are owned by investment firms and private equity groups whose stock portfolios are diversified well beyond media ownership. In many cases, news media corporations are wholly owned by larger corporations – General Electric and Westinghouse are major owners of the media globally. Ben Bagdikian, in his book The New Media Monopoly (2004), notes that five corporations own the vast majority of American news media and “have become major players in altering the politics of the country”, for example, by “promoting new laws that increase their corporate domination and that permit them to abolish their control”.

Corporate ownership of media gives a bottom line to their operations, while corporate advertising and sponsorship are crucial sources of revenue. As Chomsky and Herman observe: “The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs—they are ‘patrons’ who provide the media subsidy.” This has logical consequences for media outlets; one is that “many firms will always refuse to patronise ideological enemies and those whom they perceive as damaging their interests” and will “also choose selectively among programs on the basis of their own principles.”

These forces, enormous as they are, are among many that shape the provision of information and opinion to the public by corporate media. To touch on another filter, “reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power” further necessitates corporate support for their programming. Conversely, if media outlets antagonise corporate power, they are likely to cop flak from the various front groups and “thinktanks” that promote corporate interests. A recent documentary, Merchants of Doubt (2015), sheds much-needed light on the role of corporate flak in manipulating public opinion in the United States. A far more comprehensive study in this area, though dated, is Alex Carey’s book Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia (1995).  It is plausible that John Campbell copped his share of flak in the wake of his campaign against zero-hours contracts, though his cancellation came with the secrecy that shrouds all commercial deals; this itself should be a point of interest for those of us concerned with democracy.

The ownership and funding of NZ news media fits the criteria for a propaganda model. MediaWorks, for example, is wholly owned by IronBridge Capital, an Australian private equity company. Meanwhile, TVNZ, while state-owned, is commercially funded, and its news and current affairs shows are completely dependent on private capital. Seven Sharp is sponsored directly by a subsidiary of Rabo Bank NZ, RaboDirect. The financial industry is predominant in direct sponsorship of current affairs. ASB Bank has in the past sponsored Nightline, while ANZ has sponsored news updates. TVNZ has drawn criticism for allowing finance company Hanover to fund weather updates. Advertising veteran David Walden has noted that current affairs has been popular with car companies; Kia sponsored Close Up while Mazda was a key sponsor for Campbell Live. Walden further notes that there was for a long time reluctance among media corporations to allow direct private funding of current affairs shows, “But that is all gone now, you can sponsor anything.”

While the studies cited above are rigorous in their scholarship, it should perhaps flow naturally that news and opinion contrary to corporate interests will be marginalised by corporate media, while opinions that serve these interests will be elevated. Thus, the political views of Mike Hosking are not coincidental to his position of media dominance. On every issue, with intriguing exceptions, Hosking can be relied upon to come to the defence of private enterprise. To take a recent example, he actively defended the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), perpetuating virtually every public myth that has been invoked to promote it. Largely, his support has been on grounds that it will add billions to New Zealand’s GDP, despite this being dismissed as wildly untrue by Jane Kelsey, who, by Hosking’s own admission, has studied the deal more closely than anyone else. In the same interview with Kelsey, where his arguments in support of the Agreement were flawlessly dismantled, he shifted quickly from principled support to suggesting, falsely, that nothing can be certain until the TPPA is committed to. A slick tactic.

Corporate media have a rich history of supporting trade deals that are disastrous for working people. It has been noted that US media “like the corporate world in general, were close to 100 percent in support of NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]” (Carey, xii). Passed in 1994, NAFTA was the first international trade agreement of the contemporary era. It represented “the door through which American workers were shoved” into neoliberalism, depriving them immediately of close to a million jobs, destroying their conditions and undermining their bargaining power. For Mexicans, NAFTA has been catastrophic. Hosking is not remotely concerned about the impact the TPPA might have on working people. The agreement has corporate support, so it has his.

Nor was he “remotely bothered” by the recent stripping of tea breaks from workers, using the opportunity to assure people not only that “a modicum of talent and a decent work ethic will see you through, no matter what they do to employment laws”, but also to jab at trade unionism.

“Never having joined a union, and having worked out fairly early that hard work was your calling card – not someone called Ernie from the union advocating on your behalf – I wasn’t remotely bothered by all the upheaval.”

The notion that “hard work” and not the trade union represents a means for workers to protect their rights is an old one peddled by employers. Any union organiser will tell you that it is farcical.

Turn to other expressions of Hosking’s political views. As Chomsky has elsewhere noted, an effective propaganda system will “limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum” (The Common Good, 2002). Consider Hosking’s support for foreign direct investment in New Zealand at a time when it is attracting public criticism. In a debate surrounding a review of the Overseas Investment Office, he observes that “ACT finally opened their campaign over the weekend, and part of the policy deal was the deregulation of the Overseas Investment Office. In other words they want to deregulate foreign investment.” Either Hosking knows nothing about that which is talking, or he is deliberately manipulating information. Foreign direct investment in New Zealand is almost completely deregulated already, with small exceptions around sensitive land. Kelsey notes in her book No Ordinary Deal: Unmasking the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement that there is no government oversight whatsoever for foreign investment under $100 million, and for Australian corporations the threshold is $477 million. To quote Kelsey: “In summary, the Overseas Investment Act is completely ineffectual with regard to most decisions on foreign investments that are economically important to New Zealand”.

Note how Hosking is able to set up a spectrum by which his views are indisputably moderate or centrist, while those of ACT are extreme. “That’s ACT in a nutshell. Everything is taken to the extreme. Any form of normality or regulation is out of the question […] But the current rules make sense.” In this way, artfully, our massively deregulated foreign investment environment, a corporate free-for-all, is reinforced as perfectly ordinary. Hosking’s unquestionable reassurance that “the current rules make sense” has nothing to do with his personal understanding of them, but are, again, due to who supports the rules, namely corporate power. Incidentally, Ironbridge is one of the biggest beneficiaries of our lax regulations, as are shareholders in APN News & Media, Hosking’s former employer. Ironbridge is actually cited in Kelsey’s book in the context of lax foreign direct investment regulations, having come under criticism for buying up media and waste management companies, despite having no experience owning or managing either.

Hosking’s (and Henry’s) mild support for Unite Union’s campaign against zero-hour contracts might appear to deviate from the propaganda model. Instead, it fits with what can be described as a “bad apple” paradigm, or “the threat of a bad example.” When a section of the corporate class acts in a way that attracts public animosity, it is quickly marginalised and its behaviour corrected. Individual companies are attacked so that the system avoids censure. Targeting rogue companies is within the spectrum of acceptable opinion; criticism of the system that enables their behaviour is not. After all, Hosking was just as quick to defend the (again, perfectly moderate) need for “flexibility in the workplace” in an interview with Unite Union’s Mike Treen. “Flexibilisation” of labour markets is a major source of poverty.

Hosking shares the values of the elites who own and control the media. It is likely also that he has spent his career self-censoring and adjusting to fit the model, to be rewarded for it. As Chomsky notes

Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms. (Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, 1989)

Hosking joins a list of right-wing ideologues in the New Zealand media. Internationally, the list is much longer. These people can be passed off as pundits, but they are agenda setters with considerable power. All are to the right of the general population on most issues and they have no counterparts on the left.

The sooner Hosking and others are recognised for what they are, the sooner they can be perceived as systemic outcomes, necessitating systemic change if they are to be replaced by democratic, accountable and honest sources of information and opinion. Alternative models of media exist globally. Worker cooperatives, trade unions, community alliances–these institutions all serve as alternative sponsors for popular news media. We can guess who the enemies of any social change in this direction will be.

Sam Oldham writes for academic and popular publications. He has been a member of trade unions and libertarian socialist groups in both Auckland and Melbourne, and is presently a member of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association and is a member of the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement.