MEDIAWATCH: JMAD’s damning NZ Media Ownership Report 2024 highlights misinformation and disinformation hellscape

Each year, AUTs School of Communication Studies releases one of the most important reports on Media, the JMAD NZ Media Ownership Report.

The Journalism, Media and Democracy Research Report has been producing these reports for 14 years now and it has tracked the power of corporations over our news media while explaining the how and why we get the media environment we do.

Professor Wayne Hope alongside Dr Merja Myllylahti, Dr Sarah Baker, Dr Peter Hoar, Dr Rufus McEwan, Dr Atakohu Middleton, Dr Danielle Selman Julian, Dr Saing Te and Dr Greg Treadwell have produced a report that once again details the ongoing decline of the media and its inability to provide the Fourth Estate Obligations a Democracy must have to survive.

Professor Hope’s opening comments in the Report lays bare where we are at…

…Spinoff is sinking, Maori TV announced the axing of its news room that seems like an enormous breach of their obligations while 14 Newspapers are being culled.

We will have news deserts and social media hate algorithms will be left to generate tsunamis of ignorance and hate in an ever increasing washing machine of polarisation.

This on top of TVNZ cut backs and the destruction of Newshub.

The legacy media based their revenue on ratings systems that were always more art than science.

The capital cost of a printer, a satellite or a radio frequency disappeared and far more critical analysis of viewer interaction with content demanded a new economic model, especially with Vulture Capitalists wanting to cover their debt and social media sucked away all the revenue.

Into this dystopian reality comes the power of the podcasts and the rise of a new news media filtered by their own ideologies.

We don’t trust the news any longer, but we trust the filter we view that news through now.

Facts are behind paywalls, the lies are free.

Imagine how little we would know of what was really going on in Gaza if we had relied on the mainstream media coverage?

The people lost trust in capitalist media, because capitalist media had betrayed them.

They turned us from citizens into consumers. It’s never been a better time to buy a house in the NZ Herald world view because the real estate pimps are the biggest advertisers.

The intense loneliness that plagues so many lives has led to rabid hole doom scrolling that brainwashes people into MAGA Qanon anti-vaxxer hate cults.

This fracturing of realities mixed with social media ‘facts’ will corrode the heart of democracy, which is why Public broadcasting matters so much.

There have to be new ideas from the State to enable and support a plurality of voices and production companies.

Pumping $10m into The Spinoff over a decade wasn’t the problem, the problem was that it was just limited to them and their chums. There are lots of important existing content that deserves the same level of taxpayer support because of the job they do in creating a media ecosystem for the Fourth Estate.

There are solutions to the problems we face, no one politically seems to have anything other than shrugging.

We need new regulations in media and new funding from NZ on Air and a social media campaign to point to that content.

There is currently no vision from any political party on this.

As the guard dogs of our democracy are euthanised, our democracy is at risk.

JMAD is another warning that Public Broadcasting is an essential infrastructure for democracy and not a nice to have.

 

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