Source: Radio New Zealand
Image from the BSA’s recent report ‘Public trust in news media’ highlighting the factors that damage it – and enhance it. Broadcasting Standards Authority
“The blatant, blatant bias of the New Zealand media makes you want to weep,” an exasperated Mike Hosking told his Newstalk ZB listeners last Thursday.
A new unauthorised biography of Jacinda Ardern by journalist David Cohen triggered that complaint.
“One of the things that most upset me during that period was the acquiescence of the New Zealand media to her. Their journalistic integrity got completely and utterly blown up,” he said.
David Cohen interviewed dozens of people about her for the book – including Mike Hosking, who complained about the media “falling in love” with Ardern when she was PM.
“When you’re a journalist, you’ve got to put that to one side and cover it in a fair and balanced way. But fairness and balance just went out the window,” he said.
But over the years some of his critics have said similar things about the friendly tone of Hosking’s own interviews with other PMs he clearly liked more – including the current one.
Back in 2013 he even endorsed John Key while MC’ing the PM’s state of the nation speech. Petitions were launched to take the job of moderating TVNZ election debates away from Mike Hosking.
Bias is in the eye of the beholder, but he’s far from the only one questioning the media’s trustworthiness out loud these days.
The latest annual report of the official broadcasting watchdog – the Broadcasting Standards Authority – said formal complaints for the public for the year were down. The BSA found only eight breaches of standards all year.
This month the BSA released another report – zeroing in on public trust in the media.
Several surveys in recent years have shown our trust in news sliding significantly, but the BSA’s online survey and focus groups didn’t just add more numbers to the others. They asked people who’d lost trust in it why – and what, if anything, might restore it for them.
Large majorities told the BSA they wanted news backed by credible evidence, more neutrality, prompt corrections and more in-depth reporting. They also wanted more transparency, accountability and facts distinguished from opinion and advertising.
They also wanted less clickbait, sensationalism and aggressive attack style journalism.
So far, so much like many other surveys.
But while bias was also cited as a major reason for slumping trust, respondents also acknowledged that their perceptions of bias were coloured by their personal views – and whether their own views were reflected in the media.
Why has trust slumped?
“Why do news outlets continue to exhibit the sort of behaviour that contributes to declining trust when the solutions are so obvious?” former New Zealand Herald editor turned scholar and commentator Gavin Ellis asked this week.
“A day does not go by when I do not witness the opinion of a reporter indelibly over-written on reportage. I – and the rest of the audience – am left to my own devices in separating one from the other,” he said in an article about the BSA research, claiming solutions to declining trust are staring news media in the face.
“The practice not only transgresses journalistic boundaries but also provides ammunition for those seeking every opportunity to diminish and discredit media outlets with claims of bias.”
Ellis also said we saw clickbait headlining and story selection all the time, particularly on news sites that use artificial intelligence algorithms and analytics. And while consumers applied higher trust scores to outlets offering hard news rather than light lifestyle or entertainment content, that stuff keeps coming in spades from the mainstream media too.
While he was at it, Ellis said reporters should be “off-limits for commercially-linked stories”
As if to illustrate that problem, TVNZ 1News viewers in the ad breaks currently see the hosts of TVNZ Seven Sharp, nominally still a current affairs show, promoting their upcoming ‘Swede As’ national roadtrip to hype the launch of Ikea.
Seven Sharp’s hosts promoting the ‘Swede As’ campaign for the launch of Ikea. TVNZ Seven Sharp
Daily prizes are on offer and being in to win requires signing up to the Ikea Family loyalty programme via Seven Sharp’s website. It’s the kind of thing that confirms for some the news media are for sale when the price is right.
Yet some of the same ad breaks also feature urgent and persuasive messages for immunisation which could save lives in the current measles outbreak, showing the medium as a force for good.
Almost three in 10 respondents in the BSA research said there was nothing a news provider could do to reverse their lost trust – but more than twice as many said they could.
“The forms of redress in the BSA report are quite simple and represent no more than the re-emphasis of traditional journalistic values,” Ellis insisted.
“Transparency and accountability, clear editorial boundaries and commitment to impartial and fact-based reporting were – and should still be – the cornerstones of journalism.”
Fixes – easy and hard
RNZ’s executive editor of podcasts and series Tim Watkin once worked under Ellis at the Herald in the time before online technology and social media changed the nature of public trust.
In his new book – How to Rebuild Trust in Journalism – he sees the relationship between the audience and the media of today as like a relationship on the rocks. And he believes it’s the media that need to change and come to terms with the fact that the public are “just not that into them anymore”.
“The trends (in the research) are really clear. It’s very easy to say we are well-served by media in New Zealand and our journalism is of a high standard. But people don’t see that, and are making some pretty serious claims about what we do,” Tim Watkin told Mediawatch.
“The Reuters Institute research across 47 countries points to the fact most of the public does not trust most of the news most of the time. Edelman does research across 28 countries and 64 percent say journalists purposely mislead people.
“Here in New Zealand, RNZ is at the top of the trust tree. But we’re still only getting about half of the people reliably trusting us. I think that speaks to a burning platform.
“People have turned against us for some time now and it’s been a pretty clear trend for a generation or two. The people have spoken.
“If we fail to take it seriously, the news business might start running out of public to serve – and might not have much of a business left to do.”
The BSA research on trust found fewer than one in five who experienced a drop in trust as a result of a particular event or period report an improvement since that time. The loss of trust appears locked in for them.
But the same survey also found that of people who have experienced an event which strengthened their trust, almost 75 percent are more likely to maintain or increase their levels of trust.
Those people are there to be won back?
“It is not irretrievable. If you go back to the end of the First World War, there was a global pandemic, real social upheaval and political discord,” Watkin said.
“And at that time, there were a lot of commentators saying the trust in our news is falling apart. There was a reaction to that, especially in the US, but around the world, in the form of objectivity.
“Journalism decided as an industry to say ‘we are different from public relations, we’re different from government information, we stand apart, we try and write detached, factual information that describes the world as it is’. And that worked pretty well for us for the best part of a century.
“Now the media landscape is way more complicated, but the principles and the lessons are still pretty sound. We can work our way back.”
But is it really ‘them’ and not ‘us’ that’s changed?
Does asking people about their trust in media actually invite – or even incite – increased scepticism? Asking people if they use and value news media in spite of their reservations might yield different results and less definitive conclusions about loss of trust?
“It’s true if you highlight something, it creates a situation where people start to see a problem. But I think we’re well past it just being journalists or news media being able to really take any comfort from that,” Watkin told Mediawatch.
“Trust is around human connection and relationships. If the other partner in a relationship perceives you as a problem, then it doesn’t really matter what the facts are,” Watkin said, who did research in the philosophy department at the University of Glasgow.
In the relationship with the public, the media also have money problems and insecurity. And Watkin said the news media needed to do the work of the “cheating spouse”.
But in decades gone by, the public did not express huge distrust. They’re now the ones who often aren’t paying for news, have stopped valuing journalism and using free and alternative sources of news and content online.
“We could absolutely say: ‘Come on public, stop cheating on us with social media, stop running off with Instagram and Facebook – and come back to your good solid relationship with mainstream news media that actually knows how to treat you well,” Watkin told Mediawatch.
“But the reality is that people are dallying with TikTok and all the others and we can blame them or we can do something about it. In a world where… nobody is complaining about having not enough information, we can control the quality of that information that we provide.
“We say in a lot of cases that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck – it’s a duck. The problem with journalism is there are a lot of things that walk and quack and look like journalism, but they’re not journalism.
“We need to protect our specialty as journalists, I think, and we haven’t been very good at doing that.”
Powering up superpowers
Watkin’s book identifies four “superpowers” to differentiate journalism’s “duck”.
The first is objectivity, the subject of many inconclusive and often frustrating debates among journalists.
Some say it’s not realistic or achievable – or even really desirable if it fosters ‘both sides’ equivalence that can actually mislead the audience. Others say it’s the only way to overcome – or at least moderate – inevitable biases.
“I thought long and hard about this and concepts around impartiality. But sometimes journalists do need to be partial towards their communities, towards democracy, for example, towards a free press.
“So I kept coming back to objectivity. We all come with our baggage and bias. But what people don’t get – and it’s incredibly frustrating that we have to keep having this argument – is that it’s because people are biased that we have an objective method.
“As a journalist, you sign up to a method of telling a story. An Iowa professor defined objectivity as describing the world as it is, not as you want it to be.
“That shows that we are putting the interests of the people we serve ahead of our own opinions. Frankly, the public does not give one hoot about our opinions.
“Verification links in with transparency, which is the third superpower. Verification is the one that we kind of take for granted. You should be able to go to mainstream journalism and know that we have, as part of our professional creed, checked things.
“Balance is important, but how much better that we go beyond balance to actually verification? What we then need to do is be transparent and show our workings.”
The BSA’s Public Trust in Media report identifying examples of stuff people considered to be real news – and not. Broadcasting Standards Authority
Do the public want the workings? Does it risk clogging up stories and content like long labels on American food products that no one really reads? Or software licensing T’s and C’s of which almost everyone simply scrolls to the end?
“As journalists we are better at communicating than those ingredients labels. But those labels are actually useful and they do build trust in products. I’m not talking about sodium at 0.5 percent, but we can certainly be a lot more open in our journalism about how many people we spoke to, who refused to comment – and explaining some of the context or some of the history behind the story.
“Research consistently shows the public does not understand how journalism is different from the rest of the content that’s so much part of their lives these days. We actually have to do a much better job of saying why you can trust us more than Bill on TikTok.”
The fourth of Watkin’s superpowers for media is “caring”.
His book says journalism needs to be “more humble and care more about how it presents the verified and objective facts gathered in the public interest.”
Sounds nice, but does that alienate people who already think media care about the wrong things – and that their own values and motivations don’t align with the media?
“It’s not ‘caring’ in a way that takes sides. That would undermine the objectivity part of the superpowers and often the verification part too. It’s the kind of caring (like) friends in your life who… are prepared to tell you what you need to hear and are actually honest with people.
“They care enough to investigate the stories. They care enough to hire people who look like me – the different ethnicities, classes, rural, urban, university-educated and not university-educated.
“They should care enough to spell correctly, to have a podcast on their favourite app or a website that doesn’t glitch. All of these things show that we care about the information we’re providing.”
Fact vs opinion
Another persistent gripe that the research picks up is the blurring or even the blending of fact and opinion.
Watkin runs a separate site devoted to opinion – pundit.co.nz. In election years, he runs the podcast Caucus in which senior RNZ presenters give opinions on how the campaign is going.
Does that blur the line?
“Gavin Ellis is right that just slapping ‘analysis’ on the top doesn’t cut it. I think we need to be overly demonstrative in showing the difference between an article of factually-checked news – and an opinion piece which is based on facts but doesn’t have to be balanced because it’s their opinion.
“I’ve suggested that opinion pages on sites could be kept separate. In newspapers they could even be changed to a different colour so that it’s much clearer.
“On Caucus, we can probably do better on the transparency front but we’re really careful not to take sides, not to be partisan. We offer analysis and decades of experience covering politics to try and give people some quality information and some insight from our experience.”
Media are also often criticised for ignoring or marginalising some views and groups and featuring too narrow a range of sources.
“Again, when you go through the research and you see a lot of workshops and focus groups and so forth, they often get frustrated that they listen to the news and it doesn’t sound like them or look like them. 23 percent of journalists in the US live in three cities: New York, Washington DC and LA.
“New Zealand probably suffers from a similar thing in that Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch probably dominate. But local media are usually the most-trusted media – because people see that they care and are part of their community.
“We probably need to be better at finding people from all walks of life who can tell stories and help us understand because they bring an understanding of the world with them. If we are too narrow in the kind of people who we hire or the people we interview, then we miss a lot.”
“I really hope, regardless of my book, that people at least start thinking seriously about the importance of who they trust and who they don’t trust – and make good choices. And for journalists to actually work really hard at earning that trust.”
View from abroad
Dr Melanie Bunce RNZ / Colin Peacock
In 2019, Melanie Bunce pondered the current and future state of journalism here in a BWB text titled The Broken Estate.
She’s now the director of the new Centre for Media and Democracy at London’s City St George’s University, also researching trust in news around the world.
“If you get three different people telling you they don’t trust the media, they might have three different reasons so it’s a really hard one to counteract. But in a crisis, when people want to actually know what’s happened and where to for help they overwhelmingly still go to the mainstream media, even when they say they don’t trust those organisations,” Prof Bunce told Mediawatch.
“Here in the UK, the BBC for example is wrapping itself in knots around the coverage of Gaza and Israel, as it did during its reporting of Brexit, because people are trying to perform their balance and impartiality.
“But then you perhaps end up giving a lot of space to a side of the argument or interpretation of the argument that your audience at home doesn’t think should have any oxygen given to it whatsoever. So it’s incredibly hard.
“I think you need to explain to the audience as much as possible that you are trying to give due impartiality… based on where the evidence lies. But it’s not easy.
“A lot of the growth and distrust in the media over the last decade or so has resulted directly from political elites attacking and discrediting the media. Not giving the media a free ride or anything, but we should always wonder what’s in it for a political elite when they are saying you can’t trust that news and that ‘fake news’ media.
“In New Zealand because we’re lucky that there’s still high readership of local news. That genuinely is not the case in the UK. I live in London, one of the world’s global cities, but there’s very little news coverage of my borough, even though it’s larger than my hometown Dunedin.
“I can’t read the equivalent of the Otago Daily Times about the place that I live because of how the media ecosystem here works.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
