Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
A week ago I just despaired at the state of the industry I spent my working life in. What on God’s earth engineered an outburst like that of Andrea Vance against female politicians of the political right?
The issue of gender pay equity is complicated and, to say the least, nuanced. It has the potential to be an unfunded government liability which could cost the country billions. That’s why the system needed to be changed. The matter required intelligent and reasoned discussion. Instead Andrea Vance and her editor allowed a deeply misogynistic personal and political attack famously featuring the most vulgar of obscene words, even if that was mostly blanked out.
The column reminded me that Stuff and its associated publications should never be looked at again. So far I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything!
But within a day of that assault on my (probably too tender) sensibilities, the media world regained some equilibrium. The erudite Philip Crump, aka Thomas Cranmer, published twice on his Substack outlining a possible future for NZME, owners of the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB.
Crump, once a successful London lawyer now enthusiastically embracing media matters back in his homeland, was originally part of Jim Grenon’s plan to take over the board of the listed media company.
But in the compromise that settled the shareholder/boardroom stoush, Steven Joyce becomes the chairman of the board, Jim Grenon will be a director while Crump will be part of, and quite possibly the leader of, a newly formed editorial board.
He hasn’t taken him long to express his thinking about the editorial direction NZME outlets should be taking. In two separate Substacks, Crump firstly outlined half a dozen challenges undermining trust in the media and then, two days later, six ideas to restore that trust.
It’s enlightened reading and worth summarizing here. Remember that trust in our media has reached diabolical levels whereby less than a third of us trust what we read, see or hear through mainstream media.
Crump believes the reasons for this are “emphasizing a narrative over factual reporting, abandoning balance for editorial advocacy, shaping discourse through editorial gatekeeping, prioritizing sensationalism to chase engagement, manipulating perceptions with loaded language and reinforcing narratives with selective experts and anonymous sources”.
In summary Philip Crump believes too much reporting in today’s media comes with preconceived ideas, and that voices offering another perspective are not heard or published.
Coverage of matters like the Covid response, Treaty and race relations issues and climate/net zero concerns are all classic examples of one-sided narratives presented to the media-consuming public in the last five years.
But the public isn’t stupid. That’s why the trust barometer is at an all-time low.
A couple of days later Crump was back, this time with some suggestions to make news websites and their associated publications a worthwhile proposition for the wider public once again. He contends that stories should be given “appropriate prominence,” they should be written for the most discerning of readers, facts should be presented objectively with regular new insights, that they should be written with clarity and at all times with integrity.
Crump is drawing on his inner George Orwell, quoting from the 1946 essay Politics and the English Language when Orwell wrote that “sloppy, vague or manipulative language perpetuates muddled thinking.”
The former London lawyer seems to have been influenced by top end British newspapers like the Times and the Daily Telegraph and would like to see New Zealand publications, despite their limited resources, aspire to those standards of balance and depth.
In his likely new role at NZME, Crump has the opportunity to change the way the Herald will cover the news and present a diversity of opinion. An editorial board should set the editorial direction for the company’s two flagship outlets. But he’s apparently been told already that his views are “old fashioned” and “not the way journalism works anymore”.
If that’s the case then why is trust at all time low and why is the industry battling for financial survival?
What Crump is suggesting is surely worth investment. The media’s performance in the last five years could hardly have been any worse and has brought us to where it is now.
What Andrea Vance produced in that column last week was undoubtedly a media low water mark. With intellectual thinkers like Crump not far from entering the fray there is hope.
POSTSCRIPT: The first man Crump should employ as a Herald columnist is University of Auckland economics professor Rob MacCulloch. The highly entertaining DowntoEarth.Kiwi blogger has shut up shop with claims he’s been told he’ll never get a government advisory appointment while he continually criticizes the policies of the major political parties. I hope that’s not the real reason because not getting such appointment should be a badge of honour! Maybe it’s because such good quality writing is not being fiscally rewarded the way it should be. Put him in the paper Mr Crump, and pay him a fee.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
