ACT leader David Seymour has intensified criticism of RNZ, questioning its direction and leadership while arguing publicly-funded media must be more accountable to taxpayers.
Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
New Zealand media is in the firing line, with political attacks, public distrust and a controversial high-profile resignation – so can newsrooms get back on track to regain public trust?
A high-profile political editor is gone, a watchdog is on the chopping block, and political attacks on mainstream media are loud and direct.
Welcome to the first half of May for New Zealand media.
“The media is under huge scrutiny at the moment, and the events of the past couple of weeks have not gone well for us,” says Newsroom cofounder Mark Jennings, who was also the head of news at TV3 for more than two decades.
The Detail talks to Jennings and longtime political correspondent and founder of Politik, Richard Harman, about the wobbly state of New Zealand media, fuelled, in part, by attacks from politicians and on social media.
“What we have seen is a social media lynch mob, and Maiki Sherman is a casualty of that,” says Harman. “The question now is to what extent the media, as a whole, are a casualty of this.”
Sherman resigned as TVNZ’s political editor last Friday, after it was revealed she had used a homophobic slur against Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr during pre-Budget drinks in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ office last May.
More recently, Sherman was suspended from Parliament for five days for breaching parliamentary rules by pursuing an interview with National’s chief whip, Stuart Smith.
Jennings describes the resignation as “puzzling” because the slur incident was a year old and had “seemingly been resolved” when Sherman apologised to the minister and Burr.
In a statement on social media, Sherman wrote: “From my own perspective and for context, my comment was made in response to deeply personal and inappropriate remarks made to me that evening. This does not excuse my actions, I took responsibility for that a year ago, it is merely to help others understand why I reacted in the way that I did.”
Jennings says Burr should now reveal what he said to Sherman, and he also questioned the “lack of support” given to Sherman at TVNZ.
“If you look at it, Maiki said she had told her manager the day after [the incident]. Her manager would be the head of news. They were informed the day after, then nothing happens for a year, so that seems very strange.
“She must have had the support of that manager over the year, so what changed suddenly when the story became public?”
He says from day one, as political editor – the “hottest job in television news” – Sherman had been let down, pointing to her first time reporting on a political poll, which she “overdid” and “sensationalised”.
“How was that allowed to happen?
“[The head of news and the producers] should have said, ‘Look, Maiki, this has gone a bit too far, let’s pull this back into a more realistic state’. But they didn’t.
“And I think that lack of support has been a problem for Maiki in her term as political editor.”
Harman says he knows Sherman well and “respects her” and is disappointed she had to resign.
“As for how the whole thing has played out, I have never seen anything like this. This has become a total obsession [in mainstream and social media].”
He says that “there is a case to be made against the media at the moment. There is no doubt about that. We see this in the trust surveys, and we know that the media is not really serving its audiences all that well, across the board.
“The other thing we have got now is social media, which enables people – anonymously – to carry out witch hunts. And that’s what has happened here.
“This has gone way beyond any reasonable discussion about the failings of the media, and has turned into a personal witch hunt.”
While the Sherman controversy has dominated headlines, another media story has made its way into the news cycle.
The government has announced it is scrapping the Broadcasting Standards Authority, which critics deem an outdated relic from an era when television and radio dominated public conversation.
Harman says that “if you look at the broadcasting landscape, it had to go”.
“The fact is that over the airwaves, linear broadcasting is on its way out … and so if the Broadcasting Standards Authority has no jurisdiction over streaming or social media, then it is becoming irrelevant in many senses.
“I don’t know how you regulate social media. I don’t think you can. It’s like herding eels.”
He believes the big news organisations will join up with the media council and “the pirates and the cowboys will be pirates and cowboys. I don’t think there is much we can do to stop that”.
Decision ‘ a bad thing’
But Jennings argues the decision to chop the BSA is “overall, a bad thing”.
While he concedes the BSA can be a “headache” and has been known to pursue trivial events too far, he believes “they really are an important part of the trust system in New Zealand”.
“We have seen some decisions where the media has been wrong, they had to apologise or take a penalty, and I think justice is seen to be done. To get rid of that is stupid, in my view.”
At the same time, political attacks on mainstream media are becoming more direct.
ACT leader David Seymour has intensified criticism of RNZ, questioning its direction and leadership while arguing publicly funded media must be more accountable to taxpayers.
In an interview with The Platform, he appeared to single out chief executive Paul Thompson (though Seymour did not name Thompson), saying “look, that guy’s got an awful lot to answer for, and I suspect that he won’t be answering the call at RNZ for much longer.”
Jennings tells The Detail that “Seymour has shot himself in the foot here … because if he does think Paul Thompson is a poor CEO and wants him to go, he’s just made that much harder”.
“I think Thompson will be laughing now about it. Because if Paul Thompson is forced out, it’s going to look very much like a politician caused this event.”
He admits he was surprised by Seymour’s comments, describing him as an “astute and nimble politician”, and saying that this seems like “a rush of blood to the head”.
Harman, who had Seymour up about the comments, says the ACT leader is “paradoxical” about this – “he’s had a go at Thompson, but at the same time he says Jo Moir and the RNZ gallery team are the best team in the gallery, so I’m not quite sure what his game is”.
So how does the media gain back public trust and soothe relations with politicians?
“I think part of the answer to getting widespread trust in the media back is to go back and concentrate on the old-fashioned fundamentals of journalism, and that is fairness, balance, [and] accuracy, and [to] try to move away from opinion,” Jennings says.
“That is the way we can win it back.
“But also, we don’t need things like the BSA being scrapped. We need to have good, transparent regulation around the media, we need to have good professional bodies around the media, and we need big media organisations, like TVNZ, to be really supportive of their journalists, in making sure they do the right job, they do really good jobs.
“And I think the Maiki Sherman thing has shown that that really hasn’t occurred here.”
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