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Mediawatch looks critically at the New Zealand media - television, radio, newspapers and magazines as well as the 'new' electronic media.
Start-up scores a scoop and a scalp:
Back in March, the New Zealand Herald and the ODT revealed that MP Todd Barclay declined to talk to police about allegations he recorded his electorate staff member Glenys Dickson. National Party officers in the Clutha Southland electorate had also quit too citing various grievances.
But Prime Minister Bill English told reporters the matter had been resolved. Todd Barclay denied wrongdoing and the police ended the investigation.
It was time to move on, the PM said, and Todd Barclay had been selected again as a National's candidate for the upcoming election.
But the story burst back into life last Tuesday when online news website Newsroom.co.nz published an investigation by Melanie Reid.
Along with an exclusive interview with Glenys Dickson, it included written pieces and a timeline with the catchy title “The File of Denial.”
The full half-hour video is as compelling - and as televisual - as anything Melanie Reid created for the TV current affairs shows she worked on for over 25 years: 60 Minutes, Campbell Live and 20/20.
Glenys Dickson talked about the covert recording, pressure put on her and even anonymous threats by phone.
What Melanie Reid termed “the debacle in the deep south” reverberated further north in Wellington when she revealed the PM knew all about Todd’s trouble and hush money paid from the public purse.
That was revealed by text messages redacted from the the police report, but acquired by Melanie Reid.
News travels
On TVNZ’s Breakfast former National Party president Michelle Boag said the mainstream media seemed reluctant to talk about who broke the story.
“This was a story that came out of a subscriber website. All the other media with all the resources had all that time to get the story and none of them did. Very few have acknowledged the fact that it’s not their story,” she said.
The rest of the news media certainly weighed in full noise on the biggest political scandal of election year so far.
"This is not about an employment dispute. It is now about the Prime Minister, trust and credibility," said The Herald’s political editor Audrey Young.
Later, news websites broke out the breaking news banners when the PM changed his tune and said he had told the police that Todd Barclay had told him about the recording during the investigation.
"Bill English should have thrown his MP under the bus," said Fairfax political editor Tracey Watkins.
On The Spinoff, University of Otago law professor Andrew Geddis reckoned claims of pressure put on Glenys Dickson to withdraw her complaint could even lead to the reopening of the police investigation.
PM Bill English was a wanted man in the corridors of power last Tuesday. Photo: screenshot
Todd Barclay was still clinging on to his job when Newshub’s political editor Patrick Gower cut loose live on TV3's The Project.
"The only thing those people in the Beehive care about is themselves," he said.
“Good on you for keeping them honest,” replied co-host Jesse Mulligan.
But the irony was that it could have been TV3's scoop.
Melanie Reid produced investigative journalism for TV3 for years, until the management there began a scorched earth policy for current affairs in 2015.
That included culling Campbell Live at 7pm, so now the closest thing TV3 has during the week is the host-heavy but news-lite The Project, where the kind of reporting Melanie Read produces has no place.
Coincidentally, one of those applauding the demise of Campbell Live in 2015 was MP Todd Barclay.
The following year, the TV3 news boss Mark Jennings left MediaWorks and teamed up with former New Zealand Herald editor Tim Murphy to create Newsroom for public interest journalism. Melanie Reid was the first journalist to come on board.
Newsroom published a second exclusive on Tuesday afternoon which also appeared in full on stuff.co.nz, reproduced by permission. It carried the bylines of Newsroom’s Melanie Reid and Sam Sachdeva, who formerly reported for stuff.co.nz from the press gallery in Parliament.
Beltway or bust
At this point, political journalists were at pains to point out how serious and politically damaging the story had become.
"Let me count the ways the Barclay scandal matters," said Audrey Young for the Herald, above a handy 5-point summary.
But one colleague at NZME was going out of his way to say the opposite.
Mike Hosking told Newstalk ZB listeners it was "just a beltway issue."
After Todd Barclay's announcement he wouldn't contest his seat at the election after all, Mike Hosking told TVNZ Seven Sharp viewers it was still just a beltway issue.
"No-one cares about politics, lives and breath this stuff, the rest of us get on with our lives," he said on Newstalk ZB on the next day.
Mike Hosking seemed very determined to tell his viewers and listeners this was something they wouldn’t be interested in.
When Bill English fronted up on TV3's The Nation this weekend he wouldn't concede Todd Barclay made any covert recordings at all. When asked if he'd been economical with the truth for more than a year on this matter, he said he was anxious not to compromise the police investigation or the confidentiality agreement reached after the employment dispute involving Glenys Dickson.
But for the media, that goes beyond what Todd Barclay did or didn't do. That agreement was secured with money from public purse through the Leader's Fund.
The New Zealand Herald investigative reporter Matt Nippert put it like this on Twitter this weekend:
Glenys Dickson also told Newsroom’s Melanie Reid a member of the National Party's board warned her about consequences of pursuing her grievances, and that she and her family members had been threatened by phone.
The National Party's former Clutha Southland chair Stuart Davie didn't want to answer when Melanie Reid asked if he had been threatened too.
But it is a question that needs an answer now that Newsroom has exposed things politicians in Southland and in Wellington wanted to hide.
Joining in 'The Conversation':
The Conversation is an international effort to bring academics and their expertise to an audience beyond the ivory tower.
Mediawatch asks its newly appointed New Zealand editor Veronika Meduna what it will bring to our media landscape.
Silver spacesuits and meals in pill form? The pitfalls of portraying the future:
Predicting the future is a risky business for programme-makers. They can easily end up on the wrong side of history, looking stupid. Dan Salmon bit the bullet 14 years ago with a series imagining New Zealand life in 2050.
TVNZ’s five-day futurism binge last week What Next? wasn’t the first TV series to ponder New Zealand life in the years to come.
14 years before TVNZ looked ahead to 2037, TV3 screened 2050: What If?
This series, coincidentally commissioned by the same TV executive Jude Callen, imagined three very different futures: one in which tino rangatiratanga comes to pass; one in which New Zealand goes truly clean, green and organic by law - and the opening episode pondered life as the seventh state of Australia.
They included a range of experts, pundits and stirrers, some of whom were a bit more blunt than the the rather earnest experts in What Next? The series was named best documentary at the NZ Television Awards and the Qantas Media Awards in 2004.
“Both series were vehicles for discussing critical issues we are going to face, as a nation and as a species," the series creator and producer Dan Salmon back told Mediawatch.
"I was thinking about . . . what would provoke middle New Zealand and I thought, 'Well, the Aussies take over, the Maori take over, the Greens take over," said Dan Salmon back in 2003.
He chose the date 2050 because that is as far as official Stats NZ projections go, and today's children would still be alive.
He coined the term "social fiction", as opposed to science fiction, to describe the approach.
Each episode featured a fictional family called the Smiths: a Pakeha dad, a Maori mum and two kids. (a boy and a girl, naturally . . . )
"I was joking to my wife that the father, played by Bruce Hopkins, foreshadowed the grouchy middle-aged white guy thing we have at the moment: a little bit Mennonist, a little bit under siege. Bruce was a precursor to the 'what about me?' thing going on in social media at the moment," he says.
"One thing we can predict - but which wasn't as much a part of my series as it should have been - was climate change. That is going to have a massive impact on our country and our world. How we deal with that is going to determine our economic and political health. That's was we need to be having a discussion about," says Dan Salmon.
"If I made those programmes again, I would change those scenarios up a gear," he says.
"There are things we can't predict but we do know that the big technological changes always surprise us. We wanted to dramatise a recognisable but different future (in 2050: What If?) but if you get sucked down the vortex of showing the minutiae of how that looks, then you're losing - because we're not all riding hoverboards and living like The Jetsons," says Dan Salmon
Dan Salmon says most efforts to portray the future have been fictional. He points to Occupied, a recent Norwegian TV drama created by author Jo Nesbo. It stirred up diplomatic strife by portraying a near-future Russian takeover of Norway sparked by an energy crisis.
"It was a recognisable and not-too-distant future. But we can deal with these future scenarios in an intelligent and thoughtful way in non-fiction too. We should always be discussing what our future might look like, and how our actions might impact that, in all our art forms," he says.
What Next? was live on TV and online on five consecutive nights and it was praised for getting serious New Zealand issues discussed on prime time TV and persuading people at home to take part.
TVNZ says nearly 1.5 million people watching the show on TV at some point across the week, and there were 350,000 video views on Facebook.
TVNZ also claimed there were more than 200,000 online responses to the show's questions and this showed “overwhelmingly, Kiwis want change.”
But in a review published on stuff.co.nz last Monday, associate professor in Media and Communication at the University of Auckland Luke Goode disagreed.
"Poorly framed questions, scattergun topics and a disconnect between studio discussion and audience feedback made it seem more like interactivity for its own sake than a platform for serious public debate," he wrote.
Viewers were asked if they wanted to live to 130 years of age, and if they'd give eats bugs instead of beef to help the environment.
But the answers were expressions of personal preferences rather than public policy, he said.
In the NBR last weekend, technology consultant Roger Dennis said What Next? far outstripped any previous effort address the future - and the results were meaningful.
But he felt What Next? only scratched the surface.
"The nature of live television means that deep coverage of the topics isn’t possible. Perhaps the next step could be a series of live events around the country that allow people to engage at a deeper level," he said.
Simon Wright and John Pennington run a company called Public Engagement Projects and have created a platform called HiveMind in partnership with news website scoop.co.nz
The idea is to get large groups of people to share their knowledge or opinions to produce “collective intelligence” about complex and challenging problems.
Scoop.co.nz has run HiveMind projects on issues including sugar and obesity, and making housing affordable
Individuals taking part agree or disagree with a series of statements, and they can see where their opinions fit among clusters formed by those of others people taking part.
The online visualisations are live, with clusters forming, moving and even splitting apart as more and more people take part.
The visualisations look abstract at first glance, but are actually quite simple to interpret. Taking part doesn't take long either.
"You've probably seen 'recommended products' on Amazon, or 'recommended movies' on Netflix," says scoop.co.nz by way of explanation.
"Each of those services uses statistics to group you with people who buy and watch similar things, then show you things that those people bought or watched. When you cast a vote on a comment, you are grouped with people who voted like you did," says Scoop.
Jon Pennington says the comments people are confronted with could be the policy positions of lobby groups or political parties they might not otherwise consider, and they may find themselves surprised to discover their own views don't diverge from those of other people as much as they might have realised.
"We're still using mid-to-late 20th century tools to grapple with things like climate change and the changing nature of work. These are not questions we had to face until recently. They demand different ways of making decisions and this is a great time to experiment," says John Pennnington.
"It would be amazing if you were a doctor or a lawyer or architect and you stopped being up to date with the latest developments in your field's knowledge. Yet democracy and politics seem to be locked into a model that isn't engaging with current and new developments," he said.
From: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch