About 1000 pro-Palestinian protesters marked World Press Freedom Day — May 3 — today by marching on the public broadcaster Television New Zealand in Auckland, accusing it of 18 months of “biased coverage” on the genocidal Israeli war against Gaza.

They delivered a letter to the management board of TVNZ from Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA) co-chair John Minto declaring: “The damage [done] to human rights, justice and freedom in the Middle East by Western media such as TVNZ is incalculable.”

The protesters marched on the television headquarters near Sky Tower about 4pm after an hour-long rally in the heart of the city at a precinct dubbed “Palestine Square” in the Britomart transport hub’s Te Komititanga Square.

• READ MORE: Human rights group calls for probe into attack on Freedom Flotilla ship
• Too many journalists remain silent over the Gaza genocide, a threat to our media credibility — David Robie
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• RSF 2025 World Press Freedom rankings
• RSF World Press Freedom Index 2025: economic fragility a leading threat to press freedom
• Other Gazan journalist reports

Several opposition politicians spoke at the rally, calling for a ceasefire in the brutal war on Gaza that has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians with no sign of a let-up.

Labour Party’s disarmament and arms control spokesperson Phil Twyford was among the speakers that included Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and Ricardo Menéndez March.

All three spoke strongly in support of Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s Member’s Bill to sanction Israel for its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Davidson said the opposition parties were united behind the bill and all they needed were six MPs in the coalition government to “follow their conscience” to support it.

Appeals for pressure
They appealed to the protesters to put pressure on their local MPs to support the humanitarian initiative.

Palestinian activist Nadine Mortaja also appealed to the crowd: “Being a Palestinian from Gaza is one of the things I’m really proud of. There’s nothing worse than seeing your people suffer day in and day out. Seeing children starving.

“Use your platform. Speak up. Boycott those [Israeli] products we shouldn’t be using. Talk to the people around you.

“I’ve seen a real fatigue among people. It’s tiring. Exhausting but we need to keep showing up for the mothers of Gaza. The children of Gaza as well.”

In The Hague this week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard evidence from more than 40 countries and global organisations condemning Israel over its actions in deliberately starving the more than 2 million Palestinians by blockading the besieged enclave for more than the past two months.

Only the United States and Hungary spoke in support of Israel.

A senior diplomat from Qatar, a leading mediator country in the war, told the ICJ that Israel was conducting a “genocidal war against the Palestinian people” and weaponising humanitarian aid.

Mutlaq al-Qahtani, Qatari Ambassador to The Netherlands, also said there were “new trails of tears in the West Bank mirroring Gaza’s fate”.

Israel executing ‘genocidal war’ against Gaza, Qatar tells ICJ.    Video: Al Jazeera

Among the speakers in the Auckland rally, one of about 30 similar protests for Palestine across New Zealand this weekend, was coordinator Roger Fowler of the Auckland-based Kia Ora Gaza humanitarian aid organisation, who denounced the overnight drone attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla aid ship Conscience in international waters after leaving Malta.

The ship was crippled by the suspected Israel attack, endangering the lives of some 30 human rights activists on board. Fowler said: “That’s 2000 km away from Israel, that’s how desperate they are now to stop the Freedom Flotilla.”

He reminded protesters that Marama Davidson and retired trade unionist Mike Treen had been on previous aid protest voyages in past years trying to break the Israeli blockade, but there was no New Zealander on board in the current mission.

Media ‘credibility challenge’
Journalist and Pacific Media Watch convenor Dr David Robie spoke about World Media Freedom Day. He paid a tribute to the sacrifices of 211 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel — many of them targeted — saying Israel’s war on Gaza had become the “greatest credibility challenge for journalists and media of our times”.

Too many journalists remain silent over the #Gaza genocide, a threat to our media credibility #CafePacific #mediafreedom #PressFreedomDay #NZpol #WorldPressFreedomDay2025 @palestine @palestine @OnlinePalEng @Aam_For_Freedom @PalestineAusNZ https://t.co/aBoQGDoL53 pic.twitter.com/FO7ly4wk3w

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) May 4, 2025

Many protesters carried placards declaring slogans such as “TVNZ your biased reporting is shameful. Where is your integrity?”, “Journalists are not targets” and “Caring for the children of Palestine is what it’s about.”

After marching about 1km between Te Komititanga Square and the TVNZ headquarters, the protesters gathered outside the entrance chanting for fairness and balance in the reporting.

“TVNZ lies. For the past 18 months they have been nothing but complicit,” said Palestinian speaker Samer Almalalha to a chorus of: “Shame!”

He said: “Every time TVNZ lies, a little boy in Gaza dies.”

Nadine Mortaja said: “Every time the media lies, a little girl in Gaza dies.”

Deputation delivers TVNZ letter
A deputation from the protesters delivered the letter from PSNA’s John Minto addressed to the TVNZ board chair Alastair Carruthers but found the main foyer main entrance closed so the message was left.

Minto’s two-page letter calling for an independent review of TVNZ’s reporting on Palestine and Israel said in part:

“Over the past 18 months of industrial scale killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military in Gaza we have been regularly appalled at the blatantly-biased reporting on the Middle East by Television New Zealand.

“TVNZ’s reporting has been relentlessly and virulently pro-Israel. TVNZ has centred Israeli narratives, Israeli explanations, Israeli justifications and Israeli propaganda points on a daily basis while Palestinian viewpoints are all but absent.

“When they are presented they are given rudimentary coverage at best. More often than not Palestinians are presented as the incoherent victims of Israeli brutality rather than as an occupied people fighting for liberation in a situation described by the International Court of Justice as a ‘plausible genocide’.

“This pattern of systemic bias and unbalanced reporting is not revealed by TVNZ’s complaints system which focuses on individual stories rather than ingrained patterns of pro-Israel bias.

“Every complaint we have made to TVNZ has, with one minor exception, been rejected by your corporation with the typical refrain that it’s not possible to cover every aspect of an issue in a single story but that over time the balance is made up.

“Our issue is that the bias continues throughout TVNZ’s reporting on a story-by-story, day-by-day basis — the balance is never achieved. The reporting goes ahead just the way the pro-Israel lobby is happy with.”

The rest of the letter detailed many examples of the alleged systematic bias, such as failing to describe Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem and as “Occupied” territory as they are designated under international law, and failing to state the illegality of Israel’s military occupation.

Minto concluded by stating: “It is prolonging Israel’s illegal occupation, its apartheid policies, its ethnic cleansing and theft of Palestinian land. TVNZ is part of the problem – a key part of the problem.”

The letter called for an independent investigation.

New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has upheld complaints about two 1News reports relating to violence around a football match in Amsterdam between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.

The authority found an item on “antisemitic violence” surrounding the match, and another on heightened security in Paris the following week, breached the accuracy standard.

In a majority decision, the BSA upheld a complaint from John Minto on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) about reporting on TVNZ’s 6pm 1News bulletin on 9 November 2024.

• READ MORE: Media bias, inaccuracy and the violence in Amsterdam – The Listening Post
• Other Broadcasting Standards reports

This comprised a trailer reporting “antisemitic violence”, an introduction by the presenter with “disturbing” footage of violence against Israeli fans described by Amsterdam’s mayor as “an explosion of antisemitism”, and a pre-recorded BBC item.

TVNZ upheld one aspect of this complaint over mischaracterised footage in the trailer and introduction. This was originally reported as showing Israeli fans being attacked, but later corrected by Reuters and other outlets as showing Israeli fans chasing and attacking a Dutch man.

“The footage contributed to a materially misleading impression created by TVNZ’s framing of the events, with an emphasis on antisemitic violence against Israeli fans without acknowledging the role of the Maccabi fans in the violence – despite that being previously reported elsewhere,” the BSA found.

A majority of the authority found TVNZ did not make reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy.

It considered the background to the events was highly sensitive and more care should have been taken to not overstate or adopt, without question, the antisemitic angle.

The minority considered it was reasonable for TVNZ to rely on Reuters, the BBC and Dutch officials’ description of the violence as “antisemitic”, in a story developing overseas in which not all facts were clear at the time of broadcast.

The authority considered TVNZ should have issued a correction when it became aware of the error with the footage. It therefore found the action taken was insufficient, but considered publication of the BSA’s decision to be an adequate remedy in the circumstances.

Western media’s embarrassing failures on Amsterdam violence.    Video: AJ’s The Listening Post

In a separate decision, the authority upheld two complaints about a brief 1News item on 15 November 2024 reporting on heightened security in Paris in the week following the violence.

The item reported: “Thousands of police are on the streets of Paris over fears of antisemitic attacks . . . That’s after 60 people were arrested in Amsterdam last week when supporters of a Tel Aviv football team were pursued and beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters.”

TVNZ upheld both complaints under the accuracy standard on the basis the item “lacked the nuance” of earlier reporting on Amsterdam, by omitting to mention the role of the Maccabi fans in the lead-up to the violence.

The authority agreed with this finding but determined TVNZ took insufficient action to remedy the breach.

“The broadcaster accepted more care should have been taken, but did not appear to have taken any action in response, or made any public acknowledgement of the inaccuracy,” the BSA said.

The authority found the framing and focus careless, noting “the role of both sides in the violence had been extensively reported” by the time of the 15 November broadcast. TVNZ had also aired the mischaracterised footage again, not realising Reuters had issued a correction several days earlier.

As TVNZ was not monitoring the Reuters fact-check site, the correction only came to light when the complaints were being investigated.

Other standards raised in the three complaints were not breached or did not apply, the authority found.

The BSA did not consider an order was warranted over the item on November 15 – deciding publication of the decision was sufficient to publicly acknowledge and correct the breach, censure the broadcaster and give guidance to TVNZ and other broadcasters.

• The full adjudication

By the time US President Donald Trump announced tariffs on China and Canada last Monday which could kickstart a trade war, New Zealand’s diplomats in Washington, DC, had already been deployed on another diplomatic drama.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz had said on social media it was “difficult to treat New Zealand as a normal ally . . .  when they denigrate and punish Israeli citizens for defending themselves and their country”.

He cited a story in the Israeli media outlet Ha’aretz, which has a reputation for independence in Israel and credibility abroad.

• READ MORE: Mark Brown on China deal: ‘No need for NZ to sit in the room with us’
• NZ-Kiribati fallout: Maamau’s inability to engage with NZ difficult to defend
• NZ-Kiribati fallout: A ‘Pacific way’ perspective on the Peters spat

But Ha’aretz had wrongly reported Israelis must declare service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as part of “new requirements” for visa applications.

Winston Peters replied forcefully to Cruz on X, condemning Ha’aretz’s story as “fake news” and demanding a correction.

But one thing Trump’s Republicans and Winston Peters had in common last week was irritating Mexico.

His fellow NZ First MP Shane Jones had bellowed “Send the Mexicans home” at Green MPs in Parliament.

Winston Peters then told two of them they should be more grateful for being able to live in New Zealand.

‘We will not be lectured’
On Facebook he wasn’t exactly backing down.

“We . . .  will not be lectured on the culture and traditions of New Zealand from people who have been here for five minutes,” he added.

While he was at it, Peters criticised media outlets for not holding other political parties to account for inflammatory comments.

Peters was posting that as a politician — not a foreign minister, but the Mexican ambassador complained to MFAT. (It seems the so-called “Mexican standoff” was resolved over a pre-Waitangi lunch with Ambassador Bravo).

But the next day — last Wednesday — news of another diplomatic drama broke on TVNZ’s 1News.

“A deal that could shatter New Zealand’s close relationship with a Pacific neighbour,” presenter Simon Dallow declared, in front of a backdrop of a stern-looking Peters.

TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reported the Cook Islands was about to sign a partnership agreement in Beijing.

“We want clarity and at this point in time, we have none. We’ve got past arrangements, constitutional arrangements, which require constant consultation with us, and dare I say, China knows that,” Peters told 1News.

Passports another headache
Cook Islands’ Prime Minister Mark Brown also told Barbara Dreaver TVNZ’s revelations last month about proposed Cook Island passports had also been a headache for him.

“We were caught by surprise when this news was broken by 1News. I thought it was a high-level diplomatic discussion with leaders to be open and frank,” he told TVNZ this week.

“For it to be brought out into the public before we’ve had a time to inform our public, I thought was a breach of our political diplomacy.”

Last week another Barabara Dreaver scoop on 1News brought the strained relationship with another Pacific state into the headlines:

“Our relationship with Kiribati is at breaking point. New Zealand’s $100 million aid programme there is now on hold. The move comes after President [Taneti] Maamau pulled out of a pre-arranged meeting with Winston Peters.”

The media ended up in the middle of the blame game over this too — but many didn’t see it coming.

Caught in the crossfire
“A diplomatic rift with Kiribati was on no one’s 2025 bingo card,” Stuff national affairs editor Andrea Vance wrote last weekend in the Sunday Star-Times.

“Of all the squabbles Winston Peters was expected to have this year, no one picked it would be with an impoverished, sinking island nation,” she wrote, in terms that would surely annoy Kiribati.

“Do you believe Kiribati is snubbing you?” RNZ Morning Report’s Corin Dann asked Peters.

“You can come to any conclusion you like, but our job is to try and resolve this matter,” Peters replied.

Kiribati Education Minister Alexander Teabo told RNZ Pacific there was no snub.

He said Kiribati President Maamau — who is also the nation’s foreign minister — had been unavailable because of a long-planned and important Catholic ordination ceremony on his home island of Onotoa — though this was prior to the proposed visit from Peters.

On Facebook — at some length — New Zealand-born Kiribati MP Ruth Cross Kwansing blamed “media manufactured drama”.

“The New Zealand media seized the opportunity to patronise Kiribati, and the familiar whispers about Chinese influence began to circulate,” she said.

She was more diplomatic on the 531pi Pacific Mornings radio show but insistent New Zealand had not been snubbed.

Public dispute “regrettable’
Peters told the same show it was “regrettable” that the dispute had been made public.

On Newstalk ZB Peters was backed — and Kiribati portrayed as the problem.

“If somebody is giving me $100m and they asked for a meeting, I will attend. I don’t care if it’s my mum’s birthday. Or somebody’s funeral,” Drive host Ryan Bridge told listeners.

“It’s always very hard to pick apart these stories (by) just reading them in the media. But I have faith and confidence in Winston Peters as our foreign minister,” PR-pro Trish Shrerson opined.

So did her fellow panellist, former Labour MP Stuart Nash.

“He’s respected across the Pacific. He’s the consummate diplomat. If Winston says this is the story and this is what’s happening, I believe 100 percent. And I would say, go hard. Winston — represent our interests.”

‘Totally silly’ response
But veteran Pacific journalist Michael Field contradicted them soon after on ZB.

“It’s totally silly. All this talk about cancelling $104 million of aid is total pie-in-the-sky from Winston Peters,” he said.

“Somebody’s lost their marbles on this, and the one who’s possibly on the ground looking for them is Winston Peters.

“He didn’t need to be in Tarawa in early January at all. This is pathetic. This is like saying I was invited to my sister’s birthday party and now it’s been cancelled,” he said.

Not a comparison you hear very often in international relations.

In his own Substack newsletter Michael Field also insisted the row reflected poorly on New Zealand.

“While the conspiracy around Kiribati and China has deepened, no one is noticing the still-viable Kiribati-United States treaty which prevents Kiribati atolls [from] being used as bases without Washington approval,” he added.

Kiribati ‘hugely disrespectful’
But TVNZ’s Barbara Dreaver said Kiribati was being “hugely disrespectful”.

In a TVNZ analysis piece last weekend, she said New Zealand has “every right to expect better engagement than it has been getting over the past year.”

Dreaver — who was born in and grew up in Kiribati and has family there — also criticised “the airtime and validation” Kwansing got in the media in New Zealand.

“She supports and is part of a government that requires all journalists — should they get a visa to go there — to hand over copies of all footage/information collected,” Dreaver said.

Kwansing hit back on Facebook, accusing Dreaver of “publishing inane drivel” and “irresponsible journalism causing stress to locals.”

“You write like you need a good holiday somewhere happy. Please book yourself a luxury day spa ASAP,” she told TVNZ’s Pacific Affairs reporter.

Two days later — last Tuesday — the Kiribati government made percent2CO percent2CP-R an official statement which also pointed the finger at the media.

“Despite this media issue, the government of Kiribati remains convinced the strong bonds between Kiribati and New Zealand will enable a resolution to this unfortunate standoff,” it said.

Copping the blame
Another reporter who knows what it’s like to cop the blame for reporting stuff diplomats and politicians want to keep out of the news is RNZ Pacific’s senior journalist and presenter Lydia Lewis.

Last year, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese questioned RNZ’s ethics after she reported comments he made to the US Deputy Secretary of State at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga — which revealed an until-then behind closed doors plan to pay for better policing in the Pacific.

She’s also been covering the tension with Kiribati.

Is the heat coming on the media more these days if they candidly report diplomatic differences?

“There’s no study that says there are more people blaming the media. So it’s anecdotal, but definitely, both the public and politicians are saying the media (are) making a big deal of things,” Lewis told Mediawatch.

“I would put the question back to the public as to who’s manufacturing drama. All we’re doing is reporting what’s in front of us for the public to then make their decision — and questioning it. And there were a lot of questions around this Kiribati story.”

Lewis said it was shortly before 6pm on January 27, that selected journalists were advised of the response of our government to the cancellation of the meeting with foreign minister Peters.

Vice-President an alternative
But it was not mentioned that Kiribati had offered the Vice-President for a meeting, the same person that met with an Australian delegation recently.

A response from Kiribati proved harder to get — and Lewis spoke to a senior figure in Kiribati that night who told her they knew nothing about it.

Politicians and diplomats, naturally enough, prefer to do things behind the scenes and media exposure is a complication for them.

But we simply wouldn’t know about the impending partnership agreement between China and the Cook Islands if TVNZ had not reported it last Monday.

And another irony: some political figures lamenting the diplomatically disruptive impact of the media also make decidedly undiplomatic responses of their own online these days.

“It can be revealing in the sense of where people stand. Sometimes they’re just putting out their opinions or their experience. Maybe they’ve got some sort of motive. A formal message or email we’ll take a bit more seriously. But some of the things on social media, we just take with a grain of salt,” said Lewis.

“It is vital we all look at multiple sources. It comes back to balance and knowledge and understanding what you know about and what you don’t know about — and then asking the questions in between.”

Big Powers and the Big Picture
Kwansing objected to New Zealand media jumping to the conclusion China’s influence was a factor in the friction with New Zealand.

“To dismiss the geopolitical implications with China . . .  would be naive and ignorant,” Dreaver countered.

Michael Field pointed to an angle missing.

“While the conspiracy around Kiribati and China has deepened, no one is noticing the still viable Kiribati-United States treaty which prevents Kiribati atolls being used as bases without Washington approval,” he wrote in his Substack.

In the same article in which Vance called Kiribati “an impoverished, sinking island nation” she later pointed out that its location, US military ties and vast ocean territory make it strategically important.

Questions about ‘transparency and accountability’
“There’s a lot of people that want in on Kiribati. It has a huge exclusive economic zone,” Lewis said.

She said communication problems and patchy connectivity are also drawbacks.

“We do have a fuller picture now of the situation, but the overarching question that’s come out of this is around transparency and accountability.

“We can’t hold Kiribati politicians to account like we do New Zealand government politicians.”

“I don’t want to give Kiribati a free pass here but it’s really difficult to get a response.

“They’re posting statements on Facebook and it really has raised some questions around the government’s commitment to transparency and accountability for all journalists . . .  committed to fair media reporting across the Pacific.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Television New Zealand has breached its collective agreement with the E tū union when deciding on discontinuing programmes, the Employment Relations Authority has ruled.

It was announced in March that 68 staff members who work for news programmes Midday and Tonight, consumer justice programme Fair Go, current affairs programme Sunday, and the youth programme Re: and in-house video content production were affected by redundancy.

Last month, the company confirmed the axing of Fair Go and Sunday, along with its midday and late night news bulletins.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ programme, staff cuts reports

Yesterday, the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) ordered the broadcaster to go into mediation with E tū union.

“The Authority finds that TVNZ has breached cl 10.1.1 of the collective agreement,” the ruling stated.

It said that if after mediation, matters were not resolved, an order would be made against TVNZ to comply with its collective agreement.

Executives, staff gave evidence
TVNZ executives and staff were among those giving evidence in an investigation meeting at the ERA in Auckland on Monday relating to the state broadcaster’s alleged breaches in its redundancy process.

E tū union took the case against TVNZ, arguing the company did not follow the consultation requirements under its collective agreement with its members.

E tū wants more of a role in the initial decision-making, which it said TVNZ was obliged to do under the collective agreement.

But TVNZ opposed the application, claiming there had been no breach and that the company had clearly communicated to staff and unions that redundancies would take place.

In a statement, TVNZ said: “We are disappointed by the decision today from the Employment Relations Authority. We will now take the time to consider the decision and our next steps”.

Staff still employed
E tū negotiator Michael Wood told RNZ Checkpoint yesterday that the determination was a very clear one and any redundancy notices that had been issued were therefore not valid.

Staff still continue to be employed during this mediation because “there has not been a legitimate process to result in their redundancies”, Wood said.

It had been a “botched process”, he said.

“If you have an agreement with someone that says you’re going to work through something in a particular way, you need to follow it and TVNZ did not follow it in this case and the ERA has affirmed that.”

It had been an incredibly disruptive time for stuff and they were “really happy about this outcome”, Wood said.

The ERA said the clause that TVNZ had breached was an uncommon provision, but Wood said the company signed off on it.

“We would like to meet as soon as we reasonably can.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Television New Zealand Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to investigative journalism and Pacific communities in a ceremony at Government House, reports 1News.

She has been the Pacific correspondent for 1News since 2002, breaking many stories uncovering social and economic issues affecting Pacific people living in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Her investigative journalism has exposed major fraud, drug smuggling, corruption and human trafficking that has led to multiple arrests and government action.

• READ MORE: Pacific journalists are strong and ‘it’s up to us’, says honoured Barbara Dreaver — Khalia Strong
• Other Barbara Dreaver reports

Dreaver said it was “quite emotional” to receive the honour.

“I didn’t realise how special it was going to be until it actually happened. I’m so honoured, it’s hard to put it into words which is unlike me.”

Dreaver received the honour for services to investigative journalism and Pacific communities in a ceremony at Government House today.

‘Incredible’ family
Receiving the honour in front of her family “meant everything”, she said.

“You don’t get what you get without friends and family. My family are just incredible and my parents right from the beginning have been there for me, and I think that’s a big part of it.”

When asked what was next, Dreaver told 1News it was “back to work”.

“Keep doing what we do, telling New Zealand stories, telling Pacific stories is something we have to keep doing, and I will.”

Republished from 1News.

Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side gate entrance for media workers for about an hour.

The protest climaxed a week of critical responses from commentators and critics of TVNZ’s Q&A senior reporter/presenter Jack Tame’s 45-minute interview with Israel ambassador Ran Yaakoby last Sunday which Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott described as “a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months”.

• READ MORE: October 7: Forensic analysis shows Hamas abuses, many false Israeli claims
• Israel social security data reveals true picture of October 7 deaths
• Israel’s war on Gaza updates: Evidence of torture, executions in mass grave

Waving Palestine flags and placards declaring “Bias”, “silence is complicity — free Palestine,” and “Balanced journalism — my ass,” the protesters chanted “Jack Tame, you cannot hide – you’re complicit with genocide.”

Chalked on the pavement and on the walls were slogans such as “Jack ‘Shame’ helped kill MSM”, “TVNZ stop platforming genocide and Zionism”, “TVNZ genocide apologists” and “137 journalists killed” in reference to the mainly Palestinian journalists targeted by Israeli military forces.

Across the street, a wall slogan said: “TVNZ (Q&A) broadcast Israeli lies about Gaza”. Other slogans condemned the lack of Palestinian voices in TVNZ coverage – there are about 288 Palestinian people in New Zealand, according to the 2018 Census.

Palestinian advocate Billy Hania of the Palestinians in Aotearoa Coordinating Committee (PACC) said: “We demand TVNZ refrain from parroting the Israeli propaganda narrative and return to practise its duty of professional journalism.”

Ironically, TVNZ tonight screened a rare Palestinian story — a heart-rending report about the tragic death in Gaza of a baby girl, Sabreen Joudeh, “Patience” in Arabic, who had been saved from her dying mother’s womb after an Israeli air strike on their family home.

The TVNZ report interviewed the related Gouda family in Auckland hours before Abdallah Gouda, a doctor, flew out to Turkiye to join a humanitarian aid flotilla leaving for Gaza.

PSNA’s Neil Scott criticises TVNZ coverage of Gaza.   Video: Café Pacific

Criticism of ‘complicity’?
“Jack Tame, you’re a professional,” yelled PSNA secretary Scott through a loud hailer addressing TVNZ. “You know what would be set up, you have to know.

“But you allowed it to happen!”

“I don’t get you Jack, stupid or complicit? Complicit or stupid? One of the two.”

Critics are understood to be filing complaints about the alleged “one-sidedness” of the programme citing many specific criticisms.

“We’re here today because of Jack Tame’s Q&A report for TVNZ,” said Scott.

A Palestine protester calls out TVNZ journalist Jack Tame for alleged bias over Gaza. Video: Café Pacific

With the war having passed 200 days this week with more than 34,000 Palestinians having been killed — mostly children and women — and 392 bodies having been recovered from three separate mass graves discovered at two hospitals after they were destroyed by the Israeli military, some of his complaints were that presenter Tame:

• Interviewed Ambassador Yaakoby at the Israeli Embassy in Wellington instead of at a TVNZ studio with the New Zealand flag being showed alongside the Israeli flag. “Tying the two countries together – a professional would have had the New Zealand flag removed”;
• Did not provide context around the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel at the start of the interview – “more than 75 years of repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled as refugees from their homeland in the 1948 Nakba”;
• Asking a series of questions that the Israeli ambassador “avoided, changed, or outright lied” in his response;
• Did not follow up with the questions as needed; and
• Avoided the questions that “would have placed the issue of the Israeli attack on Gaza” in context.

Platform for propaganda
“Essentially, Tame gave Israel a platform for propaganda to excuse the genocide happening in Gaza over the last six months,” said Scott.

Among the contextual questions that Scott claimed Tame should have questioned Ambassador Yaakoby on were the envoy’s unchallenged claim that “1400 people had been butchered” by Hamas fighters.

In fact, the documented figure is 1139 — 695 civilians, including 36 children, and 373 security force members, according to a France 24 report citing official sources.

“The ambassador didn’t mention that more than 350 Israeli soldiers were among those killed — at their military posts,” Scott said.

“Many of the others were aged between 18 and 40 and in the military reserves.”

Also, no mention was made of the controversial Hannibal Directive which reportedly led to the Israeli military killing many of its own countrymen and women captives as the resistance fighters retreated back to Gaza.

The controversial Q&A interview with Israeli Ambassador Ran Yaakoby. Video: TVNZ

Among other responses to TVNZ’s Q&A this week, Palestine solidarity advocate and PSNA chair John Minto declared in an open letter to TVNZ published by The Daily Blog that the programme “breached all the standards of decent journalism. In other words it was offensive, discriminatory, inaccurate and grossly unfair.”

‘Unchallenged lies’
“It wasn’t journalism – it was 45-minutes of uninterrupted and unchallenged Israeli lies, misinformation and previously-debunked propaganda. It was outrageous. It was despicable,” Minto wrote.

“The country which for six months has conducted genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza was given free rein to pour streams of the most vile fabrications and misinformation against Palestinians directly into the homes of New Zealanders. And without a murmur of protest from Jack Tame.

“Even the most egregious lies such as the ‘beheaded babies’ myth were allowed to be broadcast without challenge despite this Israeli propaganda having been discredited months ago.

“The interview showed utter contempt for Palestine and Palestinians as well as New Zealanders who were assailed with this stream of racist deceits and falsehoods with Q&A as the conduit.”

Among a stream of social media comments, one person remarked “On John Tame’s YouTube channel it gained a lot of comments fairly quickly . . .

“These comments were encouraging as at least 95 percent were denouncing the interview . . . with a lot of them debunking the endless stream of blatant lies and atrocity propaganda that poured out of the Israeli ambassador’s mouth.

“Most of the posters were obviously from our country and it was a great example of how Israel’s actions have shattered its reputation with their propaganda fooling hardly anyone anymore.

“It’s a bit like a little child with chocolate all over their face denying they ate the chocolate . . . except in Israel’s case it’s civilian blood all over their face . . .

“Anyway, when I revisited the thread the comments had been purged and deleted.”

On the Q&A YouTube channel, @ZaraLomas commented: “The fact that Q&A are deleting critical comments speaks volumes about their integrity (or lack thereof), and their faith in this shocking piece of ‘journalism’.”

PACC call for ‘truth and accuracy’
In a statement calling for “truth and accuracy in the face of state propaganda”, the Palestinians in Aotearoa Coordinating Committee (PACC) said that Palestinian New Zealanders were in a community that needed “accurate journalism, as we witness the deadliest period of modern history unfold for our people”.

A “hasty two-minute Palestinian response” in a news bulletin to follow the ambassador’s 45-minute interview as arranged by TVNZ was inadequate and rejected.

“Our stake in this is irrefutable. Palestinian perspectives need to be heard on their own terms, not just in brief response to Israeli propaganda,” said the PACC.

The committee called for a comprehensive 45-minute Q&A session with a Palestinian advocate to “ensure a balanced perspective”.

Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.

Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.

Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

• READ MORE: Donors urged to re­sume UN­R­WA fund­ing as re­view finds no Is­raeli ev­i­dence
• Media bias over Palestine
• Other War on Gaza reports

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.

Here is our interview with Israel Ambassador, Ran Yaakoby. From this morning’s @NZQandA https://t.co/pSHdxpccre

— Jack Tame (@jacktame) April 20, 2024

From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.

For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.

In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

The announced closure of Television New Zealand’s last primetime current affairs programme seems to be the final nail in the coffin for New Zealand’s television credibility. Coming a day after the announcement of the closure of Newshub, it shows that Kiwis have the worst television and video media in the Western world.

Let’s compare ourselves with our mates across the ditch. Australia’s ABC TV features a nightly current affairs show called 7.30. The blurb for it reads:

“Sarah Ferguson presents Australia’s premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.”

• READ MORE: Stuff to provide news bulletins to replace Newshub on Three
• Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism — Gavin Ellis
• Other Newshub reports

Clearly 7.30 is far more serious than our Seven Sharp with its fluffy stories and advertorials. The ABC also screens six weekly current affairs shows and documentaries this week. Shows like Australian Story, Four Corners and Media Watch.

But Australia has five times as many people as we do so that’s why they can afford it, right?

Ireland has five million people, like NZ, but they still have primetime current affairs. In fact, the Irish enjoy quite a lot of it. The Irish version of TVNZ is RTÉ and features a nightly current affairs show called Nationwide and three weekly current affairs programmes on serious topics.

There are several other human interest factual programmes too, on subjects like history, gardening, dance and more. It’s the same in other countries with similar populations such as Norway, Denmark, Finland and so on.

It’s true that in New Zealand, there’s still the off-peak studio politics programmes like Q+A, and current affairs in te ao Māori are well examined on Whakaata Māori. But what about the rest of NZ?

Some people might say television is dead, and everything is online now. But nearly all online current affairs videos start out as television programmes. The only exceptions are Newsroom’s video investigations with Melanie Reid, and Stuff Circuit which is now disbanded. And for younger audiences there is Re: which TVNZ is also making cuts to.

Death of current affairs TV
The death of New Zealand’s prime-time current affairs television has been a long time coming. At first it was documentaries that dwindled and then disappeared off our screens.

Other genres that are expensive to produce have also become extinct or rarer than a fairy tern — drama, science programmes, kidult, arts programmes, wildlife documentaries, chat shows. Now we can add consumer affairs and prime-time current affairs to the list.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If other countries can do it, why not NZ?

On Wednesday, the Minister for Media and Communications, Melissa Lee, said “I don’t think I can actually save anything. I’m trying to be who I am, the Minister for Media and Communications.”

This suggests either a lack of understanding of her role or a lack of ambition. She also let slip that there was no way she could save Newshub.

The only substantive solution to come from the minister is her promise to review the Broadcasting Act. But that review process was initiated by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage years ago and started under the Labour government.

Moreover, the Broadcasting Act does little more than lay out the rules for broadcasting complaints, election broadcasting, and establish NZ On Air, the BSA and Te Māngai Pāho.

Minister just tweaking
The minister says she is reviewing the Broadcasting Act to create a “more level playing field” and allow media businesses to “innovate”. That doesn’t sound like it will do much for television and video current affairs, which will take much more than just tweaking how NZ On Air and the BSA work.

Perhaps she intends something much more comprehensive, such as a new funding stream for public media, perhaps through a levy, a compulsory subscription, or even a licence fee.

Despite her protestations, there are several options available to the minister. To save TVNZ’s Fair Go and Sunday, she could provide TVNZ with an interim cash injection (which is actually what governments often do in disasters) until the comprehensive long-term funding is sorted out.

To save Newshub she could promise to remove advertising from TVNZ, or partially on weekends only. This would throw Warner Bros Discovery a lifeline in the form of advertisers looking for a television station to advertise on. She does not have to stand by and watch while our media burns.

Sunday is only with us for a few more weeks. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Myles Thomas is a trustee for Better Public Media Trust. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

Many observers said this had been coming but few seemed to have a plan for it, including the government. 

Mediawatch looks at what viewers will lose, efforts to resist the cuts and talks to the news chief at Newshub which is set to close completely.

By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

On the AM show last Wednesday, newsreader Nicky Styris suffered a frog in the throat at the wrong time.

Host Melissa Chan Green took over her bulletin while Styris quickly recovered. Minutes later Styris had to take the place of no-show panel guest Paula Bennett.

Just before that, viewers saw co-host Lloyd Burr on his knees fixing the studio flat-pack furniture with a drill.

Three hours later they were at an all-staff meeting at which executives from offshore owner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) confirmed the complete closure of Newshub by midyear.

On TVNZ’s Midday news soon after, reporter Kim Baker-Wilson was live from the scene of the announcement of Newshub’s demise.

The previous day the roles were reversed, with Newshub’s Simon Shepherd outside TVNZ’s building reporting TVNZ’s Midday had been scrapped, along with the late news Tonight and Fair Go. 

On Wednesday TVNZ also confirmed flagship current affairs show Sunday will cease next month.

So as things stand, it’s the end of the line for all news bulletins on TVNZ other than 1 News at 6, though the news-like shows Breakfast and Seven Sharp survive because they accommodate lucrative sponsored content (“activations” in the ad business) as well as ads.

And TV channel Three will be entirely news-free for the first time in its 35-year history.

Senior journalists led by investigations editor Michael Morrah presented a proposal for a stripped-back and shortened news bulletin to keep the Newshub name alive (and some jobs) but while WBD took it seriously, it eventually turned the idea down.

Another media player to fill the Newshub void?
There have been rumours and reports that other media companies were talking to WBD about filling the Newshub at 6 news void.

Initially light-on-detail reports of lifelines suggested a possible sale of Newshub to another media company. Then there were reports of other media companies pitching to make news for WBD on a much-reduced budget.

Among the names mentioned in media despatches was NZME, which has radio and video studios and journalists around the country, though most of them are north of Taupo.

NZME told Stuff “it was not currently part of the process”.

The Herald’s Media Insider column reported on Tuesday that Newshub was “set to receive a lifeline” and understood Stuff was “among the leading contenders.”

However when Stuff itself reported on Wednesday that Stuff was “understood to be a likely contender,” a spokesperson for Stuff declined to comment to Stuff’s reporter on whether Stuff had been in talks with WBD — or not.

RNZ said it wasn’t in the frame for this. (It recently killed off the video version of its only daily news show with pictures, Checkpoint).

Sky TV has production facilities galore and its free-to-air TV channel Sky Open currently runs a Newshub-made news bulletin at 5:30 each weekday. Sky has only said it was an “interesting idea” — or words to that effect.

“At this point there is no deal,” WBD local boss Glen Kyne told reporters after confirming the closure of Newshub on Wednesday.

Kyne also said the company’s “door has been open to all internal and external feedback and ideas, and we will continue to be”.

But anyone opening that door clearly isn’t willing to do it in daylight — or  tell the rest of the media about it.

Lifelines likely?

If there is to be any kind of “Newshub-lite” lifeline, a key question is: what is WBD prepared to pay for the programme?

Presumably not much, given that they said they had no choice but to carve the cost of Newshub — amounting to tens of millions a year — from its bottom line in line with its reducing revenue.

So is it worth any major media company’s while to commit to making news in video for another outlet? And it would have to be done in a hurry because the last Newshub bulletins screen on July 5.

When Newshub’s owners first announced they wanted to get rid of it in late February, its former chief editor Hal Crawford told Mediawatch the problem with finding a buyer was that minimum viable cost for a credible TV news operation was greater than anyone here was prepared to spend.

Longtime TV3 news boss Mark Jennings (now co-editor of Newsroom) said any substitute service on the fraction of the current budget would have another problem — TVNZ’s 1 News.

“You’re up against a sophisticated TVNZ product so viewers will have an immediate comparison. Probably that won’t be favorable for Warner Brothers,” he told RNZ.

TVNZ has its own news production problems after the cuts they confirmed this week.

“We’re proposing to establish a new long-form team within our news operation, which would continue to bring important current affairs and consumer affairs stories to Aotearoa in a different way on our digital platforms.”

TVNZ declined Mediawatch‘s request to speak to TVNZ’s news chief Phil O’Sullivan about that at this time.

Newshub’s news boss responds

One who did though is Newshub news boss Richard Sutherland — appointed as interim senior director of news at Newshub in January.

It was his second spell at Newshub, during a career in broadcast news spanning four decades at almost every significant national news outlet in the country, including RNZ, where he stepped down as head of news a year ago.

In that time he’s experienced many a financial crisis in the business — but did he see this one coming?

“The last couple of weeks has been coming for quite some time. I think that the so-called legacy news operations have almost done too good a job of keeping the lights on and papering over the cracks. And we just got to a point [the industry] couldn’t paper over the cracks any longer.

“But when you look at audience behaviour and the fall off and revenue, particularly in the advertising market, then that doesn’t surprise me that we’ve got to where we’ve got to.”

But if the audience was big, the ad revenue would be too?

“It’s certainly by no means as big as it once was simply because people have other options available to them. The cliche is that you’re not in a war with the other media, but in a war for people’s attention.”

“It’s not so much the audience has changed so much as the dynamics of the advertising market that has really changed over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. The digital advertising — and the big two main players in that space, Facebook and Google — are eating everybody’s lunch.”

TV ad income on the slide
Annual advertising stats that came out this very week show media in 2023 attracted $3.36 billion across the whole of the media industry — about the same as in 2022.

But TV advertising revenue of $517 million in 2022 slumped to $443 million last year.

“That’s why what the TV industry has found is that can’t cut its costs fast enough to meet the falloff in the advertising income,” Sutherland told Mediawatch. 

Digital-only ad revenue rose by $88 million in 2023 — but it’s Google and Facebook which secures the vast bulk of that.

But if this has been coming for a number of years, as Sutherland says, has there been enough planning for it?

After the closure of Newshub was mooted by its owner last month, seven of Sutherland’s colleagues led by investigations editor Michael Morrah put together a transition plan to keep Newshub on air in a few days.

Shouldn’t this sort of transition planning have been done at high levels over recent years right across the television business?

“Every media company that I’ve worked for or have observed over the last few years has been trying to innovate and get to a more sustainable level. The revenue was just collapsing far faster than anyone ever anticipated.”

“It annoys me when I hear people say older media haven’t innovated enough. We’ve done a lot of innovation. That’s pretty lazy politics to just say: ‘You need to innovate.’

“It’s also lazy politics to say, the government should just come in and bail everyone out. New Zealand Incorporated needs to have a big conversation about what it wants to do with the media and how it wants to fund it.

“For the past few years the industry has been like so many rats in a sack, fighting with each chasing a smaller and smaller amount of ad dollars. We need to get together and work out how we get ourselves collectively out of the sack,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.

Shortly before TVNZ and Newshub announced their cuts, there was a meeting of chief executives including Newshub’s owners Warner Bros Discovery to discuss a shared new service. TVNZ rejected the idea.

“But a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And I would like to think that eventually we’ll get to a point where we can actually have honest and productive conversations about what we can do to help each other as well as maintaining a degree of competition, but also realising that if we just keep fighting with each other, we’re not going to have a sustainable industry,” Sutherland said.

Would Sutherland want to work for a low-budget alternative to Newshub stave off the complete closure? And would Kiwis want such a service?

“There is a segment of the audience that appreciates a very highly produced, well-curated news bulletin every night. And there’s large numbers of people who no longer see that as part of their media diet.

“The trick is to provide options so that people can get what they want when they want it.

“It’s not really for me to say what a possible replacement for Newshub might look like. I’m well away from those negotiations.

“If we reach a stage where the media scene here withers away to nothing, there’ll be no-one to tell the stories. The media uncovers a lot of shady stuff in this country.

“And the fear of media coverage prevents people in positions of power and authority at all levels doing a lot of shady stuff. So it is important to document the ructions of the New Zealand media scene just like we do in other parts of the country.”

Minister in a corner

The day the axe fell at Newshub and at TVNZ, New Zealand’s screen producers’ guild Spada said “while the newsroom cuts have dominated media coverage to date, it is actually the whole production sector being impacted”.

“While TVNZ and Three aren’t giving definitive numbers at this time, Spada has calculated that we are looking at around $50 million coming out of our sector,” said president Irene Gardiner.

Spada is also asking the government to exempt screen funding agencies from the percent public spending cuts and to force the international streaming platform to support local production.

Spada called for” swift and decisive action” from the government on this.

Should they be holding their breath?

When confronted by reporters for a response to the current TV news crisis, Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee said: “If only I was a magician, if I could actually just snap up a solution, that would be fantastic.

“But I’m not a magician, and I’m trying to find a solution to modernise the industry . . .  there is a process happening.”

But the media are not expecting magic — just a plan rather than assertions of a process with no timeline.

She has repeatedly said she’s preparing policy in a paper to take to cabinet, but refused to give any details.

On RNZ’s Checkpoint, persistent and pointed questions from Lisa Owen yielded few further clues.

Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis-Allan told Melissa Lee she was being “weird and shady” and the next morning ZB’s Mike Hosking told her she was using “buzzwords that don’t mean anything” and was doomed to fail.

Stuff’s Tova O’Brien reported that the need to consult coalition allies on policy means it can’t be progressed until after Winston Peters returns from overseas at the end of the month.

The under-wraps media policy is also not in the government’s recently-released quarterly action plan.

Meanwhile this week, our two biggest TV news broadcasters ran out of time.

Ex-minister leading resistance to cuts

After his unenlightening on-air interview with minister Melissa Lee on Thursday morning, Mike Hosking’s ZB listeners told him she reminded them of ministers in the last government.

Coincidentally, one of them was also one of few people who did speak out about the crisis while it was unfolding.

Michael Wood represented TVNZ journalists from the E tū union as its negotiations specialist.

E tū  is now taking legal action against TVNZ, claiming it failed to abide by the conditions of their employment agreement.

Could that reverse or wind back any of the cuts TVNZ has announced?

“That does remain to be seen. The collective agreement has very clear processes around what should happen if TVNZ wants to move forward and make changes. It requires [staff members] to be involved throughout the process, and for the company to try and reach agreement with them. Our very strong view is that that hasn’t happened.”

“Staff have said: ‘Look, five years ago, we came to you and said we want to do these things with our shows to make sure they have a sustainable future to make sure that they have a strong online platform.’ And [TVNZ] frankly has not demonstrated strategy and leadership around those things.”

“These are still shows that are very, very popular. Canceling them will reduce costs, but based on TVNZ’s own information that they’ve provided, it will reduce revenue by more.”

It’s been difficult to get any media company executives or even journalists at the two companies affected by these cuts to talk about them, even off-the-record.

Wood is one of the few people who has spoken frankly to broadcasters’ executives, albeit confidentially behind closed doors.

“There is a bit of a delicate dance which has to happen when media companies themselves are making these decisions. And media need to report on that.

“So I have some sympathy, but these aren’t just individual employment issues. This is a public policy issue . . .  about whether we have a functioning and vibrant Fourth Estate.”

Wood was until last year a minister in the Labour government which could have averted the TVNZ cuts.

It spent more than $16 million planning a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a not-for-profit public media entity — but then scrapped it weeks before it was due to begin.

“You’ve just identified one of the core things that we’ve got to deal with. TVNZ, in terms of its statutory form, is neither one thing nor the other. It has a commercial imperative and it also has some other obligations in terms of public good.

“News and current affairs should be at the heart of that — and that is something that we should be much clearer about.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The future of Aotearoa New Zealand television news and current affairs is in the balance at the two biggest TV broadcasters — both desperate to cut costs as their revenue falls.

The government says it is now preparing policy to modernise the media, but they do not want to talk about what that might be — or when it might happen.

On Monday, TVNZ’s 1News was reporting — again — on the crisis of cuts to news and current affairs in its own newsroom.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ and Newshub reports

The extent of discontent about the proposed cuts had been made clear to chief executive Jodi O’Donnell at an all-staff meeting that day.

The news of cuts rocked the state-owned broadcaster when they were announced four days earlier.

In fact, it rocked the entire media industry because only one week earlier the US-based owners of Newshub had announced a plan to close that completely by mid year.

No-one was completely shocked by either development given the financial strife the local industry is known to be in.

But it seems no-one had foreseen that within weeks only Television New Zealand and Whakaata Māori would be offering national news to hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who still tune in at 6pm or later on demand.

Likewise the prospect of no TV current affairs shows (save for those on Whakaata Māori) and no consumer affairs watchdog programme Fair Go, three years shy of a half century as one of NZ most popular local TV shows of all time.

Yvonne Tahana’s report for 1News on Monday pointed out Fair Go staff were actually working on the next episode when that staff meeting was held on Monday.

All this raised the question — what is a “fair go” according to the government, given TVNZ is state-owned?

Media-shy media minister?
After the shock announcements last week and the week before, Minister of Media and Communications Melissa Lee seemed not keen to talk to the media about it.

The minister did give some brief comments to political reporters confronting her in the corridors in Parliament after the Newshub news broke. But a week went by before she spoke to RNZ’s Checkpoint about it — and revealed that in spite of a 24-hour heads-up from Newhub’s offshore owner — Warner Bros Discovery — Lee did not know they were planning to shut the whole thing.

By the time the media minister was on NewstalkZB’s Drive show just one hour later that same day, the news was out that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning.

In spite of the ‘no surprises’ convention, the minister said she was out of the loop on that too.

After that, it was TV and radio silence again from the minister in the days that followed.

“National didn’t have a broadcasting policy. We’re still not sure what they’re looking at. She needs to basically scrub up on what she’s going to be saying on any given day and get her head around her own portfolio, because at the moment she’s not looking that great,” The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Claire Trevett told RNZ’s Morning Report at the end of the week.

By then the minister’s office had told Mediawatch she would speak with us on Thursday. Good news — at the time.

Lee has long been the National Party’s spokesperson on media and broadcasting and Mediawatch has been asking for a chat since last December.

Last Sunday, TVNZ’s Q+A show told viewers Lee had declined to be interviewed for three weeks running.

Frustration on social media
At Newshub — where staff have the threat of closure hanging over them — The AM Show host Lloyd Burr took to social media with his frustration.

“There’s a broadcasting industry crisis and the broadcasting minister is MIA. We’ve tried for 10 days to get her on the show to talk about the state of it, and she’s either refused or not responded. She doesn’t even have a press secretary. What a shambles . . . ”

A switch of acting press secretaries mid-crisis did seem to be a part of the problem.

But one was in place by last Monday, who got in touch in the morning to arrange Mediawatch’s interview later in the week.

But by 6pm that day, they had changed their minds, because “the minister will soon be taking a paper to cabinet on her plan for the media portfolio”.

“We feel it would better serve your listeners if the minister came on at a time when she could discuss in depth about the details of her plan for the future of media, as opposed to the limited information she will be able to provide this Thursday,” the statement said.

“When the cabinet process has been completed, the minister is able to say more. That time is not now.”

The minister’s office also pointed out Lee had done TV and broadcast interviews over the past week in which she had “essentially traversed as much ground as possible right now”.

What clues can we glean from those?

Hints of policy plans
Even though this government is breaking records for changes made under urgency, it seems nothing will happen in a hurry for the media.

“I have been working with my officials to understand and bring the concerns from the sector forward, to have a discussion with my officials to work with me to understand what the levers are that the government can pull to help the sector,” Lee told TVNZ Breakfast last Monday.

A slump in commercial revenue is a big part of broadcasters’ problems. TVNZ’s Anna Burns Francis asked the minister if the government might make TVNZ — or some of its channels — commercial-free.

“I think we are working through many options as to what could potentially help the sector rather than specifically TVNZ,” Lee replied.

One detail Lee did reveal was that the Broadcasting Act 1989 was in play — something the previous government also said was on its to do list but did not get around to between 2017 and 2023.

It is a pretty broad piece of legislation which sets out the broadcasting standards regime and complaints processes, electoral broadcasting and the remit of the government broadcasting funding agency NZ On Air.

But it is not obvious what reform of that Act could really do for news media sustainability.

Longstanding prohibitions
The minister also referred to longstanding prohibitions on TV advertising on Sunday mornings and two public holidays. Commercial broadcasters have long called for these to be dumped.

But a few more slots for whiteware and road safety ads is not going to save news and current affairs, especially in this economy.

That issue also came up in a 22-minute-long chat with The Platform, which the minister did have time for on Wednesday.

In it, host Sean Plunket urged the minister not to do much to ease the financial pain of the mainstream media, which he said were acting out of self-interest.

He was alarmed when Lee told him the playing field needed to be leveled by extending regulation applied to TV and radio to online streamers as well — possibly through Labour’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.

“Are you seriously considering the government imposing tax on certain large companies and paying that money directly to your chosen media companies that are asking for it?” Plunket asked.

“I have actually said that I oppose the bill but what you have to do as the minister is listen to the sector. They might have some good ideas.”

When Plunket suggested Lee should let the market forces play out, Lee said that was not desirable.

Some of The Platform’s listeners were not keen on that, getting in touch to say they feared Lee would bail the media out because she had “gone woke”.

That made the minister laugh out loud.

“I’m so far from woke,” she assured Sean Plunket.

A free-to-air and free-to-all future?
At the moment, TVNZ is obliged to provide easily accessible services for free to New Zealanders.

TVNZ’s Breakfast show asked if that could change to allow TVNZ to charge for its most popular or premium stuff?

The response was confusing:

“Well ready accessibility would actually mean that it is free, right? Or it could be behind a paywall — but it could still be available because they have connectivity,” Lee replied.

“A paywall would imply that you have to pay for it — so that wouldn’t be accessible to all New Zealanders, would it?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked.

“For a majority, yes — but free to air is something I support.”

When Lee fronted up on The AM Show for 10 minutes she said she was unaware they had been chasing a chat with her for 10 days.

Host Melissa Chan-Green bridled when the minister referred to the long-term decline of linear real time TV broadcast as a reason for the cuts now being proposed.

“To think that Newshub is a linear TV business is to misunderstand what Newshub is, because we have a website, we have an app, we have streaming services, we’ve done radio, we’ve done podcasts — so how much more multimedia do you think businesses need to be to survive?

“I’m not just talking about that but there are elements of the Broadcasting Act which are not a fair playing field for everyone. For example, there are advertising restrictions on broadcasters where there are none on streamers,” she said.

Where will the public’s money go?
On both Breakfast and The AM Show, Lee repeated the point that the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money for broadcasting is at stake — and at risk if the broadcasters that carry the content are cut back to just a commercial core.

“The government actually puts in close to I think $300 million a year,” Lee said.

“Should that funding be extended to include the client of current affairs programs are getting cut?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked her.

“I have my own views as to what could be done but even NZ on Air operates at arm’s length from me as Minister of Media and Communications,” she replied.

It is only in recent years that NZ On Air has been in the business of allocating public money to news and journalism on a contestable basis.

When the system was set up in 35 years ago that was out of bounds for the organisation, because broadcasters becoming dependent on the public purse was thought to be something to avoid — because of the potential for political interference through either editorial meddling or turning off the tap.

That began to break down when TV broadcasters stopped funding programs about politics which did not pull a commercial crowd — and NZ started picking up the tab from a fund for so-called special interest shows which would not be made or screened in a wholly-commercial environment.

Online projects with a public interest purpose have also been funded by in recent years in addition to programmes for established broadcasters — as NZ on Air declared itself “platform agnostic”.

Public Interest Journalism Fund
In 2020, NZ on Air was given the job of handing out $55 million over three years right across the media from the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

That was done at arm’s length from government, but in opposition National aggressively opposed the fund set up by the previous Labour government.

Senior MPs — including Lee — claimed the money might make the media compliant — and even silent — on anything that might make the then-Labour government look bad.

It would be a big surprise if Lee’s policy plan for cabinet includes direct funding for the news and current affairs programmes which could vanish from our TV screens and on-demand apps within weeks.

This week, NZ on Air chief executive Cameron Harland responded to the crisis with a statement.

“We are in active discussions with the broadcasters and the wider sector to understand what the implications of their cost cutting might be.

“This is a complex and developing situation and whilst we acknowledge the uncertainty, we will be doing what we can to ensure our funding is utilised in the best possible ways to serve local audiences.“

They too are in a holding pattern waiting for the government to reveal its plans.

But as the minister herself said this week, the annual public funding for media was substantial — and getting bigger all the time as the revenues of commercial media companies shrivelled.

And whatever levers the minister and her officials are thinking of pulling, they need to do decisively — and soon.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The union representing Television New Zealand staff is calling on the public to join a campaign protesting the broadcaster’s plans to axe programmes and cut jobs.

Last week TVNZ announced plans to cut up to 68 jobs — and scrap several long-running shows, including Fair Go and Sunday.

E Tū union spokesperson Michael Wood has told Midday Report the Save Our Stories campaign united workers, viewers and supporters to remind TVNZ of its responsibilities.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: E Tū spokesperson Michael Wood on the TVNZ planned cuts
• Other NZ media cutback reports

“TVNZ isn’t just some business, it’s a vital part of our society and Kiwis need a strong TVNZ to tell Aotearoa’s stories and hold power to account.

“This is about everyone — every single New Zealander is a stakeholder in this, so we invite everybody who wants to build and protect a strong media landscape to support the campaign.”

People could help by signing an open letter to TVNZ, and sharing the campaign video, he said.

“So many people have reached out to our union to show their support for TVNZ workers and ask how they can help. From prominent public figures, to people whose lives have been changed thanks to TVNZ’s coverage, to dedicated viewers who don’t want to see their favourite shows get the axe,” he said.

“These people can help by signing the open letter, sharing our video, and sending the message to decision-makers that our media is worth protecting.”

TVNZ staff from the E Tū union voted unanimously to reject the proposals.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Television New Zealand’s chief executive has been challenged by the public broadcaster’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver at a fiery staff meeting over job cuts and axing of high profile programmes, reports The New Zealand Herald.

Writing in his Media Insider column today, editor-at-large Shayne Currie reported that Dreaver, one of TVNZ’s most respected and senior journalists, had made the challenge over the planned layoffs and axing of shows such as the current affairs Sunday and consumer affairs Fair Go.

Dreaver reportedly asked chief executive Jodi O’Donnell if she would apologise to staff — “apparently for referring to her watch during an earlier staff meeting on Friday”.

• READ MORE: Mediawatch: Apocalypse now for NZ news – take 2?
• TVNZ plans to axe Fair Go, Sunday, midday and night news in restructure
• NZ media people react with ‘shock’ over plan to close Newshub in June

“TVNZ would not confirm specific details last night, but it is understood O’Donnell pushed back during yesterday’s meeting, along the lines that perhaps she might also be owed an apology,” wrote Currie, a former Herald managing editor.

“One source said she talked at one stage about the response she had been receiving.”

Media Insider quoted a TVNZ spokeswoman as saying: “We expect sessions like this to be robust, but to give all TVNZers the opportunity to be free and frank in their participation, we don’t comment on the details of these internal meetings to the media.”

Dreaver told 1News last night: “We need really strong leadership and we expect to get it. And I’m quite happy to call out and challenge it [and] my own bosses when we don’t get that, just as I would a politician or any other person who deserves it.”

A ‘legend, icon, queen’
Media Insider reported that in a social media post today, Sunday journalist Kristin Hall had described Kiribati-born Dreaver as a “legend, icon, queen” for her Pacific reporting.

Legend, icon, queen

So proud to call @barbaradreaver a colleague https://t.co/FNksH6ih2f

— Kristin Hall (@kristinhallNZ) March 11, 2024

In November 2022, Dreaver was named Reporter of the Year at the New Zealand Television Awards and in 2019 she won two awards at the Voyager Media Awards for her coverage of the Samoa measles outbreak.

In this year’s New Year Honours, Dreaver was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to investigative journalism and Pacific communities.

Yesterday’s TVNZ meeting came amid a strained relationship between the TVNZ newsroom and management over the way the company has handled the announcement of up to 68 job cuts, as least two-thirds of them journalists.

The shock news followed a week after the US-based Warner Brothers Discovery announced that it would be closing its entire Newshub newsroom at the end of June.

Television New Zealand is proposing to axe its long-running and award-winning current affairs programme Sunday, hosted by veteran broadcaster Miriama Kamo.

It is part of plans to cut dozens of jobs at the public broadcaster.

Staff were learning which programmes will be affected at a series of meetings today.

• READ MORE: TVNZ to cut up to 68 jobs in restructure – ‘dire for democracy’
• Other TVNZ and Newshub reports

TVNZ said a proposal had been presented to Sunday staff which could result in cancellation of the programme.

The show was named Best Current Affairs Programme at the Voyager Media Awards and the New Zealand Television Awards last year.

It first aired in 2002 and has run for more than two decades, showcasing a mix of New Zealand stories and reports from overseas.

One award-winning investigation looked into the 2008 Chinese poisoned milk scandal, and how patients were treated at Porirua Hospital.

Veteran journalists like John Hudson, Janet McIntyre and Ian Sinclair have contributed to the show.

News bulletins may be canned
RNZ understands the 1News Midday and Tonight bulletins may also be canned, and consumer affairs programme Fair Go could to be cut too.

Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.

Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.

The remaining five staff will have a change in reporting line, reporting to TVNZ digital news and content general manager Veronica Schmidt.

RNZ has been told there will be a shift away from social media in a bid to drive more traffic to the Re: News website. Its documentary series funded by NZ On Air is also set to be canned.

The digital media platform was launched in 2017 as a current affairs platform aimed at audiences under-served by mainstream news.

It produces documentary videos, articles and podcasts particularly relevant to youth, Māori, Pasifika, rainbow communities, and migrant and regional audiences.

The platform won four awards at last year’s Voyager Media Awards, including best news, current affairs or specialist publication; video journalist of the year; best video documentary series; and best original podcast — seasonal/serial.

On average, Re: News receives more than a million video views each month.

Difficult choices
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell said in a statement that difficult choices had to be made to ensure the broadcaster remained sustainable.

It comes just a week after rival Newshub announced it had proposed to axe its entire news operation of 300 staff.

A hui for all news and current affairs staff is due to be held at 1pm, following the individual programme meetings.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, speaking at a press conference in Whangārei, said he was concerned about reports of job cuts and that it was a “pretty tough time if you’re a TVNZ employee”.

Luxon said consumers are consuming news in different ways and advertising and revenue models are changing.

He said it was a pretty tough time for people working in the media but he had travelled the country and many other sectors were doing it tough.

Media companies needed to evolve and innovate in order to adapt, he said.

Fair Go
Fair Go is one of New Zealand’s longest running and most popular television series.

The consumer affairs show, which investigates complaints from viewers, first aired in April 1977 and is just shy of its 47th birthday.

During a 2021 interview with RNZ’s Afternoons programme, original host and creator Brian Edwards said he was inspired by a BBC programme called That’s Life.

“One particular segment was on consumers and I think that was the germ of the idea, that we could do a programme in New Zealand where we could look at protecting people right there in their normal daily lives from rip offs and scams by various people and it it just soared from the beginning. I mean, it was tremendous,” Edwards said.

“I suppose my main function was to grill the villains, and because I’m a really quite unpleasant person, this fit in my my personality very well.”

Well-known presenter Kevin Milne hosted the show for almost three decades, from 1983 to 2010.

“It was beautifully set up, really, and it didn’t require any change as much and still hasn’t, you know, 44 years later,” he told Afternoons during the same interview.

‘Good deal of cynicism’
“I remember that there was a good deal of cynicism in the early days from the newsroom journalists who thought that because there was an element of entertainment on the show that you couldn’t call it real journalism, which was nonsense because it ended up leading the way in terms of investigative journalism.”

The show broke new ground, Milne said.

“It’s hard to believe now that back then, at the time when Brian set up those programmes, most broadcasters never named names. I can remember now hearing news stories which could say a well-known department store in Lambton Quay appeared in court this morning. No mention [of name], and when Fair Go started up, it was decided it would name names.”

Edwards said that was an “absolutely critical” aspect of the show.

“The thing would have been pointless I think, if you couldn’t name names. The thing was to expose the wrong doers if you like . . . what was the point in in doing that if you couldn’t name names?

“And I think we probably, together, our team, won some battles there and being able to do that. It took a while and I think there was a degree of nervousness by the broadcaster and eventually it turned out all right.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Television New Zealand will start talks from tomorrow with staff who will lose their jobs in the state broadcaster’s bid to stay “sustainable”.

It is proposed that up to 68 jobs will be cut which equates to 9 percent of its staff.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell told staff today that “tough economic conditions and structural challenges within the media sector” have hit the company’s revenue.

• READ MORE: RNZ’s live blog on the media cuts

She said “difficult choices need to be made” to ensure the broadcaster remained “sustainable”.

Changes like those proposed today were incredibly hard, but TVNZ needed to ensure it was in a stronger position to transform the business to meet the needs of viewers in a digital world.

RNZ understands a hui for all TVNZ news and current affairs staff will be held at 1pm tomorrow. This follows separate morning meetings for Re: News, Fair Go, and Sunday.

A TVNZ staffer told RNZ it was not yet clear what the meetings meant for those programmes — whether they were to be fully cut or face significant redundancies.

RNZ also understands 1News Tonight might also be affected.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said of the job cuts: “It’s incredibly unsettling”.

He said he felt for the staff there and acknowledged some would be at his media standup in Wellington.

Luxon said all media companies here and around the world were wrestling with a changing media environment.

Minister Shane Jones interrupted and said “a vibrant economy will be good for the media, bye bye”.

More than TVNZ 60 roles to go with 6pm news & current affairs threatened. Increasingly hard for free to air public broadcasters to survive commercially. Time to bite bullet & accept that as with BBC & Oz ABC, public broadcasting needs 2 be publicly funded? https://t.co/oL7awc7ag2

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) March 6, 2024

Former prime minister Helen Clark said on X it was becoming increasingly hard for free to air public broadcasters to survive commercially.

She asked if it was time to accept that, as with the BBC and ABC, public broadcasting should be publicly funded.

‘Dire implications for our democracy’
Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo said the news of jobs possibly being axed was “awful”.

“It’s devastating not just for our business, it’s devastating for what it means for our wider society.”

She said along with the likely demise of Newshub it had “dire implications for our democracy”.

When cuts were being made in news programmes at the state broadcaster that indicated how dire things had become.

“I’m very very concerned about what the landscape looks like going forward.”

A TVNZ news staffer who spoke to RNZ on the condition of anonymity said the most disappointing part of the process was finding out there would be job cuts via other media, such as RNZ and The New Zealand Herald.

“Our bosses didn’t have the decency to be transparent about what was going on. You know, they say that they’ve been forthcoming over the past month over what’s going to happen in this company and whatnot — they haven’t.

‘What sort of vision?’
“So it’ll be an interesting day tomorrow to see how widely the team’s affected, and to see what sort of vision they have for TVNZ, because in the time that I’ve been working there they keep talking about this digital transformation, and I haven’t seen any transformation yet.”

The mood among current staff this morning was “pretty pissy”, particularly from those affected.

“Obviously, not impressed,” the person said.

Media commentator Duncan Greive said some TVNZ staff were hopeful an argument could be made against the job losses.

Greive, who also founded The Spinoff, told RNZ’s Midday Report TVNZ staff working on Fair Go, Sunday and Re: News were invited to meetings today, and told to bring support people.

He said staff have told him the news was devastating, but said they didn’t yet know how deep and widespread the cuts would be — leaving them hopeful their teams would not be as impacted on as they feared.

Meanwhile, an organisation supporting news media staff said the hundreds of people facing redunancy would struggle to find new work in the industry.

Deeply unsettling
Media chaplaincy general manager Elesha Gordon said it was deeply unsettling for those whose livelihoods were on the line.

She said 368 people (from Newshub and TVNZ) with very specialised skillsets would be stepping out into an industry that would not have jobs for them.

Gordon said the proposed cuts were a “cruel and unfair symptom” of the industry’s financial state.

Last week, TVNZ flagged further cost cutting as it posted a first half-year loss linked to reduced revenue and asset write-offs.

The state-owned broadcaster’s interim financial results showed total revenue had fallen 13.5 percent from last year to $155.9 million.

Its net loss for the six months ended December was $16.8m compared to a profit of $4.8m the year before.

O’Donnell said the broadcaster’s management had tried to cut operating costs over the last year but there was now no option other than to look at job losses.

‘No easy answers’
“There are no easy answers, and media organisations locally and globally are grappling with the same issues. Our priority is to support our people through the change process — we’ll take the next few weeks to collect, consider and respond to feedback from TVNZers before making any final decisions.”

A confirmed structure is expected to be finalised by early April.

The layoffs at TVNZ have come one week after the shock announcement by the US corporation Warner Bros Discovery that it intended closing its Newshub operation in New Zealand by the end of June.

It means up to 300 people will lose their jobs.

Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee told RNZ Checkpoint yesterday she had spoken to TVNZ bosses last week but it was not up to her to reveal details of the conversation.

She declined to comment on Newshub’s offer to TVNZ to team up in some ways to cut costs, nor suggestions TVNZ could cut its 6pm news to half-an-hour or cancel current affairs programming.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.

RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.

In her report, political reporter Amelia Wade reminded viewers more than 30 years of TV news and current affairs — spanning the entire period of commercial TV here — could come to an end in June.

Before TV3 launched in 1989, state-owned TVNZ had been the only game in town.

But for most of its recent history, TV3’s parent company MediaWorks was owned by private equity funds and it was hamstrung with debts.

There were periodic financial emergencies too which seemed to signal the end.

In 2015, the boss Mark Weldon axed the current affairs shows Campbell Live and 3D and replaced them with ones that didn’t pull in more viewers or pull up many trees with their reporting.

“Reports of our death at 6pm have been greatly exaggerated”, host Hilary Barry responded to reports 3 News might be for the chop the following year.

But Weldon persuaded the owners to stump up a significant sum to launch Newshub instead.

When the huge global company Discovery bought MediaWorks loss-making TV channels in December 2020, many in the media were pleased a major media outfit was now in charge.

Using the Official Information Act, Newsroom later reported the Overseas Investment Office fast tracked Discovery’s application and sought no guarantees of a commitment to local news.

The 2021 mega-merger in the US that turned it into “Warner Bros Discovery” excited The Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve.

“Tova O’Brien breaking stories on CNN NZ at 6pm, before an evening of local reality TV souped up by global budgets and distribution — with major sports and drama rights for good measure,” was one scenario.

“It could also swing the other way, with the New Zealand linear asset seen as too small and obscure,” he warned.

After losses including a $35 million one last year, the owners now “propose” to slice out the entire on-screen and online news operation. New Zealand could lose more than 15 percent of its full-time journalists in one go.

Beginning of the end?

“Oh, the irony, right? When those so-called ‘vulture funds’ had it, the operation still continued, albeit always run on the smell of an oily rag. Then a big media organisation was the one which axed it,” long-serving TV3 current affairs journalist Eugene Bingham told Mediawatch.

“I’ve been around long enough to see death by a thousand cuts over the years. But this was a moment we’ll look back on as a watershed moment in democracy and journalism,” Bingham said.

Former MediaWorks executive Andrew Szusterman told RNZ’s Morning Report the next day this decision would also ripple out to local drama and entertainment.

“We’re going to start to see how this is going to impact the production sector. Irrevocably, possibly,” said Szusterman, now the chief executive at production company South Pacific Pictures.

Does Newshub’s demise also kill off Three?

There’s been no shortage of people this week pointing out the appetite for TV news — and linear TV in general — is not what it was. That’s the main reason for the ad revenue slump cited by WBD.

Some who do tune in to Three (and WBD’s other channels) for The Block, Married at First Sight and free movies may not miss the news shows from June 30. So maybe Three will be fine?

“The loss of the newsroom represents the loss of the ability to respond to any event in real time. That is the heart and soul of a traditional TV broadcaster,” Hal Crawford — chief news officer at MediaWorks (and effectively Newshub’s boss) until early 2020 — told Mediawatch.

“When the Queen dies you can send a team to London, you can have someone in the studio talking about it, you can interact in a way that makes people feel like it is alive and a real human entity.”

Channels without the live element news brings are effectively just “content databases”, Crawford told Mediawatch.

“News is the one programme that runs 365 days a year . . . which the schedule is going to rely on to lead into prime time. So the rest of your schedule is going to dwindle. Ratings are gonna fall off and everything is going to go to pieces.

“It really is going to dwindle as a cultural entity in New Zealand because you’re not going to be able to justify the funding from NZ on Air if you aren’t getting audiences. It’s hard for me to see a way out of Three basically going away as a cultural force in New Zealand.”

But TV-style news and current affairs is also now being done online.

After Eugene Bingham’s TV3 show 3D was axed in 2016, four members formed the Stuff Circuit investigative team. Its video documentary productions won awards until it was axed by Stuff late last year.

“Of course, there have been changes in viewing habits . . .  but there’s still a reason that the ‘1’ and the ‘3’ on remotes around the country are worn down. Hundreds of thousands of people at six o’clock flip the channel. Without a TV bulletin there, doesn’t (Three) just become like Bravo, where there’s just programmes running and you either switch on or you don’t?”

In the end, journalists have to confront the fact that not quite enough people these days care about what they do — including executives at media companies, politicians not inclined to intervene and members of the public.

Most New Zealanders are happy to use services like Netflix or Google search or Facebook that carry news and local content but contribute almost nothing to it.

“But I don’t think people quite understand the depth of the problem facing media and the implications. That certainly came through to me watching the broadcasting minister saying, well, people can still watch programmes like Sky for news,” Bingham said.

The National Party went into the last election without a media or broadcasting policy or any specific manifesto commitments.

What should/could the government do?

While Wednesday’s announcement shocked the 300-odd staff, the local chief executive Glen Kyne — close to tears on Newshub at 6 —  told Newshub’s Michael Morrah he had known about the possibility since January.

The government also got a heads-up earlier this week.

Media minister Melissa Lee told reporters WBD made no requests for help, prompting Glen Kyne to tell Newshub WBD did ask both the current and previous government for assistance, such as a reduction in the multi-million dollar fee paid to state-owned transmission company Kordia.

Lee later clarified her comment but was firm that the government had no role to play because this was a case of a private company taking action because “their business model actually wasn’t working.”

On Morning Report, Andrew Szusterman disagreed.

“Channels 7,9 and 10, SBS, ABC, and Fox in Australia all run news services. I don’t think their government would let the last commercial free-to-air news broadcaster just walk away. The fact the broadcasting minister hasn’t fronted . . .  it’s quite shameless,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report.

Stuff’s Tova O’Brien — who famously turned on her former employer MediaWorks on air in real time last year when it closed Today FM — called the minister’s response “cold and tone-deaf” and accused the government of a “glib shrug”.

That was partly because Lee’s first response to the Newshub announcement was to tell reporters: “There’s Sky as well, there’s a whole lot of other media about.”

Sky contracts Newshub to produce its 5.30pm free-to-air news bulletin — and Sky subscribers won’t find any locally-made news on Sky TV’s pay channels.

Lee should have known that. She was a programme-maker before she was an MP and was National’s spokesperson on broadcasting for years in opposition.

Lee declined all interview requests this week — including from Mediawatch — but did tell reporters at Parliament: “I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been. But I am taking this seriously.”

The PM told Stuff he is expecting an update at Cabinet on Monday. The media will be watching that space with pens and cameras poised.

There is legislation currently before a select committee which could compel the big online tech platforms to pay local producers of news for it.

In opposition, Lee opposed it and called it “literally a shakedown” in Parliament. (This weekend Facebook’s owner Meta announced it would not do any more deals with media under Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, prompting a likely confrontation with the government there.)

“The government’s position on this will obviously take into account these latest developments in terms of the wider media landscape. This government is committed to working with the sector on ways to ensure sector sustainability, while still preserving the independence of a fourth estate and avoiding market interference,” Lee said in Parliament on Thursday when questioned.

The government already heavily intervenes in the market by overseeing the state-owned broadcasters and agencies — including TVNZ — and putting over a quarter of a billion dollars every year onto broadcasting, programmes and other content.

The former government also put $80 million over two years into Māori media content, partly in the expectation there might also be a new public media entity to broadcast it.

In 2019, Hal Crawford — boss of Newshub at the time — declared the New Zealand news media is broken.

His chief executive also urged the government to intervene. AM show host Duncan Garner switched the studio lights off as an on-air stunt.

Crawford is now a digital media consultant based in his native Australia. The broadcasting funding agency in NZ On Air hired him in 2021 to review its own spending of public money on the media.

“It’s not a good idea for governments to knee jerk and sponsor particular commercial companies in some sort of bailout,” he said.

“To give money to the people who are in financially the worst position is the most ineffective and unfair use of public money that I can think of. If the market is telling you that something isn’t wanted and needed, you have to listen to that.

“But it doesn’t mean that you have to always listen to the market and do things that have never been done before.”

He cites the Public Interest Journalism Fund which put $55 million into new content and created new jobs for cash-strapped news media companies.

Crawford’s fact-finding report on the planned PIJF in 2021 records media managers feared cuts and possible closures to come.

“Many of our interviewees believed that if an organisation could show that cuts were imminent, they should be able to apply for funded roles under the PIJF. Many saw the dangers in this non-incremental funding, but argued for exceptions in extreme circumstances. Although these arguments are compelling, Funding could evaporate quickly trying to keep the newsrooms of big commercial companies afloat if this became the primary aim of the fund.”

“Around the world and in New Zealand, there’s ample evidence that public funding of journalism is becoming more essential. There has to be a way there, because what we’re seeing with the the planned closure of Newshub is the end result of the factors that we’ve known about for at least a decade,” Crawford told Mediawatch.

“Direct subsidy from the government to a commercial newsroom isn’t going to work. The government has to find a way to sensibly finance news and structure it so that it doesn’t become a political football.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Former broadcasting minister Willie Jackson has defended Aotearoa New Zealand’s public interest journalism fund that his government started during the covid-19 pandemic, after the new deputy prime minister characterised it as “bribery”.

Speaking to media on Monday after his swearing in, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters accused state-funded media organisations of a lack of independence from the previous Labour government.

Peters was asked how quickly he expected government departments to take action on removing te reo Māori from their names.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Journalism fund for media outlets all around the country – Willie Jackson
• Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters attacks state-funded media independence

“Well, we’ll see the speed at which TVNZ and RNZ — which are taxpayer owned — understand this new message. We’ll see whether these people, both the media and journalists — are they independent?,” he said.

“Well, isn’t that fascinating, I’ve never seen evidence of that in the last three years.” he said.

He then laughed, and said “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery, cannot defend $55 million of bribery. Get it very clear”.

That last remark was a reference to the Public Interest Journalism Fund, a three-year $55m contestable fund for journalists initially set up to shore up public interest media during the covid-19 pandemic, which was wound up in July.

Media jobs, development funded
This included funding for 219 jobs and 22 industry development projects. Political coverage was exempted from eligibility to benefit from it. The fund was administered by NZ On Air.

Jackson, who became broadcasting minister in the Labour government two years after the fund was set up, said it was for media around the country, not just state-funded organisations.

“It was introduced during covid because it was a disastrous time in terms of media and we were pressured by good people out there to say, ‘hey, you support financial institutions so how about supporting local media that’s struggling’.”

It was aimed at supporting New Zealand media to keep producing public interest stories, he said and was “not just for RNZ and for TVNZ”.

“What you saw was a great investment in support of media outlets, Māori, Pasifika, regional [outlets] … Gisborne Herald, Otago Daily Times, Asburton Guardian, they got support and an opportunity to rebuild, reset.

“I’m very proud of what we did.”

Influence denied
He denied the then Labour government had any influence over the media as a result.

“The rules are very clear, we can’t interfere, we can’t intervene . . .  You guys have to have your own independence.”

RNZ’s charter requires the broadcaster to be independent, including providing “reliable, independent, and freely accessible news and information”.

While the organisation is funded by the government, by law no ministers of the Crown or person acting on their behalf may give direction to RNZ relating to programming, newsgathering or presentation, or standards, and cannot have staff removed.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s public television broadcaster TVNZ is planning significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending in response to commercial clients’ reduced spending on advertising.

Future projects are under review and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff have also been scrapped at the state-owned broadcaster.

Staff were informed of the changes in a memo and video address today from acting chief executive Brent McAnulty.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ reports
• Other Mediawatch reports

The memo says senior executives have identified “all the possible cost savings opportunities we have” in recent weeks.

“Content budgets have been reduced, both for local production and international content. Remuneration reviews have been cancelled for our exec team and our other highest-earning employees,” it said.

“There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means,” McAnulty told staff.

“All projects are being reviewed to decide whether they should continue, be paused, or be cancelled for this financial year,” the memo said.

Digital technology overhaul
TVNZ currently has a tender out for a major overhaul of its digital technology and internet infrastructure.

“We’re also putting tighter controls on capital expenditure and we’re looking at how we can reduce casual and contractor labour costs,” the memo said.

“The TV advertising market is tough right now, and as the biggest player we are being impacted,” McAnulty told staff in today’s memo.

“Local businesses have been reducing their advertising spend because of the economic conditions, and uncertainty in the lead up to the election,” it said.

The memo urges staff to use up their leave this year.

Recruitment for vacant roles is “paused until 2024” and TVNZ is “choosing not to fill some other vacant roles” and will defer the starting dates for some roles.

TVNZ has more than 750 staff. More than 300 of them earn more than $100,000 a year.

Annual allowance dropped
An annual allowance of $350 paid to all staff — which was effectively a covid-19 relief initiative — will not be paid this year.

TVNZ has “paused” all travel for 2024 except “business-critical travel related to newsgathering, commercial clients and content negotiations”.

TVNZ will also spend less on social media and online marketing and promotion and market research, according to the memo.

“We’re pausing all internal events — though we’re still hopeful that we’ll have Christmas celebrations in our three main offices,” the memo said.

TVNZ reported revenue of $180.3 million in the six months to December 2022, but forecast a loss of $15.6m in the 2023/24 financial year.

The broadcaster has previously signalled that it may need to respond to financial difficulties in the near future.

TVNZ’s most recent Statement of Intent (pdf) says alignment of revenues and costs was under “increasing pressure”.

A ‘dynamic approach’
“We’ll adopt a dynamic approach to the allocation of business resources between investing to sustain our core TV business and accelerating the growth of our future online business. The stronger the commercial performance of our core business, the more actively we’ll be able to invest in shaping our future,” the document says.

Brent McAnulty assured TVNZ staff in today’s memo that TVNZ still had a strong share of television audience and revenue and its online platform TVNZ+ had an “impressive growth trajectory.”

Previous CEO Kevin Kenrick persuaded the government in 2019 to allow TVNZ to effectively forgo dividends to the Crown to allow it to invest in programmes and digital services.

This angered rival commercial media rivals who could expect no such backstop, while also competing with offshore-owned streaming services as well other broadcasters for audience and revenue.

TVNZ has invested heavily in TVNZ+ and recently launched live sport on the platform after securing rights held by Spark Sport until it ceased in July.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Nothing much changed in a 1News Verian poll released last Monday. However, some commentators treated the boring results as a blank canvas on which to express their creativity.

1News presenter Simon Dallow described the results of the newly named 1News Verian poll on Monday as a harsh verdict on the government.

“It is just under three months until the election and Labour seems to have been dented by a series of ministerial distractions,” he said as he introduced the story at the top of the bulletin.

• READ MORE: Other NZ elections reports
• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: NZ election poll analysis

Despite that effort to dress up the poll as a tough verdict on the government, it was mostly notable for how un-notable it was.

Few parties moved more than the margin of error from the last 1News poll in May, which also showed National and Act with the numbers to form the next government — just. National and Labour both dropped the same amount: 2 percent.

You might have thought the damp squib of a result would put the clamps on our political commentators’ narrative-crafting abilities.

Instead, for some it proved to be a blank canvas on which they could express their creativity.

‘Centre-right surge’
At Stuff, chief politics editor Luke Malpass called the poll a “fillip for the right” under a headline hailing a “centre-right surge”.

One issue with that: the poll showed a 1 percent overall drop for the right bloc of National and Act.

“Fillips” generally involve polls going up not down. Similarly, a drop in support doesn’t traditionally meet the definition of a surge in support.

The lack of big statistical swings wasn’t enough to deter some commentators from making big calls.

On Newstalk ZB, political editor Jason Walls said Labour was plunging due to its disunity.

“All [Chris Hipkins] has been really able to talk about is what’s happening within the Labour Party — be it Stuart Nash, be it other ministers who are behaving badly. Jan Tinetti. Voters punish that. And we’ve seen that from the Nats in opposition. They punish disunity.”

It’s uncertain what National’s equivalent 2 percent drop was down to. Perhaps voters punish unity as well.

Wider trends context
Mutch-McKay’s own commentary was a bit more nuanced, placing the poll in the context of wider trends.

On TVNZ’s Breakfast the day after the poll’s release, she said some people inside Labour couldn’t believe the results hadn’t been worse for the party.

Perhaps that air of disbelief also extended to the parliamentary press gallery.

After all, the commentators are right: Labour has had a terrible few months, with high-ranking ministers defecting, being stood down, being censured by the parliamentary privileges committee, facing allegations of mistreating staff, or struggling with the apparently near-impossible task of selling shares in Auckland Airport.

Maybe a sense of inertia propelled some of our gallery members to keep rolling with the narrative of the last few months, in spite of the actual poll result.

Or maybe part of the issue is that hyping up the significance of these polls is a financial necessity for news organisations which pay a lot to commission them.

“You’ve got to squeeze the hell of it. You’ve paid $11,000 or $12,000 for a poll, it’s got to be the top story. It’s got to be your lead. It’s got to have the fancy graphics,” Stuff’s political reporter and commentator Andrea Vance said recently on the organisation’s daily podcast Newsable.

‘Manufacturing news’
“It just feels like we’re manufacturing news. We’re taking a piece of information that’s a snapshot in time and we’re pretending that we know the future,” she said.

Vance went on to say these kinds of snapshot polls don’t actually tell us all much — but she said long-term polling trends are worth paying attention to.

It’s probably no coincidence then that the most useful analysis of this latest poll focused on those macro patterns.

In a piece for 1News.co.nz, John Campbell noted the electorate’s slow drift away from the centre, with Labour losing 20 percent of the electorate’s support since 2020 and National failing to fully capitalise on that drop-off.

He quoted Yeats line, “the centre cannot hold”, before asking the question: “What do Labour and National stand for? Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, this is a growing section of the electorate saying — you’re almost as bad as each other.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other commentators. In his latest column for Metro magazine, commentator and former National Party comms man Matthew Hooton decried the major parties’ lack of ambition.

“At least Act, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori aren’t insulting you with bullshit. Instead they offer ideas they think will make your life better, even if they’ll never happen. So here’s a better idea than falling for the big scare from National or Labour.

‘Reward ideas-based parties’
“How about using your ballot paper to tell them to f*** off and reward one of the three ideas-based parties with your vote instead?” he wrote.

And on his podcast The Kaka, financial journalist Bernard Hickey and commentator Danyl McLauchlan criticised our major parties for their grey managerialism.

“You kind of have to go back to the mid-1990s when so many people just hated the two major parties because they didn’t trust them,” he said.

“We seem to be going through a similar phase now. The two major parties are just these managerial centrist parties. They don’t have much to offer by way of a vision.”

Maybe it’s a little shaky to say anyone’s surging or flopping on the basis of a couple of percentage points shifting in a single poll.

But if you zoom out a bit, at least one narrative does have a strong foundation — voters saying, to quote Shakespeare this time — “a plague on both your (untaxed) houses”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed today what pundits have predicted for weeks: the plan for a public media entity has been scrapped — before they even settled on a name for it.

It is the second time in five years Labour has backed away from its public media policy, leaving RNZ and TVNZ in limbo again — along with less-heralded overhauls of the media.

The assumption the government would drop its plan for a new public media entity to be launched on March 1 was sparked by the then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last December.

• READ MORE:  Policy purge: TVNZ/RNZ merger scrapped, income insurance and hate speech laws delayed
• Other NZ media policy reports

She signalled reforms diverting ministers from the cost of living and post-Covid recovery would be shelved. She told Newsroom the so-called RNZ/TVNZ was “not number one on the government agenda”.

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson had already made a mess of explaining the policy in a now-notorious TVNZ interview, which also amplified sideline concerns about possible political influence.

Earlier in the year on Mediawatch, Jackson dismissed criticism of the proposed legislation, some of it coming from strong supporters of public broadcasting.

That came back to bite him last month when the parliamentary committee scrutinising the Bill rewrote important parts of it. Recent opinion polls revealed both low levels of support for the merger and little understanding of it, while rival media lobbyists called the new entity “a monolithic monster bad for the country”.

‘Reprioritised spending’
The formerly non-committal opposition leader declared it, not just bad but mad, repeatedly labeling the policy “insane”.

This year Ardern’s successor, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, also spoke of the urgent need to “reprioritise spending” while recent reporting has almost universally described the merger as “on Chippy’s chopping block”.

Today the axe fell, finally and formally, putting a policy five years in the making out of its misery after millions of dollars and years of effort.

He said RNZ’s funding would increase in the short term “around the $10 million mark” and this could be done before the next Budget process.

RNZ put out a statement welcoming the “clarity” and the prospect of more funding. TVNZ was also “pleased to now have clarity . . . and a clear path forward for TVNZ”.

MediaWorks CEO Cam Wallace said he was pleased but too much had been spent on this proposal “at a time when the industry was dealing with decreasing advertising revenues.”

Watch live: Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed the TVNZ/RNZ merger will be scrapped https://t.co/tgagvtE68v

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) February 8, 2023

What was the plan anyway – and what went wrong?
When Kris Faafoi took over as Broadcasting Minister in late 2018, Labour junked its previous policy (launched in 2017 by then opposition leader Jacinda Ardern) of boosting RNZ with $38 million a year to become a truly multimedia public media platform — and ignoring TVNZ.

The government — through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage — launched a Strong Public Media policy instead.

Consultants who kicked off the project in 2019 concluded “the status quo is not an option”.

They said TVNZ and RNZ in their current form were not sustainable, given rapid digitally-driven changes in the media.

Covid-19 stalled the policy’s progress, but Cabinet finally agreed in 2021, greenlighting the creation of a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ.

They insisted it was not merely a merger of the two, but the enabling legislation unveiled last year was effectively just that.

Budget 2022 allocated $109 million a year until 2026 to fund the new entity’s operations, but Kris Faafoi, Willie Jackson and the PM never gave any clarity about what new services the new entity might offer.

They said yet-to-be appointed executives and governors would decide that, not ministers.

Similarly, no-one in charge convincingly addressed the fear that a hyper-commercial culture at TVNZ would clash with the charter-driven, public service MO of RNZ.

The entire process was carried almost entirely behind closed doors — and without a proper business case — until the public and other media agencies got a fortnight to make submissions on the legislation late last year.

So what next?
Effectively it will be business as usual for RNZ and TVNZ — both of which can pause plans to launch things like admin and IT services as a single system less than a month from now.

RNZ will carry on as a fully-funded bonsai-scale (by international standards) public broadcaster operating on radio and online under its existing charter (which is currently under review) with a yet-to-be announced increase in funding.

TVNZ will carry on as a possibly the world’s only commercial state-owned TV company doing news and entertainment online, which dominates the free-to-air TV market, but makes no significant money for the nation.

At all stages of the merger proposal, TVNZ has reassured advertisers it would still be open for their business. (Last year Willie Jackson chided TVNZ for dragging the chain, a claim denied by chief executive Simon Power on Mediawatch).

RNZ’s board, its chair Jim Mather and chief executive Paul Thompson, strongly backed the plan for a new entity from the early stages.

New Zealand on Air was notified last year around $80 million of its budget would be re-allocated to the new entity, forcing it to urgently pull apart its own funding plans and priorities. Today the PM also announced NZoA could expect an increase in funding.

The long-term plan
There is no long-term plan yet — beyond the status quo, which consultants and Cabinet eventually agreed was “not an option”.

But the Broadcasting Minister — who retained his portfolio in the recent reshuffle — has much to confront.

The collapse of the so-called merger goes beyond RNZ and TVNZ into other overhauls that were supposed to run in parallel with the new media entity’s creation.

Willie Jackson is also Minister of Māori Development, overseeing Māori broadcasting. He secured $80m over the past two years in extra funding for programming. But this was tied to a twice-undertaken Māori media sector shift, which was held back for — and meshed-in with — the new public media entity plan.

Jackson is also in charge of the legislative backstop to ensure tech titans Google and Meta cough up for news media content they share, a significant stream of income for under-pressure news outlets for the future.

And then there is the ongoing overhaul of the oversight of the media designed to better “protect Kiwis from harm”.

The media and online content regulation review has been run by the Department of Internal Affairs under Jan Tinetti, recently promoted to other portfolios.

This is supposed to overhaul four separate overlapping pre-digital agencies regulating the media, but is also unlikely to be “bread and butter” business for Labour in 2023.

The public media entity policy has finally been put out of its misery, but there will be consequences for kicking the can down the road again in a public media system that is still operating on 30-year-old foundations and swallowing a sizable budget for limited public returns.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

How the RNZ/TVNZ merger went from its first reading in Parliament to the legislative extinction list is an example of why New Zealand actually needs more public media and not less. Let me explain.

It has been labelled a grenade, a dog and a monolithic, monopolistic monster. Yet it is actually a reasonable policy that would bring New Zealand public media in line with most other developed countries.

No other developed country has separate national television and radio networks. They have seen how it fails us and said, “no thanks”.

• READ MORE: Other RNZ/TVNZ merger reports

Most other developed countries spend quite a bit more on their public media platforms too. Brits pay $81 each, Norwegians $110, Germans $142, but Kiwis just $27 each year to fund RNZ, TVNZ and NZ On Air.

Even with the government’s funding increase over the next three years, we’ll still be spending less per person than Australia, Ireland or any other country we like to compare ourselves to.

A big part of our public media underspend is successive governments’ policy that TVNZ pay its own way and rely on advertising dollars.

Other countries subsidise their public media because they realise that a reliable source of news and information is too important to be left in the hands of marketers and advertising departments.

Other end of the spectrum
At the other end of the spectrum is the US spending just $3 per person on public media. You have to wonder how different US politics might be if it had fully-funded public media.

It is true that TVNZ does receive funding for programmes through NZ On Air but those shows still have to be simple and entertaining because TVNZ sells adverts around them. Only Sunday mornings have programmes for minorities or long-form political interviews, and of course, that is when there is no advertising.

That is the big difference between public media and commercial media. Public media doesn’t rely on advertising so it isn’t so desperate to get your attention and blast adverts at you.

Public media has time to examine public issues in-depth.

Commercial media needs to make money and with advertising dollars drifting to Google and Facebook, they work even harder to make content as eye-catching, entertaining and easy to understand as possible.

You may have noticed it on TVNZ, Newshub, Stuff or at the New Zealand Herald. These days there are more articles about crime, car crashes and weather bombs because they catch people’s attention.

Political reporting also wants to catch your attention. While public media can spend half an hour discussing a policy in-depth, commercial media want eyeballs so they go for the fun stuff — who’s up and who’s down in the pugilistic soap opera of daily politics. It is entertaining and it’s quick and easy to explain.

Complicated issues
Unlike this opinion piece I’m writing for you now — I’m already halfway through my allotted word count, yet I’ve spent all of them just explaining the background. Complicated issues take more time to explain. I had better get on with it.

It was in this commercial political reporting soap opera that the media merger lost its way. Like many politicians, opposition broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee exploited commercial media’s focus on simplification and pugilism to attack the government. She repeatedly claimed the government could not explain why we need the merger, but the government had tried to explain it, only the public hadn’t heard because it is too complicated to explain quickly and simply on commercial media (as I’m trying to do here).

Political reporting fixated on Willie Jackson’s various stumbles as though this reflected the policy, rather than analysing the policy itself.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon also exploited commercial media’s lack of examination. He criticised the merger for being “ideological”, claiming it would destroy TVNZ’s business model, and saying he would demerge it if National win the election.

But none of the interviewers asked Luxon to explain his figures or why the destruction of TVNZ’s business model would be a bad thing. None asked him if demerging would also be “ideological” and none asked if he would get a cost-benefit analysis done before demerging.

Lee and Luxon’s criticism worked. A Taxpayers Union poll in November claimed 54 percent opposed the merger and 22 percent supported it.

Different polling outcome
My organisation, Better Public Media Trust, also polled on the subject but we added some information about the merger, its costs and benefits. We got quite different results with just 29 percent opposing and 44 percent supporting the merger.

That shows what a little bit of information can do to public opinion. It also shows that reliance on commercial media for political discussion is prone to being style over substance, posturing over policy, soap operas over documentaries.

That is why the merger should go ahead. People would see it’s not a dog, grenade or monster, but intelligent, diverse and informative public media. Just in time for the election.

Myles Thomas is chair of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a television producer and director of various forms of “factual” programming, and in 2012 he established established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. This article was first published in the New Zealand Herald and is republished here with the author’s permission.

A mother, daughter of a migrant and an “OG Taranaki girl” – they are some of the ways Aotearoa New Zealand’s new Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni describes herself, reports TVNZ’s 1News.

She is also the first New Zealander of Pacific Island heritage to take on the role.

Addressing reporters in the Beehive Theatrette with incoming Prime Minister Chris Hipkins on Sunday, Sepuloni said she would back Hipkins “every step of the way” and was humbled to be chosen as his deputy.

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“It’s very hard to fathom that a working class girl from Waitara who turned westie . . . can become the deputy prime minister of New Zealand — and now I get to back up the boy from the Hutt”

Sepuloni, who was also New Zealand’s first MP of Tongan descent, was referencing Hipkins’ description of himself from a press stand-up interview on Saturday, reports 1News political reporter Felix Desmarais.

On Sunday, Sepuloni said she was “proudly Samoan, Tongan and New Zealand European”.

She will be the first Pacific Islander and third woman to hold the position.

She said she represented “generations of New Zealanders with mixed heritage” and acknowledged the significance of the moment to Pacific communities.

“As deputy prime minister I will continue to be focused [on] serving our communities and whānau and Aotearoa.”

Carmel Sepuloni makes history.                                 Video: Television New Zealand News

She acknowledged outgoing prime minister and deputy Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson and said they were “big shoes to fill”.

The deputy leader of the Labour Party remains Kelvin Davis.

Curated by Pacific Media Watch from Television New Zealand News.

The ‘girl from Waitara’ – Carmel Sepuloni makes history https://t.co/Sj5E0eGcOn

— 1News (@1NewsNZ) January 22, 2023

Television New Zealand has filed an opposition claim against Vodafone’s attempt to trademark the name “One NZ”.

In September last year, the telecommunications company revealed it wanted to change its name to One New Zealand to better reflect its legacy in Aotearoa, having separated from the global Vodafone group three years ago.

But a TVNZ spokesperson said its own TVNZ 1 and One News were reputable and valuable brands, and it was keen to protect them.

“Given these discussions are ongoing, we are simply exercising our rights until the parties reach a position they are comfortable with,” they said in a statement.

“We continue to partner with Vodafone commercially and on a range of projects.”

An initial three-month extension to the opposition period was filed in October but could not be renewed, and discussions had paused for the holiday break.

In a statement, Vodafone NZ corporate affairs head Conor Roberts said they expected TVNZ’s objection given the extension period could not be renewed.

They were “constructively working” with TVNZ on the matter, Roberts said.

“The remaining issues are minor and procedural and relate to various uses of the brand — rather than whether it can be used at all — and as such we believe they can be resolved,” he said.

Vodafone has up to two months to file a counterclaim or withdraw the application.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

TVNZ’s head of news and current affairs, Paul Yurisich, has resigned after a review into the hiring of presenter Kamahl Santamaria.

TVNZ released its long-awaited report this afternoon. It came after an inquiry was carried out by senior employment lawyer Margaret Robins.

The former Al Jazeera presenter lasted just 32 days in the job and left under a cloud of accusations of inappropriate behaviour to colleagues.

• READ MORE: The Breakfast anchor media saga

The review covered TVNZ’s recruitment practices and processes in general, as well as the specific recruitment of Kamahl Santamaria, who had carved out a strong television broadcasting reputation while a news anchor and presenter at Al Jazeera in Qatar between 2005 and 2022.

In addition, TVNZ took the opportunity to have Robins undertake a review of several policies, including those relating to internal workplace complaints and the development of TVNZ’s “Speak Up” policy.

The review found that Santamaria was hired “without meaningful input from key individuals” who usually included senior staff, including the chief executive, the general manager of news and current affairs and the chief people officer.

Robins concluded that Yurisich had not sufficiently consulted with senior executives, although “the fundamental problem was the failure of TVNZ’s recruitment policy to provide a process suitable for the recruitment of unique roles such as a key presenter”.

New policy needed
While TVNZ’s recruitment policy was suitable for the majority of roles, it did not traditionally apply to hiring key presenters, she said.

She said even if Yurisich had consulted more widely it was likely Santamaria would have been hired.

However, if he had consulted more widely and had secured two additional references, more safeguards could have been put in place and sufficient due diligence may have been provided.

She recommended that the People and Culture team, which carried out recruitment, should set out new recruitment guidelines, and that it should also follow some suggestions from the review author on recruiting in a “fair and robust” manner where the usual guidelines were not being followed, such as for presenters.

TVNZ chief executive Simon Power said “the review’s findings and its recommendations provide a clear path to ensure TVNZ’s recruitment practices and internal policies are adequately robust and fit for purpose”.

He said TVNZ supported the findings and recommendations of the review.

“There are improvements needed in our recruitment policies and work is already under way to embed these,” he said.

Power said Yurisich had spearheaded the digital transformation of the newsroom which has set TVNZ up strongly for the future. He had also provided strong leadership to the news and current affairs team during the pandemic.

Phil O’Sullivan will continue in the role of acting head of news and current affairs.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill — introduced to Parliament this week — will have a long journey before it is fit for purpose.

The Bill gives effect to the government’s plan to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a new entity designed for the digital age, but the legislation as it stands does little more than cement the two public broadcasters together.

On first reading (mine, not Parliament’s), it looks like a legislative instrument to give effect to the merger, but its stated intent and functions are much wider. This is supposed to be the legal foundation upon which a new age of public media is to be built.

• READ MORE: Gavin Ellis: An open letter to the incoming media minister
• Public media: new name, new law, new minister, old questions
• The BBC Charter

The general policy statement accompanying the Bill says: “This Bill seeks to strengthen the delivery of public media services by establishing a new public media entity.” It may achieve the latter, but it falls far short of guaranteeing its objective.

The Bill falls short on many fronts: Matters that should be covered are omitted, others are dealt with in obtuse ways, boilerplate clauses are employed in place of purposeful creativity, and ironclad protection of the public interest is absent.

The Bill’s shortcomings are too numerous to set out all of them, but a few key failings give a sense of how much work must be done on the proposed law through its committee stages.

The Bill states the new organisation will be a Crown entity but does not stipulate the category under which it must fall. We need to go to Schedule 2 Part 1 to find that Schedule 2 of the Crown Entities Act is to be amended to make Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media an autonomous Crown entity.

Why the change?
Both TVNZ and RNZ are currently Crown companies. Why the change?

Was it because autonomous Crown entities “must have regard to government policy when directed by the responsible Minister”? While the new public media organisation will be protected against ministerial interference on matters relating content and news gathering, there are many ways to skin the cat.

Why was the new entity not designated an Independent Crown Entity which is “generally independent of government policy”?

The Bill states that, in accordance with provisions of the Crown Entities Act, the Minister of Broadcasting and Media will appoint the board of the new entity, but the new Bill stipulates at least two of those directors will be nominated by the Minister for Māori Development.

As things stand, that means Willie Jackson will appoint the entire board because he holds both portfolios. The proposed legislation does not anticipate that aggregation of power.

Ministers are writ large across the Bill. There is oversight of the new entity by no fewer than three, possibly four. Aside from the Minister of Broadcasting and Media, the finance minister has direct powers over financial issues and the Māori development minister has Te Tiriti oversight.

The Crown Entities Act provides for the broadcasting minister to appoint a monitor to act as his eyes and ears over the new entity. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has been working behind the scenes to gear itself to take on that role – and an even wider role across all media if its current strategy framework draft is anything to go by. So, it is possible that its minister (currently Carmel Sepuloni) will also have a look-in.

Independence absolutely vital
I do not think that augers well for the independence that is absolutely vital if the new body is to gain and retain public trust and confidence.

Yes, the Bill does carry over the provisions in existing legislation that tells ministers to keep their hands off editorial matters. However, there are too many other mechanisms by which politicians can influence the direction of the new organisation.

There is a charter that should provide its own protections, given that the relevant minister’s actions must be consistent with it. However, the charter in the Bill consists largely of boilerplate generalities that are less aspirational than the existing RNZ charter.

It is in marked contrast to the BBC Charter, which is erudite, explicit, and carries more direct obligations.

Submissions on the Bill will, no doubt, focus on the charter and it may yet go through iterations that improve it. One necessary improvement relates to the digital environment that made all of this reorganisation necessary. Although there is passing reference to online services, the tenor of the Bill is rooted in the present, not the future.

The entity’s principal purpose is “broadcasting”. That would be fine if the term was defined in broad enough terms. However, it talks of “transmitting” and “reception by the New Zealand public by means of receiving apparatus”. That hardly conjures up pictures of very smart interactive devices and a community for whom one-way linear transmission is antiquated.

The charter does state that one of its principles is “innovating and taking creative risks” but that looks tame alongside the BBC Charter’s clause on technology that states it “must promote technological innovation, and maintain a leading role in research and development”.

Technologically aspirational requirements
I would have thought that, in order to set the stage for a future-oriented organisation built for the digital age, the Bill just might contain some technologically aspirational requirements.

It is not the only element of the new organisation that is absent from the proposed legislation.

Aside from a pressing need to provide far more robust independent governance, the Bill’s most glaring omissions relate to finance and internal structures.

The Bill contains an explicit requirement that RNZ’s commercial-free services will continue, and where a charge is applied to new services on first broadcast it will later be free. There is no reference in the Bill, however, to TVNZ’s current commercial status, nor to annual appropriations from government.

It takes a careful reading of the Bill’s schedules and amendments to those in other acts to determine whether the current practice of channelling RNZ’s funding through NZ on Air will continue. Reading between the lines it appears that a more direct funding stream is being contemplated, with some form of coordination with other bodies such as NZ on Air and Te Māngai Pāho.

The Bill itself makes no direct reference to future requirements for TVNZ to pay a dividend but a tick in a column in the Bill’s schedule suggests the new entity will not contribute to the Treasury coffers.

Beyond that, the finances of the new entity are a deep void. The new organisation faces real challenges in reconciling public funding and commercial revenue. It must also determine the division of expenditure associated with programming to meet the expectations created by both sources.

No legislative guidance
However, there is no legislative guidance on how these challenges should be met. There is total silence on commercial expectations, and on the mechanisms by which any continuity of government funding will be calculated or guaranteed. The Cabinet papers released to date suggest funding matters will be dealt with through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. So why is that not explicit in the Bill?

Internal structures — which must address the cultural and funding process differences between commercial and non-commercial broadcasting — are apparently entirely in the hands of the Establishment board as there is nothing in the Bill that mandates the unique internal structure that will be needed to satisfy both imperatives. Does Parliament have no view, for example, on whether news and current affairs should be structurally separated from a commercial enterprise, say as a separate subsidiary with its own statutory independence?

Why is there no requirement to follow the Irish precedent whereby the state broadcaster RTÉ must adhere to a Fair Trading Policy that complies with EU rules on State aid? That policy requires RTÉ “to trade in a manner which ensures that public funds are not used to subsidise RTÉ’s commercial activities…[and] that ensures that RTÉ’s commercial activities are compatible with its public service objects.”

These questions, and more, will be raised during the Bill’s select committee hearings. My fear is that the timetable set out for the legislation — it must be passed and in force by the end of the year — will truncate the process to the point where the necessarily exhaustive examination of its provisions will not take place.

Last week I set 12 labours for the new Minister of Broadcasting and Media. This Bill, as it currently stands, will make Willie Jackson’s tasks even more Herculean.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Draft legislation which would see state broadcasters RNZ and TVNZ subsumed into a new entity has been published ahead of its introduction to Parliament.

It would take effect from March 1 next year, setting up Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media as a not-for-profit autonomous Crown entity.

The two broadcasters would then become subsidiaries, with all staff transferring to the new organisation, under the leadership of a new board.

• READ MORE: Gavin Ellis: Fundamental flaws in public media plans call for big fixes
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Under a commercial and government mixed-funding model, services which are advertising-free will remain so and any profit will be reinvested.

Services and programming that carry a fee must later also become freely available within a reasonable time, and the organisation will be required to ensure content overall remains “predominantly free of charge”.

Some $370 million over four years in operating expenditure and $306 million in capital funding was set aside in this year’s Budget for the new entity.

It will operate under a charter that sets out goals and responsibilities, with editorial independence enshrined in law.

Tikanga Māori knowledge
Board members must collectively have the financial and sector-specific skills and experience to meet the charter. At least two of them must also have good knowledge of te ao Māori and tikanga Māori, appointed in consultation with the Minister for Māori Development, and engage with Māori where relevant.

Many of the decisions about how ANZPM will run in practice have been left to the six-to-nine member board appointed by the government. This includes when RNZ and TVNZ will be dissolved, though this must be before 1 March 2028 with at least three months notice.

The entity is also required to collaborate with other media entities, including Māori media. Freeview; Ngā Taonga Sound Archives; and TVNZ’s international, investments, and free-to-air service arms are also listed as subsidiaries.

Kris Faafoi, who had spearheaded the project as broadcasting minister since 2018, officially announced the plan in March.

At the time, he signalled the organisation would be up and running by the middle of the year.

Faafoi is set to leave Parliament and gave his valedictory speech this evening.

His successor, Willie Jackson, will introduce the Bill on Tuesday.

Broadcaster charter
A summary of ANZPM’s objectives laid out in the Bill:

• Reflecting and representing a strong New Zealand identity and culture
• Ensuring te reo Māori and tikanga Māori are valued, visible and flourishing
• An inclusive, enriched and connected society, supporting children’s wellbeing and growth and New Zealand’s diverse languages, regions and cultures
• Fostering a healthy, informed and participative democracy

The legislation says ANZPM would achieve this through freely available, accessible, and high-quality content across all genres that informs, enlightens, and entertains.

News and information is required to be reliable and accurate, comprehensive, impartial and balanced, while the organisation must also reflect New Zealand’s history, and ensure Māori can access content by and about themselves.

Strong relationships with Pacific Island countries must also be recognised and supported.

The minister responsible is banned from giving direction over content, complaints, newsgathering, and compliance with broadcasting standards, and cannot remove people for making decisions over such matters.

ANZPM’s directors are also banned from receiving compensations for loss of office.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The “sorry saga” of former Breakfast celebrated host Kamahl Santamaria’s abrupt departure from Television New Zealand last month has created a political headache for the public broadcaster, says the country’s leading daily newspaper.

The New Zealand Herald said in an editorial in its Sunday edition this was “much more than celebrity tattle”.

Santamaria, 42, a New Zealand journalist who had arrived back in Auckland in April to take on this role after a stellar 16-year career as a news and current affairs anchor at global broadcaster Al Jazeera, abruptly quit TVNZ last month and then went to ground.

• READ MORE: From Middle East to middle New Zealand: Kamahl Santamaria on joining Breakfast
• Kamahl Santamaria quits Breakfast a month into the job
• Santamaria’s spectacular fall from grace
• Stuff want more TVNZ blood for Santamaria blood
• Behind the tears for Shireen, more evidence of Israel’s daily crimes with impunity
• Other Kamahl Santamaria reports

In a profile of the broadcaster on April 27 — the week before Santamaria appeared on his new programme, The Spinoff’s editor-at-large Tony Manhire went beyond the “Mr Serious” image:

“Over the course of those 16 years, the first of which was before the [Al Jazeera English] channel went to air, Santamaria found himself surrounded in the desert city [Doha] by a cluster of other New Zealanders; Anita McNaught, Elizabeth Puranam, Tania Page, Charlotte Bellis and dozens of others behind the scenes who became known as AJE’s ‘Kiwi mafia’.”

The Herald editorial tried to put the controversy in perspective.

“First and foremost, it should always be remembered there are real people who have been affected by what has taken place,” it said, pointing out that Santamaria had been taking over hosting TVNZ’s morning current affairs show after veteran broadcaster John Campbell had left.

“But, after just 31 days on the job, he mysteriously resigned.

“Despite TVNZ saying his disappearance was due to a ‘family emergency’, The Herald spoke with a number of women who claimed to have received questionable messages from him.

“A number of emails sent internally to TVNZ staff about Santamaria’s departure were then leaked to The Herald. One email outlined plans for a review of the state broadcaster’s recruitment processes after the abrupt resignation.”

Middle East angle
According to The Herald, the sequence of events not only called into question TVNZ’s recruitment processes, “but also the response to managing complaints, and the manner in which the state broadcaster responds to questions of public interest”.

The TVNZ controversy was also a headache for Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi at a time when he was trying to “merge RNZ and TVNZ into a non-profit ‘public media entity’ as a multi-platform public service provider capable of fulfilling its cultural and civil remit into the 21st century”.

Meanwhile, said the newspaper, it had been revealed last month that “five Radio New Zealand employees have been accused of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct or sexism in the last five years”.

Three of them had left the broadcaster as a result and the other two people were no longer working for RNZ at the time the allegations were raised with management.

No changes had been made to RNZ’s sexual harassment policy as a result of the complaints, according to information released to The Herald in an Official Information Act application.

“Media organisations, including ours,” noted The Herald, “have struggled to maintain ideal working environments at times. The mix of rolling deadlines, pressures of live news reporting, and vigorous personalities can amount to a brew of tension and manifest sometimes in unacceptable behaviour.

“Other industries will have their own examples and challenges but we all must accept our responsibilities and failings and strive to be better,” the newspaper said.

“But the circumstances at TVNZ give rise to such a raft of concerns, Minister Faafoi needs to insist on full disclosure of what has taken place, and what will be done about it.”

At least one news commentary and current affairs site, The Daily Blog, has offered a different explanation to the Breakfast controversy: “One version of what happened was Santamaria cursing the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Israel for the assassination of his former Al Jazeera colleague, Shireen Abu Akleh.”

The proposal for a new entity to replace Television New Zealand and RNZ has two fundamental flaws that must be fixed if it is to gain the public’s trust.

The first flaw is the assumption that an existing legal structure — the Autonomous Crown Entity — is an appropriate form of governance. The second is that it has provided inadequate protection from political interference. The two issues are related.

Let me say at the outset that I support the restructuring of public service media. It is an idea whose time has come. It is an opportunity to create, almost from the ground up, a public organisation designed to live up to a digital incarnation of BBC-founder Lord Reith’s dictum that public media should inform, educate and entertain (now, however, in a creative and clever mix).

• READ MORE: Other RNZ and TVNZ merger reports

My concern lies in the need for this new entity to demonstrate from the outset that it will be free-standing and free from influence. By treating its formation little differently from a stock-standard Autonomous Crown Entity (ACE) into which existing organisations are dropped, the government is sending the wrong signals. From Day One (i.e., right now) it needs to be treated very much as a special case.

Let’s not lose sight of what is possible here: The creation of a ground-breaking structure that can set new standards for public service media in the digital age – if it is born out of independent thinking, creativity, and wisdom.

And let’s not forget why it is vital that it succeed in that aim. Public trust in the institutions of democracy and a free society are being systematically undermined. We need to look no further than the darkly manipulated “protest” in front of Parliament.

Stirrers wanted the prime minister and journalists lynched and violent “protesters” set fires and threw paving bricks at police. They were supported throughout by a much wider social media narrative that neither politicians nor the media could be trusted.

Public trust in media eroding
Public trust in media is already on the way down. AUT’s Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy polled trust in media last year and found it had declined across all four industry-wide metrics it had measured in 2020. RNZ and TVNZ remain the most trusted brands but both declined year-on-year. So, too, did all media included in the previous survey.

There is a real need for media institutions in which the public has trust and the JMaD studies point to public service media being at the pinnacle of that structure.

I have no doubt that the Minister of Broadcasting and Media, Kris Faafoi, is well-intentioned. As a former journalist he is only too well aware of the importance of trust and of the need to protect, nurture and champion media independence. Whether his cabinet colleagues have the same set of imperatives is harder to judge.

However, the restructuring requires a longer view than what might happen around the cabinet table over the next few months. We need to be concerned that the structure which emerges is not only fit for purpose now, but will endure for decades and be capable of withstanding winds of political change that on a global scale are showing more negative than positive signs.

In other words, it must be robust enough to survive not only known risks but also some conceivable unknowns: We had a Robert Muldoon, so could we have a Donald Trump?

Unfortunately, the announcement last week provides a less-than-reassuring beginning. The cabinet go-ahead was sparse on structural and operational detail. It did speak of a charter and proposed legislation that will contain a much-vaunted guarantee of editorial independence from ministerial control. However, that is undermined by other planned moves and much of the potential damage could be done even before the new structure is up and running.

Significantly, control of the governance of the implementation phase of the restructuring is one area of the cabinet paper and supporting documents in which there is real detail. Absence of detail elsewhere is explained away by saying these are matters for the Establishment Board to decide.

Seen as the architect
The draft terms of reference for the Establishment Board state it will be responsible for overseeing the detailed organisational design of the new entity and the transition to the new structure. In other words, it is to be seen as the architect. That was certainly the inference in Kris Faaoi’s announcement last week.

Yet the Establishment Board is precisely where the Minister (and his Cabinet colleagues) and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage have a potentially high level of influence.

The Establishment Board is expected to stay aligned to any cabinet decisions and is responsible for ensuring it “progresses government policy” and meets the minister’s objectives.

All members (up to nine) are to be appointed by the minister, who will also appoint the chair. The minister can terminate any member’s term before the expiry date and there is no requirement for him to state cause.

The board will not have its own staff but may ask the Ministry for Culture and Heritage – which will provide the secretariat — to appoint people to provide specialist or technical advice. MCH will also procure other services on the board’s behalf and its chief executive will decide what functions it will delegate to the board. Meanwhile MCH will continue to provide advice directly to the minister.

The Establishment Board will, according to the terms of reference, operate on a consensus basis — not a majority vote — and where it can’t reach consensus “the chair will advise the minister of the difference of opinion”. That begs the question: Does the minister effectively have a deciding vote?

He certainly has a tight hold on what the Establishment Board says in public. The section in the terms of reference relating to the Establishment Board’s relationship with the minister is devoted almost entirely to public statements. There can be “no surprises” (no surprise there) and the chair is the sole spokesperson.

The minister is to be informed of any public comment “either prior to, or as soon as possible after comment is made”, and all press releases must be sent to the minister in advance.

Multiple avenues for influence 
All of this suggests to me that both the minister and the ministry have multiple avenues through which they can influence the way the new structure is put together.

I freely admit there is good reason for liaison. For example, the early activity of the board will take place while the entity’s empowering Act and other law changes are working their way through the legislative process. The board’s thinking on the new entity should be reflected in that legislation and, if it isn’t, we might question why it is not.

However, there are equally good reasons why the Establishment Board should be seen to be independent. If the minister deflected questions on detail by saying they were matters for the Establishment Board, then let it be so.

The way it now stands, it looks (as my betting old dad would say) as though the government is trying to have a quid each way. Hedging bets is not a good way to begin the trust-building process.

Step one in that process should be an unequivocal statement from the minister that the Establishment Board does, in fact, have autonomy and, so long as its actions support the aims of the new entity, it will not be subject to ministerial or ministry direction. It should also have the power to appoint its own advisors.

Then there is the new entity itself. I was frankly surprised that work by a Chief Executives Working Party (to which I was an advisor), a Business Study group, and then a Business Case Governance Group did not produce a unique structure for what will be a unique organisation. Specifically, I expected to see the strongest recommendations for iron-clad protections, and I expected to see such protections accepted by cabinet. That hasn’t happened…yet.

Instead, cabinet has accepted the option of an Autonomous Crown Entity with a traditional minister-appointed board, with two board members appointed in consultation with the Minister for Māori Development. The only aspects that separate it from a stock-standard ACE is a charter (to which I’ll return) and a section that protects the entity’s editorial independence. As it stands, that section is less prescriptive that either the Television New Zealand Act or the Radio New Zealand Act.

Statement of good intentions
Cabinet has approved what is titled a “proposed basis for charter structure” that is little more than a statement of good intentions. Admittedly, no charter should be so detailed that it limits initiative or the ability to respond to changed circumstances.

However, what is missing from this document is an overarching statement that the organisation as a whole will be predicated on autonomy and independence. Instead there is a clause stating that the organisation itself should “demonstrate editorial independence”.

Also missing — or among the 12 redacted sections of the cabinet paper relating to financial implications — is how the new entity will be protected from the cudgel that governments here and elsewhere have used to bring recalcitrant public broadcasters to heel. That big stick is control of the purse-strings.

It is vital that there be some certainty of funding, both for operational reasons and to demonstrate to the public that the entity doesn’t kowtow to government in order to pay the bills.

We do not know what the core level of public funding will be, the term over which it will be paid, and who will set it. Funding, of course, is ultimately in Parliament’s hands and, as we’re talking taxpayer money, that is as it should be. However, it still needs protecting in some way from a vengeful ruling party – and here I want you to think forward to that Trump figure in our possible future. Multi-year funding, for example, is a pre-requisite.

There is still time to put right the governance shortfalls in the proposal.

The first step should be for the government to accept the need for an additional tier of governance that sits, effectively, above the board. Not to second-guess it, but to ensure that it meets the spirit of the charter under which the entity will operate, to review proposed budgets and Crown appropriations, and to act as a shield against external interference from government, the ministry or elsewhere.

Why Guardians are needed
The entity needs Guardians. RNZ’s board is described as guardians but they are effectively the equivalent of company directors (even if they are absolved from the need to turn a profit). The new entity will need something more akin to the Guardians of Lakes Manapouri, Monowai, and Te Anau that were established by Norman Kirk to protect those waters against detrimental effects from the hydro power scheme.

The Guardians of Public Media should, however, differ from that precedent in several fundamental ways.

First, they should not be appointed by a minister but by Parliament. In fact, the board of the entity should be similarly appointed, as is the case with a number of European public service media.

Second, they should produce an annual report, made not to a minister but to Parliament. It should include a judgement on funding adequacy and a review of the entity’s relationship with the minister, the ministry, and government as a whole.

This annual report should replace the proposed yearly review by at least four government departments, but not annual reports to Parliament by the entity itself.

The cabinet paper proposes a five-yearly review of the charter by Parliament. That can be read as a review by the politicians in power. Therefore any parliamentary review should be preceded by a Guardian review of the charter’s fitness for purpose and it is that review that should go to the House. That way, if a ruling party wants to mess unilaterally with the charter, it will be seen for what it is. In addition, each year the guardians should review performance against charter objectives, separate from any assessment by the entity itself.

They should also act as a bulwark against interference in decisions relating to any content produced or disseminated, and that is not limited to news. A shiver still runs down the spines of old broadcasters at the mention of Robert Muldoon’s undoubted role in the decision in 1980 not to screen the drama Death of a Princess to avoid upsetting the Saudi government.

More protection for news
News and current affairs, however, require more protection and guarantees of autonomy than other forms of programming. That was not apparent in the documents released last week. There must be explicit prohibitions — in legislation and in the charter — on both external and internal interference in news operations. A minister is not the sole potential source of pressure. Officials, board members, commercial staff, and management of the entity must be held at arm’s length.

Legislation should also preclude the chief executive from also holding the position of editor-in-chief. Paul Thompson holds both positions at RNZ and has done so without controversy, but the new entity will be both much larger and will be a hybrid of commercial and non-commercial functions.

I believe all of the entity’s news and current affairs functions and decision-making, including the position of editor-in-chief, must be kept within that department if autonomy and independence are to be seen to be real.

Details missing from last week’s announcement and document release created frustration but there may be a brighter side. If the detail has yet to be worked out, there is still time for Kris Faafoi, his cabinet colleagues, his ministry, and the Establishment Board to get it right.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

• Read the full Gavin Ellis article here:

https://knightlyviews.com/2022/03/15/fundamental-flaws-in-public-media-plans-call-for-big-fixes/

The New Zealand government last week unveiled the creation of a new public media entity that will incorporate RNZ and TVNZ. It will pave the way for digital innovation as well as adding new capability and services.

This is a big shift and is a lot to get your head around.

In particular, the public media focus of the new entity is a watershed.

• READ MORE: RNZ and TVNZ to be folded into mega public media entity, says Faafoi
• Merging commercial TVNZ and non-commercial RNZ won’t be easy — and time is running out — Dr Peter Thompson
• Other RNZ and TVNZ merger reports

New Zealand has had various combinations of public and publicly-owned commercial media entities in the past, but this takes the public media remit to a new level.

The new entity is designed to ensure New Zealand has one well-resourced, comprehensive public media entity that can weather the ongoing disruptions caused by the almost unbridled power of the FANGS (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).

Over recent years the media sector has been in flux, with commercial models under strain and audiences fragmenting and often favouring the products provided by the FANGS. This has contributed to increased misinformation and polarisation.

The government hopes the new entity will be strong and flexible enough to adapt to those challenges in a way a stand-alone RNZ and TVNZ would not be able to achieve.

Four key building blocks
To understand what the government is trying to do it is useful to focus on four key building blocks it is putting in place.

First, the new public media entity will be exactly that — an organisation that is centred on public media services that inform and connect the nation, celebrate our culture and identity and equip people to participate in our democracy.

Commercial activity will play an important role and will be required to support this public media focus.

Second, the entity will operate under a public media charter that will enshrine in law its editorial independence. The Charter will be the north star for the organisation, requiring it aspire to and deliver the best attributes of public media.

The draft charter that is proposed in the Cabinet paper looks promising. This, more than anything else this, will ultimately determine the direction of the new entity, its tone and culture and the services it provides.

Third, the policy places a strong emphasis on the new entity’s obligation to support and recognise the “Māori Crown relationship”. This is another big change. Indeed, the purpose of the new entity will require it to contribute to a “valued, visible, and flourishing te reo Māori me ngā tikanga Māori”.

This is vital as the new entity, from day one, needs to capture what makes Aotearoa New Zealand unique, including Te Tiriti. The new entity’s board will include at least two members with Te Ao Māori and tikanga Māori expertise.

And fourth, the new entity will be required to collaborate with other media and support the overall health of the wider media system. This recognises the critical importance of sustaining a plurality of media sources and perspectives in the years ahead.

Mediawatch: Can RNZ + TVNZ = new PME in 2023? https://t.co/6HDIgnY3L1

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) March 13, 2022

Trusted media underpin democracy
Trusted, independent news and current affairs underpin our democracy. The only way to ensure trust in the media is to ensure people have a range of sources and perspectives to choose from.

The new entity will need to support that diversity in meaningful ways, for example, by training the next generation of reporters, producers, presenters, and programme makers for the benefit of the wider industry.

Public media institutions around the world have been on the back foot recently.

In many countries publicly-owned and funded broadcasters have been reined-in, leaned on and co-opted to serve political ends.

This is happening to a shocking degree in Hong Kong, Turkey, Slovenia,and Hungary, and in southern Africa as authoritarian regimes flexed their muscles.

But even in Australia and the UK it has been tough for the ABC and BBC with attempts to question the pivotal role played by feisty, independent public media in a time of crisis and heightened polarisation.

This all points to the value of strong public media to our democratic processes. Both RNZ and TVNZ carry strong reputations internationally. The rebuilding of our public media mandate will enhance that.

Much is still to be determined, including funding levels, and no doubt there will be intense public debate when the draft legislation is opened for public submissions.

RNZ is up for the challenge and will work hard to contribute our valued services and our public media ethos and expertise to the new entity.

The bottom line will be ensuring all the people of New Zealand benefit.

Paul Thompson is chief executive and editor-in-chief of Radio New Zealand. He is also president of the international Public Media Alliance. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It was first published on the Stuff website.

The announcement of the government’s decision to merge RNZ and TVNZ into a non-profit “public media entity” was long anticipated but, coming in the second year of Labour’s second term, underwhelming in its lack of detail.

Cabinet had discussed the proposal back in 2019, and yesterday’s announcement was expected to be the culmination of extensive planning, consulting, expert committees and corporate accounting reports.

The protracted process was intended to give shape to the broadcasting minister’s vision of a multi-platform public service provider capable of fulfilling its cultural and civil remit into the 21st century.

• READ MORE: BBC funding: licence fee debate risks overlooking value of UK’s public broadcasters
• Closures, cuts, revival and rebirth: how covid-19 reshaped the NZ media landscape in 2020
• Crisis, disintegration and hope: only urgent intervention can save New Zealand’s media

And while it’s significant that the government recognises the importance of strong public media across all platforms in New Zealand, and is committed to its strategic vision, in many respects the announcement raises more questions than it answers.

Video: NZ Herald

Commercial tension
Firstly, how will the organisational and governance structures across radio, television and online services function? Minister Kris Faafoi has indicated that these details will now be delegated to a new “establishment committee”, although the Strong Public Media governance group had delivered a business case to cabinet last year.

Complications arise because TVNZ is a commercial entity, which competes directly with other commercial media for (slowly declining) audiences and advertising revenues, while RNZ is a fully funded public service provider with a charter.

The minister has affirmed that the current non-commercial radio services will be retained. But aligning the commercial television arm and future online services — for example, the integration of the RNZ and TVNZ news operations — entails potentially contradictory priorities, even under the broad directives of a public charter.

Plans unveiled for #NZ‘s new mega public media –
it will operate under a #charter, with “trustworthy #news” as a core service #AsiaPacificReport #RNZnews #RNZPacific #publicmedia #publicbroadcasting #KrisFaafoi @shrek45 @EveningReportNZ #communitymediahttps://t.co/Wf6sLWKP7p pic.twitter.com/5dpefe2XCc

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) March 10, 2022

Secondly, what funding arrangements will support the new public media entity? The ratio of public to commercial revenues and the mechanisms for ensuring its adequacy across future changes of government are critical, but have not been specified — although some redacted figures in related cabinet papers suggest these have been estimated.

The minister suggests these will be determined through forthcoming budget deliberations. If this implies that the level of funding depends on annual budget wrangling with other cabinet portfolios, then there is little hope of gaining substantial and sustainable commitment over the demands of health, education, housing and other policy priorities.

NZME and Stuff voice unease over merger of TVNZ and RNZ, but TV3 owner says ‘so far, so good’. https://t.co/NV9ji1mMJ0

— Stuff (@NZStuff) March 10, 2022

Budget uncertainty
Faafoi’s predecessor, Clare Curran, ran into this problem in 2018. Having announced an anticipated investment of NZ$38 million to develop RNZ’s services, the budget delivered only $15 million.

Prior to that, Labour’s attempt to restructure TVNZ with a dual-remit charter was compromised by cabinet disagreements. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage allocated $95 million of public funding only for Treasury to extract $142 million in dividends.

Crucially, balancing public service and commercial expectations requires the organisational structure and funding arrangements to be in sync. But this is unlikely to happen if one is determined by a committee and the other is left to the uncertainties of the budget.

There are successful public service operators, such as RTE in Ireland or CBC in Canada, which have mixed commercial and public funding. In both cases, though, the public ratio is more than 50 percent. It would be wishful thinking to suppose cabinet would provide 50 percent public funding to align TVNZ’s services with a public charter remit.

That would cost at least $150 million per year — triple the current allocation to RNZ and TVNZ. When reliance on commercial revenue predominates, commissioning and scheduling decisions inevitably reflect the imperative to optimise eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Time is tight
Even with base-line funding assured for the non-commercial RNZ services, without any mechanism to ensure adequate ratios are maintained, there is a risk that future revenue increases will come to depend increasingly on developing commercial spin-offs online.

This would inevitably affect the new entity’s capacity to use the expansion of its online services to deliver more diverse content to a full range of audiences.

The minister has suggested the new entity will be established by 2023. Given the legislation has yet to be drafted, that time-line is already tight. Any further delays or announcements of bold intentions without concrete substance will risk pushing Labour’s public media plans further toward the 2023 election.

If the new entity has not been established before then, and with Labour slipping in the polls, all bets on the future of public media in Aotearoa New Zealand are off.

Dr Peter Thompson is associate professor of media studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

RNZ and TVNZ will be subsidiaries of a new mega public media organisation, Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi has confirmed.

Faafoi announced the long-awaited changes to public broadcasting today, outlining the government’s plans for RNZ and TVNZ and the creation of a new public media entity.

Faafoi, a former political journalist, said the government was aiming to have the new organisation up and running by the middle of next year.

• READ MORE:  Public media plan emerges from behind closed doors – Colin Peacock, Mediawatch
• RNZ, TVNZ’s future: Mega public media entity likely to be unveiled
• Other NZ public media reports

He said the government had accepted the recommendations of the business case working group, and agreed to establish the organisation as a new Autonomous Crown Entity.

It will operate under a charter, with “trustworthy news” as a core service. It will be funded by a mix of government funds and commercial revenue, with complete editorial independence. Advertising-free programming will be maintained.

An establishment board will be set up in the next month, with the aim of having the new entity operational by 1 July next year.

Decisions about how the new organisation would work in practice would be left for the board to make.

This could include whether to keep TVNZ and RNZ as subsidiaries, and while current programmes would be maintained there would also be the opportunity for new ones.

This could include the likes of advertising-free television, but again those decisions would be left for the board to make.

Watch the announcement

“Whether it be covid, national emergencies or Olympic Games, the last few years have shown how important a strong media environment is to reflect New Zealanders’ stories, dreams and aspirations and it is important we support public media to flourish,” Faafoi said.

“RNZ and TVNZ are each trying to adjust to the challenges, but our current public media system, and the legislation it’s based on, is focused on radio and television.

“New Zealanders are among some of the most adaptive audiences when it comes to accessing content in different ways; like their phones rather than television and radio, and from internet-based platforms.

“We must be sure our public media can adapt to those audience changes, as well as other challenges that media will face in the future.

“The new public media entity will be built on the best of both RNZ and TVNZ, which will initially become subsidiaries of the new organisation.

“It will continue to provide what existing audiences value, such as RNZ Concert, as well as better reaching those groups who aren’t currently well served; such as our various ethnic communities and cultures.”

He said funding decisions would be made as part of Budget processes, and the new organisation would have a focus on providing quality content to under-served or under-represented audiences.

Deliver on Te Tiriti obligations
It would be required to deliver on the Crown’s Te Tiriti obligations, and could collaborate with and support the wider media sector where appropriate.

Faafoi said the public would have a chance to give their views, including on the new charter, through the select committee process later in 2022.

Faafoi, who is unwell but has tested negative for covid-19, made the announcement from his home today.

Labour first announced intentions to boost public broadcasting through “RNZ Plus” at the 2017 election, but since then the proposal has gone through several iterations.

A working group was commissioned to look into a new public media entity in March last year.

Faafoi said he announced in-principle decisions in February 2020 to ensure public media could face the challenges of the future, to keep up with audience, technology and market trends.

“The world is a vastly different place compared to that time. There are new challenges, but still fundamentally the challenges that face audiences and media are the same and if anything they have intensified.”

He said when the government began looking at this issue, TV and radio were ranked one and two for the biggest daily audience in New Zealand, and now are ranked two and four, with video on demand like YouTube at number one, and subscription video on demand like Netflix at number three.

Process put on ice
The process was put on ice when the covid pandemic hit, but last year the government followed through and asked experts to develop a business case. They delivered their recommendations late last year, to create a modern public media entity.

They also stressed the importance of protecting and future-proofing the trust and strength that public media has built up over decades.

He said the case for change is there, so Cabinet had decided to create the new public media entity, but has committed that all current non-commercial programming and platforms will endure and the likes of RNZ National and Concert FM will continue.

“The establishment of the new entity will allow better use of a range of platforms including current radio and linear TV, and those of third parties, to reach audiences when, where and how audiences choose, and will operate under a public charter set out in legislation.”

He said there will be some areas where it will make sense to collaborate with others, but “there will also be areas where it will continue a long-standing tradition of excellence and fierce competition”.

The establishment board will have members from both RNZ and TVNZ, and Faafoi said he intended to ensure there will be “some representation of people on the shop floor. Someone who understands the media and the issues that are important to staff as we work through this transition”.

Budget announcements will come on Budget Day, he said, but some of the decisions are best left to the establishment board, “which is why that board will be up and running soon”.

A stronger foundation
He said this change will cause some unease, but the future under a new entity with the ability to respond to the challenges and opportunities of local media will give a stronger foundation “to do what public media has done for decades, and that is to tell our stories”.

He disagreed with criticisms that the move would lead to dominance of the media sector by a publicly funded behemoth.

RNZ and TVNZ had a long history of editorial independence and Faafoi said he was pleased that would continue, with protections maintained in legislation.

He said the very heart of the proposal was to ensure the content the public media had provided over decades could continue to be delivered in whatever form audiences would consume it from in future.

“Audiences need to know that the government is moving with it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

When I first learned about the mythical place called Hawaiki. I understood it to be Cape Reinga at the tip of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island, where the two oceans meet – the Blue Pacific and the Tasman Sea.

As Māori told me, it was the place where their tupuna (ancestors) departed.

In this three-part series Origins (TVNZ), Scotty Morrison, a Te Reo expert and host of Te Karare, goes in search of his Hawaiki and much more beyond. It is a journey through the origins of time in search of where Māori came from.

• READ MORE: The three episodes of Origins

It’s the universal question – who are we and how did we get here? Morrison travels “across the world and through time” to discover just that.

“When our ancestors were believed to be the last people on earth to inhabit these shores, I want to know who they were these people and how they got here,” he says.

He asks the question: “Were they great sailors or starving refugees?”

He goes back to his marae where the carvings depict his tupuna, including Tamate Kapua, captain of the first waka to bring his ancestors to these shores. However, the tales of legends is not enough to convince of roots.

Waka and names
The Ngati Whakaue man describes Hawaiki as the “Homeland” which is how the eldest of his three children is named.

As he explains, every iwi arrived on a different waka and his was no different, arriving as the Ngati Whakaue did on the waka of captain Tamate Kapua

After the tribulations, they finally arrived at Maketu where the Te Arawa iwi takes it name, settling in the Bay of Plenty. They believe the waka set of from a real place which he wants to visit.

In the first episode, he takes viewers of the documentary to the sacred archaeological site at Wairau Bar, or Te Pokohiwi, where some of the first people to arrive in Aotearoa, are buried.

“There is a whole lot of Hawaikis” says Sir Toby Curtis of Te Arawa. “The last Hawaiki is in the Pacific. The other Hawaikis are named in India and Africa before they moved to the Pacific.

“Wherever they stayed, that place was called Hawaiki.

“So, there are many places that are Hawaiki, but the Hawaikii we talk about is here is the Pacific,” the Te Arawa kaumatua says.

Keeps pointing to Rangitea
“The Hawaiki we talk about keeps on pointing back to Rangitea [in “French” Polynesia], and it is important because we want to know where we came from,” says Toby.

That is the quest that Morrison undertakes tracing the journey of the first people to arrive in New Zealand and also the history of the first people to walk the Earth which features him travelling from Polynesia to Asia to Africa.

As Morrison says, the story “starts here with us and the Māori story, but it turns into a story around human existence basically, and where we all seem to have originated from.”

The series was inspired by Meg Douglas of Scottie Productions who has worked on the project for nearly a decade and was motivated by the tales that her father narrated to her about his own epic journey to uncover and write about the origins of his own iwi.

And so, in 2018 Scottie Productions teamed up with Greenstone TV and TVNZ came on board to support the project.

Production started in early 2019. It was a massive task, with research being undertaken through immeasurable hours of sifting through papers, historical books, and talking to people all over New Zealand and the world.

The project began shooting in July 2019 and finished in January 2020 just before the covid-19 pandemic hit the world.

First tupuna to arrive
For Morrison, the next part of his journey was from the Wairau Bar, Te Pokohiwi, where some of the first tupuna to arrive are buried. After learning the secrets of history that the Bar had to offer him to give him a grounding it was time to move on.

Next, he goes to Tahiti, Eastern Polynesia where finds connections through language as he discovers that he can converse in te reo with a man speaking Tahitian Ma’ohi at the museum and similarities in language can only be described as remarkable.

The indigenous language is no longer commonplace but Ma’ohi is starting to enjoy a revival, as Morrison discovers.

He feels a connection to Tahiti even though the journey to Aotearoa is a 4000km and dangerous voyage.

As Jack Thatcher, a master builder from Aotearoa who prepares to sail his waka from Tahiti to New Zealand tells him: “Hawaiki is an ideal, it’s one of those places, it’s one of those places from whence we came and where we settled we had a Hawaiki back to Rarotonga, Tahitinui, Rangitea, so I think Hawaiki might just be moana,”

After travelling to Meheti’a, or Maketu, where voyagers made their final preparation, he then travels to Rangitea (or Rai’atea) to Taputapuatea, a Unesco World Heritage site on Rai’atea, which is said to be the launch place of Tamatekapua’s waka, Morrison’s Te Arawa ancestor.

“I feel as though I’m about to walk to into my tribe’s sacred places,” he says discovering that the Tainui, Te Arawa and Tokomaru waka left Rai’atea for Aotearoa.

Felt in the DNA
“This is a good point to start because when you come here we feel it in your DNA and genealogy as Maori and I think if you take the time to come here you’ll feel it to.”

The calm serenity on the beach where he sits on Rai’atea reveals that to be his personal Hawaiki.

Morrison learns how early Pākehā researchers got the origins of Māori so wrong. He is surprised to find that several traditional folktales in Samoa are replicated in Māori culture and he makes a shock personal discovery at an ancient Vanuatu urupa (burial place).

Much of Pakeha research is debunked by historian Dr Rawiri Taonui who says: “You really need to go in with your eyes and heart wide open because there is a lot of stuff in these books that are exciting and interesting but not true.”

Then in later episodes he explores links with Western Polynesia and goes to Western Samoa, Vanuatu and Taiwan, where Morrison says there are some linguistic similarities with te reo in an usurping discovery which tells the tale of his ancestors voyagers.

It surprises him that Māori may have travelled from Western Polynesia too and the discovery of Lapita pottery in Samoa then takes him to Vanuatu where it came from.

He is welcomed by a challenge by young warriors like a wero but it is the Lapita pots that gives a clue to the colonisation of Vanuatu where he similarities in the words found in common word.

Pots similar to Taiwan
But the Lapita pots are that similar to those found in Taiwan and in 2003 a major burial site or urupa (burial ground) was discovered.

In the final episode Morrison travels to Taiwan and Ethiopia to explore the place that is said to be the origin of us all, and he visits the Cook Islands – the stepping off point for waka heading to Aotearoa hundreds of years ago.

He travels to Eastern Taiwan which hasn’t been inhabited by the Han Chinese and ancient rituals still hold true.

Once again he finds similarities in the language when he ask an indigenous sailor to recite numbers to 10. And he travels inland to find a structure not to dissimilar to the Wharenui back home.

“It is extraordinary how similar this whare is to the whare back home,” Morrison says in astonishment.

However, his last stop 8000 km away in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, said to be “cradle of humanity” and one which Sir Toby Curtis spoke as a knowing elder of Te Arawa.

He discovers the bones of “Lucy” a 3.2 million-year-old woman whose relics can be found at the National Museum of Ethiopia.

Left in ‘search for food’
As it explained to him by the curator of the mueum, human beings left in “search of food”.

In Ethiopia, he visits the Omo Valley where the cradle of humanity is said to be and where the oldest, completely formed human skeleton was found.

The question of where we come from is “always going to be something that’s debated,” says Morrison, and there are many varying beliefs about how we came to be here.

While visiting with a traditional tribal group in the Omo River Valley, Morrison met a chief who took umbrage at the most popular theory of human evolution.

“I said through an interpreter, ‘Do you believe in the theory that eventually monkeys stood up and walked out of the bush and that was the evolution of human beings?’

“And the chief who I was talking to said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him if he says that to me again I’m going to take his head off’,” laughs Morrison

From visiting the Hamar people in Omo River Valley he then returns fron the 5000-year-old journey to the Cook Islands and to familiar surroundings to where three waka sailed – Te Arawa, Tainui and Takitimu.

The afterbirth is buried
As a master builder and carver from Rarotonga Mike Tavaoni says: Avaiki (Hawaiki) is where you are born, where afterbirth is buried. It is simply where you originated,” that is what it means to the Cook Island Māori.

“Ultimately (the journey) has strengthened my commitment to my own Maori culture and I finish in the firm belief that I visited my Hawaikii in Ra’aitea,” says Morrison.

The documentary is a mammoth feat of research and travel and does much to tell where Māori originated from.

• Origins: In search of the mythical Hawaiki and beyond (TVNZ), a three-part documentary series.
  Director: Dan Salmon
• Camera-man: Jack Bryant
  TVNZ On Demand

The future of the flagship Māori news show Te Karere is on the line as the New Zealand government proposes to create a single Māori news service run by Māori Television.

The government this week released its much-aniticipated proposals for a major Māori media shake-up, Te Ao Pāpāho Māori, but some of the plans have come as a shock to the industry.

After 38 years on air, Te Karere on TVNZ1 is still the highest-rating Māori news bulletin in Aotearoa New Zealand, so news this week that the government wanted to create a single Māori news service run by Māori Television came as a blow to TVNZ.

READ MORE: Proposed single Māori news services alams journalists – Mediawatch

The state-owned network’s general manager of local content Nevak Rogers said they met with the Te Karere team after the proposal came out.

“It was definitely a shock,” she said.

“We have our annual application for funding for Marae and for Te Karere currently with Te Mangai Paho so we are on tenterhooks here.

“We don’t know what the outcomes of those decisions will be. It’s pretty tense times.”

The Māori media proposals have been in the works for years.

The project covers Māori broadcasting funding agency Te Māngai Pāho, Māori Television and Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori which represents 20 iwi radio stations around the country.

In the discussion document out this week – the government said some Māori media outlets struggle to generate and deliver news and that the number of Māori news services funded by Te Māngai Pāho is “not sustainable”.

It wanted to see “an authorative clearing house for news and current affairs content” which would also feature content made by iwi radio stations, who would be in line for extra resourcing.

While Te Karere is aired on TVNZ, it is produced independently with funding by Te Māngai Pāho.

Rogers said she knew money was tight – each news show was made for as little as $9000 – but canning it was not the answer.

“At the moment, the public media review is happening and there has been a lot of talk of plurality of voice and how important that is.

“And yet here we are looking to go in the opposite direction.”

A plurality of Māori voices
Prominent Māori journalist and producer Annabelle Lee Mather agreed.

She said the goverment had poured tens of millions of dollars into the media recently and kept talking about the need for plurality and diversity in the media.

“A single news service for Māori does not achieve that and it also assumes that all our interests, our whakaaro, our lenses are the same and they are not,” she said.

“Māori audiences deserve the same service and diversity as our countrymen.”

The proposal also put Mather in a stressful position.

She leads the weekly Māori current affairs show The Hui on Mediaworks channel Three and said they did not know what it meant for them either.

In any case, she said Te Karere was a legacy and should not be “thrown in the bin on the scrap heap”.

‘Not going to be accepted’
“We have seen too much emphasis and importance being placed on the plurality of voice and so to accept Māori to be minimised and subordinated through one news services while everyone else enjoys a variety of news services, is just not going to, I think, be accepted,” Mather said.

The government was also proposing a Centre for Media Excellence to develop staff and appoint joint members to boards of the Māori Television Service and Te Māngai Pāho.

It recommended a national radio station broadcasting in te reo Māori and making taxpayer-funded content freely available to Māori media.

Iwi media organisations could be funded to contribute as regional news bureaux with “the Māori media ecosystem” having access to all the content, the report said.

Māori Television chief executive Shane Taurima said he supported plurality in Māori media too, but the industry was under-resourced and under pressure.

“What I think is great about the proposals that have been shared is that we will see more resource and more attention given to that fact so that we can create more reo Māori speaking journalists to be able to deliver a diverse news offering,” Taurima said.

A former editor of Te Karere, Taurima said he never wanted to see it go.

Up to the challenge
He did not want to jump the gun but he said if the proposal went ahead, Māori Television would be up to the challenge.

“Can Māori television deliver to expectations? Absolutely yes.

“If the decision is taken for this news hub to be placed in the hands of Māori Television, that Māori Television is supported and backed from a financial and resource perspective and from a community perspective to be able to do a good job of it.”

Te Karere will not go down without a fight, however.

Rogers said if a single Māori news service was what was wanted, TVNZ hoped it could make a bid to run it too.

“I feel like we have been handed the mantle in terms of kaitiakitanga of these taonga and we need to fight as hard as we can to make sure we can maintain them,” she said.

Minister urges calm and kōrero
Māori Development Minister Nanaia Mahuta would not say whether that was possible, but invited TVNZ to talk.

It was too early to say what funding implications the move could have on Te Karere, she said, but she hoped it would not spell the end for the news programme.

“I would hope not … in mainstream media there is the advantage of Te Karere to link into TVNZ and there is one service through Radio New Zealand.”

“TVNZ has been bailed out recently to be able to continue to do what they are doing and I am inviting them to engage in the conversation they want to have.”

The central service would also use news content created in the regions by iwi radio, which would maintain a plurality of Māori voices, she said.

“In the Māori media space, there have been real challenges to ensure that we can continue to contribute to growing and revitalising te reo Māori, providing the diversity of content, but also being responsive to a quickly changing and evolving world in the media sector.”

The discussion document will be open to submissions for the next fortnight.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

There are now 147 positive cases across seven countries in the Pacific region and four deaths.

In Guam, cases continue to grow, with the count now at 77, five of them health workers.

The island nation is facing its own crisis on land, with issues brewing at its port, where a Covid-19 stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt has more than 70 positive cases among its 7000 crew.

READ MORE: More Barbara Dreaver Pacific Update reports

Watch Barbara Dreaver’s Pacific Update for 2 April 2020. Video: TVNZ

Authorities have agreed to allow those who have tested positive to use nearby motels for quarantine, but the captain of the US Navy vessel has been begging for help for the rest of his crew, saying his sailors do not need to die.

Now navy officials are looking in to how they can get sailors off the vessel, with 10 percent of the crew to stay behind and manage critical systems on board.

It is bad news for neighboring Northern Marianas, with six confirmed cases including one death through community transmission.

These new cases include a 14-year-old girl as well as two people over the age of 60.

In the local hospital there are fears their health system, serving a population of around 55,000 people, wouldn’t be able to handle an outbreak.

All schools have been closed in the country and a curfew imposed for the public until next year.

5 Rapa Nui cases
On Rapa Nui, Easter Island, five people have so far tested positive for the virus though it’s believed that all the cases came from the same household.

The island has been on lockdown and residents are only allowed outside for essentials between 5 am and 2 pm.

In the Cook Islands, wage subsidies have been announced starting from Monday, April 6. Cash grants will also be available and welfare payments have been paid out until April 16.

Minister of Finance Mark Brown says a payment system of this magnitude has never been done before in the history of the Cook Islands.

Tonga, which remains in lockdown, is scrambling to prepare for potential Covid-19 cases due to limited supplies of medical equipment and protective gear.

The government has refused to let an aircraft carrying medical supplies from China land, so donated items will instead be shipping from Fiji.

While Samoa has closed its schools, it is offering alternative ways of learning.

A government digital channel will be used by the education ministry to deliver programmes to students.

Local radio station 2AP is doing the same thing. Schedules can be found on the ESC website and their Facebook page.

Barbara Dreaver is Pacific correspondent of Television New Zealand. Her Pacific Update is aired daily. Today’s report is embedded by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

Over the years, many graphic and violent images of torture and beatings have emerged from the Indonesia-controlled Melanesian region of West Papua.

News agencies and social media groups across the world have reported the alleged human rights abuses of the island’s native population by Indonesian soldiers.

Yet, the international community continues to ignore the plight of the West Papuan people.

WATCH THE VIDEO: Human rights abuses in West Papua

I have covered the story of the West Papuan fight for independence from Indonesia for many years.

In this report, I explore the reasons why Indonesia clings tightly to power of the island and shuts the rest of the world out, denying access to the island and its people.

I also look at the close relationship New Zealand has with Indonesia, one our country’s strongest allies and trade partners.

This report is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of Barbara Dreaver and Television New Zealand.

Reporter: Barbara Dreaver

Produced by: Natalia Sutherland

Edited by: Luis G. Portillo

• Barbara Dreaver’s video on Facebook – ‘Amid claims of oppression in West Papua, NZ is silent’