OPINION
As the Herald marks another milestone, it does not have to look back very far to feel it has used the “power of the press” for good purpose.
At this time two years ago, Auckland was in quarantine, sealed by roadblocks north and south to stop the rest of the country catching its infection. Life inside the fence was dull, internal movement discouraged, social events forbidden. There was just one way out: mass vaccination.
The Prime Minister wanted a “high level” of immunity across the country before she would relax the restrictions. But she wouldn’t specify how high. She did not think numerical targets helpful.
The Herald did. The target it set, 90 per cent, was well above the level achieved in almost all other countries that had received the vaccine before us. But a country more cohesive than most just needed a clear focus.
The pandemic saw news media lend their voices to a level of public alarm unprecedented since wartime, if then. It was the latest event of historic proportions the Herald has covered and inevitably influenced over 160 years.
Founded amid the tensions of the Waikato War, named the New Zealand Herald when Auckland was the colonial capital, it grew with the city’s business life. By the 1880s, according to historian Russell Stone, the Herald “so often and so felicitously captured the local mood that its editorials might almost have been regarded as the business community thinking aloud”.
For the past 50 of its 160 years I’ve been reading the paper, for 40 years I’ve been writing for it. For a long time I was one of the anonymous (non-business) people who spoke for it.
Anonymous for a reason - a great newspaper has a personality of its own. Its character needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, the people of various views and skills who produce it for a while.
They are custodians of a heritage. A newspaper’s character is set in a real sense by its readers, it is what its editors and writers of its editorials think its readers would expect of it.
The Herald I met when I came to Auckland in 1973 was big, serious and grey. I had come to work on the city’s evening paper, the lively but now long-gone Auckland Star, where the morning rival was called “Granny”, not always affectionately.
Our first task each morning was reworking clippings from the Herald as brief items of news the Star had no time to gather for itself before its first edition deadline. “Granny”, we knew, could be trusted.
As a reader, the Herald seemed more of a gentleman to me, sober, grey-suited, cautious and kindly but unsentimental. It was reserved, factual and above all, reliable. If it was in the Herald, it must be right.
Its editorials in those days and Minhinnick’s cartoons were of the Holyoake era. It was less comfortable with a Labour Government elected in 1972. When that Government launched a scheme to fund superannuation from compulsory savings over the next 40 years, the Herald marshalled all of its persuasive power to defeat it.
In editorials and signed articles, the fund was demonised as a device that would enable the state to dominate the sharemarket.
More likely it would have been a sovereign wealth fund like any other, professionally managed, objectively invested, mature by now, reducing the burden of pensions on taxation and lessening the country’s reliance on foreign investment.
The power of the press can be a mixed blessing.
The Herald I joined in 1981 was navigating a sea of social change. The Springboks came, the country was ruptured. The issue for many became bigger than rugby, or even race; it shook people’s confidence in the country’s ability to maintain orderly civil life.
The Herald played it down the middle. Its reporting remained factual, non-judgmental, impartial.
A few months later, shaken and fearful people re-elected Robert Muldoon, but he could not cure a declining economy.
Exports were steadily losing value relative to imports, especially oil. Protected business and militant unions were sharing the fruits of cost-plus pricing. Inflation had set in, unemployment was met with make-work schemes, Budgets were deep in deficit. It could not go on.
When the dam burst, I was reporting at Parliament for the Herald. A torrent of reform came from the new Government on Treasury advice to neutralise the state’s role in the economy and force business to adjust to open, competitive markets.
It made sense to me and to Herald editor Peter Scherer, who invited me to join his leader-writing staff. Our editorials contributed, I like to think, to the acceptance of reforms that have made New Zealand a stronger economy today.
Not that the Herald was ever an unequivocal mouthpiece for Rogernomics. My place at Parliament was taken up by a dedicated critic, the diligent, prolific Simon Collins.
Quietly spoken, almost reticent in person, he wrote with a powerful sense of social justice, a deep understanding of economics and a remarkable grasp of data for that pre-digital time.
His analysis of the flat tax rate proposed by Finance Minister Roger Douglas after the 1987 sharemarket crash took the form of a series of articles in the Herald over the ensuing summer holidays.
The series was read by Prime Minister David Lange and contributed to his break with Douglas in the new year, from which the Fourth Labour Government never recovered.
Collins was ahead of his time. News coverage became much more analytical in the 1990s with the help of the new internet and the data-sorting digital technology that began to come into newsrooms as that decade progressed.
Technology was not the only change. Newspapers became more selective in their coverage, devoting several pages and sometimes whole sections to a big story. Princess Diana’s death filled the Herald every day for weeks.
I suspect another change has been important. Tertiary education had expanded as jobs became harder to get in a market economy.
In the 1970s, most journalists were recruited from a practical polytech course. By the turn of the century, more of them were schooled in the sociology that dominates academia these days.
They came with history’s revised interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi and imbued with concepts of biculturalism, systemic racism and modern gender theory, all of which challenged readers who were not convinced of these things.
Surveys found trust of news media declining and the internet was providing alternative information sources that had no reputation to preserve with rigorous verification of everything they report.
Newspapers now compete online with their own websites and other platforms that carry their integrity. Serving the voracious appetite for fresh news on phones at all hours of the day and night requires skills I don’t possess.
No longer on the staff, I am in awe of today’s reporters who not only write well, they take pictures and videos and file frequently to the paper’s digital platforms before they find time to compose a piece for the printed paper.
I don’t know how they do it, I’m just impressed every morning with their research, freshness and verve, and glad the integrity of 160 years still lives on these pages as well as the website.
May this heritage guide the Herald well into a future facing artificial intelligence and other challenges to journalism’s honest job.
John Roughan is a journalist, columnist and former associate editor who has written for the Herald for the past 40 years.
There are no female candidates in Wellington's mayoral race this year.