It was an awful day in my household and office yesterday, as TVNZ joined its free-to-air mates at Warner Brothers Discovery in announcing massive cuts to newsgathering operations.
My wife Mava is a reporter on Sunday, and for many, many years I’ve worked with the teams on Sunday, FairGo, Tonight, and Midday. They are my colleagues and friends. As anyone in any industry who has gone through a restructure or been made redundant will know, it’s a personally devastating thing to experience.
Perhaps I’m biased, but I do think the news business is a bit different to other businesses. I think it contributes to the strength of our democracy and the vibrancy of our society in ways that can’t be measured on a balance sheet. I think it celebrates and reflects us, and I think well-resourced journalism is our single most effective check on power.
When it comes to the TV business, it’s clear the traditional economic models are no longer fit for purpose. In the digital age, traditional TV plays a less prominent role in our lives than it once did. Advertising dollars move from the telly to the likes of Google and Meta, instead. The gazillions they make in profits are mostly shipped offshore.
News media outside the TVNZ building. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Jack Tame and Mava Moayyed
Of course, people in my industry should have seen this coming. And for the most part they have. I’m not saying there aren’t things they couldn’t have done differently, innovations they could and should have made, but ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs, and local programming, in a country with five million people... is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off.
TV and moving pictures still have a certain magic. Radio has intimacy. But TV is the only medium where you can both hear the crack in the politician’s voice and see the flash in their eyes when a hypocrisy is exposed. At moments of national or international significance... natural disasters, pandemics, we can get information from several sources, but for the collective experience, we still turn to telly.
And there is an extra power that comes with TV currents affairs. Think about the kinds of stories that have been exposed in New Zealand. I remember as a kid in Christchurch, when the doctor Morgan Fahey was exposed by TV3′s 20/20 for sexually abusing his patients. I was eleven years old and I remember it. It was profound, devastating journalism... a story which has stuck in my head for more than 25 years.
Consider Kristin Hall and Sunday’s extraordinary recent investigation into emergency housing in Rotorua. News reports about that issue popped up from time to time on various news websites, but it took moving pictures, careful storytelling, meticulously-produced, expensive current affairs, to drive home the full scale and significance of those abuses. It took the power of telly to affect change.
If we value these things, one way or another we have to pay for it. From a purely economic perspective, if the commercial model is broken, the only other real viable option is a regulatory response.
Of course I’m biased, but I’d argue the value of journalism should be measured in more than dollars and cents. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think a number of newish, small, independent, digital outlets fills the gap left by the shows that are dying. I think I’d be more open to that argument if the overall number of journos in New Zealand wasn’t massively, steadily dropping.
The traditional TV companies might be poor, but without something meaty in place of Newshub, Sunday and Fair Go, our society and our democracy are poorer too. And by the very nature of the work they do and the vital stories they tell, we will never know what we have lost.
