Mana Maori News - the voice of Maori

By TIM WATKIN

It took a fair bit of chutzpah to get Mana Maori News up and running 10 years ago.

The story goes that Piripi Whaanga, as editor of Tu Tangata magazine, had arranged an interview with Ruth Harley, head of the newly formed New Zealand on Air, on the basis that he wanted to learn her plans for Maori broadcasting. It was all a ruse.

"I was really there to tell her my ideas on Maori broadcasting in the guise of interviewing her," Whaanga says. "She called my bluff and said she'd fund us."

A real bit of chutzpah. Not the most Maori of words, admittedly, but Mana has never really been about Maori language. The rejuvenation of Te Reo has largely been a job for others. Mana is about credible news and what its founders - Whaanga, Gary Wilson and Derek Fox - call "a Maori voice."

That voice started speaking to National Radio listeners on May 28, 1990, at 6.08 pm, just after the news. That it is still speaking is remarkable - and unprecedented. Mana has trod successfully through the swamp of Maori broadcasting where others have sunk.

Those who know the industry are lining up to offer praise. New Zealand on Air board member Roger Horrocks calls Mana "a powerhouse that deserves to be celebrated from the rooftops," and Radio New Zealand chief Sharon Crosbie says it's done "more to alert Pakeha New Zealand to the issues and realities confronting Maori than just about anything else."

Author and former Maori affairs journalist Michael King says the staff deserve praise for consistently high standards and the fact that they have endured when everyone else who has tried to do something similar has rarely lasted long.

But in the sparse, grey Mana office that crouches in the suburban spread of Papatoetoe, celebrations are subdued. Truth be told, Mana hardly has the strength to blow out its own candles.

Wilson and Fox speak with the weariness of crusaders who have been ahorse too long without quite reaching the Holy Land. They both use the word "debilitated" too often for comfort.

While there's no suggestion of imminent demise, their financial situation is precarious and the number of employees is "well, well down," Fox says. From a starting team of about 15 fulltime staff, based in Rotorua, Wellington and Auckland, they now have only eight fulltimers in the two main centres.

Mana magazine - first published in 1993, put together by the same staff and steadily selling a respectable 10,000 issues twice a month - now helps to subsidise the radio programmes.

Contracts with Radio New Zealand and Te Mangai Paho amount to just over $700,000 - half the funding of a few years back, Wilson says. That money pays for three six-minute programmes for National Radio each day and six 25-minute documentaries in Maori for the iwi network each week.

In its heyday, Mana also produced 12 top-of-the-hour news bulletins each day and a nightly hour-long magazine show for iwi stations, plus four Maori language bulletins and a half-hour Sunday night magazine show for National Radio.

"We're severely hobbled in what we can do," Fox says.. "But there's a term in Maori - kaupapa - and we're doing this because of the kaupapa, because of a philosophical view that we need to have this strong, competent, professional Maori voice in the media. This is our effort, as best as we can muster at this stage."

That kaupapa was generated by the pioneering trio in the late 80s. All three had spent that decade repeatedly pointing out the lack of news about Maori, by Maori or for Maori. They had been reporting, training and agitating but were frustrated.

"We were aware that there wasn't a Maori voice within the existing establishment organisations and we should probably do something about it," says Fox, former television presenter and Te Karere founder. "If we couldn't do it from inside we should do it from outside.

"The planets all came together at the same time, you might say. There were things crashing around in the dark which came together and Mana Maori Media began."

Those planets were the trio's kaupapa, Harley's vision, the momentum of the Maori renaissance and, crucially, the political will and funding.

"It was the one bullish time we had, those first years of New Zealand on Air," says Horrocks, a member of the board since its inception. "Suddenly the public broadcasting fee was increased and some money came into the system. It was a period when new things were possible."

For setup and the first three years of operation, Mana received $2 million. It was money hard won. Horrocks says they looked at the trio's plans with "hard eyes."

Wilson, the proposal writer of the team, says New Zealand on Air demanded "all these things we weren't too familiar with. Bloody business plans and ... I've forgotten the terminology, but we had to run it past accountants and so forth."

Mana's lack of business knowhow, apparent from the start, has been the main hole in its armour over the years. The priority has always been the journalism, the credibility, the voice. But to get that Maori voice heard, they needed cooperative broadcasters.

The newly emerging iwi stations were going to be eager for any content they could get but Mana wanted the voice to speak to the wider public.

"I was arguing then as I would now," Wilson says. "In many ways you win the Maori language argument in English. That's not to say you abandon Maori or ignore it, it's just that the critical battle is the mindset of MPs, newspaper editors, school principals, and that sort of thing."

They turned to National Radio.

"Producing the content was never difficult - finding the outlets was," Fox says. "I remember having some tense negotiations with Radio New Zealand as we talked about this product. How do you walk in and say to somebody, 'We think you're doing a terrible job, therefore you should get out of the way and let us do it better'?"

They did find a way, and won a contract to fill the 22 minutes between 6.08 and 6.30 pm at a time when National Radio rarely used outside sources.

"We went for a slot that would be good for us, but also a time when we thought the senior executives in RNZ had better things to do," Fox says. "What they put to air had a fresh, distinctively Maori tone. It was conversational, canvassed comment from a wider range of people than was usual in the mainstream, and allowed itself a sense of humour.

"With part of the programme in Maori - in particular the satirical audio cartoon called Reta ki a Mama (Letter to Mum) by Waihori Shortland and Rereata Makiaha - they could get away with a cheekiness, even defamation, that English language news daren't try."

King adds that "they introduced a new cultural element to news coverage."

Wena Harawira, one of Mana's longest-serving reporters, says it gave them the chance to be creative.

"We told stories rather than reporting events. We weren't undermining the journalistic integrity of our pieces but we were looking at areas that hadn't been looked at by Pakeha journalists."

"Even though we're a raggedy outfit we don't come up with a raggedy product," Wilson says, "so that gives us a credibility and a marketability, even though we haven't really cashed in on it."

Wilson proudly admits that Mana's purpose goes beyond the magazine and radio programmes to political lobbying and providing a start for many of the Maori journalists now working in the mainstream, such as Maramena Roderick, Mike McRoberts and Gideon Porter.

But in Mana's news, credibility is still king. Campaigning journalism of the British variety is not indulged in. Mana campaigns by doing.

"We've demonstrated what you can do in terms of unearthing talent, what can be done with programmes on radio, and with publications," Wilson says. "What's needed now is both funding and airtime so that Maori voice can be heard."

Wilson, the quiet man of the founding three, is widely acknowledged for working with integrity at the crossroads where things Maori meet with hardnosed journalistic standards.

Whaanga left Mana a few years after its inception and Fox, though he is still a 50 per cent shareholder, has taken a back seat since he won the Wairoa mayoralty. But Wilson - working on an old Olivetti typewriter he refuses to exchange for a computer, and despite ill health in recent years - is still at his desk.

"He's the key," says Whaanga frankly. "The unfortunate thing is the colour of his skin."

Yes, Wilson is Pakeha. The former journalism tutor and New Zealand Herald and Auckland Star reporter keeps a low profile, not wanting to undermine Mana's Maori focus.

But King says that Wilson's input, along with Pakeha journalists Carol Archie and Andrew Robb, has forged an inspirational model.

"It's been a bicultural effort in that there are Pakeha journalists in there too. They've made it inclusive rather than separatist. It's so important that we're talking across the frontier all the time."

From out there on the frontier, Mana staff are staunch critics of how the mainstream media "averts its eyes" from Maori issues.

"If journalism involves fair reflection of the whole range of the community," says Wilson, leading his charger into battle one more time, "mainstream media have consistently failed to reach that level of professionalism and seem quite unconcerned about that failure."

And when it does take a look? "What you get is a Pakeha view of a Maori story largely dependent on its effect on Pakeha."

A mainstream audience will be told how much a treaty settlement will cost the Government, for example, but nothing of the original grievance and cost to Maori.

But each of the founders also knows, in Whaanga's words, that "Maori can be their own worst enemies."

Wilson holds his hands up and apart to illustrate: "On one hand there's this mainstream media ignorance of things Maori. Things are undervalued, ignored or mispresented. But equally damaging to the progress of Maori media is this indifference to, and lack of confidence with, the media among Maori leaders."

Whaanga compares Maori broadcasting to carving - "you are carving out the image of the people" - but says the Maori elite have failed to understand its significance.

"We haven't been able to convince people. That's probably the story of our lives."

Wilson adds: "We've been fairly successful and we sit in august company within Checkpoint and Morning Report. The failure, if you look at the downside, is that it [the Maori voice] hasn't expanded."

Part of the reason for the lack of other Maori media groups has been what Fox calls "minimalist" government support and a contract tendering process that meant Mana had to fight for funding with Mai FM's Ruia Mai news service.

Though these crusaders have glimpsed the Holy Land before, only to be forced back, this Government seems to be offering new hope.

Alliance broadcasting spokesman Willie Jackson says a comprehensive review of Maori broadcasting is pending.

"It's imperative that Mana News is retained, and we as a Government have an obligation to make sure that not only is it retained, but that we set up Maori news in English in other media as well."

Such a commitment is icing on Mana's birthday cake, yet the battle is far from over. To survive, Mana will still rely on what Fox call the staff's "sheer cussedness."

They will keep offering a Maori voice just because, like any true crusaders, they feel they have to.