On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 18:26:19 +1200, Crash <
nogood@dontbother.invalid>
wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 17:16:00 +1200, Rich80105<rich80105@hotmail.com>
wrote:
In an period of spin, blatant political manipulation of official >>information requests, removal of reporting that could be embarrassing,
the replacement of journalism by public relations "sponsored
articles", and straight lies, it is good that journalism in England is >>still alive enough to show us a little of how it is done: >>http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/2e43b3e8-01c7-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62.html
We therefore should be grateful for the fact that in cases where you
have identified political shortcomings above, that the media benefit >commercially from exposing those shortcomings. The article you cite
has only the most general connection to our political theatre.
Politicians will always seek to portray statistics that support their >political viewpoints. Nothing new there and nothing new in how false >statistics are exposed.
The risks we face that are not covered in that article (the Financial
Times is a newspaper) is that the media - being the traditional press,
TV News etc. - do not adapt to a trend away from reading newspapers
and watching Television. These are the media where politics is most
commonly debated. The risk is that if media companies such as
Fairfax, Mediaworks, TVNZ etc. don't adapt then they will die and
their critical political journalism will die with them. Then we will
have less media outlets to scrutinise politics.
We can disagree about the extent to which the shortcomings relate to
New Zealand; I note that political advice and practices on the
conservative side of politics have to an extent been converging -
Crosby Textor have spread their methods from Australia to the UK and
New Zealand in particular, but also to other jurisdictions. National
is known to have regular discussions with other conservative parties,
and to a lesser extent (probably related to costs involved) with other
liberal / left / progressive parties.
Certainly media experience is fairly consistent in different
countries, and I agree with you that the media risks are critical. We
have seen in New Zealand an increase in sponsored articles and thinly
disguised pres releases. Journalism is no longer portrayed as a
profitable profession, whereas public relations is seen to empoloy an increasing number of former reporters and journalists, to the extent
that tertiary institutions are starting to look more favourably at
courses in PR than in Journalism. The trend you rightly identify is
already with us - an increasing number of people now give their
primary source of news and current affairs knowledge as coming from
the internet, including social media, than from newspapers and
television.
In the USA. you will be aware of the growth of the partisan Fox News,
which appears to have fostered such a level of blind hatred among its
followers that it may well contribute to the split or demise of the
Republican party. The closest equivalent partisan media organisation
on the Democrat side may be Huffington Post, or perhaps shows like the
Jon Stewart show - not nearly as influential as Fox, but having at
least making an attempt at reasoned argument. UK and USA newspapers
are particularly partisan, but there is usually at least one that
covers issues on a relatively non-partisan basis. As a smaller
country, we do not have that balance with newspapers, and popular
perception would probably be that Paul Henry and have greater
influence than John Campbell, and as far as blogs are concerned
Kiwiblog is probably seen as roughly equal in influence to The
Standard, with neither really making much difference except to those
already committed politically.
Reasoned argument is getting scarcer, which suits the current
government just fine.
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