RNZ NATIONAL. MEDIAWATCH 01/10/2017

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2017
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A265541
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Rights Information
Year
2017
Reference
A265541
Media type
Audio
Item unavailable online
Series
Mediawatch
Place of production
New Zealand/Aotearoa
Categories
Radio
Production company
Radio New Zealand
Credits
Reporter: Colin Peacock

Mediawatch looks critically at the New Zealand media - television, radio, newspapers and magazines as well as the 'new' electronic media.

Party leaders picking on the media:
When Winston Peters took centre stage this week, he also took a big swing at the media. Other party leaders also criticised the coverage of the election, but some political players and the media seemed to get along just fine.

Last week, the story was: who will win the election? This week, it was: who will Winston want in power?
Newshub political editor Patrick Gower said he’d been talking to sources in NZ First Party who blamed National for the pre-election leak of Winston Peters' super-sized superannuation payments. A four-pronged National Party plan to take down New Zealand First at the election had backfired, he added.
"They are now full of fear, waiting and wondering if Winston's utu is about to strike," Patrick Gower told Newshub's viewers, not holding back on the drama.
On Tuesday night, Winston Peters took to Facebook to hit back at what he called fiction, barefaced lies and grossly misleading reporting from Patrick Gower and Newshub - and others.
"Newshub is claiming sources that don’t exist, and is merely toying with viewers and presenting make believe instead of facts. It’s the very worst form of journalism and Newshub is not the only one doing it – sad to say."
Winston Peters  - sad to say - didn't specify which other media were also doing it, or even which parts of Newshub's reports were the supposedly barefaced, grossly misleading fictional bits.  
But he had at least one journalist in his corner.
"Good on Winston Peters for calling out some of the drivel that has been passing as news over the past few days. The notion that Peters would be seeking revenge on National for regaining the Northland seat is ridiculous," wrote New Zealand Herald political editor Audrey Young.
"That fact is that Peters will come to his view about who is best to lead Government . . .on far less flimsy grounds than the nonsense that is being peddled at present," she added.
That was a message Winston Peters himself hammered home when he had the media’s full attention at Parliament on Wednesday. He went on the offensive and  - deliberately offended the media, waving a copy of The Dominion Post at the podium for effect.   
Winston Peters went on to say there would be no more talking to the media til the final count next week.
That’s probably just as well.
After something of a Clayton’s election result - now we can all get some sleep  . . . for a bit.
Post-poll media complaints come to the surface
"Thre's a lot of negativity here at Morning Report. I got better coverage from the Edge and Radio Hauraki than I got from you," said ACT’s leader David Seymour when he clashed with Guyon Espiner on Morning Report last Monday.

Guyon Espiner replied that he'd had pretty good exposure for a party with just one MP which was "kept on life support by National".
ACT got less than a quarter of the votes pulled in by the ten-month old Opportunities Party, whose leader Gareth Morgan went to court when he was excluded from party leaders' debates on TV.
On Nine to Noon right-leaning pundit and lobbyist Mathew Hooton reckoned metropolitan-minded media was blind to National's strength in the suburbs and provinces. 
"I think the New Zealand media is very, very dominated now by people who, broadly speaking, live in Auckland central and Wellington central and we've seen an inaccurate assessment of the overall election campaign. We've seen a very urban, liberal, under 40, probably female perspective of the election," he said.
He said the demise of provincial radio and the national news agency NZPA has resulted in a dearth of political coverage from the provinces during the election campaign.
Agents of change?
The week before on Nine to Noon Matthew Hooton  said - more than once -the media “had decided to change the government.”
 And as it turned out, one man from the media might have actually done that - whether he meant to or not: former TV personality Tamati Coffey took the Maori Party out of the MMP equation by winning Waiariki from its co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell.
"The 38-year-old . .  .maximised his television skills with a strong video campaign on social media. Some of Coffey’s Facebook videos had more than 50,000 views. He had help from at least one ex-TVNZ branding expert," Mark Jennings wrote on newsroom.co.nz.
The devastated co-leaders of the Maori Party were seen sharing tears and hugs with Newshub’s Patrick Gower on Newshub at 6 last Sunday. 

"(It) wasn’t an easy watch," said Mark Jennings, who was formerly Gower's boss at TV3.
It may be no bad thing that political reporters can console politicians who’ve been knocked back, but not all of them get a shoulder to cry on on the 6 o’clock news.
While David Seymour, Winston Peters and Gareth Morgan all accused the media of shutting them out, politicians and lobbyists for Labour and National still seem to have no problem getting on air as pundits.
Last Monday, TV3's The Project turned to lobbyist Jenna Raeburn, partner of newly elected National Party MP for Hutt South - to ask out why National did better than most polls predicted.
She was an advisor to government minister Gerry Brownlee until last year when she joined the newly-established local branch of Australian lobbying firm Barton Deakin, At the time Jenna Raeburn told stuff.co.nz the company would be "completely partisan" and focused solely on the National Party.
So was her answer to The Project's Jesse Mulligan.
"National was campaigning for all New Zealanders," she answered, echoing National’s election campaign slogan.
When Bill English launched “Delivering for all New Zealanders" in August, Jesse Mulligan called out the PM directly in an on-air editorial on The Project.

“Don't say this government is delivering for all New Zealanders when what you mean is that it's delivering for all New Zealanders except the poor, the homeless, the first-home buyers, New Zealanders suffering from depression and mental illness and the 100-plus young New Zealanders who take their own lives each year,” he said sternly down the camera to the PM and TV3 viewers. 
But Jesse Mulligan didn't seem to be straining at the leash to challenge Jenna Raeburn's claim last Monday. She went on to praise Bill English's campaigning more-or-less unchallenged before being applauded and thanked for her time.  
Maybe The Project has shown our politicians the way forward for those coalition negotiations. What appear to be strongly-held beliefs can simply be parked if required.
Three days before election day, Winston Peters himself went on The Project and praised New Zealand's reporters.
"There are some seriously great journalists, " said the NZ First leader charmingly 
If journalists can co-exist so cosily with and politicians and lobbyists on a news show, it should be no problem to form a government that can get along.

Too much talk about too few polls?:
The two big TV broadcasters aggressively promoted and reported the opinion polls they paid for during the election campaign, which returned very different results. How did they compare with the result the mattered last weekend? Do we need more of them - or none at all?  

TVNZ’s Mike Hosking spent the first five minutes of the 44 minute final TV leaders debate on the Wednesday before the election asking between Jacinda Ardern and Bill English about the latest opinion poll results.
Two weeks earlier, it was the same in the first debate between the pair. 
“(It was) a complete waste of time – especially considering how volatile the polls have been,” said Newstalk ZB's Josh Price in reponse. 
Like viewers at home hoping for debate about political differences between the two main parties, he was frustrated so much time was taken up with public opinion - specifically those polls commissioned by the two main TV networks who hyped up the results in a big way. 

TV3’s Reid Research poll findings were at variance with TVNZ’s Colmar Brunton polls even though both had the same sample size. Two TVNZ Colmar Brunton polls barely a week apart showed a big swing of support away from Labour not echoed in any other poll.
Another poll had Labour on 44 per cent support, ahead of National on 40 per cent and the minor parties fading. Soon after, Newshub's poll had National 10 points ahead with potentially enough support to govern alone. 
"Either support is swinging wildly between Labour and National as we hit the final straight of this election campaign — or the polls are wrong," said Fairfax media's political editor Tracy Watkins.
Rogue results can happen, but if the polls are that far apart, can they possibly be accurate? Election results in the UK this year and in the so-called Brexit vote defied the pollsters' predictions.  And few predicted Donald Trump would now be living in the White House (and Trump Tower). 
“The discrepancy between Colmar Brunton and Reid Research's polls is larger than any I can recall," polling expert Prof Jack Vowles from Victoria University said on Newsroom.co.nz - just before the final TVNZ poll. 
"Perceptions of difference between a close race and a more skewed one do affect party strategies, and voter choices," wrote Prof Vowles. 
Sean Plunket - the communications director for the unsuccessful Opportunities Party told Newstalk ZB it was a "farce" that Labour changed their tax policies based on poll results two weeks before election day while people where already voting.
"Polling on who people are going to vote for changes he outcome of an election because of how our minds work and because of the way the average New Zealander votes," he said. 
For that reason, Newstalk ZB’s Josh Price also argued it’s time to ditch political polls for six months in the build up to elections.
"I have spoken to people who have told me they would like to vote for Gareth Morgan’s Opportunities Party. A lot of people in their mid-twenties  can relate to what he is saying. But when asked if they would vote for the party, most simply said “Nah, it doesn’t look as if they will reach five-percent, it will be a wasted vote,” he wrote. 
"That’s not how the system should work. People shouldn’t be influenced by a thousand or so people who were called up randomly," said Josh Price. 
It turns out that long before the election even TV3 - which promoted its polls and reported the results polls as aggressively as possible - was having doubts about them.
In a video made for the Maori Televisoin's Media Take, Newshub political editor Patrick Gower said they'd reconsidered the whole idea, but decided to carry on with a new method combining online questions with phone polling. 

When election day had come and gone, Newshub’s Patrick Gower took to the Newshub website to insist its Reid Research polls were "vital and correct". 
Stuff.co.nz showed averages of credible pollsters' surveys were close to the eventual result in previous elections too.
But this time round, there were fewer polls as well. Previously, news publishers Fairfax Media and the Herald’s publisher NZME  - formerly APN - commissioned opinion polls from other pollsters, but not this time - reportedly - to save money.
RNZ's Guyon Espiner suggested on the Caucus podcast that the Electoral Commission could fund more polls to fill the gap - as a public service.
Do we need more polls - or if they disappeared altogether would we miss them as much as the broadcasters who commission them for their own newsgathering purposes?
Gavin White was formerly a pollster for the UMR company here in New Zealand. Now he’s working for an offshoot of the company in Australia, UMR Strategic Research. While UMR 
"We do need more polls," he told Mediawatch. 
TVNZ's Colmar Brunton polls were criticised for relying solely on landline phones. Today more and more people simply can't be contacted by landline.   
Gavin White says that doesn't necessarily skew the result.
'All of the companies do a lot of work to account for such biases. They are more aware than anyone about the decline of landlines," he said. 
He says media created confusion over apparently conflicting poll results. Polls taken at the end of the campaign period are usually close to the actual result. Reports focussing on single polls accentuate the differences, but it is often not clear to the public that the survey periods are different.  
"There is a Catch 22 here," says Gavin White. 
"Why would a media company commission a poll if they can't get maximum value out of it? But media need to report polls more responsibly," he said. 
Should we just do away with polls during campaigns? 
"There is a need in the media to report what's happening in the contest," he says, pointing out that political parties won't stop doing their own internal polling.
"If you don't have legitimate polling people would then draw conclusions based on quasi-polls and vox-pops," he says.  

"The polls are problematic,"says Brent Edwards, the outgoing head of newsgathering at RNZ, which only reported average "poll of poll" results. 
"The TV channels pay a lot of money for those polls and I think it distorts their news judgment," he says.
"We were trying to report the trends, but I have to say each time one of those individual polls came out our news programmes got excited too" he told Mediawatch."I'm not sure polls are a public service. Politicians make the point that there's only one polls that matters. It sounds trite - but it is right. 
"However, polling is a fact of life. you;re not going to get rid of it," he says. 

Pioneering publisher or sexual profiteer?:
These days Playboy is just one of many pornographic products on the shelf and a lucrative logo slapped on other stuff. Its founder has long been a ludicrous figure in a dressing gown and the ship’s captain's cap. But when Hugh Hefner died on Thursday afternoon, the media thought nothing else was as important.

Some foreign media moguls are of course significant figures in our public life. But with the possible exception of the octogenarian Rupert Murdoch it's hard to imagine any of them leading the news here when they die.
It's a long, long time ago Playboy broke new ground in publishing - these days it's just one of many pornographic products on the top shelf and a lucrative logo that's slapped on any number of other licenced products to make more money.
And its founder has long been a ludicrous figure in a dressing gown and the hat of ship's captain.
But when Hugh Hefner died on Thursday afternoon, the news media here thought nothing else was as important.
TVNZ One News lead with it at 6pm - tacking a local angle on at the end citing the fact New Zealand actor Matt Whelan recently played Hefner in the documentary series American Playboy, the Hugh Hefner Story.
While TV3 introduced the item by saying "the man who pioneered a sexual revolution in our time has died."
Whether he pioneered the sexual revolution or pimped it for profit has been fiercely debated in the media since he died.
Tellingly it was TV3's entertainment reporter who summed up his life and death for Newshub at 6 - starting like this:
"Defying the laws of physics and good taste, but testament to the marvels of modern medicine and chemistry, Hugh Hefner lived to the grand old age of 91."
Reportedly he wasn't defying physics so much as conquering it with chemicals - though TV3's obit didn't overlook the gruesome and sexist side of his modus operandi, reporting that waitresses had to have internal examinations for venereal disease and they were told this was a requirement of the state.
 
Newstalk ZB broke the news at 4:30pm, before Larry Williams spoke to entertainment reporter Dominic Corry in Los Angeles - who shoehorned in an old cliché saying "I only read it for the articles so I wouldn't know anything about that".
In its day the magazine featured challenging journalism by top writers. Obituaries in the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post gave him credit for that and for a commitment to sexual freedom, although mostly the kind men would benefit from.
Host Ali Jones broke the news of Hugh Hefner's death on RNZ's The Panel but then regretted asking panellist Jo McCarroll for an opinion after she said "I think he was just a sad old predator".
There was no fear of speaking ill of the dead from journalist Rose Hoare in an opinion piece published on Thursday night on stuff.co.nz.
In this, she said there were "plenty of bros high fiving on social media in tribute to the man who created Playboy publishing empire - with a loan from his mother".
But she went on to say that: "To women, he was gross and lame, a relic of the kind of slobbery sexism that rightfully belongs in the grave."
 
And that his Girls of the Playboy Mansion reality TV show series, was so dated it felt like feminism's answer to a black and white minstrel show.
On Friday's Morning Report writer Jacqueline Friedman said women in his mansion lived like hostages. When asked what she thought Hugh Hefner's epitaph should be, she laughed saying she didn't know about his epitaph but that she hoped his afterlife involved being surrounded by women who weren't concerned about his pleasure.
Hugh Hefner himself acknowledged he got rich because sex was important to people.
Evidently it's still so important to the media here that they rated the newsworthiness of his death so highly, long after he was really important to anything.

From: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/201860576/pioneering-publisher-or-sexual-profiteer