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Mediawatch for 9 September 2018
Media OTT on PM as RNZAF VIP; Nauru squirms under media spotlight; New research prompts call for media to cut ties with the online titans.
Nauru’s government has gone to great lengths in recent years to keep journalists off the island - and away from the hundreds of asylum seekers languishing in limbo there. Mediawatch looks at what happened when the Pacific Islands Forum gave some reporters a rare chance to report from on the ground this week.
Jacinda Ardern has offered to bring some of Nauru's asylum seekers to New Zealand she told reporters she was anxious not to raise their expectations if she met with any of them during her trip.
But no such expectations would be raised by media taking the rare opportunity to talk to refugees there -- something the government there has been desperate to avoid in the past.
Ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum, a new report from two refugee organisations in Australia detailed the trauma endured by people on Nauru seeking asylum - including the children there. Last month, the ABC in Australia angered Nauru’s government by airing the accounts of three health workers recently returned from the island.
First-hand accounts from Nauru have been hard to come by in recent times.
RNZ Pacific’s Sally Round told Morning Report the flow of information from Nauru dried up after the detention centres were built.
"Before that we had relatively easy access to minister and the president. Now we get little or no response to requests for interviews or comment. We have to rely on their newsletters, statement and tweets," she said.
She also made the point there are no independent media on the island to tap into.
Since 2014, Nauru has kept reporters out by charging more than $US6000 for visa applications - with no refund if no visa is grantedNauru’s President Baron Waqa has said the cost is justified because foreign media have made money out of what he regards as unfair and unbalanced reporting on the plight of asylum seekers on the island.
Back in February, New Zealand’s Minister for Pacific Peoples - Aupito William Sio - said he’d talked to Nauru's president and he was confident journalists would be “able to conduct their affairs as they do when they are here in New Zealand" during this week's Forum.
Not quite.
In May, Nauru cited limited accommodation as a reason to restrict the number of media personnel.
There was also a threat to revoke the visas of journalists filming or photographing the refugees or detention centre facilities.
The government banned Australia’s public broadcaster the ABC, which was accused of "continued biased and false reporting" about the country”.
Australian media organisations called for a media boycott of the Forum in support of the ABC after the ban was announced.
Hopes for a united front across the ditch were dashed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
The Daily Telegraph’s political editor, Sharri Markson, called the boycott “ludicrous” on Twitter:
“You can read all the news from the trip in News Corp papers, like @dailytelegraph and @australian but nowhere else,” she said.
So much for solidarity:
It led to this exchange on the ABC show between an editor of News Corp’s The Australian and former a former Tasmanian senator.
ABC The Drum
✔
@ABCthedrum
Where is your patriotism? It's either one in all in. Or you don’t go. It's that simple" - former Tasmanian senator @JacquiLambie thinks News Corp should "stand together as one" with the Australian Federal Press Gallery's boycott of the PM's trip to Nauru, after the ABC was banned
10:59 PM - Jul 4, 2018
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A glance at Australian media this week reveals little appetite for stories about the Forum - possibly because the country's new PM decided not to attend.
But it did make headlines when TVNZ Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver was detained by Nauru police earlier on Tuesday afternoon during interviews with refugees.
On Newstalk ZB, drive host Larry Williams joked that Nauru should have held her in one of the refugee detention centres so she could report first-hand on the conditions
She was released the same day and her Forum accreditation was restored. The Nauru government sent out this stern warning afterwards:
Republic of Nauru
@Republic_Nauru
To NZ journalists on Nauru. You aren’t above the law. Walking into certain areas unannounced where emotions run high increases risk & places lives in danger. The police work hard to protect everyone. Follow the rules and go through proper channels & you won’t have a problem.
8:12 AM - Sep 5, 2018
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It was one of those are occasions where politicians go into bat for the media.
"We think the most important right of all rights in politics is freedom of the press," foreign minister Winston Peters told reporters.
He is one of a handful of politicians who have targeted the media with legal action in the past.
ACT leader David Seymour told RNZ New Zealand aid to Nauru should be cut if Nauru cannot uphold "basic values like freedom of the press and not kidnapping journalists".
It's odd the human rights of one reporter detained comfortably for four hours should trigger such a threat - but not the indefinite - and definitely uncomfortable - detention of hundreds of people with nowhere else to go.
In the end Jacinda Ardern's flew in flew out without meeting a refugee.
"Could we have imagined that media scrutiny, controlled as it has been, might shame Nauru and its Australian enablers? Instead we have seen further predictable abuses of media freedom," lamented The Press in an editorial, which also said the Forum had been "an opportunity squandered".
But the Nauru government's obvious discomfort in the presence of proper reporters on its own soil tells its own story too.
If nothing else, reporters revealed that the plight of the refugees is not only a source of shame for Nauru, but also a key source of income in a country where the money ran out along with its phosphate.
A new report says our news media are too dependent on Google and Facebook. The author says it's also time to tax big online operators to secure the future of journalism. If this is even possible, how could it be done?
Facebook and Instagram users are in a frenzy after both social media giants crashed this morning"
So said a red banner on NZHerald.co.nz on Monday - and a news alert pushed to app users' phones.
Instagram and Facebook users took to Twitter “to express their grief about the issue,” said the story. No mention was made of those who reacted calmly and waited for the short-lived problem to be fixed.
The story came from the UK-based Mail Online which specialises in tabloid-type clickbait and relies heavily on social media platforms like Facebook to get it in front of millions of eyeballs worldwide.
Since Facebook tweaked its algorithm earlier this year to de-prioritise news appearing on users’ timelines and news feeds, Mail Online lost almost a tenth of its global audience. Its digital advertising revenue growth slumped and its publisher's share price dipped.
It was a powerful illustration of where the power lies in the modern media.
Last month the Guardian reported a senior Facebook executive told Australian media companies if they didn’t cooperate with the social network, their businesses would die.
“In a few years ... I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice,” she said.
The New York Times chief executive urged Facebook to stop distributing news and "just stick to cat videos".
Last month, the publisher of The Spinoff Duncan Greive said New Zealand’s biggest news sites are down on traffic and audience too since Facebook's move, and it referrals to his own site dropped too.
"In July 2017 social supplied 52 percent of The Spinoff’s web traffic; last month (July 2018) it was just 30 percent. So while our traffic and audience have increased year-on-year, it was a far more diverse and complex method of building an audience than before," he wrote.
He said it's not only a big deal for individual websites.
"We in the media - and, by extension those interested in democracy and all that - need to understand Facebook’s capriciousness as the new normal," he wrote.
Last Thursday, Dr Merja Myllylahti, research fellow at AUT’s School of Communication Studies - said local media had become dangerously dependent on Facebook and Google for online traffic.
At AUT's Centre for Journalism Media and Democracy, she unveiled new research showing the online platforms' share of digital ad revenues was growing, but New Zealand news organisations don’t make any substantial revenue from Facebook.
The paper titled Google, Facebook and New Zealand news media: The problem of platform dependency is the first report analysing the relationship between platform companies and NZ news organisations.
She told Mediawatch news publishers should pull out of Facebook - and Facebook and Google should pay a tax to ensure New Zealand journalism survives in the digital world.
Dr Myllylahti found Facebook and Google combined account for 53 percent of traffic to news websites and they harvest 63 percent of available digital advertising revenue.
She found a quarter of traffic to local news websites comes from Facebook but news organisations don’t make any substantial revenue from Facebook traffic and shares.
Dr Myllylahti said publishers were making the same mistake with Facebook news distribution as they did with their online news sites 20 years ago when they decided to make the content available for free and advertise to the large online audiences they could attract.
“Chasing clicks did not provide them with a sustainable revenue model, and chasing users attention is not working for them either. Facebook user numbers are declining in some major markets, and if the user numbers decline, so will the potential audience for news companies. Why do they stay on the platform?," Dr Myllilahti said.
“It is clear that platforms and news companies are mutually dependent, but ... news companies are failing to monetise traffic and attention they gain on platforms.This risks destroying their business model and raises the question of how content is to be funded,” she said.
Facebook and Google have not invested any money in New Zealand journalism, but they do benefit from the content, she said.
She told Mediawatch there were other publishers New Zealand media could learn from such as Norwegian company Schibsted.
"About 7 to 8 percent of their traffic comes from Facebook and Google. They have a paywall and they built their model outside of Facebook and social media," she said.
Bernard Hickey has worked on several digital journalism projects here and overseas designed to attract advertising revenue online.
Some were big established media companies - such as Reuters, MSN - and others smaller startups like Interest.co.nz, Hive News.
He was formerly the head of digital at Fairfax / Stuff and is now the managing editor of Newsroom Pro, the subscription-based service of Auckland-based Newsroom.co.nz which employs 14 journalists.
"From 2002 to 2012, we essentially agreed to let Google crawl our news and index it so they would drive traffic to us and we would make money from advertising. It seemed like a good deal at the time," he told Mediawatch.
"Since then, they've engineered a 'bait and switch'. They captured the value from all those eyeballs by having a much better understanding of who was looking at the ads," he said.
"Over that period, I've watched the value of advertising on news websites fall from about $70-80 per 1000 page impressions to about 4,5,6 dollars," he said.
"I can see why people are now saying we should give up on Facebook."
Both Google and Facebook have invested support for online journalism, such as the Facebook Journalism Project and the Google News Initiative. Both have launched tools to help media outlets secure paying subscribers.
Dr Myllilahti said none of these initiatives have so far reached New Zealand.
She said online platform companies should pay a portion of their digital advertising revenue towards journalism, and a special platform tax for them may be a most effective way to deal with it.
How would that work?
"I'm no tax expert, but either they should be levied or taxed or they should voluntarily be paying something from their advertising revenue into public interest journalism projects so we could have an independent trust to which the money could be paid," she said.
Hard on the heels of Limogate, flying the PM to Nauru this week turned political pundits into amateur accountants - and talk radio hosts into advisors in parenting and Pacific diplomacy.
“I tell you what . . . the cost of having a baby will weigh heavily on the taxpayer this week,” Newstalk ZB’s political Barry Soper told his listeners.
The cost of the RNZAF flying her alone to the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru became a huge talking point for the news media as soon as the arrangements were revealed.
It prompted a veteran Pacific affairs reporter to take to Twitter:
Michael Field
@MichaelFieldNZ
Perhaps Barry Soper could refund decent chunk of many freebee trips he had on air force flights? Took lot of fuel to lug him around & he wasn't charged...
West Side Tory
@tauhenare
Replying to @nzherald
Don't let the #Media or #BarryOldManSober set the agenda and list of where and where not the PM travels too. Maybe next time she goes over seas he should/could stay home, save his employer some dosh.
12:16 PM - Sep 4, 2018
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The same could be said of many other reporters who’ve hitched a ride with the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister in the past. The New Zealand taxpayer has saved their companies a small fortune down the years.
But Barry Soper reckoned the PM didn't need to go in the first place because Winston Peters would have it under control and Australia’s new PM wasn't going either.
Scott Morrison had his own reasons for giving it a swerve. He probably didn't want to kick off his leadership with a visit to the place the BBC this week called the Island where children have given up on life.
All this of course followed the media-driven angst over Simon Bridges ‘Limogate’ bill and in trying to work how much taxpayers’ money on the line this time, political journalists turned into amateur accountants.
Newstalk ZB initially reported the cost would be near $50,000 "based on fuel prices from two years ago."
The guesstimates had gone up by the time ZB Drive host Larry Williams grizzled about the trip later in the day, but his guest on The Huddle Matthew Hooton said it was essential the PM went to Nauru and the cost didn't matter.
“If we are lucky enough to elect a Franklin Roosevelt as our Prime Minister, he will come with the cost of getting his wheelchair on and off the plane,” he wrote in a subsequent opinion piece for RNZ.
As guesstimates increased further, so did the alarm of Newstalk ZB hosts on Tuesday.
"It is wrong to spend $80,000, on travel for one person. Plain wrong. Even when that one person is the Prime Minister,” Tim Dower sternly told ZB listeners.
“I've no idea what they cost, but I can't imagine a Lear jet or whatever would be $80,000,” he said.
Over at Radio Live, Mark Sainsbury said he’d been making some calls and the cost of a private hire would be six figures.
On the AM show he said the quibbling was petty, but AM host Duncan Garner criticised the trip with reference to seriously ill Hamilton woman Abby Hartley stuck in a hospital Bali.
"I said rules and precedents are broken and set all the time. Wasn't I right Prime Minister?"
That story turned out to be a bit more complicated. Checkpoint that night revealed she had not declared a pre-existing condition, but that’s another story . . . .
Back on Newstalk ZB, morning host Leighton Smith declared the PM’s baby was interfering with her job.
"As a working mother you have to make choices, we all know that, every working woman who has had a child and a job knows that. Breastfeeding is to be encouraged for three months. Well the three months is up but she has decided she isn’t going to stop, and wants to keep breastfeeding. So that is interfering with her job as she chose to do it.
Where am I wrong so far?"
On two counts.
The PM’s baby was born just two and a half months ago - and the Ministry of Health recommends exclusive breastfeeding for first six months of a child’s life. After 6 months, mothers should start babies on solid food and also continue breastfeeding until they’re at least one year old.
Listeners in the Wellington region get Heather du Plessis Allan instead of Leighton Smith.
"To save $80,000 wouldn't you just give the baby formula for three days?" she told ZB listeners.
"I can't think of a Prime Minister before Jacinda Ardern who would have . . . been this dumb. I predict baby Neve will be this PM's greatest asset. She will also be the PM's greatest liability," she said.
She called Nauru a “hellhole” and said it was not worth attending the Forum anyway because the Pacific Islands “don’t matter.”
“They are nothing but leeches on us. The Pacific Islands wants money from us,” she told ZB's Wellington region listeners.
She said the only point in going would be to tell their leaders to reject the overtures of China in the Pacific and stick with New Zealand and the US “on our team".
(Though if getting the ‘leeches’ to stick on ‘our team’ was important, surely the PM’s presence would help?)
"Commentators' outbursts of faux outrage over the temerity of the Prime Minister not cancelling her trip on the basis of cost are misdirected," Fran O'Sullivan wrote in the Herald
"New Zealand's focus on the Pacific Reset would have looked pretentious and insincere at best if she had not shown up," she said.
"It would have been cruel to deprive an eleven-week-old baby of her mother's warmth for a three-day period," she added.
Ahead of the May budget, more than one billion dollars was pledged for the “Pacific reset“ policy, much of it for aid programmes in the Pacific.
How that is to be used is a bigger issue at the time of the Pacific Islands Forum than the bill for freighting the PM to the event.