92. Auckland stories are human stories too

Online news stories about traffic woes on the Auckland motorway system always rack up huge numbers, because they appeal to two very different audiences - one is the people who live outside the country's biggest city and who delight in the pain and suffering of the Auckland commuter because it shows that they're so much better people for not living there and all those bloody Jafas deserve all that misery because they're so stuck up anyway; and Aucklanders who just want to know if they're going to be late getting home to their loved ones.

The main difference between the two audiences - apart from the obvious geographical distances - is that the first group will read the stories while also denouncing Auckland as everything that is wrong with the country, and moaning that the city gets too much attention from the national media, while the other is just grateful that they've got a heads-up that three lanes are out on the Southern past Greenlane.

It's all part of a general narrative from the rest of the country that Aucklanders are a bunch of feijoa-eating, latte-sipping arrogant pricks, demanding all the attention, with an overt focus on Auckland issues in the national press that comes at the expense of everyone else in the country.

To be fair, there are loads and loads of people south of the Bombays who have no problem with the big city, but there are definitely areas around the country (especially around Canterbury) that only look at Auckland with fear and loathing. For their part, when it comes to this divide, Aucklanders don't really give a shit, and are Don Draper in this Mad Men scene, too busy dealing with their own problems to worry what the rest of the country think about them:

This urban/rural divide has been part of NZ for a long time (and with much of the rest of the country also becoming more urbanised, has never really been limited to Auckland), and it's unlikely to go away soon, and still flares up quite often.

It was there the other week when the city of sails was battered by huge winds, followed by mass power outages across the city, with all suburbs suffering some kind of loss of electricity. It affected a huge amount of people and was comprehensively covered in our national media, as it bloody well should have been.

This was, of course, greeted with the usual sneering, with Wellingtonians pointing out that the winds weren't that strong compared to what they have to put up with; and people in rural areas saying that they lose power all the time, and the media was just making a big deal out of it because it was Auckland, and there were plenty of people only too willing to spit out the usual asinine comment about the affected people needing a spoonful of cement.

But this was a fucking big story, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, and the idea that the news media was making too much of a deal about it was asinine - it was their goddamn duty to get as much facts out there as possible, and follow up on long delays in restoring power. This is part of the fucking job.

Even proud Wellingtonian John Campbell took a break from his Checkpoint show to have a mild rant about the anti-Auckland sentiment he was getting in his feedback, and he seemed genuinely appalled that some peoples' first reaction to an extreme weather event was to start sneering at the victims.

It didn't stop many - including, of course, a couple of NZ Herald columnists - from saying that Aucklanders should get out and fix their own mess instead of going on the news and moaning about it. Which is a staggeringly stupid idea, with live and exceedingly dangerous power lines down all around the city, the last thing anybody needs is Joe Fuckwit firing up the chainsaw and getting in the way - no amount of number-eight wire mentality is going to fix the power gird for a city of 1.5 million people.

(One of those columnists later went on record as saying she was just joking about it. Which is fine then. Obviously, young families with hungry babies and old folk who can barely out the front door, who were still without power after a week, would have thought it was real fucking funny.)

Even years after the Christchurch earthquakes, only a proper arsehole would go on public record to tell Cantabrians they should stop whining and harden up about their EQC repairs, and many reporters are still checking in on places like Edgecumbe to see how they're doing after devastating floods a few months back. Nobody is ignoring this shit, and nobody is going to ignore it when it happens in the big city either.

People live in Auckland for different reasons - it might be where all their family and friends are; or they might have moved there for the social and employment opportunities. But they're just like everybody else in this country, and deserve to have their story told when things get a bit shit. Especially when there are so many of them, and especially when the city is such a huge driver of cultural and economic power in this small nation.

Still, Auckland can take it, the residents of that fine city have enough to worry about with traffic and infrastructure issues to listen to the sneers coming from down south. We just want to get home on time.

- Steve Lombard

91. Who needs fake news when the real stuff is so good?

They try to hide it, but they don't always succeed. When the newsreaders on NZ's television bulletins are on air, and there has just been a piece about the latest foolishness coming out of the White House -  and it might be about a porn star, or the blatant corruption going on, or a military attack that is obviously a desperate attempt to pull attention away from all of the above - and when the report is finished and it goes back to the studio, you can sometimes see the presenters look back at you with an unmistakable 'can you believe this shit?' expression

It only ever lasts a second, but they look straight down the camera with an expression that says they can't believe what they're reading. And while they're all total pros, and they're onto the next item in the blink of an eye, the sentiment lingers.

Nobody really needs fake news when the world is more than crazy enough to fill the news bulletins. There is so much unbelievable shit going on every day without having to make up more.

If you'd gone back even a few years and told people the President of the United States would be a petulant garbage bag of a human being, and rattled off a short and abridged version of the hurricane of crap that has surrounded the office since he took power, nobody would believe it. A lot of people still don't, because they have all the news judgement of a fried oyster and can somehow ignore the mounting evidence and proper, full-scale investigations into the craziness.

But even if nothing is going on in politics, there is more than enough going on in the real world to fill the bulletins - extreme weather, massive social injustices and strange crime. Some of it can be quite concentrated in certain areas: it's a cliche in the US media that the strangest of the strange stories all come out of Florida, and every country has one district that provides some of the weirdest court stories on the planet (In New Zealand it is, of course, the West Coast. The papers there get the best shit from court.)

Some of it is too good to be true and editors need to use their experience and judgement to figure out if something stacks up. One classic example recently was the dude whose story about seagulls getting into his room and leading to him getting banned from a hotel was just so good, and quickly went viral. And while it was picked up by a lot of places, including the BBC, NPR and Stuff, a bunch of others didn't touch it, because it was just too good a story to be relying on third-hand sources from the international newswires. It certainly didn't help that the story surfaced just a couple of days after April Fools Day, when any kind of interesting news story is immediately suspicious.

Those editors who decided that story was just too good to be true rejected it with some regret, because there is a huge audience for things like this. It's part of the reason why true crime stuff does so well these days - you couldn't make up what happened in the OJ Simpson trial, if somebody wrote it as a fictional screenplay they'd be thrown out of the movie studio because  it was too far out there and much too unlikely and strange.

But it still happened. Fact is always stranger and more complicated than fiction, with unlikely twists and coincidences which don't fit into a three-act structure. Real life is incredibly interesting that way.

After all, who could predict that Mike Hosking would come out with an epic self-own last week? After moaning about the fact that the only thing stopping Auckland Transport from functioning smoothly were all the other morons on the road who couldn't drive, he then, just hours later, smashed up part of a race-car on a clear track. His utter shamelessness at these double standards was still eclipsed by the sense of the karma police coming down hard.

Anything can happen and even though newspapers still devote some space to the horoscope, nobody can predict the future. The news industry - and society as a whole - has been totally addicted to breaking news for almost all of the 21st century, after we all woke up one morning in September and saw those towers come down, and now we don't want to miss anything, and the crazier the news gets, the more it gets read by everybody.

If you're fortunate to work in the same office as some of the country's best news readers, you can hear them add their own snarky and profanity-laced annotations to the news when they're reading over their scripts before their broadcast begins, but sometimes the news is so overwhelmingly strange and unexpected, their reaction slips through onto the TV screen. It might not be totally professional, but that's when you know the news is really, really fucked up.

- Margaret Tempest

90. Nobody is getting away with making up shit

Fools and fuckwits who bang on about fake news in the mainstream news media always seem to conveniently overlook the fact that all the big news media companies have to be accountable for what they say, and can be legally forced to correct or retract anything they get wrong. Making up shit just isn't worth it. At all.

While the President of the United States can spend all day telling lies that can be easily refuted by actual facts, news organisations that cover his bullshit have to make sure they have everything right before they ever get near publication or broadcast (and then get endless crap from that orange shithead in the White House about it anyway).

There have been many, many think-pieces in the past decade about the failing power of big news media and how new news sources like social media have disemboweled the old beasts, but if there is one thing the old guard have going for them, it's that they have exact standards to meet and can face severe punishments if they fail to do so.

Meanwhile, social media is full of unverified bullshit - something isn't true just because it's been endlessly shared - and when something is shown to be complete bullshit, there are rarely any more repercussions than a shrug from the audience, who goes on to click on the next piece of dishonest trash.

All news organisations with a staff of more than two people have to be bloody sure they get things right - for example, if anybody is going to try and name and shame the actress who bit Beyonce, they're going to be 120 percent sure they're naming the right fucking person. It's not just the threat of legal action if they get in wrong, it's a irreplaceable loss of credibility.

And this is just one small part of the accountability umbrella the whole business is covered by - there are plenty of things that are not acceptable in this industry and can lead to instant dismissal, such as plagiarism or making up stories, (although these things are actually fairly rare, because most people are smart enough to know its wrong, and others who might be tempted are still bright enough to know you can't get away with that shit).

There are, of course, some exceptions - column writers get to spout endless bullshit while hiding behind their keyboards, but that's not really news anyway; while some organisations let their staff get away with some amazingly awful shit - Fox News won't fire its odious news show presenters who think it's fine to attack teenagers who are sick of their schools getting shot up, even when those presenters go way over the fucking line. 

But in general, there are so many checks and balances in place at newspapers, TV networks and radio stations, the errors are in the minimum. It is a major reason why all the columnists worried about Stuff's #metoonz need to check themselves before they wreck themselves, because there is no way the country's biggest news group is going to let fly with accusations without stacking them up.

It is arguable that journalists are more accountable and liable to pay the price for something that the powerful people they often interact with, and for a strong example of that, you only need to see the fall-out from the Hirschfeld/Curran breakfast meeting

After a long career as a distinguished journo, Hirschfeld had to resign from Radio NZ the other week over the meeting, while Curran remains in her job as both broadcasting minister and minister for open government, despite another mark in her long record of political incompetence and stupidity.

To be clear, it wasn't the meeting itself that led directly to Hirschfeld's resignation, that was a fuck-up that could be forgiven, but lying to your bosses about it and forcing them to lie to a select committee about it was unforgivable, and Carol had to go after that.

But it is another example of journos - especially those involved with public broadcasting in any way - paying the price for something they did, and paying it in the most public way possible. To hold onto its credibility, any news organisation is going to be extremely upfront and transparent about the measures it takes to set the record straight, because if it doesn't have that kind of credibility, it doesn't have anything.

There are still always going to be mistakes, and malicious errors, but when the whole industry can be tarnished by it, somebody is always going to be held accountable. It's just the way it works.

- Katherine Grant

89: Detachment is everything when you're reporting on yourself

It wasn't much of a surprise to see Carol Hirschfeld's resignation from RNZ get so much attention in New Zealand's media – she was a high-profile media figure who had been caught lying to her bosses about a meeting with the minister holding the public broadcasting purse-strings, (for reasons that remain unclear), forcing those bosses to unknowingly tell falsehoods to a parliamentary select committee. What news organisation wouldn't do a story on that?

It was equally unsurprising that RNZ also carried the story, even though it was about strife in its on ranks, and even though there was nothing on rnz.co.nz about the initial news of the fated meeting between Hirschfeld and Clare Curran. They covered it – and actually broke the news about it - because it was a bloody good story and covering bloody good stories is what journalists do.

In fact, it was essential that RNZ covered it like it was any other news story, because it would just make things more awkward – and raise serious questions about the RNZ newsrooms' journalistic impartiality – if they did try to ignore it. It probably also helped that the organisation had the obvious scoop, since all the drama was playing out within the public broadcaster.

There were, of course, some people at RNZ who could have nothing to do with the story because they were directly involved in the case, because that would further taint that impartial image, but there were also plenty of journos there who had stayed at arms length, and could report on the situation with getting personally involved. (After all, by most accounts, the news of Hirschfeld's resignation caught 95 percent of the RNZ workforce by complete surprise.)

It can be fucking weird, writing and broadcasting stories about your own organisation, but any real journo will be able to foster a sense of detachment. There should always be some distance between the subject of a story and the people telling it, even if they share the same elevator in the morning.

It might be weird talking about RNZ in the third person when you're actually working there in the newsroom, but it can also be surprisingly easy. When it runs stories about the situation, reporters can even find it darkly amusing to say the chief executive or chairperson refused to comment, when you see them wandering around the office every day.

Plus, of course, if they're not going to talk to their own journos, those reporters can rest easy that they're almost certainly not going to gt scooped by another organisation. If Paul Thompson won't return Jane Patterson's phone calls, he's not about to turn around and give Barry Soper or Tracy Watkins the full story. Indeed, one of the few interviews he has given in the past week was for the Mediawatch programme on RNZ.

It can seem a little silly, and even have the faint hint of hypocrisy, when a newsroom covers shenanigans in its own office, but it's also absolutely vital that the reporters are free to cover these things, with no interference from the executive branch.

Otherwise, you end up with cases like Newsweek in the US, which recently fired several reporters who had the temerity to investigate the dodgy goings-on within its organisation. Now you can't trust anything coming out of that newsroom, because it's shown that the corporate sword is stronger than the editorial word.

This attitude among journos – of reporting on something within their own organisation without fear or favour - can drive media company executives with no real experience in an actual newsroom fucking crazy, because why the hell would you do something that could damage your own company. But journos understand they have to expose this shit in their own house if it comes out, otherwise all claims of credibility go right out the fucking window.

Fortunately, that's not a problem at RNZ, where everybody right up to the CEO has an editorial background, and is well aware of these issues. Hirschfeld's resignation – which was unavoidable after her lie went into the public record – was a big fucking story, and it was only right and proper that it was covered as if it was happening to anybody else.

The organisation has lost a strong, experienced and capable figure in its leadership team, and Hirschfeld's resignation puts a spanner in the works of the greater RNZ+ plan the new government is so keen on. But she had to go, and the reporters who once answered to her still have to have that detachment to investigate it all, or nobody will ever trust anything they ever say again.

- Margaret Tempest

88. No, Minister

Former health minister Jonathan Coleman put a proper full stop on his political career last week when he hung up on an interview with Radio NZ's Susie Ferguson, going out in the same way he had always operated as minister - obstructive, uninformative and just plain pissy.

Even in a National government that always viewed the media as the enemy, Coleman was notorious among New Zealand's news journalists for his unwillingness to talk about some huge issues facing the health sector. He would only talk to reporters if they caught him in the hallways of Parliament, would never agree to a decent one-on-one interview with anybody, and outright ignored some pretty fucking important questions from journos like Kirsty Johnston for a goddamn decade.

As a lame duck minister who is only filling in time until he can fill his pockets in the private sector, Coleman obviously thought they would take it a bit easier now that he was no longer in power and agreed to talk to RNZ, but seemed genuinely shocked to be asked some hard questions about the state of some health department buildings, which were found to contain some dangerous mould.

Coleman was so surprised that somebody might confront him about the issue of this black mould in buildings that were under his charge that he did the obvious thing, and attacked the people asking him the question, saying they had ambushed him without warning.

It sounded lame, but it worked with the usual idiots, who bombarded RNZ with messages telling them that Susie was shrill and mean and rude to the poor politician and they were never going to listen to the station again, because being less informed about news and current affairs was definitely going to help their arguments. (The language of these complaints were, of course, riddled with the kind of sexist, misogynistic bullshit that Guyon never seems to get.)

But the idea that Coleman was blindsided by the questioning was a load of crap, and the delightful Ms Ferguson confirmed this with a tweet, which contained the message to Doc Coleman's people from the day before the interview, making it quite clear what they were interested in talking about.

Of course RNZ were going to go hard on the mould thing - four big Middlemore Hospital buildings were full of rot and dangerous mould that could make staff and patients sick. It was a news story they had broken and was a long-term issue that his ministry was responsible for. That's always going to be the angle of any interview, not 'my top five haircuts during my time in government'.

Frankly, Coleman was fucking dreaming if he thought he wouldn't have to answer for failures on his watch. The health portfolio is massively important, and the National government's determined bid to run it like a business has been a bloody catastrophe. We're literally talking about matters of life and death here, and anybody at the head of all that needs to acknowledge that they have fucked up, or we're never going to get anywhere.

Coleman can piss off to work for a private health company now, leaving behind a system full of aging equipment, underpaid & overworked staff and buildings that can make sick people even sicker. But he can not walk away from this legacy, and no journalist is ever going to let him get off that easy.

People in position of power have to be held accountable and that accountability doesn't just melt away when you slink out of office. The current government is a bit more willing to talk to news people about the issues they're facing and while that isn't going to last forever, no journalist is ever going to try and stop asking the questions that need to be asked. No matter how rude they sound.

-  Katherine Grant

87. The only journalist at the barbecue

Journalists are like everybody else in modern society - when they're not at work they like to unwind and relax with friends and family. They like to go to barbecues and dinner parties and Friday night drinks, just like you do.

And they can be decent company, because part of their job requires them to be great at small talk and feeling empathy for other people, so they're terrific listeners and have interesting stories about dealing with the great and powerful, and have all sorts of gossip from behind the headlines.

But after a week at work, a lot of them just want to crash out on the couch and binge-watch some Netflix instead of going out and socialising, because being the only journo at a barbecue can be a massive pain in the arse.

Everybody has their opinions about the state of the modern news media and most of it is fairly uninformed and dull, (and yeah, some of us have enough opinions to start a blog about it, so we're fully aware of the hypocrisy involved here). And if you're the member of this vast and sprawling industry at a social gathering, you're almost guaranteed to hear those opinions. At length.

If you're surrounded by non-journos, you'll be lucky if you get away with some light interrogation about the 'real' story behind something, and at worst, you might be held up as an example of everything that is wrong with the world. In between mouthfuls of sausage and bread, somebody will mention something about the bloody media and how they all distort and deceive.

In particularly awful cases, you'll have to sit there and listen to a full conspiracy theory from cousin Phil or Mary's partner Sean, who are happily and obliviously undermining everything you do every day. It's doubtful that they even know they're insulting you, they're just declaring that you're a liar and a cheat and a fraud, that's all. 

Most of the time, it will be casual insults, and they will not even realise they're doing it. Friends and family will talk about the media in such broad terms they might not even think they're talking about you, but it's hard not to take it personally when people who have never set foot in a newsroom start pontificating about how all journos suck. Do you need another drink?

And then it turns out they're talking about a completely different radio station/newspaper/TV network/website to the one you work at, but that doesn't matter, because you're all the bloody same. Everybody knows that. You're all responsible for everything everybody else does, even if they're hated competitors.

Nobody would get very far if they started declaring that all office managers or account executives or mechanics were charlatans, based on their own limited and anecdotal experiences, but it doesn't matter if you work at RNZ or the Women's Weekly, all journalists are the same.

There are some commonalities between us - every journo at every company never fully turns off, they've always got an ear out for a story - but the media industry is fucking huge, even after years of deconstruction, and any generalisations are pointless, because we've all got different motivations and goals and methods

Journos do like to get out of the house and have a beer or three, and often do it with colleagues who work in the same field. This is partly because they all do shitty shift work, but also because it's easier to relax, because you don't have that weird spotlight. You're all in the same game. There is still plenty of moaning, but at least we have a vague idea of what the hell we're talking about.

- Ron Troupe

86: It's a dickhead hunt

If you were only judging the vibe of the NZ news media scene by the content of its columnists, you could be forgiven for thinking the launch of Stuff's #metoonz campaign has created a deep schism in the industry, between those who are rushing to judgement and those who have deep concerns about the entire idea.

But there isn't, not really. Most journalists, especially those down on the newsroom floor every day, are happy to see people like Alison Mau and Paula Penfold really get stuck into it. Even though a lot of us still blame Stuff for pushing NZ's news towards trashy, worthless content, we can also applaud their efforts when they really take a stand, or do something really innovative.

And it probably helps that the news media scene has a long history of sexual harassment, which can be objectively seen in the higher ranks of the industry. You can bet your arse there are going to be a few Stuff reporters with some harrowing first-person stories to tell, and their colleagues at every other rival news organisation want to see their own industry held to the same account as everyone else.

Still, that hasn't stop a lot of chin-stroking opinion pieces to appear in recent weeks, which spend a great amount of space looking at the new campaign, wondering what it's all about.

Hosking, of course, got in there early, but he's been joined by Al Nisbet's deeply dumb witch hunt cartoon for the Press; a mind-numbing observation from Davd Cohen in the NBR that even though there are men are scumbags in all other cultures and nations, that doesn't mean there are scumbags here too; a Deborah Hill Cone column in the NZ Herald yesterday, telling harassment victims that they should probably keep quiet for their own good, while implying that the journos involved would throw a hissy-fit if a story fell over; and a piece from John Drinnan where he was very, very John Drinnan.

Leaving aside the fact that these efforts reek of having something to hide, it's baffling that many of these takes come from people who have worked in big newsrooms, and know how much things like this get legally approved. Nobody is going to publish anything until they're really, really sure they've got the proper story, because it would be media suicide to do otherwise.

Everything they receive is going to be collated and cross-referenced and stacked up. They're not going to do a five-part series on something they heard whispered at a Christmas party, they're going to get their facts straight. They're explicitly targeting the richest and most powerful people in the country, people who probably have something nasty to hide, and if they make one wrong step, they're going to be litigated and shamed into oblivion.

It's not going to be easy and nobody is doing it just for the exposure or web page clicks. They're doing it because it's the right thing to do.

Despite the fear-mongering, #metoonz is not a witch hunt, because it's not powerful men destroying poor women for fun and profit. Instead, it's a dickhead hunt - and these campaigns are designed to expose the behaviour of those dickheads and to try to prevent it happening again in the future.

One of the great goals of journalism is to find, name and shame the biggest dickheads in our society, to get some justice for their innocent victims, and to show the world that this kind of shit is not acceptable anymore, and will not be tolerated in any way. This is how we grow as a civilisation, and as individual people, by not being dickheads. It's the only way we're ever going to move forward.

If there is a schism in the industry, it's between the dickheads and the non-dickheads. And trust us, mate - the dickheads are losing. You can tell by how much they're whining about it.

- Margaret Tempest

Editors' note: Media Scrum would like to apologise for doing two posts in a row on the reaction to the #metoonz campaign, but it just really, really fucked us off. So, yeah, we would like to apologise, but we're not actually going to. Next time we'll talk about barbecues or some shit.