79: Signing out for the summer

Like a lot of the news industry, Media Scrum is taking a break for a month or so, because it's been a hell of a year, and we're going outside to sit in the sun for a while.

We've been ranting and raving for nearly a year now, and none of us thought we'd last that long, but we keep coming up with new things to moan about, so we're not going anywhere.

It's also a good chance for a bit of reflection. The Media Scrum crew have had the chance to expose some of their core beliefs on this site, and we're standing by all of them.

This is some of what we believe:

* The first rule of journalism is still 'fill the fucking space'.

* The second rule is 'you can't do journalism on an empty stomach'.

*The third rule is now apparently 'don't sexually abuse people, you fuckers', and we're embarrassed and ashamed that this has to be spelled out like this.

* The NZ news industry is full of great people doing tremendous work every single day, and most of them don't get enough recognition for their efforts, and it's no wonder so many of them are buggering off overseas.

* There are also some jerks.

* But no matter who they are, the hours are shit for everybody. No wonder it's becoming more of a young person's game.

* The news media is bigger than it looks, and can't be tied down as any one thing.

* Time is not on our side, and bullshit 'pivot to video' strategies are not helping.

* Scoops are everything, but they're not the only thing.

* Breaking news banners are broken.

* We're always falling down a photo hole, looking for that perfect shot. It doesn't mean we can just rip off a Facebook post for fun and profit.

* Never, ever read the comments.

* No, seriously, nobody gives a shit about your ideology

* Some people just want to burn the world down for the LOLs.

* You can't predict the weather or the traffic, but you can still report on it.

* The future is unwritten, but it won't be written by robots.

* There is great journalism everywhere, if you can be bothered to look.

* But too much 'look at me, look at me' going on.

* Anybody who keeps going on about fake news just sounds like a moron.

* We're too fucking white.

* We need to remember the easy mistakes.

* It's easy to laugh at the bloopers, but newsreaders are still humans under that make-up.

* Winston Peters is a total arsehole. Fuck him, a lot.

* The big news sites have far too much junk in their trunk.

* You might be right, but you don't have to be a dick about it.

* It's an endless cycle of bullshit, blatant disrespect and crap pay for journalists in this country, and we still fucking love it.

Happy holidays, everybody! See you in 2018.

78. You can't do journalism on an empty stomach

Journalists are dealing with a lot of shit these days, including shrinking newsrooms, vastly increased workloads and an audience that often gets downright hostile. The industry is rife with sexual harrassment, people are being served with legal papers because they did their fuckin' job, and people are just dicks to you, like, all the fucking time.

These are some big issues to wrestle with, but when it comes to getting through the workday, it's all about the food, because you just can't do good journalism on an empty stomach.

You can't come up with a proper intro or audio cut when you're stomach is grumbling away, and any kind of dedicated writing and editing requires some serious brain power, and all that mental processing needs fuel to keep you going, or you'll just crash, and get nothing done. If you're out in the field, you might spend hours sitting in a hot car waiting for somebody to show up, and any food is welcome on the stake-out.

And yet, journos have the worst eating habits, and can often blame the job for their nutritional deficiencies. Shift work has a lot to answer for - workers on the late shift might only be getting dinner-level hungry late in the day, and the options become terribly limited, and those who are forced to take lunch breaks in the late afternoon might have to chance the dodgy sushi in that shop across the road, or some other shitty fast food, because there ain't many other options.

Journos who are out the road might go most of a day without ever finding the time to cram something into their gob to keep them going, or could be way out in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization, with nothing but a half a pack of breath mints to keep them going. The killer adrenaline rush of chasing down a big news story will carry you a long, long way, but it can't do it forever.

Meanwhile, subs and online editors might find themselves chained to their desk for a full eight hours straight, barely able to pop out for a slimy dairy pie and a packet of Doritos. When you're working in the news business, anything could happen at any moment, and that's part of the appeal. But it also means a major international incident could break out while you're in the bathroom.

Plans for a decent lunch break can be totally wiped out when breaking news suddenly hits, right before you step away for a minute, and it can be a long time before you get the chance to sort something out again - breaking news is notoriously inconvenient like that

In the Ocean's 11 movies, there is a recurring joke where Brad Pitt's character is always eating weird snacks all through the films, whenever you see him. The actor's reasoning for this was his character was someone who was always wheeling and dealing, and never sat down for a proper meal, so just had to snack his way through the day to keep his energy levels up.

Working in a modern newsroom feels like that sometimes, even if only a select few of us are as pretty as Brad Pitt.  We'll gorge on foods that are full of saturated fats and sugar, because we've got too much work to do.

It gets good when it's election night or some other big event - those who have to work on Christmas Day (which, in newspapers, is always busier than Christmas eve, because you're always working one day ahead), usually get a decent spread to help alleviate the fact you can't spend it with your loved ones. At the very least, the poor souls working while everyone else is at the barbecue usually bring some kind of tasty treat into the office.

Because, make no mistake, even the most seasoned and jaded journos will seize upon any free food sent to the office, they will descend on it like fucking seagulls. It doesn't matter if a lot of the food that shows up comes from PR companies, most journos will just take the food and ignore the message. 

You can't actually buy a journalist with a doughnut, but they might still love you for it, for as long as the taste lingers.

Look, the news media isn't the only industry where workers can be struggling to keep their energy levels up as they work long hours. It's part of modern life. It's just that journalism is a business where you will crucified for missing out on some big breaking news, just because you needed to duck out and get a fuckin' burger, and you were stuck on a shift with no back-up.

No wonder so many reporters and editors and producers eat at their desk, it's the only way to keep going as the news piles up.

- Ron Troupe

77: Should Radio NZ use so much Māori language?

Āe.

Of course it fucking should. Keeping te reo alive is a mark of distinction and honour for this country, and anything that can be used to make it more ubiquitous must be encouraged and nurtured.

RNZ should use more - it's just one tiny step in the long road to overcoming the bullshit Maori have had to put up with for the past two centuries, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

There is no argument against this that isn't fundamentally racist, so there really isn't much more to say. Te reo is here to stay. 

Anybody who has a problem with that needs to grow the fuck up and join the 21st century. We won't be waiting for you to catch up for much longer.

- Perry White

76. The level of sexual harrassment in the New Zealand media industry is appalling

The news media has a vital role to play in the exposure of serial sexual abusers and harassers, and any justice their victims may find usually involves mass exposure of the monstrous men and their horrendous habits.

The awful stories about people like Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK and Kevin Spacey were, apparently, open secrets in the movie, comedian and theatre industries, and anybody in a position to do anything about it was, apparently, a coward or a sycophant. It was only when stories of their misconduct where reported by bigger news organisations that anything actually happened. Somebody only fucking did something about it because everybody was looking at them.

None of this is easy for their victims, and some of it can be intensely triggering for many people, but it sometimes takes a massive fucking spotlight to expose a massive fucking scumbag.

Unfortunately, there is the usual hypocrisy at the heart of all this reporting, because the news media is riddled with absolute dickheads who have abused and harassed their co-workers and staff, just like every other industry appears to be. It happens overseas, with dicks like Charlie Rose, and it happens here, even if local victims are not ready to name names. Not yet, anyway.

The recent #metoo movement proved this, with many women in the media industry standing up and revealing their own unfortunate experiences. The Spinoff has done a few stories on this, and you can find just the tiniest taste of the bullshit female journalists have had to put up with here and here.

For concrete and empirical proof of the toll this is taking on our news media, just look at the ratio of women are in high-powered positions in the industry, compared to the ratio of women who enter the business. J-schools have been overwhelmingly female for decades now, but that same representation isn't seen at the top table. There are obvious exceptions - some of the country's biggest papers and broadcasters are female-led, and there are growing numbers of women at the board table - but the upper echelons of editors and producers tend to still be predominantly male

There are, of course, many reasons why women slip away from the industry - the usual glass ceilings and gender pay gap issues; the fact they're much smarter than men, and realise they can make way more money in comms and PR much faster than their male contemporaries; the idea they might choose to spend more time raising a family (although this is another area where men need to step the fuck up more).

But given all the evidence, along with innumerable rumours and whispers, it is clear that many women are being harassed right out of the industry, and that's not good enough. If the news media is ever going to give any kind of indication of how society should act, it needs to sort its own shit out as well.

This means no tolerance for this kind of behaviour. And anybody - male, female, gay, straight, trans, whatever - who is aware of it needs to make sure something is done about it. Nobody needs to be treated like this, and it only stops if we make it absolutely unacceptable to do so.

This world feels so horrible sometimes, especially with all these stories of harassment and abuse around, and even more especially when somebody who gleefully admitted to grabbing women by the crotch is sitting in the goddamn White House, but this kind of behaviour isn't right or proper, and it is a little heartening to see that these shitheads can't get away with it anymore. No more turning the blind eye.

Because the more these kinds of serial offenders are exposed, the better off we are. And the more we say we don't want people to see people on our TV screens who don't seem to have a lot of contrition about, say, breaking somebody's fucking back,the better off the world is.

In other words, we might like to talk about sport, but we don't want to be your fucking mate, Tony.

***

In similar and blatantly shameful territory, Media Scrum fave Harkanwal Singh has been on a couple of platforms recently, pointing out that the average newsroom in this country is white as fuck. While Singh had the misfortune to spend most of his news media career in the whitest big newsroom in the country - one that never bothered with something as important as a Māori Affairs reporter for years - he's still right, and the news industry in this country really is white as fuck.

Again, there are notable exceptions - RNZ has some gorgeous brown faces in its large Māori and Pacific Affairs teams - but this is something that needs to be addressed, because you can't reflect society properly in your news stories if you don't properly reflect society in your newsrooms. Any kind of programme or scheme designed to get a better ethnic mix in the news media must be aggressively pushed, if we're going to get anywhere.

This is still a country where men get their panties in a twist over hearing a little bit of te reo on the airwaves (a dumbarse concept which we thought was well and truly settled before the ODT decided to print a complaint straight out of the 1930s last week), so any kind of programme will invariably see white blokes moaning that they're not getting jobs because of reverse discrimination. But that can't be right, because reverse discrimination isn't a fucking thing, and they're just hiding their own inadequacies and incompetancies behind good ol' racism, so who gives a shit what those arseholes think?

This is 2017, and journalism is still hanging in there, but society is starting to outpace it. Newsrooms need to be more sexually and culturally aware if they're even going to catch up, because it can't continue like this.

- Margaret Tempest, Steve Lombard

75. This is why things don't happen

Wellington traffic was going to be a nightmare, they said. With none of the trains running, all the city's roads were going to turn into car parks, they said.

Industrial action by Wellington train workers shut down the whole network for a day last week, leading to inevitable warnings of carmageddon on Wellington's roads. In the end, the traffic were fine for much of the day, and many commuters were convinced they even got into work a little faster.

But even though it really wasn't a problem, any snarky comments blaming the media for over-reacting to the issue - and there were inevitably a few - can be ignored for the bullshit they are, because if the media didn't report on it, it definitely would have been a fucking problem.

This is a different issue from the moaning about the media hyping up potential issues with upcoming weather patterns - that's an issue where nothing really could happen, because nobody can 100 percent predict which way the wind is going to blow. But in those cases, it's still far, far better to be safe than sorry - better to have the inconvenience of moving out of a danger area, than being taken unaware by a sudden flood and drowning in your fucking bed.

In the case of the Great Wellington Traffic Jam That Wasn't, the strike was definitely going to happen - both sides made that clear they couldn't reach an agreement the day before it all kicked off - and it would have been a complete fucking mess if everybody hadn't been warned about it. If the capital's commuters hadn't seen the news on TV or heard it on the radio, or found it on the web, or read about in the paper, they would have been totally fucked.

Still, we're talking about Wellington here, so all it really took to save the day was the public service telling everybody to stay home, and that reduced the congestion by a tonne. But those public servants - and the people making the decision to keep people home - still had to be made aware of how bad it could get.

The fact that it didn't go all Mad Max on the white line nightmare of Wellington's mean streets showed that getting the message out through the mass media still worked, even in this attention-fragmented age.

The ultimate example of all this is the good old millennium bug, which is still, 17 years into the 21st century, held up as the greatest beat-up in history.

For a lot of the 90s, there were all sorts of breathless warnings in the news media about how critical computer programs weren't going to recognise the difference between 1900 and 2000, and that was going to fuck us all up - nuclear power stations across the world could melt down, planes could fall from the sky and everybody's porn was going to be deleted.

In the end, nothing much happened - there were a few hiccups, but in general, life in the 21st century carried on, same as it always was.

And ever since then, there has been endless whining about how it was such a waste of time, and the entire news media made a big deal out of nothing, and it's all such crap.

It was precisely because of all those warnings that something was actually done - giant companies saw the coverage and were spooked enough to hire huge IT teams to scroll through their code and fix the issue, so it didn't become a problem. All vital systems needed to keep the modern world ticking along were the first thing searched and repaired, and literally billions of dollars were spent sorting out the problem. 

The fact that nothing happened meant the system fucking worked. The warning prevented the problem from happening.

This can't keep happening indefinitely, and it won't matter how much warning you're given if the Wellington bus company can't agree with its staff - things will go full-on road warrior really quickly, because people could only hold off heading into town for so long.

Warnings will only go so far, but they do sometimes work. Moaning that something didn't happen doesn't mean it should have been ignored. We'd all be screwed then, no matter how shiny and chrome things get.

- Margaret Tempest

74. No, they're not going to reveal their bloody sources

Last week, the deputy prime minister of New Zealand served legal papers on a number of prominent people, trying to uncover the source of the leak of his super over-payments. Winston Peters is still on the warpath there, even though it didn't look like it did him a hell of a lot of harm in the end.

Along with several politicians, a couple of journalists were also included in this round-up, including staff at both Newshub and Newsroom. The action might be nothing more than a fishing expedition - we're a long, long way away from reporters standing in the dock on contempt charges - but if Mr Peters is expecting news people to give up their sources, he's absolutely dreaming.

As much as it is a cliche, it's also totally true - journos never, ever reveal their sources. In cases all over the world, reporters and editors have been threatened and have even gone to jail to protect their source of information. Betraying that kind of confidence is never acceptable.

Besides, if you give up the people who tell you things, nobody is ever going to trust you again. You just can't be a journalist any more, if you don't hold that kind of base line of integrity. You give up your source, and you might avoid something unpleasant, but you're not a journo anymore. No newsroom is ever going to hire you, none of your colleagues are ever going to share anything with you again, and you're done.

On the other hand, there is a lot to be gained if you stick by your source. Yeah, you might suffer some unfortunate short-term effects, but you gain a reputation as someone who can be trusted, who won't dob you in if things get a bit sticky, and you'll get the first call from any future whistle-blowers who are looking for a trustworthy reporter.

Journalism is an industry that is built almost entirely on reputations, and they can be destroyed in an instant - just ask poor old Ben Mack, who vapourised his the instant he sent his opinion piece to the Washington Post last week - but they can also be steadily built up over years of grinding work, and are certainly helped if you show some integrity, and just a bit of goddamn backbone.

You also get the undying respect of your peers, which is nice. We could all do with a bit of that.

The only time it is acceptable to reveal a source is if that source gives their express permission, and is happy and willing to face the consequences. This doesn't happen very often, but it does happen, and there is no black mark on the journo's reputation.

Maybe, one day far down the line, when everybody involved is dead or retired or just don't give a fuck anymore, the truth will all come out. Some book or long-form article will dig back into the past, and might be able to find out who said what to whom. When it becomes history, when there is nobody left to protect or blame, the truth will become clear.

It usually does. 

- Margaret Tempest

73. Honeymoons don't last forever

Any change in government inevitably leads to a kind of honeymoon period, as the new regime gets settled into their new role, and everybody cuts them a little slack, for a while.

Even those members of the public who voted for the old status quo can grudgingly admit that the new government deserves a chance, at least, and the media tends to follow this nation-wide sentiment fairly closely. There will still be the odd spiky interview, right from the start, but in general, reporters, editors and producers give them a break.

The new Labour-led government was sworn in just the other week, and is still getting a little bit of  a free ride through the first days. There is still, of course, a deeper focus on its new policies, and their cost, and their possible effectiveness, now that they have made the leap to the big time, which is only to be expected. And there are interviewers whose entire reputation rests on having a bite at everybody, and nobody should be surprised to see them getting their licks in.

These kind of things have already prompted murmurs and whispers about the end of this honeymoon stage, with several political commentators already giving the new government a bit of the side-eye. But it takes more than that a short, snide column or long, boring Twitter thread to bring that honeymoon to an end. It never lasts forever, but it lasts a bit longer than you might expect if you were hip deep in endless political analysis and guesswork.

The honeymoon period between a new government and the media usually well outlasts the usual prophets of doom, but it comes to a dead stop at the exact moment the current regime can't blame the previous ones for all its own fuck-ups.

This could take years, with the new government's policies so diametrically opposed to National's, on so many different levels. Issues with the health, justice, housing and transport systems are all being proactively looked at, and steps are already been taken to move in new directions. It just takes fucking ages for these kinds of processes to fully kick in, and in the meantime, the previous direction takes a kicking.

Eventually, ministers won't be able to hide behind the ideas, flawed or otherwise, of their predecessors, and will have to front up to questions and accusations, based on its own merits. They might still whine about the mistakes the earlier guys made, but sooner or later, they've got to stand or fall on their own work.

For the best example of this, you only have to look at the media's access to government ministers. By the end of its three terms, the National government was notorious for declining to comment on some pretty fucking big issues. Trying to get Jonathan Coleman into a live interview to talk about some of the horrific examples of our healthcare system failures, or Paula Bennett to talk about another social welfare fuck-up, was bloody difficult,

That's flipped around now, and new ministers are only too happy to go on The Hui or Checkpoint, or talk to long-suffering newspaper reporters. They're only too eager to show that they're concerned, and doing something about it. There have been tonnes of media appearances in the past couple of weeks by the new Trading and Health and Housing ministers, and it's easy to get almost any government minister on the line.

But if time drags on and there are no real results, there will be no more excuses, and any failure to meet expectations will lead to a souring of that relationship. If Labour manages to stay in power for three terms, there is little doubt they'll end up the same way National did after nine years - wary and weary of being exposed to any media scrutiny. It certainly happened to the last Labour government.

Meanwhile, the new opposition is still getting used to the idea of needing the media's help to get their message across. Several of them, including the lovable Gerry Brownlee, remain hilariously grumpy with reporters who ring up for a quote, clearly blaming the media for their part in their loss of power, instead of their own shortcomings around the negotiation table.

They'll flip around in about the same time the government starts to sour on the media intrusions, and starts muttering darkly about those pinkos at RNZ, or that bloody Paddy Gower. National will have to re-learn the opposition game, although the lack of any real bloodshed in the ranks after their loss might mean it takes a bit longer.

In the meantime, the new government should enjoy their honeymoon while it lasts, and try not to think too much about the inevitable divorce.

- Steve Lombard