Some may have thought to dismiss their submissions as hyperbole or rhetoric, but on Wednesday came a sudden, crushing confirmation that such language was far from being over the top.
News that Newshub was to close, with the loss of about 300 jobs, is shocking. While the news service and current affairs shows broadcast on 3 have always existed on the smell of an oily rag — and indeed the future of the broadcaster as a whole seemed shaky until its recent sale — that was part of its appeal.
A scrappy insurgent, it did not broadcast the news of the day in the same way that TVNZ did, and its web news service also took a different tack from its rivals.
The media landscape is at its best when it has a multiplicity of voices, and the raucous coverage of Newshub added plenty of value to the discourse of the day.
While its financial issues were not precisely those of the companies which submitted on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, there were plenty of commonalities.
News is not a cheap undertaking. Finding it and developing it to the point where it can be shared with an audience takes time, skill and expertise.
Doing so on television, and in particular on live television, takes both talent and experience, commodities which need to be paid for but which are a huge benefit to the viewers.
More broadly, the likely imminent closure of Newshub raises important questions about the media in New Zealand as a whole.
None of Newshub’s competitors will have revelled in news of its closure: a competitive news environment makes all reporters perform better and all media try harder to tell the stories that matter.
With no disrespect to the fine folk at TVNZ, turning on the set at 6pm and only having one choice of television news is not good for journalism and it is not good for the country as a whole. In an instant the number of perspectives on the day’s events halves, and the number of stories which can be told also shrinks.
Given the amount of news which happens in New Zealand, having fewer people to bring it to people’s attention is bad for the public’s understanding of what is happening in their country, and ultimately bad for democracy — fewer eyes will be on what councils, the government and decision-makers are doing and scrutinising the potential pitfalls of their proposed policies and the demonstrated negatives of present policies and systems.
We will also soon be in the unenviable position where the two main broadcasters in New Zealand will be state owned. We do not for a second believe that editorial policies at either TVNZ or RNZ are affected by this, but there are enough people who are of that opinion that an independent voice has real value.
The proposal to close Newshub came with the inference that 3’s wider New Zealand content may also be under threat. That the channel which brought us the likes of Outrageous Fortune might verge closer to becoming yet another of the many channel stations owned by its parent company, divested of genuine New Zealand programming and voices, should be of real concern for those want to see local fiction, as well as local facts, on their screens.
Newshub’s demise is sad, and what makes it worse is that it may not be the last media organisation to take such drastic measures. The national conversation will only be the poorer without its voice.
