Richard Prebble: What’s gone wrong with the news media

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Trust in the media has fallen, according to a Stats NZ survey, Photo / 123RF
THREE KEY FACTS
Richard Prebble is a former Labour Party minister and Act Party leader. He currently holds a number of directorships.
OPINION

Our confidence in all the institutions vital for a representative democracy has fallen. Stats NZ has released its 2023 Wellness Survey. Our trust in the courts,
police, Parliament, media and the health and education systems has never been lower.

Our faith in all these institutions, bar one, was sustained or improved under Sir John Key’s government.
The number of New Zealanders reporting satisfaction with their lives has fallen from 85% in 2018 to 76% last year. This result is validated by the World Happiness Reports. In 2018, we were the eighth-happiest nation. Now we are ranked 11th. We were more satisfied with our lives than Australians – now the Aussies are happier than we are.
Stats NZ has been conducting this survey for 16 years. Statistics show the wellness results have been very stable. The survey is evidence of the failure of the Dame Jacinda Ardern/Chris Hipkins government’s “world-leading wellness budgets”.
Stats NZ attributes the decline to Covid, but it was a worldwide pandemic. If our response was the “best in the world” then our relative wellness should have risen. Perhaps the reason for the decline was not Covid but our response.
A country that locked down even more severely was China. The Chinese economy has still not recovered.
Maybe also there is something else going on.
We have our lowest level of trust in the media. Most respondents reported they do not trust the media. As free press is essential for a healthy democracy, this is a very alarming finding.
A former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has an explanation. Gurri’s job in the CIA was to analyse the world’s media. He noticed something extraordinary: “In the year 2001, double the amount of information was produced that had been produced by the entire human race from the cave paintings and the dawn of culture until now. 2002 doubled 2001.”
Gurri says we are in the fifth wave of human communication. Each information wave – the invention of writing, the alphabet, the printing press and then mass media – has had profound effects on human society. He believes the invention of the internet has caused a fifth wave that will be just as impactful.
The immediate effect is the elites are no longer able to control information. The public can and is challenging authorities and exposing mistakes.
Labour’s PR media was superb. The government could not control the internet. Many posts were nonsense but economists like Michael Reddell challenged government policies and predicted their failure. Reddell’s blog “Croaking Cassandra” has proved prophetic.
Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public is itself an example. His CIA masters dismissed his finding that the internet would challenge existing institutions. He resigned and published his book privately. I read about the book on the Internet.
Gurri predicts a revolt of the public against the elites who once controlled information is just beginning. He fears for the survival of representative democracy. He does not claim to have a solution.
I think Gurri’s findings have validity.
The advice given to me as a budding candidate was to read the Herald. The Herald sought to be a paper of record. In a country where information was scarce, we Herald readers were well-informed.
Today, in addition to the Herald, I subscribe to two international newspapers, several news sites and many blogs. My devices receive far more information than I can read. With an internet awash with information, no one can claim to be fully informed.
It was a huge shock in the pre-Official Information Act days to open the books and discover what the Muldoon government had been up to.
While coalition ministers may be surprised by the escalating cost of infrastructure, from ferries to Dunedin’s hospital, they did know about these projects.
I think the answer to the information explosion is more information.
The Reserve Bank publishes the minutes of its meetings. Why not publish the minutes of Cabinet meetings?
Secrecy causes far more damage than disclosure.
The answer to leaks is to have no secrets to leak.
Why does the taxpayer own media outlets which the public does not trust?
There are good government websites. Parliament’s website provides more information than I received as an MP.
Rather than the taxpayer owning media outlets, the Government should utilise the internet to be totally transparent.
With the help of AI and without having to make a formal Official Information Act request, a citizen should be able to make a request through any government website and receive all the information the government has on the topic.
All human institutions are fallible, and as politicians are prone to making impossible to deliver promises, we should never fully trust.
The best we can aim for is to have the same information as these who seek to govern us.
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