The State and the Media

Little Progress, Much Ambivalence

The appearance of Media Minister Paul Goldsmith before Parliament’s Social Services and Community Select Committee was a disappointment.

He acknowledged what we already know about the state of the media – that a reduction in advertising caused by changing consumer habits and by the current recession was putting the media industry under “real pressure”.

The problem is that he rejected a suggestion by Green MP Ricardo Menendez March that the Government was taking a “hands off” approach to media woes. Mr. Goldsmith pointed out that the Government invested more than $100 million a year in New Zealand On Air, provided $70m a year to RNZ and was “actively considering options at the moment for things that we might do for the broader media sector”. This indicated, suggested the Minister, that the Government was not “hands off”

The elephant in the room, however, is what the Government is going to do about the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. I have already written about that unfortunate piece of proposed legislation. I agree with media expert Dr Gavin Ellis that it should be abandoned.

Just as a refresher, as reported by Tom Pullar-Strecker, the Bill is designed force internet giants including Google and Meta to help fund journalism to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year by requiring they strike licensing deals with media outlets on terms that could ultimately be set by a government-appointed arbitrator. The use of the term “licensing” is an interesting one because it suggests that media would license the use of their content to the Platform Giants. That does not require the legislation proposed. Rather, as I have suggested elsewhere, the answer lies in the Copyright Act.

When the Bill was introduced by the previous Labour Government, National opposed it. However the coalition has vacillated on what is to happen. The absence of a clear policy approach meant the end of the previous Media Minister, Ms. Melissa Lee. But Mr. Goldsmith does not seem to be in a hurry to make an announcement and before the Select Committee declined to comment on speculation that he would take a recommendation on whether to advance the bill to the Cabinet next week, saying the Government would make announcements when it was ready.

However, the Minister did make it clear that direct financial support from the Government could further undermine public trust and confidence in the Media and he went on to observe that this was part of a growing distrust of institutions generally.

Admittedly there are degrees of separation between the Government and the provision of financial support for the media in the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. But the fact remains that the regime proposed involves a state created and supported system that would compel bargaining with a penalty regime for infractions and non-compliance. That is neither bargaining nor is it fair. And in the final analysis it is a state created means of subsidization of the media. The fact is that public money – other than that necessary to run the regime – would not be used.

Perhaps some indication of the Minister’s view came from his remarks about the reporting of court cases and local government matters. This reporting is often accompanied by a note that funding is from NZ OnAir which administers the Public Interest Journalism Fund which is winding down.

He suggested these were the type of matters where direct Government support may remain an option. This cherry-picking approach to media funding is a bad idea

However, he noted that

“Where it gets more difficult is if there are funds and there's a list of criteria around how you get those funds. That’s where you can get into ‘perception’ issues”

The reference to a “list of criteria” was a clear reference to those that accompanied the PIJF.

The problem is that no matter how one tries to approach it, any sort of Government involvement in media funding a fraught with problems, not the least of which is that of perception. The PIJF was a means by which Labour exerted a level of control over media with the criteria that it imposed for grants. But the PIJF – apart from perception difficulties – was unsustainable. Hence the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. If that Bill goes further and is enacted there will be pushback from the Platforms. A simple expedient will be to disconnect from news activities as Meta has done overseas. That will be disadvantageous to mainstream media whose news stories are accessed from the Platforms rather than from their own “home” sites.

That was not the end of the story of media control by the previous government. A matter that was being investigated by the Department of Internal Affairs was a project that started life as a content regulation policy and morphed into the more politically acceptable Safer Online Services and Media Platforms programme. Work on that ill-starred and ill-conceived project has been brought to an end.

The firm view of State involvement with the media was expressed by Andrew Neil before the House of Lords and about which I wrote in my article “What the Government Should Do About the Media”. His clear position was that there should be no financial support from the State at all.

If Mr Goldsmith and the current Government followed Mr. Neil’s advice the answer Mr Goldsmith should have given to Mr March’s suggestion that the Government was taking a hands-off approach to media woes would be a resounding “yes”. But he didn’t do that. On the contrary he said:

“We're not hands off, we're engaged. We're talking to the sector and where there are things that help, we're open to considering those.”

It seems that State entanglement with the media, and a continued perception of a lack of independence on the part of the latter, is likely to continue.