Owen interviews Mark Boyd, Jonathan Milne and John Minto
Lisa Owen interviews Mark Boyd, Jonathan Milne and John Minto
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Lisa
Owen: The election campaign has been described as chaotic,
surreal and the grubbiest in living memory. In the midst of
it all, the right hammered the media for its supposed
obsession with Dirty Politics. And now those on the left are
saying journalists are falling for National's spin cost it
the election. So how did the media do, really? Well, I'm
joined this morning by former TV news executive Mark Boyd,
who's completing a PhD in media coverage of the election;
Internet Mana candidate John Minto; and SundayStar Times and
Sunday News editor Jonathan Milne. Good morning to you
all.
John Minto: Good morning.
John Minto, if can come
to you first. Can you explain how did the media cost the
left the election?
Minto: Well, I think if you look at
the clip of Pam outside the campaign launch and you looked
at what happened on TV3 that night, the entire coverage was
devoted to what Pam had said and how she had behaved. And
inside that launch, we had the most important— I think the
biggest jobs policy that the country has had for several
decades, where full employment was the objective, and we
spelt out very carefully how that was going to funded and
how it was going to lead to a dramatic change and, you know,
giving everybody a stake in the future of the country. But
that was not even mentioned on the TV3 news. Now, I can
understand that being reported, but the fact is that jobs
package was just completely lost and I think across most of
the media that night.
Yeah, that—
Minto: That's a
good example of—
That outburst was obviously on a
number of number of media outlets, but that's a single
incident, so in the bigger picture, what went wrong, do you
think with the media, in your view?
Minto: Well, I think
in the bigger picture, we have the news people receive is
dominated by television. And I think we've got this culture
developed in New Zealand where TV journalists see their job
as catching journalists— sorry, catching politicians out.
And, I mean, I've got no objection to journalists having
political opinions. I've got no objection to them expressing
those opinions. But when their personal opinions drive the
narrative that the public receive as the news, then I think
we've got a serious problem. And I think in TV3, for
example, right from the get go, their chief parliamentary
reporter, Duncan Garner— Patty Gower, was hotly opposed to
the link-up between Mana and the Internet Party. And I think
that drove the way the TV presented the news all the way
through the election.
Is that not the job of political
reporters to ask questions which you might not find
particularly palatable?
Minto: I think it is. Absolutely
it is, and journalists should be really drilling down, and
they should be enhancing the idea of an election as a
contest of ideas. And they should put every politician on
the spot. They should really drill down, but this idea of
we're going to have an interview and the purpose of the
interview is actually to catch you out, rather than what the
up-front reason given for the interview.
Okay, let's
bring Mark into the conversation here. You are crunching the
numbers. Have you seen so far any evidence of, say, a
right-wing bias in the coverage of the election?
Mark
Boyd: Absolutely not. I mean, this is just fantasy on the
part of the left. You know, let's go back to what John just
said about Pam Corkery's outburst. That wasn't provoked by
the media. The media didn't put words into Pam Corkery's
mouth. Pam just lost it, and that was covered. And also that
night, the National Party had a launch as well, but that was
the second story in both bulletins. Look, in this campaign,
and I'm analysing in detail both television and newspaper
coverage in cooperation with Dr Babak Bahadorat Canterbury
University. I'm about halfway through the campaign so far,
up to day 18 of a 31-day campaign. The media coverage in
those first 18 days — there was a lot more coverage than
2011, both on television and in newspapers. It was a lot
more negative. There was a lot less policy. But that was
mainly because of Dirty Politics. So the left can't claim
that there was a right-wing conspiracy when, certainly, in
the first two weeks of the campaign, all of the media were
absolutely hammering the Government and hammering John Key
on Dirty Politics.
Well, if the—
Boyd: And it led to
the resignation of a Cabinet minister, and that hardly ever
happens in New Zealand.
If there was a disproportionate
coverage of Dirty Politics, was it warranted? Were those
issues legitimate?
Boyd: It was not disproportionate. It
was absolutely proportionate. It was a legitimate issue. It
wasn't a policy issue, but it was a legitimate issue. It
raised some very serious questions about accountability and
credibility at the highest levels of
government.
John—
Minto: And yet we've still not
seen an interview with Jason Ede. You know, we've not seen
that whole—
Boyd: The guy keeps running away.
Minto:
Yeah, he does. He does, indeed.
Boyd: He put up a sign in
his front yard saying, 'Implied consent to enter is denied
to media.' So, you know, that's—
Let's bring Jonathan
Milne in here. Was there an appetite for policy with your
readers, and did they get that policy?
Jonathan Milne: I
believe— I can only go only go on gut instinct here. I
don't have hard numbers to back this up, but I certainly
felt towards the end of the campaign that people had had
enough of a lot of the toing and froing of Dirty Politics,
that they'd had enough of the mudslinging and the
personality politics. We've learnt— We've been told for
the last, going on 20 years now, isn't it, in MMP that it's
all about presidential personality politics, but I think in
this election, and I think this was really good, that
towards the end of the campaign, people really did start
saying, 'Tell us what the parties actually stand for. Tell
us what the policies are.' Certainly in the final week of
the campaign for myself, I interviewed the Prime Minister
and David Cunliffe at length. We focused entirely on their
policies because by that point, we'd kind of had enough of
Judith Collins and everything else. As far as Internet
Mana's claim that the media was somehow out to get them, I
really do think that's utter nonsense. And we saw the rest
of the left actually blaming Internet Mana, saying, 'They
got all the air time. They sucked up all the attention. They
got too much attention, and that's why the left's going
down.' And that's one of the things that we'll be looking at
very closely in this Sunday's papers.
Minto: Internet
Mana didn't get the attention at all. The policies of
Internet Mana didn't receive that sort of coverage. What
received coverage was Kim Dotcom, and he received—
Hang
on, John—
Boyd: John, you got about 8% of the coverage
I've counted so far. Now, admittedly, a lot of that was
negative, but that was because of Kim Dotcom.
Minto: I
know. I know—
Boyd: His brand was poison.
Jonathan:
John, I don't think I received a single policy press release
from you guys. So if you're not even—
Minto: Oh,
look—
John Minto—
Minto: Can I say this? I put out
a number of media releases. I'm one of the spokespeople. And
throughout that entire campaign, the six weeks of that
campaign, I had one journalist send me one email to clarify
one aspect of our policy. I never received any coverage
whatever for any of the policies that we were promoting.
Instead, there was all this—
You were on an economics
debate with us. I had—
Minto: Yes, you were. Yes,
sorry, early on, I was.
Okay, well, just on the Kim
Dotcom question, though, that now infamous outburst from Pam
Corkery was because she was annoyed at the fact that journos
were asking for an interview with Kim Dotcom. But I want to
put this to you, John, if you fund a party and you fund a
campaign and you publicly state that your aim is to get rid
of the sitting Prime Minister—
Minto: Yeah, change the
Prime Minister, change the government.
...aren't you
trying to influence the outcome of an election without
accountability, because you're not allowing yourself to be
interviewed, to be questioned? You're dodging
that.
Minto: Oh, heavens above. Look, Kim Dotcom was
interviewed numerous times. Multiple times. And all the way
through the election campaign, he was prepared to front up.
But what became clear to us was—
He cancelled— He was
due on this programme for a long-form interview, and he
cancelled.
Minto: Oh, look, there's been so many
interviews he's done. So many interviews over such a long
period of time that we were concerned that his presence was
swamping things, and we wanted to get the policies out. I
mean, an election should be this battle of ideas. Instead,
there was this—
But was that your mistake, John, going
into coalition with him as such?
Minto: Sorry?
Was
that your mistake? You say you felt his image, his presence
was swamping the campaign. You chose to run on a ticket with
him.
Minto: We did, and we realised it was a big risk.
We've said that.
Boyd: It was a big mistake.
Minto: It
was a big risk—
Boyd: ...to blame in that
case.
Minto: No, it was a big risk. We realised there was
a risk. We went in with our eyes open. And to be frank, I'm
really proud of the fact that we took that risk.
A
mistake in the end?
Minto: Yeah, it turned out to—
Obviously, it didn't turn out well, but I'm proud of the
fact that we did it. If we hadn't, we would have been stuck
around 1% in the polls, as we are at the moment.,
Boyd:
But you still are stuck at 1%.
Minto: I know we are, but
the thing was— No, no, no, listen. The coverage of Kim
Dotcom — I mean, in the last week of the campaign, The
Herald just poured scorn all over him—
Boyd: Because he
didn't deliver. He had this—
Minto: He did
deliver.
Boyd: He had this big revelation he did not
deliver.
Minto: He did deliver. He delivered
that—
Boyd: He had an email which appears to have been
falsified.
Just in the couple— Gentlemen, just in the
couple of minutes that—
Minto: Where did you get that
evidence from, Mark?
In the couple of minutes I've got
left—
Minto: How do you know it's falsified?
I
just— John—
Boyd: The media looked at it expertly.
Got experts to analyse it.
Look, the blogger Keith Ng has
written recently that journalists covering the campaign were
not lazy, nor were they biased, but they have failed, he
said, essentially because the claims around Dirty Politics
have been neither proven or disproven. Is that fair comment?
Because, you know, we don't know who sanctioned— Do we
know who sanctioned snooping in the computers? Do we know
what Judith Collins' role was? You mentioned Jason Ede. We
haven't got to the bottom of that.
Minto: Well, we
haven't got to the bottom of all of it by any means, but
it's certainly— The premise of Nicky Hager's book, and
I've read the book, and the evidence is there that we had,
you know— that the National Party used this vicious
right-wing attack blog to do their dirty work for them and
this two-track campaigning where John Key could be the man
stepping aside and having the lovely public image, while
behind the scenes in the office two doors down from him,
Jason Ede was feeding stuff to right-wing bloggers.
All
right, last word to Jonathan Milne. Do you—?
Jonathan:
You're right. There's still work to be done, and Keith is
right. You know, we've still got to dig further into that.
But, look, Judith Collins quit as a result of an
investigation that the Sunday Star Times did into Dirty
Politics. We have made some real progress there. If I had a
dollar for every time I've been accused by the left or the
right of pandering to one side or the other, I really would
be the corporate lackey that you accuse me of being.
So,
Jonathan, in a word, was this election different from any
other that you've covered in terms of coverage? Yes or
no?
Jonathan: I think we worked harder, and I think we
tried to be really fair, and I think we succeeded.
All
right, thank you very much for joining me this morning,
gentlemen.
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