Poking Out The Eyes Of The Public.

Managing The Message: Labour supporters are invited to receive a copy of Andrew Little's conference address by e-mail. The people surrounding the party’s leader have a “message” they wish to present to the public, and they are determined that every single party member should remain resolutely and coherently “on message”. Hence the near total ban on media access to conference proceedings.

 

THE LABOUR PARTY’s annual conference kicks-off today in Palmerston North and the news media might as well stay at home. Apart from a handful of carefully controlled events: speeches of welcome; tributes to fallen comrades; three spectacularly misnamed “Challenge Sessions” and, of course, the Leader’s Address; the weekend’s proceedings will take place under a comprehensive media ban.

 

The Sector Sessions: where the party’s component groups – trade unionists, women, Maori, youth – meet to discuss issues of special interest to their members, are “closed to the media”. The Policy Workshops; where conference delegates debate policy remits on health and society, jobs and growth, skills and wages, human rights, and a host of other matters, are similarly “closed to the media”. Likewise, all discussion of the Party’s all-important ‘Policy Platform’ (to which all Labour MPs are bound) has been deemed too sensitive for the ears and eyes of the public’s proxies.

 

Also “closed to the media” is the session headed ‘Whakarongo me korero’ – which features “discussions and presentations on a variety of current topics”. Even the announcement of the results of the Party’s internal elections are “closed to the media”, along with a session intriguingly titled “Re-written Constitution and Rules”. The Party big-wigs have also decided that no journalists should be present at the special workshop entitled “How to be a Treasurer”.

 

Most worrying of all, the critical plenary session at which the members’ policy proposals, developed at all those earlier workshops, are debated, amended and voted up or down is – that’s right, you guessed it – “closed to the media”.

 

The extent of this year’s media ban speaks eloquently of a political party at odds with, and mortally afraid of, itself.

 

It is almost a reflex among those who like to think of themselves as political “professionals” to deny the public even the slightest glimpse of events they haven’t already emptied of anything remotely resembling controversy, spontaneity or authenticity. The people surrounding the party’s leader have a “message” they wish to present to the public, and they are determined that every single party member should remain resolutely and coherently “on message”.

 

After the tumult and turmoil of the past four years, the message Andrew Little’s staffers are determined to communicate to the voting public is that Labour is united. And by ‘Labour’ they mean the whole party. The Labour caucus, the New Zealand Council, the trade union affiliates, and even the rank-and-file, are all 100 percent united and raring to go. Nobody’s heard of Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody’s the slightest bit worried about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. From top to bottom, Andy’s electoral vessel has been caulked and sealed and plugged. Nobody’s getting in and, sure as Stalin, nothing is getting out!

 

Except that a political party – especially a left-wing political party – has no right to shut away its deliberations from public scrutiny. After all, the body we’re discussing is not a society of philatelists, but a quasi-constitutional institution within which the future leaders of our nation are raised and readied, and out of which its future economic and social policy directions are expected to emerge.

 

This quasi-constitutional quality is only enhanced when a political party’s membership arrogates to itself the right to choose the leader of its parliamentary caucus. When the choice of who should be Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition is restricted to the candidates’ caucus colleagues, the voters can at least reassure themselves that these key political figures are being chosen by people who have, themselves, been put to the democratic test. But, they can have no such reassurance when their political leaders are being decided by people whose only qualification is the payment of a membership fee.

 

When Labour’s members took upon themselves the duty of deciding who the next Prime Minister will be, they simultaneously forfeited the right to behave as if they were a society of stamp-collectors. The latter has every right to determine who can participate in and observe its AGM. The Labour Party, however, like all political parties, lays claim to the right to design and deliver the nation’s future. And that must mean that the nation possesses a reciprocal right to watch them do it.

 

By banning the news media from a huge chunk of its conference proceedings, Labour is poking out the eyes and blocking the ears of the voters. Shame on them!

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 November 2015.

Corbyn’s Choice: God Save the Queen, Or, A Fascist Regime?

Not Smart: Corbyn's situational awareness as a politician is woeful. Unless he makes the transition from Backbencher to Leader of the Opposition, especially in terms of handling the news media, he will not survive 18 months. If the protestant claimant to the French throne, Henry of Navarre, could see that "Paris is worth a mass", then surely Corbyn can see that Westminster is worth an anthem?

HARRY PERKINS, the hero of A Very British Coup, would have sung ‘God Save the Queen’ – lustily, and standing ramrod straight. Why? Because, his own republican sympathies notwithstanding, he would have understood that the majority of his fellow countrymen both love and believe in Elizabeth II. Refusing to sing – especially at a memorial service to “The Few” who saved Britain from Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1940 – would have upset them. Not only that, it would have lent credence to the uniformly negative things the Tory press was saying about him. Chris Mullins, the Labour MP who wrote A Very British Coup, knew that to be at all believable, his left-wing, working-class hero would have to be preternaturally media savvy.

 

Unless Jeremy Corbyn becomes preternaturally media savvy very quickly there will be no need for a very British coup. The general who told The Daily Mirror that a Corbyn-led Labour Government committed to taking the UK out of Nato and scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent would be removed “by fair means of foul” will no doubt be disappointed to hear it, but it’s true. The anthem incident marked Corbyn as a man almost entirely lacking in the situational awareness so essential to the practice of politics in our media saturated twenty-first century. Without that awareness Corbyn cannot possibly succeed as a radical Labour leader. He will be replaced – and sooner, rather than later.

 

Corbyn’s mute performance in Westminster Abbey sent commentators from both the Left and the Right scurrying for their George Orwell. And rightly so, because in his 1941 pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, there is a passage that could have been written especially for Corbyn.

 

“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.”

 

That was why, when Mullin created Harry Perkins, way back in 1982, he made him the antithesis of Orwell’s “English intellectual”. He knew that there could never be a radical left-wing British prime minister who sniggered at horse-racing or suet-pudding – because the British people would never vote for such a person.

 

The Fictional Labour Leader, Harry Perkins: "The whiff of treachery."

 

The other thing Mullin built into his hero was a rock-solid understanding of how crucial the news media has become to the conduct of modern politics. That’s why, when he becomes Prime Minister, Perkins revolutionises the way No. 10 Downing Street interacts with the news media. Rather than, like Corbyn, keeping them at arm’s length and refusing to give them sound-bites for their six o’clock news bulletins, Perkins turns his administration into a more-or-less permanent press conference. He offers political journalists unparalleled access to all his ministers and deluges them with official information. As he suspected, this “love bombing” of the media leaves them feeling uncertain and confused. How do you play “gotcha!” journalism when you’ve already “got” everything you need to write great stories?

 

Corbyn’s weaknesses as a communicator with the news media were not immediately apparent during the campaign for the Labour leadership. As an essentially internal party process, the political dynamics of that very narrow contest were quite different from those that dominate the politics of Westminster. Those who followed his astonishing rise, and who celebrated his even more astonishing victory, simply assumed that he was equal to the challenge of reformulating his message in a way that rendered it receivable by the Great British Public. To date, it is by no means clear that Corbyn is equal to the challenge.

 

Indeed, as the weeks pass, it becomes clearer and clearer that the true hero of the Labour leadership contest wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn, but the Labour membership which elected him – ably assisted by the tens-of-thousands who paid Labour three quid to see “a new kind of politics” triumph over business as usual. Looking back over these extraordinary weeks, political and social historians will likely conclude that, far from creating his own following, Corbyn was actually created by it. The MP for Islington North was pressed into the service of a labour movement grown weary of “leaders” who arrived amongst them still shrink-wrapped from the same Blairite factory. Corbyn wasn’t a robot – so Corbyn had to win.

 

But if Corbyn is not a robot, neither is he a Harry Perkins. Mullins’ hero was strong from the start and only too aware of what lay in wait for him. As he climbs the stairs to the living quarters of No. 10, he quips to the following pack of journalists that there’s a smell of history about the place – “and just the whiff of betrayal”.

 

Except, in Corbyn’s case, it’s not so much a whiff, as a sickening stench, of betrayal. Knowing that the parliamentary party was bitterly opposed to just about everything he believed in, the only viable course of action available to Corbyn was to establish a powerful emotional connection with the British people – one that allowed him to speak to them directly, over the heads of his parliamentary colleagues. But, as Mullins understood, that can only be done through the news media.

 

So, rather than shunning the major television platforms, Corbyn should have pitched a tent on them; telling anyone and everyone who asked what they wanted to know. Everything from his favourite brand of breakfast cereal to the alternative purposes to which the billions of pounds currently spent on Trident could be applied. When, inevitably, his colleagues cried foul (and anonymous generals threatened wholesale military revolt) Corbyn should have doubled down: intimating that he would be seeking the party’s endorsement for the policies he was promoting. If they wanted the policies; if they wanted him; then they would have to show the parliamentary wing of the party (and the UK armed forces!) who was boss.

 

Is there still hope for Jeremy Corbyn? Yes, but it is fast running out. From the moment the results of the leadership election were announced, Corbyn’s allies in the trade unions made it clear that his political survival would depend on replicating in the wider electorate the same radical democratic movement that had carried him to victory within the Labour Party. That could not be done by selecting a shadow cabinet that was three fifths parliamentary enemies and two fifths political crackpots. (Like his Environment Secretary, Kerry McCarthy, who is on record as wanting to mount a campaign against the consumption of meat along the lines of the current campaign against smoking!)

 

If Corbyn fails to build that radical democratic movement, upon which the success of his leadership depends, he will be gone in 18 months. If he would survive, he needs to re-read Mullins novel and absorb its political lessons. Most crucially, he needs to begin again with the British news media – without whose assistance his messages to the British people cannot be delivered.

 

One of the most moving moments in the television version of A Very British Coup takes place in a little news-agent’s shop. Harry Perkins ducks in for a box of matches. From the shop counter the right-wing tabloids bellow out the message that Perkins and his government are “Red Scum!” The news-agent hands over the matches, but then, locking eyes with the beleaguered PM, he whispers hoarsely: “You are not red scum!” In spite of the tabloids, Harry’s message has got through. It is the moment when a very British revolution, and its inevitable corollary, a very British coup, both become inevitable.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 27 September 2015.

Should Journalists Have To Declare Their Ideological Predispositions?

Helpful Hint: Nobody reading my own newspaper columns has ever had to waste any time working out from which side of the political divide I draw my inspiration. Would we be better or worse off if all journalists' work was so clearly identified?

 

IF YOU’RE READING this column you know already that it’s coming to you “From the Left”. You are, therefore, free to absorb its contents with a rare foreknowledge of its author’s ideological predispositions.
 

But how often can you say as much? How many of the stories, columns and feature articles published every day carry such a useful consumer warning? And how easy is it, Dear Reader, in the absence of such a warning, to discern how those stories, columns and feature articles have been put together and why?
 

Because, make no mistake, everything you read, watch and listen to, every newspaper article, television programme and radio broadcast, has been carefully constructed by an individual, or individuals, working consciously, or unconsciously, from well-established ideological predispositions.
 

The information a journalist decides to include in a story is very often less important than the information he or she decides to leave out. Indeed, this is almost always the case. Because in any “newsworthy” event there will always be many more details and contributory causes than a journalist’s employers could ever possess either the time or the space to relate.
 

A few mornings ago, for example, I listened to a correspondent reporting on the referenda on regional autonomy that had just taken place in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. His report concentrated on irregularities in the way the referenda were conducted. He then linked these irregularities to statements from European Union and United States officials in which the “Russian-backed separatists’” referenda were angrily condemned as “illegal”.
 

Another journalist, reporting from the same country, might just as easily have started her report by reiterating the illegal status of the government in Kiev. She could have pointed to the presence of the overtly fascist political formations within the Western-backed regime and linked this to the determination of ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers to protect themselves by voting in hastily organised referenda for regional autonomy. After all, these so-called “separatists” are living in territory which had, up until 1922, been part of Russia-proper.

Hero Or Villain? It depends on which facts journalists choose to put into their stories about the crisis in Ukraine, and which they decide to leave out.

 

What made the media outlet I was listening to choose the first report over the second? Both are constructed out of facts which, thanks to Google and Wikipedia, are readily checkable. And yet, the Ukraine which emerges from the way these facts are either included or excluded differs wildly. In the first report the referenda symbolise illegal Russian-backed separatism. In the second, the referenda represent East Ukraine’s determination to protect itself from Western-backed fascists in Kiev. In the end, it probably came down to the news editor’s ideological predispositions.
 

Or, alternatively, the news editor made a rational assessment of the way his bosses would react to his broadcasting the second report, and opted for the first. Such self-censorship is extremely common, reflecting the fact that individuals are not the only things with ideological predispositions – institutions have them too. And if you would discover the political direction of an institution’s bias, just find out who pays the bills.
 

In the light of the recent report on political bias released by Television New Zealand, the question of a journalist’s ideological predispositions has acquired an unusual moral salience.

Shane Taurima: Conflict of interest?

 

Mr Shane Taurima was forced to resign from his job at TVNZ because he allegedly failed to adequately separate his political ambitions from his statutory obligations, as a public broadcaster, to be politically neutral and only broadcast news and current affairs that is fair and balanced. TVNZ plans to avoid any future suggestion of political partiality by requiring its news and current affairs staff to declare and relinquish any existing ties and/or affiliations to political parties.
 

But, surely, this can only be regarded as a mixed blessing? At least an open declaration by all TVNZ journalists of their ideological predispositions would allow viewers to judge their output with a greater understanding of what kinds of facts they are more likely to put into, and leave out of, their stories. Just like the readers of this column, TVNZ’s viewers would then be able to calculate an appropriate political discount.
 

The Law may require our public broadcaster to be fair and balanced, but the Law can’t be there to witness what goes into or gets left out of everything we see.
 

Would we not be better served if all journalists were required to identify themselves as coming “From the Left’ or “From the Right”?
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 May 2014.

Would You Like A Free Daily Newspaper With Your Free Lunch?

The Power Of One: Sheldon Adelson's personal fortune of $US20 billion allows him to subsidise the distribution of a free daily newspaper throughout Israel. Unable to compete with their far-right rival, Israel's left-wing newspapers face ruin. What would happen to New Zealand's mostly Australian-owned print media if the world's richest woman, Gina Rinehart, attempted to do something similar across the Tasman?

 

A FREE DAILY NEWSPAPER. Just imagine being able to walk into your local dairy and pick up a big, fat, all-sections, all-subjects daily newspaper without paying a cent. Imagine that newspaper being delivered free-of-charge to your front door. Imagine its impact on newspaper publishers who still expected you to pay for their product.

 

Impossible, you say. Sure, we have give-away newspapers now, but they only arrive in our letter-box once or twice a week, and because they’re paid for by advertising sales the editorial content is pretty thin. A genuine daily newspaper, with all the editorial content that term implies, simply couldn’t be financed from advertising alone. The revenue from advertising would have to be augmented by over-the-counter-sales and subscriptions. So, a “free” daily newspaper must remain a pipe dream.

 

Not necessarily. If you were on the streets of Tel Aviv today you could pick up a copy of Israel Hayom for free. The paper was launched five years ago as a five-days-a-week publication, and in November 2009 added what it describes as “an expansive weekend edition”. A free daily newspaper already exists.

 

But how? What’s the Israelis’ secret? How can such a publication possibly break even? Is Israel’s economy really so buoyant that it can sustain a daily newspaper funded exclusively from advertising sales?

 

Well, no, it isn’t. Israel’s economy, like every other country’s, is feeling the squeeze of the global financial crisis. Not surprisingly, Israel Hayom runs at a substantial loss.

 

But who on earth has so much money that he can afford to run a large daily newspaper at a loss? He’d have to be a billionaire.

 

Indeed he would, and that’s exactly what Sheldon Adelson, the man behind Israel Hayom, is – twenty times over. Mr Adelson made his fortune in the casino business and now he’s using it to support his favourite right-wing politicians. Over the past three or four months he has donated $US10 million to “Restore Our Future” – a political action committee backing the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. At home, through Israel Hayom, his money is being used to promote the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party.

 

All a little unsettling. But, in a free country, doesn’t Mr Adelson have every right to set up and run his own newspaper – even at a loss? Well, possibly. Perhaps a more pertinent question might be: Does Mr Adelson, by so ruthlessly under-cutting his competitors, have the right to drive them out of business?

 

Israel, like the United Kingdom, is a country where most of the daily newspapers take an openly partisan position. Mr Adelson, by under-writing Israel Hayom’s losses is putting this politically diverse media environment at risk. Slowly but surely, the daily newspapers representing the Left of Israeli politics are being driven towards insolvency.

 

According to McClatchy Newspapers’ Sheera Frenkel:

 

“Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent left-wing daily, didn’t publish a print edition [last] Thursday for the first time in three decades as layoffs threatened much of the staff. Maariv, one of the country’s largest newspapers, has announced that it might switch soon to Web-only distribution with a weekend print version; the alternative, the paper has said, is closing.”

 

All very sad. But Israel and its newspapers are a long way from New Zealand. Our media environment is quite different. Surely, nothing like Israel Hayom could happen here?

 

Not here – not yet. But what about across the Tasman? In Australia (where most of New Zealand’s daily newspaper publishers are based) another billionaire, the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, is locked in a very public dispute with one of her country’s largest media corporations, Fairfax Media. Ms Rinehart, currently a major Fairfax shareholder, is unhappy with the corporation’s political and business coverage and is accused by her critics of seeking to influence its newspapers’ editorial direction.

 

What would happen to Australia’s print media environment if Ms Rinehart decided to adopt Mr Adelson’s strategy? How long could the already financially fragile Aussie media survive the competition of a free daily newspaper, subsidised out of the extremely deep pockets of the world’s richest woman?

 

And if the Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Mercury and Rupert Murdoch’s Australian were to suffer the same fate that appears to be awaiting Haaretz and Maariv, how would that impact the future of the Australian-owned mastheads dominating New Zealand’s print media?

 

If the future of the print media belongs to those with the deepest pockets, then perhaps it is time to start thinking about the creation of a publicly-funded, editorially neutral (and that neutrality would need to be guaranteed by statute) national (with a small “n”!) newspaper? Democracy requires a well-informed electorate, which, in turn, requires a truly independent news media.

 

New Zealand democracy is far too important to be entrusted to newspapers wholly owned and influenced by right-wing billionaires.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 October 2012.

News From The Dark Side

Sustained Moral Outrage: Comedian, Steve Coogan, confronts the former Deputy Features Editor of the News of the World, Paul McMullan, on the BBC's Newsnight programme: "You're not a journalist! You know you're not!"

YOU HAVE TO WONDER why he did it. The British people were aghast: disgust rising like bile in their throats at the gross moral turpitude of the News of the World. And yet, there he was: Paul McMullan, Deputy Features Editor of the News of the World from 1994-2001, defending the indefensible on Friday’s BBC Newsnight programme.

The casting could hardly have been better, because physically, intellectually and emotionally McMullan was the perfect representative of that doomed newspaper and the morally compromised corporate culture in which it operated.

Slack-limbed, loose-jawed, lank-haired and dead-eyed: speaking in the weak, reedy accents of East London, McMullan’s every self-justifying syllable sounded as if it had been pre-smeared with the mud of the Thames. The man would have done credit to Dickens himself.

Challenged by Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis to defend the News of the World’s hacking into the cell-phones of politicians, celebrities, the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and most egregiously, the “In-Box” of murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, McMullan’s response was eerily offhand.

“I’ve always said that I just tried to write articles in a truthful way. And – you know – what better source [for] getting the truth than listening to someone’s messages.”

In those jarring, self-contradictory sentences, McMullan not only lays bare the extraordinary strangeness of the story he tells himself, but the extraordinary lack of moral scruple that has come to characterise the British tabloid press.

In McMullan’s moral universe it is important to write articles in “a truthful way”, but not, apparently, to gather information for those articles in ways that avoid the gross violation of an individual’s right to privacy.

What McMullan simply doesn’t appear to understand is that the casual resort to immoral means inevitably contaminates, and corrupts, even the most noble of ends.

The News of the World’s use of private detectives to dig out the sort of information that would otherwise have remained hidden represented, in essence, a kind of moral and professional short-cut. The newspaper’s editors had obviously decided that the patient, laborious – but ethical – techniques of acquiring information were far too time-consuming. To get the scoop – and thus sell more newspapers than their rivals – they told themselves that their employers’ worthy objectives fully justified pressuring their journalists into adopting unethical (and, ultimately, illegal) methods of news-gathering.

True investigative journalism is not concerned with which celebrity is sleeping with which celebrity’s wife; or snorting cocaine; or watching porn. Nor does it rely on the efforts of “Bennie the Binman” riffling through rock-stars’ and news-readers’ rubbish for titillating tittle-tattle.

True investigative journalism concerns itself with the probity of our political leaders, the efficacy of government policy and the integrity of our institutions. It’s goal is not the revelation of private human frailties, but the righting of wrongs and the exposure of public malfeasance.

And the true investigative journalist gets his story not by trickery, deception or illegality, but by patient inquiry; by laborious (and often dangerous) amassing of evidence, and, most importantly, by persuading those in possession of crucial information to do the right thing, pro bono publico – for the public good.

It is this that makes true investigative journalism a genuinely noble enterprise. Not simply for informing the public about matters of great importance, but for reminding those in possession of crucial information that they have a democratic duty to keep their fellow citizens “in the loop”.

It’s what makes “Bennie the Binman” and all his ilk moneygrubbing sleaze-merchants; and William Mark Felt – No. 2 at the FBI and “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame – a genuine American hero.

For Paul McMullan, however, these ideas might just as well have come from Mars. Although, it’s fair to say that, to the two other guests on Newsnight, the comedian Steve Coogan, and the former Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, McMullan himself might just as easily have been a visitor from the red planet.

Regarding him with an expression that blended loathing and contempt in equal measure, Coogan unleashed one of the most splendid examples of sustained moral outrage I have ever heard.

“You come across as a sort of risible individual”, said Coogan, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, “who is symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with the tabloids.”

And when McMullan again tried to justify himself by thrusting forward his journalistic obligations, the grand-fatherly Mr Dyke cut him short:

“Can I just say,” he said, appealing to Maitlis and Coogan, “I’ve spent most of my life being a journalist, and I’m nothing to do with him – and nor are most working journalists.”

“You’re not a journalist!”, seconded Coogan, “You know you’re not!”

And still McMullan failed to grasp how far he was from the light.

“Oh yes I am”, he objected. “I just keep the journal of the day.”

No, Mr McMullan. Your news is from the dark side.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 July 2011.

Full Disclosure

Let Justice Be Done - Though The Heavens Fall: In Chris Mullin's political thriller, A Very British Coup, the left-wing Labour Prime Minister, Harry Perkins, attempts to subvert the Establishment by adopting a policy of full disclosure of official information. Founded on secrecy and the manipulation of information, the Establishment (especially the Tory press) organises Perkin's removal. New Zealand's own Harry Perkins, Michael Joseph Savage, attempted something similar by mandating the live broadcasting of Parliament in 1936.

HARRY PERKINS, the hero of Chris Mullin’s brilliant political thriller, A Very British Coup, rides to office on a promise of open government.

To help him demystify the business of day-to-day politics, the newly-elected left-wing Labour prime minister recruits Fred Thompson, a top-flight investigative reporter. Together, the Prime Minister and his Press Secretary pursue a radical policy of full-disclosure.

Daily press conferences provide the news media with unprecedented access to Harry and his ministers. Cabinet papers are released automatically. The machinations of senior civil servants are no longer shielded from public scrutiny. What the government sees, the voters see too.

Pure fiction, of course, but Mullin (editor of the left-wing British weekly The Tribune when he wrote the novel in 1982) makes a very interesting point. What would happen to the news media’s power to shape public perceptions in an environment where rumour, speculation and tendentious political analysis loses all currency?

In circumstances of full disclosure, where there were no official secrets or confidential reports, the dark arts of the spin-doctor would no longer be required. Journalists who only told half the story would be laughed out of the Press Gallery. Speculation about ministerial motives, when the minister was ready and willing to answer all the journalists’ questions and make available the official advice upon which his or her decisions were based, would be pointless.

In such an open, information-rich, political environment, the analysis of the average political journalist would very soon be no more insightful or compelling than the ordinary citizen’s.

FOR A BRIEF PERIOD in the 1930s, New Zealand had a prime minister whose media instincts were remarkably similar to those of the fictional Harry Perkins.

In the two years he spent as Leader of the Opposition (1933-1935) Michael Joseph Savage gave considerable thought to Labour’s fraught relationship with the New Zealand news media.

With the exception of the union-supported Grey River Argus, the daily press was unrelentingly hostile to Labour’s political ambitions. The new medium of radio, however, offered a means of circumventing this near universal editorial hostility towards the Left.

In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” to the American people had proved extraordinarily effective at “cutting out the middle man”. And even in New Zealand, Colin Scrimgeour’s (Uncle Scrim’s) “Friendly Road” broadcasts on 1ZB offered ordinary citizens access to a much less jaundiced view of Labour and its ideas. (So much so that in the run-up to the 1935 general election the conservative National government jammed Uncle Scrim’s Sunday evening broadcast.)

More than ever, Mickey Savage was convinced that radio held the key to curbing the private presses’ power to shape political perceptions.

Prime Minister Savage’s first and most enduring media reform was to arrange for the live broadcasting of Parliament. The daily press had been highly selective in its reporting of parliamentary debates, but now ordinary citizens could tune into Parliament and hear their representatives explaining the new Labour Government’s policies directly to them.

Overnight, the highly partisan filters of conservative journalism became redundant. With the people able to hear for themselves what the Labour government was doing – and why – the daily newspapers had no option but to report the business of the House of Representatives honestly and impartially.

CHRIS MULLIN’S hero goes much further than Mickey Savage ever dared in opening up the business of government to public scrutiny – and pays a heavy personal price for his radical democratisation of official information.

But in having the British Establishment overthrow Harry Perkins’ government, Mullin is being no more than honest. Secrecy is indispensible to the sort of power that British – and New Zealand – politicians are accustomed to exercising. Just as the strict rationing of information is fundamental to the modern news media’s relationship with the wielders of political authority.

If knowledge is power, then the widest possible dissemination of knowledge must be the surest means of setting us free.

First and foremost, Mullin’s “very British coup” is a blow against the truth.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 May 2011.

Revolutionising the News

BOB McCHESNEY is one of those progressive American scholars who repay the closest attention. Interviewed this morning on Radio New Zealand – National, he confidently laid out a series of radical measures that he believes will halt, and hopefully reverse, the precipitate slide in the quality of news gathering and reporting in the US and across the globe.

This is a – and quite possibly the – critical issue confronting the Left in developed western countries. But sadly, in New Zealand left-wing circles, media policy tends to be treated as an afterthought, at best, and at worst, a joke.

Now, I’m not suggesting there are no New Zealanders researching news media issues from a progressive perspective, because there are. Scholars like Peter Thompson, Wayne Hope and Martin Hirst are making an outstanding contribution. The problem is, we hardly ever get to hear from them.

Certainly, they’re much too hot for the ever-cautious Chris Laidlaw to handle. His idea of putting two cutting-edge commentators on the air is to rope-in the venerable Jim Tucker from the Whitireia School of Journalism, and Julie Starr, whose main claim to fame seems to be designing a website for Britain’s deeply conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

Now I’ve heard enough from Jim Tucker over the years to know that his heart is fundamentally in the right place. In a more open and secure political and economic environment, when people in his position weren’t required to choose their words quite so carefully, I'm pretty sure that he would be a strong supporter of McChesney’s plans to socialise the news media.

Starr, however, is a very different kettle of fish. Having visited her website, and read her little posting on "The Future of Journalism", I have no confidence whatsoever that she even understands the problems McChesney is attempting to address. News is not about something as easy and comfortable and non-threatening as "information" – it’s about giving people access to that most dangerous of all commodities – the truth.

What chance is there that Labour and the Greens will latch-on to McChesney’s ideas? Are they up to the job of formulating a media policy for the 2011 election radical enough to transform our understanding of "press freedom" in the 21st Century? Honestly, I’d have to say the chances are pretty slim. I have yet to hear anyone, from either party, speak out in favour of doing something as basic as lifting the level of state subsidy for TVNZ to match even the OECD average – let alone the levels of support given to public broadcasting in Denmark and Finland.

So, if Labour's spokesperson on media policy, Brendan Burns, were to come out with a suite of reforms based on McChesney’s ideas: free postage for publications with less than 25 percent advertising; a $200 tax write-off for a subscription to a not-for-profit newspaper; massive increases in the level of state support for public broadcasting - I'd be delighted. Unfortunately, I get no sense that the Goff-led Labour Party is ready to sanction such radical changes.

If that is the case, then Labour’s new entrants (especially the brave souls who have just launched the blog Red Alert) should think about these questions:

How are they going to communicate with the tens of thousands of voters who either abstained, or voted against them, in 2008?

What do they think will be left of our public broadcasting service after Jonathan Coleman and his friends at the Sky Network have had their wicked way with the future structure of New Zealand's electronic media?

What hope do they have that a newspaper like The NZ Herald is going to give the Labour Opposition a fair suck of the sav’ when it comes to framing "key" election issues in two years time?

Do Labour – or the Greens – possess the strength of numbers, the economic resources, or even the creative imagination and political courage, to make a successful end-run around the hegemonic edifice of the major media conglomerates?

I think not.

And yet, without that imagination and that courage Labour’s chances of holding National to a single term seem very bleak. And if John Key gets a second mandate – one which includes privatisation, radical deregulation, and dangerously regressive tax reforms – then, by the time 2014 rolls around, it will be too late for Labour - the future of the Left will have become the responsibility of a more authentic group of electoral custodians.

So, here’s a suggestion for all you Labour Party policy mavens. Why not invite Bob McChesney to address the Labour Party conference? Why not get his ideas talked about by voters as serious possibilities. Why not serve notice on Sky, and its dark master, Rupert Murdoch, that any investments they were thinking of making in the New Zealand media industry may turn out to be not quite as secure as they’ve been led to believe?

Labour, if it’s to have the slightest chance of rebuilding its electoral fortunes, has got to get the electorate thinking about new things in a new way. Revolutionising media ownership in this country is just one of the many radical steps the party should be contemplating.

My greatest fear, however, is that without the ideological space afforded by a vibrant, publicly owned, and truly independent news media, getting to those next steps may be impossible.