Keeping an eye on the information gatekeepers
Wednesday, 1 May 2019
The Official Information Act isn't working properly and that means the public is missing out on the information they're entitled to. As part of the Redacted project, Paul Gorman looks at the culture that made this possible.
Once upon a time there was a book. A book full of numbers. It was a 'contact book', a journalist's stock-in-trade.
It offered a direct conduit to the important, the famous and the decision-makers the public otherwise might have had little chance of hearing from.
All you had to do was turn to a page, find one of the numbers you had collected over the years, and pick up the phone.
Nine times out of 10, the person you were after was at the other end of the line.
**READ MORE:
* I request to know what the OIA is
* Hide and seek with the powerful
* Scientists touchy over earthquake information**
That's going back nearly three decades for me. Those were the days.
At some point, perhaps about 15 years or so ago, the number of communications staff – previously called 'information' or 'public relations officers' – began its steady rise.
Not all these people were keen on the public, through journalists, having almost unfettered access to their bosses and what they might say.
They were tasked with exerting greater control of the information, to get between journalists and their readers and be able to put their companies' own carefully worded, one-sided, messages out there, sometimes packaged as 'news'.
That is still the way the game is played by a few today within government departments, local bodies, PR agencies and Parliament. These practitioners like to be the gatekeepers – guarding phone numbers like gold, keeping the public and journalists away from awkward happenings or bad news.
To some working in government, the Official Information Act – introduced in 1982 and the subject of the Stuff project Redacted – was a nuisance and its obligations to reply in timely fashion were stretched or manipulated as much as possible.
It's difficult to pinpoint when the ascendancy of this culture began. Likely catalysts include the rise of political correctness, increasing concerns about managing risk and reputation in more financially constrained times, the growth of social media and the internet.
Another important factor has been the increasing availability of often experienced journalists to take on these roles, due to constant rounds of redundancies, a growing disaffection with turmoil in the media world, and a desire to specialise in a certain field.
As a result, there are now large organisations which have more (former) journalists in their communications teams than their local newsroom does.
There are many good and helpful comms people, who smooth the path to the door of a nervous or inexperienced chief executive, provide useful background material, photographs and videos, and let you pick their brains off-the-record to check background information. I've worked with many of those.
But there are also those with a more aggressive brief or approach, who do little to help when you need it but find plenty of time to harangue you when there is some hint of an error or they don't like the message or tone of an article.
These are the ones who complain regularly and threaten to take you to the Media Council because you told the New Zealand public something they did not like.
However, to be fair, not all journalists are saints either.
My first chief reporter, Clarke Isaacs at the Otago Daily Times, instilled the values of old-fashioned journalism into many generations of reporters.
'Don't bother with the minions, boy. Go straight to the top,' was one of his gems.
The contact book was always a journalist's most valuable possession. It soon became second nature that, every time you were given, or found, a number, you wrote it down straight away.
Mine, which I started when I was a journalism student in 1989, is falling to pieces. Even the sticky tape holding it together has been sticky taped.
Many of the people in it have since moved on and quite a few have died. But for decades it was full of useful numbers of chief executives, chairmen and women, managing directors, vice-chancellors, mayors, prime ministers, governors-general, union leaders, lawyers and whistleblowers, most picked up discreetly, circumspectly, agonisingly across the years from all manners of places.
We occasionally get 'told off' by some comms people for circumventing their preferred way of operating.
'You know that isn't the way we do things – you need to come through us first,' they might say, as if dealing with a naughty child. They want that because it slows things down and allows them to maintain control of the situation.
It is the journalist's job to get both sides of an issue and present the public with a balanced news story.
The danger is that without that balance – and the filtering provided by journalists to get rid of the acronyms and the one-sided, bureaucratic babble – the public is simply getting the picture the organisation in question wants.
It's even more concerning if people are somehow convinced that a one-sided commentary, or a blog, or social media post, is the real news.
I've enjoyed stints in the comms world and believe they've made me a better, more strategic, journalist.
In the old days there were some in the news industry who thought once you made the move from journalism to 'the dark side' you had sold your soul to public relations and could never come back.
That always seemed pretty shallow to me – blinkered thinking caused by ignorance on the part of its purveyors. Many journalists probably now realise that working in communications offers opportunities that are becoming harder to find in journalism.
I had two jobs in the comms industry. The first, at the University of Canterbury, was publications based and I had next to nothing to do with the media. The second was about two years ago, when I left The Press to be a senior media adviser at the University of Otago, a gig which lasted eight months before I ended up back in the media world, as assistant editor at the Otago Daily TImes.
After working for so many years in a newsroom, at Otago University I felt a little like I'd grown up and got a real job.
I had my own office, was offered any equipment and stationery I needed to do my job from anywhere, flexible hours, access to an unbelievable number of professional development courses, and the ability to travel around the country.
I had great colleagues, a wonderful boss and an amazing work environment. I learnt and honed skills such as budgeting, project management, event organisation, public speaking, and supervising and recruiting staff.
However, even with all that, I still felt like a journalist at heart. One day a local journo was grilling me for answers about the pending appointment of a professor that I was not able to talk about.
'Good question, good question' I heard myself saying, wishing I could fill her in more and then worrying I'd said or hinted at too much.
The speed at which things sometimes move in a large establishment also frustrated me, as did a desire to 'have a meeting' about almost anything, supplying even a quick answer to a journalist a potential nightmare.
Your concisely written media release, with a proper angle and clear news hooks, might take two days to come back from all those who needed to check it. Sometimes the news value would be much diluted, or the release would be much expanded into something which you knew would never fly.
Trying to explain that to academics and insist you knew best when it came to news coverage could be problematic.
I'm sure those frustrations about delays and interference must be repeated several times a day in comms offices around the country.
One very good media adviser colleague of mine, a highly experienced journalist, talked of the difficulties he had with a new boss who disagreed with his traditionally newsy style releases and said she wanted them to be more 'aspirational'.
He knew that approach would see them destined for the newsroom bin and the public would never see them.
Such almost irreconcilable philosophical differences are now likely in any organisation where there are old guard comms advisers – mostly former journos – and the new guard, many of whom are the managers who might have a degree in media studies or marketing but have little experience in appreciating what the public needs to know and what journalists actually require for that to happen.
There are plenty of media advisers who realise you are working on the public's behalf, including some who will call and suggest you re-word an Official Information Act (OIA) inquiry if they know you are looking for something in the public interest but outside the bounds of your original request.
But a few delight in making your job as a journalist difficult and appear disinterested in letting the public know what they have a right to know. Never does that seem as wrong as when these people and their organisations are paid by taxpayers or ratepayers.
Despite knowing the demands of news never stop, these are the ones who will tell you their very well-staffed, and well-paid, media office will be closed for several weeks over Christmas and New Year and say they must only be contacted in an emergency.
Late last year, the Christchurch City Council called for water savings to enable well repairs to proceed quickly and minimise the time chlorine is in the drinking water supply.
During Christmas and the lead up to the new year it was clear the savings message was being ignored and a call was in order to the council to see if there was concern and if any special action was being taken to reduce water use or take wells out of action.
The response from the council media team on December 31 was it was neither breaking nor emergency news and I should look at the website for the latest water information.
I didn't get a chance to say I had done that and that was why I was calling, and that it might be in the public interest for the council to ask for more savings.
As a result, the Stuff story headed City council plea to save water largely being ignored by Christchurch residents said: 'The council was approached for comment but a spokeswoman said nobody was available to talk about it. Only emergencies or breaking news were being responded to.
'It is unclear if the council has taken any action as a result of residents' high water use over the holiday period.'
This surely is an example of where some engagement with the public may have led to a better outcome?
There are organisations that genuinely seem nervous about what an actual conversation with a journalist might reveal. Rather than routinely putting you on to an expert, they will take their time issuing a statement which fails to answer any of the questions you have asked. That is incredibly frustrating.
Another industry tactic is to toy with the OIA process, leaving it until the afternoon of the 20th working day to contact you and say, your request needs fine tuning and they will be taking another 20 working days to respond, which they eventually do so with documents that are 80 per cent redacted.
Again, this is often information which the public has an absolute right to know and has actually paid for.
Some PR agencies may also engage in nit-picking games, demanding corrections when there is nothing that needs correcting but they just don't like - on behalf of their clients - the tone of the story.
One gets the image of their consultants spending hours poring over media coverage in the hope of finding something 'wrong' after refusing to help much in the first place. This aggressive form of public relations, practised by some agencies, undermines the confidence of reporters, which is probably the point, making them worried about writing anything.
Auckland media commentator Dr Gavin Ellis, the author of Complacent Nation, says Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman would probably include that PR company tactic in their definition of 'flak' — negative responses to a media statement through complaint, threat and punitive action.
Ellis says it was part of Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent.
One recent example of calling for a phantom correction involved a story I wrote last December about antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in two Canterbury rivers, the Selwyn and the Rangitata - important public information.
University of Otago, Wellington, department of public health professor Michael Baker told me dairy cattle put 250,000 tonnes of untreated effluent into the New Zealand environment every day.
DairyNZ, the industry lobby group, emailed the next day, asking for that sentence to be deleted and claiming this was incorrect information.
However, Canterbury medical officer of health Dr Alistair Humphrey had also told me there were about 1.3 million cows in Canterbury alone, each producing 70 kilograms of effluent a day, which comes to about 91,000 tonnes in just one region.
The national figure of 250,000 tonnes quoted by Baker was accurate and there was nothing to correct.
What DairyNZ was concerned about was we did not say there were farmers out there who cared about the environment and managed effluent carefully on their land. They were also upset I had used the word 'sewage' rather than 'effluent'.
Never was it more important to provide accurate information to the public than during the Canterbury earthquakes. But getting details of what might be going on below Christchurch from government agencies became an extremely fraught exercise.
As science reporter for The Press at the time, it was galvanising to find readers were just as interested to hear from the scientists as I was. Yet I was frequently stymied in my attempts to dig out information from some at GNS Science and at one stage, after the February 22, 2011 quake, was told not to ask what other faults might lie underneath the city for fear I might frighten residents.
Years later I was made aware of an internal GNS Science email which encouraged scientists not to talk to me because I was apparently always looking for a sensationalist angle and trying to catch out the organisation's specialists.
An OIA request I made at the time also became the nub of much annoyance from GNS Science, as did a feature entitled What's next?, which talked about whether there was something else Christchurch residents should know about in terms of the risk of more large, damaging aftershocks.
It came as no surprise to me then that, in October 2011, GNS Science experts actually admitted to the 2011-12 Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission they had not shared everything they knew publicly, saying it would have been 'alarmist' and 'unhelpful' after the September 2010 quake to tell the public there was a possibility of a more devastating earthquake on the way.
In New Zealand there are now more than three people employed in communications roles for every newsroom journalist.
As those comms ranks have swelled, that has provided an opportunity for some to engage in aggressive media-management tactics against shrinking newsrooms working for the public. Yet the irony is, a large proportion of these jobs exist to service the journalists who are still in work.
Will there be a tipping point, at which time there will be too many communications professionals for the number of journalists?
Or will the sector simply continue to grow in inverse proportion to the number of newsroom staff?
One day communications advisers may be able to deliver their organisations' messages as they see fit and as 'news' directly to the public, free of any interference or balance provided by journalists.
That would be really worrying for democracy.
Senior Stuff journalist Paul Gorman is the author of Portacom City, a BWB book on the difficulties of extracting public information from the authorities during and after the Canterbury earthquakes.