Morgan Godfery: Tweaks required, but NZ needs strong public broadcaster

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

Morgan Godfery disagrees with the analysis of Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson’s interview with Jack Tame as a “train wreck”, naming him one of the Government’s top-performing ministers.

Morgan Godfery is a senior lecturer in the department of marketing at the University of Otago. He has a background in journalism and public policy, including as a parliamentary staffer with the Labour Party. He is a regular opinion contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: In the 1990s chat forum geeks would often write about how the internet would soon harness and unleash humanity’s intellectual and creative potential.

The possibilities were thrilling, the early posters thought, with billions of people sharing an almost instant connection to knowledge, culture, and each other. But three decades later and few, if any, people write about the internet with the same optimism.

Five companies monopolise the internet’s most important functions. Alphabet, better known as Google, dominates searching. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, dominates social networking. Amazon increasingly dominates e-commerce, and Apple and Microsoft compete to dominate software. So far as the internet remains a space for possibilities, it’s in service to the possibilities of increasing the profits of those major companies.

* Majority of people don't want RNZ and TVNZ to merge, survey says

* Merging TVNZ and RNZ could be an absolute tragedy, or triumph for broadcasting

Meta is one of five tech giants that between them “monopolise the internet’s most important functions”, in its case dominating social networking.

* InternetNZ survey shows Kiwis growing more worried about online 'misinformation'

* The case for a non-commercial public broadcaster

The bill paving the way for the merger of TVNZ and RNZ received its first reading in Parliament on July 26.

The internet, then, perhaps had the opposite effect to what the early geeks thought. Knowledge and culture are flattened. Algorithms, whether for social networking or streaming, force the world to witness - and often participate - in dangerously insane American culture wars.

Witness the Russian warlord Viktor Bout, who the United States had incarcerated for arms smuggling, leveraging his first media appearance after his return to Russia to complain about the “72 genders” that the “Anglo-Saxons” apparently teach in their primary schools.

That moment, which would possibly have passed without much note in the golden days before the internet, travelled around the world, with each round of engagement amplifying its reach and its importance to the algorithm’s end goal: increasing engagement for the purposes of selling products and services.

Morgan Godfery: Luxon’s position is ‘’a strategic and tactical departure from the approach of his predecessors’’.

In some ways that’s quite mundane. Social networking algorithms assist advertisers to sell their products and services. This is hardly dissimilar to what the classifieds do in a print newspaper. But the algorithms work without much quality control.

Meta will happily push antivax conspiracy theories if it assists advertisers to sell their products and services. In that way, then, the impact on society is extensive. Antivax discourse poisons public health and politics, driving childhood vaccination rates off a cliff and setting fire to politics, and, quite literally, the parliamentary grounds. How does a country as small and remote as New Zealand protect against that kind of damage to knowledge and culture?

One possible answer is in the Government’s public media merger. If the legislation passes it will combine TVNZ and RNZ into a single, scaled entity - Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM).

The scale alone is important, offering producers the finance and the platform to create and release their own shows. Under the current broadcasting model New Zealand On Air (or at other times Te Māngai Pāho, the Film Commission, or private finance) funds producers to develop their shows. Securing the platform - whether TVNZ, RNZ, or another platform entirely - is a different and separate step.

That convoluted process means New Zealand producers are almost immediately on the back foot against the American streamers who commission, fund, and broadcast their programmes in-house.

On this reading the merged model provides the necessary scale to preserve and develop New Zealand culture. But scale is important, and more urgent, in another sense. ANZPM would have the resources and reach to - in the same manner as the BBC and ABC - become the most trusted source of information.

This matters when algorithms can prioritise misinformation and disinformation for no other reason than that it’s engaging.

Traditional media, who employ trained journalists to collect evidence and weigh it, and editors who fact-check it for accuracy and fairness, are one of the few safeguards against this information warfare. Combine this model with ANZPM’s resources and reach and, as a country, we’ll have one tool or one institution that can withstand the internet’s tendency to engagement at any cost.

Granted, the structure of ANZPM is imperfect. The broadcaster lacks a larger, codified purpose in the way the BBC maintains the Reithian objective to inform, educate, and entertain.

The broadcaster’s quasi-commercial functioning also risks distorting the private media market, with the competition for talent causing wage inflation that private media cannot compete with, or TV One and TV2 taking the lion’s share of limited advertising dollars at the same time as receiving public funding. To save the news, the merger could kill it. At least in the private sector. But these issues are easily solved as long as Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson is keen to solve them.

But the important principle remains. New Zealand is a small country, and to resist the damage to knowledge, culture, and politics that internet monopolies and algorithms wreak, we must maintain a public broadcaster with the reach and resources to do so.