Te reo Māori news more than a language revitalisation tool

Monday, 6 July 2020

To celebrate Matariki, Auckland Council has brought together some of Tāmaki Makaurau's finest haka teams and local Māori businesses.

OPINION: Did you know that in Aotearoa we have three daily national news services in te reo Māori? Āe, e toru ngā ratonga pūrongo.

They’re all funded by the state under various Treaty of Waitangi obligations.

On television, there’s Te Karere, the koroua or granddaddy that started on TVNZ in 1983 and Te Ao, produced by Māori Television, itself now 16 years old; both shows are subtitled in English. The third is the reo-only Waatea News, produced since 2004 by Auckland-based urban Māori radio station Te Reo Irirangi o Waatea for the iwi radio network.

Over the past four years, I have been immersed in all three for my doctoral thesis, now complete, on the nature of Māori-language journalism.

As I did my research, filming reporters as they gathered news ki wīwi ki wāwā, all over the country, an increasingly persistent question arose: Where is the next generation of Māori-speaking journos coming from? Ka ahu mai rātou i whea?

**READ MORE:

Dr Atakohu Middleton, journalist and lecturer at Auckland University of Technology. He kairīpoata, he kaiako ki te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau. Photographer: Simon Smith.

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We need quality Māori journalism that understands our language, our worldview and our issues: Tō tātou reo, tō tatou tirohanga ki te ao me tā tātou take, says Dr Atakohu Middleton.

For nearly 30 years, Waiariki Polytech, now Toi Ohomai, produced dozens of reo-speaking journalists, among them One News political reporter Maiki Sherman, but its journalism programme closed in 2013 due to falling rolls.

We got several decades’ worth of bilingual reporters through TVNZ’s Māori and Pacific Programmes department, among them Martin Rakuraku, Rau Kapa and Mihingaarangi Forbes. But it was canned in 2014 with all its shows except Te Karere outsourced.

These days, journalism training is clustered in universities and often at postgraduate level; as Māori participate in tertiary education at a lower rate than Pākehā, relatively few trickle up to journalism schools.

Takitimu Marae and urupā in Wairoa are at risk of erosion by the river, so the whanau are planting 5000 native trees to future-proof the riverbank and save the marae and tūpāpaku. Video first published in July 2020.

The result is that the pool of reporters who can tell our Māori world in our language is running dry; kei te mimiti haere te puna. In response, rangatahi with the reo but no journalism training are being dropped in the deep end – ka tukua ki te korokoro o Te Parata. It’s stressful and not all manage to swim. This isn’t fair on them and means that the service isn’t always what it could be.

You might think, so what? Hei aha? If, like me, you look at the world through Māori goggles, you’ll probably be of the mind that partnership under the Treaty doesn’t include a two-tier media in which Māori-language services are the raggedy-arse cousin of their English siblings.

In a democracy, journalism plays a key role in informing people and providing a check on power.

Mainstream media can’t do that for Māori society; we need quality Māori journalism that understands our language, our worldview and our issues: Tō tātou reo, tō tatou tirohanga ki te ao me tā tātou take.

The brake here is that Māori news is state-funded for language revitalisation purposes only; while news is viewed as a necessary part of the reo-Māori ‘languagescape’ to support rejuvenation, it’s seen as a by-product.

Funding agency Te Māngai Pāho sets rules about, and monitors, the quality and quantity of language per story (each news story needs to be 70% in te reo), but it’s silent on the quality of the information being presented. It’s never had to worry about training as talent was in abundance for many years.

This brings me to the current review of the Māori media industry, called the Māori Media Sector Shift, run by Nanaia Mahuta in her role as the Minister of Māori Development, Te Minita o te Whakawhanake Māori.

I’m happy that her suite of proposals includes a national training centre for the Māori media sector to be based at Māori Television, the intention to partner with relevant tertiary institutions to offer quality training. E pai ana tērā – that’s good. If properly planned and resourced, this will raise skill levels across the sector.

I am less happy to see that she proposes just one Māori-language news provider, to be based at Māori Television. Kotahi anake? The problem is that Māori Television management has been accused in the past of interfering in editorial decisions. In an interrelated society where asymmetrical power relations are a reality, interference is a constant risk.

Journalists must be allowed to be independent.

A bulwark against this is ensuring that there are multiple news outlets for Māori voices to be heard, just as there are multiple news outlets in wider society, from state-funded Radio New Zealand Te Reo Irirangi to the state-owned Television New Zealand Te Reo Tātaki and a range of commercial outlets.

And speaking purely as a journalist now, competition between news shows helps raise standards and makes sure a wider range of people are heard. Journalists are a competitive bunch – nau mai te whakataetae! – and we always want to be offering different takes (and better ones, we would say).

Ensuring that both Māori-language and English-language public news services are of the same quality is going to require more pūtea, more funding, and for policymakers to extend their thinking about reo-Māori news beyond its role as a language revitalisation tool.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is in part, about partnership and redressing inequality. Let’s make sure that Māori-language news services get greater (e)quality too.

Dr Atakohu Middleton is a journalist and lecturer at Auckland University of Technology. He kairīpoata, he kaiako ki te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau