NZ Herald: Temet nosce
It is trite to say that news journalism is converging rapidly with entertainment. Over the past week, the NZ Herald has been dominated by human-interest pieces, intended either to tug at your heartstrings or titillate the senses. Wednesday’s front-page story about the woman who survived a car crash was dwarfed by the glamour shot of the woman, replete with air-brushing and plenty of cleavage.
To some extent this is understandable. The Herald is a business and depends on sales for its livelihood. Sex sells. The All Blacks sell. But the Herald has to decide what it’s trying to be. Instead of a confused teenager, struggling to come to terms with its own identity, readers deserve a mature newspaper that knows who it is.
If the hacking scandal in the UK has implications for New Zealand, it’s that the media has to have a good hard look at itself and think about who it is and what its goals are. Is it light entertainment and tabloid sensationalism whose only goal is to sell copies? Or is there still some vestige of news journalism that serves the purpose of informing the public on real issues?
Tabloid journalism is fine and to some degree it is inevitable that newspapers are heading down that road. But if that’s what the Herald is these days, they shouldn’t sugar-coat it and sell it as news. There’s an election this year, and a referendum on New Zealand’s electoral system, though you’d be forgiven for forgetting with the papers dominated by endless stories on the Rugby World Cup, car crashes and Happy Feet the Penguin. There are real issues to be reported on and the public has a real interest in being informed about them. If the Herald still wants to be a serious newspaper, it should start acting like one. Otherwise, it has to accept who it is and stop misleading the public.
