Newstalk ZB and TVNZ host Jack Tame, who was named political journalist of the year at this year's Voyagers. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Jack Tame is at the top of his profession but he tells Greg Bruce he knows how close the bottom can be.
On a Friday night in May, at this country’s most prestigious journalism awards, in a room populated by the best of the country’s remaining journalists, Jack Tame was declared political journalist of the year.
It was the first time he’d won anything at the country’s most prestigious journalism awards. Until that moment, he’d doubted that other journalists even saw him as a journalist. He kissed his wife, buttoned his perfect tux, swaggered to the stage like a mid 90s Liam Gallagher and, once there, bestrode it. Behind him, the giant screen began playing his now-famous pre-election interview with Winston Peters.
It was hard not to be swept up in the moment: The swag, the tux, the flawless side-parting, the perfect smile on the ageless face, the speaking of truth to the power-hungry. He was Jack Tame and he was the country’s best political journalist. You could see how much it meant to him.
It was the narrative apex in the story of a man who has spent almost exactly half his 37 years on television, but who, for a good chunk of that time, was best-known for a live cross at Guy Fawkes, during which he told Paul Henry his favourite crackers were Meal Mates.
When his name was announced, the room was filled with the usual mix of admiration and jealousy, but that was almost immediately washed away, replaced by the skin-crawling feeling induced by the Peters interview.
In that interview, first broadcast live on Q&A in October, the New Zealand First leader, unable or unwilling to answer basic questions about his planned gangs-only prison and other topics, had chosen instead to insult his interviewer (“corrupt”, “amateur hour”, “bulldust”, “Unbelievable the arrogance of these journalists that don’t know what day it is”) as if the following exchange had not just happened:
Tame: How many gang-affiliated prisoners are there in New Zealand prisons, according to Corrections?
Peters: No one has that record.
Tame: Corrections does. It’s 2700.
From the stage, Tame watched the clip to the end, his famous smile never slipping, and then gave a perfect acceptance speech. A lesser person, swept up in the emotion of the moment, might have felt compelled to editorialise about the interview, to say something biting about Peters’ performative insults, or something falsely humble about himself, or something mawkish about the power of journalism.
Instead, he gave a brief mihi in te reo, which he speaks not fluently, but “enough to navigate the world and understand what’s going on”, thanked his wife, praised his fellow finalists Amelia Wade and Audrey Young, commiserated with the hundreds in the media, including many of his colleagues, who have just lost their jobs, and left the stage. It was magnanimous, humble, considerate, thoughtful and entirely unaffected by Winston Peters.
Later, he said that when he was on stage he wasn’t really paying attention to the interview. What was going through his head, he said, was that the last time he’d won something, he’d forgotten to thank his wife.
“It was a disaster,” he said. “It was a total disaster. I vowed that, were I ever in a position to win an award again, I would stand up to the mic and just immediately say, ‘I want to thank my wife’.”
He was particularly proud of the award because he saw it as affirmation that the Q&A team is doing “valuable, meaningful journalism”, because he believes people have, in the past, seen him as someone who reads a teleprompter, and because he understands that so much of what makes him successful is the reporting done by others: “It feels like we’re kind of cheating in a way”, he said.
“This will sound funny, but I was really chuffed that what I do was recognised as journalism because I think TV has a reputation of being filled with overpaid, vain show ponies – which is largely true – but I feel like my team and I try and do really serious work, and it felt like it was an appreciation of that seriousness.
“So, I suppose to be acknowledged in that space made me feel like; ‘Oh, well, maybe other people see this as journalism as well’.”
He felt, in other words, that powerful cocktail of pride and shame familiar to so many New Zealanders who have ever won anything. “Put it this way,” he said, “I was embarrassed but not sufficiently embarrassed to not post about it on social media. So for all the ‘I’m so humble’, it still made it onto LinkedIn”.
Tame’s journalism awards entry included his pre-election interviews with all of the country’s serious political leaders, every one of which is an excellent example of his craft. Any one of them would have made a great video backdrop for his win, so why was it Peters that made the cut and not Luxon, Hipkins, Shaw or Waititi?
This is The Problem With Peters: Interviews with him make both headlines and compelling television, not because they are revealing or provide good information for voters, but because they’re consistently chock full of conflict, which everyone in television knows is the key to good drama. And last year’s interview with Tame was perhaps the paradigmatic example.
The full-length interview is a 26-minute highlight reel of his verbal violence (“gross inexperience”, “jumped-up”, “overpaid”) and avoidance (“Move on”, “lies”, “This is ridiculous”). Because it’s human nature to be affected, and therefore diverted, by conflict, it’s easy to miss the fact Peters is not answering important questions designed to help viewers make informed decisions about his plans and policies.
Tame says: “I think there’s one way to look at that interview and think, ‘Well, actually, Winston Peters got exactly what he probably wanted out of that interview – exactly what he intended.’
“Because, if you go through the questions I asked him and the tone in which I asked them, I think they’re entirely legitimate questions, asked in a respectful tone, of an extremely experienced politician. And it’s funny, right? Like, the questions I was asking in that interview were about his own policies. There aren’t many party leaders who could have a policy like, ‘We’re going to build a gang-only prison’, for which they wouldn’t have any details that they were able to share.”
Throughout the interview, Tame remained calm. His voice rarely rose and his tone hardly changed, regardless of the intensity of Peters’ taunts. His focus on the issues and his ability to ask important questions never wavered.
This is a skill that’s extraordinarily difficult to master, even for those who do it for a living. Tame says the key to good interviewing is to listen and remain present: “If you can be calm in that state, it’s a kind of nourishing experience,” he says.
But knowing that is very different from embodying it while under sustained vitriolic attack from an MP whose first term as an MP came nearly a decade before you were born, and whose first party leader was renowned media antagonist Sir Robert Muldoon.
Tame says he’s generally a conflict-averse person. While he likes to debate ideas, he says he doesn’t get in arguments with people and has never been in a fight in his life.
“I think sometimes it might be more tense for people watching interviews than it is for me. I’ll keep on coming back to this point, but if you’re present in an interview, I think you don’t give thought to all of those other dynamics.”
After Cashmere High School, he went to broadcasting school and from there got his first job at TVNZ at 19. His early appearances on television involved bantering to the hosts on Breakfast down the line from Christchurch. Aged 24, he went to New York as TVNZ’s US correspondent, and he returned five years later to become co-host of Breakfast. Two-and-a-half years after that, aged 32, he took over from Corin Dann as host of Q&A, and there he has remained since.
He’s not the first journalist to have started out light and frothy and ended up serious and important, but it’s hard to think of any that have started so frothy and become so important. How to reconcile the modern-day interrogator of unwilling, under-prepared politicians, with the early 2000s Baby of the Nation, barely old enough to drink, doing silly breakfast banter with peak Paul Henry?
To look at him on Q&A today is to provoke one to stare back in wonder at that man-boy. We all have to start somewhere, but Tame is such a nerd, so obsessed with politics and interviewing and journalism, it’s hard to imagine he ever did anything else. Take the following, for example, on how he prepares for interviews:
“Often, the best way to do it is just to drown in reading for quite a long period of time. So, going in and reading the regulatory impact statements, reading the estimates of the budget, reading treasury documents. But also, in any other interview at the moment, it’s quite nice when there’s a change in government, because the officials’ and ministers’ respective departments issue a thing called a BIM, a briefing for incoming ministers.”
He works six days a week doing this kind of thing. He also has a Saturday morning radio show on Newstalk ZB and, as of last year, he has a family (he married TVNZ reporter Mava Moayyed and now has a seven-year-old stepson). Outside of those commitments, he likes to discuss interviewing technique while jogging with Guyon Espiner, reading a lot of mostly non-fiction and thinking about submarines.
He says the threads he reads most frequently on discussion and argument website Reddit are New Zealand Politics, Buy It For Life [’For practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last’], and Submarines.
During the day he spent with the Herald, Tame was asked, as a throwaway comment, what he knew about Lithuania. His astonishing response bears detailed reporting:
He began with a brief background of Russian involvement in World War II and the subsequent allied carve-up of Europe leading to Russia’s acquisition of a chunk of Lithuania that doesn’t border Russia, but gives it access to a port untroubled by the ice floes that inhibit its ships’ movements elsewhere. This area, he said, is now known as Kaliningrad.
Tame is both very interested in, and extremely knowledgeable about, Kaliningrad. He pulled out his phone and opened a map app, pinching, swiping and poking until he was in tight on Kaliningrad.
He said Kaliningrad is one of several “exclaves” that exist around the world, then offered several points of interest about it, as if he were an especially nerdy tourist guide: A bridge he described as “an engineering marvel”, Russia’s employment of the area as a nuclear port, a mysterious pipeline rupture which took place nearby, the importance of NATO in the area, the concerns of the Poles and so on.
He called it “super interesting”. He said he wished he could visit, adding that it would be impossible, even in normal times.
“If you could be eyes underwater in that little stretch right there [he jabbed excitedly at his phone] between Kaliningrad and the Scandinavian states – if you could just see the vessels that were passing through that strait – I think it would be the most fascinating thing. That’s State Highway 1 for submarines.”
The point is that it was always unlikely someone like this was going to spend long in the jocularity mines of breakfast television.
The good thing about specialising in breakfast banter – as opposed to hard-hitting political interviews – is that most people who watch are probably going to like you. And being liked – with a few high-profile exceptions – is something we all want.
He says: “I’m just so aware that people hate me and I’m constantly reminded of it. Someone on radio the other day said they think me and my type are the real cancer facing New Zealand or something, and I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s so extreme.’
“But, in my experience, there are a couple of things at play: People hate you until they see a political opponent being interrogated. So a lot of people who say that I’m rude or disrespectful to a politician they like will then delight when I have a similar time with a politician they dislike. So I think there’s a really significant tribalism factor.
“I also think that people are confused about what my role actually is. I know this sounds very kind of grandiose and wishy-washy, but I draw a distinction between asking questions and seeking answers, especially with New Zealand elected politicians. I know that sounds like it might be the same thing, but it isn’t, because politicians are so polished, because they’re so well media trained, because they’re so on message, I think it’s really vital we have journalists who actually pursue answers, rather than simply teeing up questions and letting politicians have a platform to say whatever they like.
“So I really, really push against anyone who says I should just be kind and let a politician say whatever they want for 25 minutes. I mean, that’s what campaign advertising’s for.”
The longer he’s been in his current job, he says, the less he’s felt an affiliation to any political party or ideology.
“Again, it’s going to sound so wanky, but I really strive to be as critical a thinker as possible. I really value critical thinking. And I think that tribalism is such a poisonous phenomenon. I think it’s so widespread. No party, no politician has a monopoly on good ideas, right? It’s just a self evident fact, I would have thought. It amazes me how many really bright people are seduced by tribalism and always thinking that their party or politician is right and that their opponents are evil.
Were someone to ask him where he lies on the political spectrum, he says he isn’t sure he could answer. When it’s suggested that some parties must represent his values better or more frequently than others, he says: “I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. I mean, honestly, come elections, I just have no idea who to vote for.”
He brought up the Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, who famously alienated the media by calling them “drongoes” and upset most of Auckland with his remarkable absence during the early stages of the January 2023 floods and subsequent insensitive comments.
Before he ran for office, Wayne Brown was Jack Tame’s next door neighbour. Tame has a lot of thoughts about Brown.
“I say this not as a brag, but as someone who – like, I’m just absolutely hopeless at predicting the future, usually. But I came in with Wayne Brown, and I was like, ‘That guy’s gonna win’.”
He believes Brown’s victory was in part a reaction to what he called “Ardernism”. He believes the city was angry and Brown was a lightning rod for that.
“Wayne Brown, I think, would be the first to admit that exuding empathy through communication is not where his strengths lie. His strengths lie in other areas. His strengths lie in policy decisions. His strengths lie in looking at a problem and working out the best solution as he sees it. He looks at things like an engineer.
“I think he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t necessarily exude the kind of empathy that Jacinda Ardern did. But in a way, it’s kind of like the pendulum had swung a little bit. It was like voters had had their empathy fix. Now they actually needed someone who said: ‘You know what? I’m not here to make you feel warm inside. I’m here to get stuff done.’ And that was much more important to voters.”
He adds: “And there is a bit of charm in there, too.”
Given that Tame is famously charming and Brown famously not, this was an incredible claim from a credible source. Asked for evidence, Tame said: “If you listen to, like, when he gives us lines, like, what did he say? ‘You go down Queen Street, you turn left, it’s world class. You turn right, it’s Donetsk.’
“And I’m like, F***, that’s funny. That’s really funny.’ I find it quite funny.”
Tame believes that, should Brown run for the mayoralty again next year, there’s “a reasonable chance that he would win comfortably”.
One of the things he seems to find appealing, or at least interesting, about Brown is his lack of political partisanship.
“People voted for him, thinking ‘Oh, this guy’s going to be a shill for the Nats’... NUP! ‘Oh, ok, is he a bleeding heart lefty?’... “NUP!
He interviewed Brown after the Auckland floods. Brown told him people in West Auckland don’t want him to give them a hug; they want their house not to flood.
“That’s 100% true,” Tame says. “That’s 100% true. Like, there’s probably a time and place where you could maybe express a bit more empathy. But, you know, there was a great line on that opening night when everything was flooding and he was asked - they did an impromptu press conference, and it wasn’t very slick, to be kind - and someone said: ‘There are these people in West Auckland whose houses are gone. They’ve been washed away. What’s your message to those people?’ Wayne goes, something along the lines of, ‘Oh, well, your house probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place’.
“And obviously part of that is like, ‘Oh that’s rough.’ But it’s almost, like, do you want support or do you want solutions? He’s actually 100% right. The house shouldn’t have been built there. “Who has consented the house to be there in the first place? It’s the council. You know, the council’s approved this. Some council in the past has said, ‘Yep, we approve this.’ And Wayne Brown, the engineer, looks at this and is like, ‘Well, this is a dumb place to build.’
“He’s not wrong. Unfortunately, if your house has just been washed away, your entire livelihood, maybe your family’s injured or at risk, you’re probably not quite ready for that message.”
The point is that charm is in the eye of the beholder.
He is at the pinnacle of his career and a good argument could be made that he is currently the country’s most important journalist, but a large number of journalists who were part of that same argument as recently as a few months ago are now without careers. This is a bad time to be working in the media, even if you’re Jack Tame.
“I feel like broadcasting is – this is going to sound ridiculous – but I feel it’s kind of like being an athlete, in that you’re there one day and it’s great, and it seems really glamorous to people on the outside, but honestly, you are an F-bomb away from completely destroying your entire career. Like, you never know what’s going to happen. You never know when the powers that be or some external forces are going to say: ‘Actually, that’s enough’.
“I’m under no illusions about the pressures in the industry right now. And, as important as I think journalism is, no part of me thinks that the models across the industry are sustainable as they stand.”
He has watched this year as Sunday and Fair Go – TVNZ shows of much longer-standing than Q&A – have disappeared, because TVNZ says they’re too expensive. Q&A has survived because it’s funded not by ailing TVNZ but by the government it regularly holds to account. But government funding is not guaranteed forever.
Towards the end of last year’s pre-election interview, after Winston Peters’ barrage of insults, Peters told Tame: “You’ve made a case for us to make sure we get the broadcasting portfolio after this election”.
“Is that a threat, Mr Peters?” he asked.
“That’s not a threat,” Peters said. “It’s a promise that you’re going to have an operation that’s much more improved than it is now.”
'I found out about it this morning.' (This article contains spoilers).