Editorial - Tuesday September 3, 2013

Peter Jackson, editor of The Northland Age

FONTERRA'S botulism debacle was regurgitated once again on talkback radio last week, starting with the company's supposedly contaminated product, then the revelation that there had been no such thing, and finally the pig's ear it allegedly made of handling both the initial crisis and the aftermath. A dairy farmer from the Waikato made the most rational contribution, suggesting that it might be wise for everyone who wanted to pass judgement on what had and had not happened, and who was responsible, to wait until they had the facts.

He didn't get a lot of traction, for two reasons. Firstly, the way in which the media function these days doesn't allow time to wait for the facts. Stories break in the now, and in a situation where the facts might be weeks in the uncovering they tend to be dispensed with. Any news organisation that had waited for the facts in this case would have missed the boat entirely, at the expense of circulation or ratings; immediacy is the key to competing.

Secondly, as the talkback host assured the farmer, the facts were irrelevant. The issue was one of public perception. That perceptions are often manufactured by the media didn't seem to bother him, but he was right. At the end of the day, whatever was or wasn't in Fonterra's whey, and however small the scale of potential contamination, the public perception was that two brands of infant formula put children at risk of severe illness or death. That was the fire Fonterra had to put out, but which continued to rage as the company appeared to dither.

The creation of public perceptions, particularly negative ones, has long been a forte of the media, exacerbated these days by social media that have much greater reach than mainstream, and none of the ethics that the latter should adhere to but often don't. The result is that the general population can very quickly get the wrong end of a pretty important stick, and, having got hold of it, can be reluctant to let it go.

The initial story, that Fonterra product appeared to be contaminated, and later revelations that the tests responsible for the scare were apparently inaccurate, were bisected by three global dairy commodity auctions. The first saw the price paid by Fonterra's customers dip a little, but remain higher than those commanded by other producers, the second and third achieving increases to the point where the company felt sufficiently confident to lift its supplier payout forecast by 30 cents per kilo of milk solids.

That might have been the best economic news this country has received in decades, but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. Either they didn't understand its significance, they didn't want to spoil one of the stories of the year, or they had simply lost interest and had moved on to something else.

Whatever the case, the public perception largely remains that Fonterra has some production issues to address, and a couple of brands of infant formula might have been damaged beyond repair. The dairy farmer who is waiting for the facts is doing the right thing, but by the time they emerge he will probably be the only person taking any notice.

The same talkback programme produced a couple of revelations that are highly significant, but in terms of public perception probably meaningless. The first was that the dirty pipes that featured prominently in the early stages of the botulism story had nothing to do with milk at all.

The pipes, dirty on the outside but widely accepted as undoubtedly spotless inside, where it matters, were apparently used to convey water, and had nothing to do with the production of infant formula or anything else.

More disconcertingly, the suggestion was made that the pipes were not part of a Fonterra plant at all. It is far from difficult to believe that a journalist would use whatever pictures were available to illustrate a story regardless of their relevance, but that too was met with the talkback host's mantra that the facts were irrelevant; if people had seen pictures of dirty pipes, and had been told they were Fonterra's pipes, then the company had a problem with perception. That the source of the pictures was being questioned might suggest that the media have a problem wasn't even discussed.

The Far North can lay claim to a famous case of its own of perception eclipsing the facts. Some 20-odd years ago an English woman drowned when the yacht she and her husband were sailing from Fiji to Opua got badly off course and was driven ashore at Great Exhibition Bay, and she was swept off the deck in heavy surf.

Within hours the police and Customs officers were at the scene, accessible only via privately-owned land and not easy to get to. The woman's body was recovered, and police and Customs, and the surviving owner, then removed a large quantity of property from the Woody Goose, for storage at the Kaitaia police station. Some time during this process a TVNZ news crew was turned away, by the police, but finally moved on to the beach when everyone else had gone, and filmed its story. And what a story it was.

It led that night's Six O'clock News with the revelation that the yacht had been stripped by looters. And not just any looters; they were Maori. That claim was backed up with a detailed list of what had been removed from the yacht; it was an accurate list, meaning that the film crew must have seen the property being removed. That being the case, they could not have missed the fact that marked police and Customs vehicles had been there, and that at least one of those doing the 'looting' was wearing police overalls.

The crew then paused in Pukenui to ask some of the locals how they felt about looters stripping the yacht. Their responses didn't disappoint, generally along the lines that hanging would be too good for the thieves.

The Northland Age took TVNZ to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, unsuccessfully, TVNZ claiming that it used the best information that was available at the time. That was demonstrably untrue, but whatever the BSA found, the damage had been done.

About a week after the event the Age received a request from the BBC in Leeds for whatever it had on the Woody Goose. Screeds of stories and documents were duly faxed, the BBC phoning again to say thanks, but they were really after the 'stripped by looters' story. They were told that there had been no looting, and that the BBC would be doing everyone a huge favour if it made that known as widely as possible. The response - thanks for going to all that trouble, but if there was no looting we're not interested.

Many months later a Customs officer who was on the beach that day wrote to this newspaper, saying he had been in England, where the hot topic of conversation amongst the yachting fraternity was the looting of the Woody Goose. The story had done huge damage to New Zealand's reputation in sailing circles. Surprise surprise.

That's a gross example of how to create a negative facts-free perception, but it happens on a smaller scale every day. The only defence is to exercise a healthy degree of scepticism, and to resist the temptation to believe everything that is broadcast and published. Unfortunately the world doesn't seem to work like that.