The only people who have gained anything from the protracted media mega-merger plans are consultants, and the lucky few executives who went on scouting expeditions to see newsrooms around the world.
Estimates suggest a total of $23 million has been spent over the course of five years on amerger that will never materialise.
The abject failure of this policy leaves the media sector in an even more vulnerable position than it was before, given follow-on Governments will be hesitant to reawaken the onslaught of criticism that has been levelled at any plan to reinforce the sector.
The added problem is that this dalliance with a merger has stagnated any progress that could have incrementally been made over the last five years.
Imagine if that $23 million had instead been put toward funding original programming that told New Zealand stories or attempted to reach different audiences, no matter what platform they preferred. At the very least, we’d have something to show for our money.
This whole situation is reminiscent of a criticism advertising executive Damon Stapleton once levelled at the marketing industry when he noted that people spend so much time focusing on the picture frame that they forget that what matters is the thing that goes inside the frame. The Government has taken this one step further removed by focusing entirely on the machine that makes the picture frame. Meanwhile, we’ve seen old problems persist of the makers in the industry running on oily rags trying to make something worth watching.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has suggested that RNZ would be given a boost of up to $10m in funding per annum, but this will only address a small part of the struggles that currently pervade the media sector.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has canned numerous big policy ideas. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The death knell for the merger was sounded in the economic strain of a country grappling with a cost of living crisis. In the changing context, the merger became an easy target for critics eager to show the Government was not being fiscally responsible for daring to spend more money on public media.
The stark reality, however, is that public media has been woefully underfunded in this country for decades. Nieman Labs Data released by the Better Public Media Trust last year showed that New Zealand’s public media lags woefully behind our OECD counterparts.
Total revenue across NZ On Air, TVNZ and RNZ equates to around $346 million, of which 38 per cent is publicly funded - equating to around $27 per capita. On a comparative per capita basis, Australia spends $37, Italy $44, Ireland $50, the United Kingdom $81, Finland $93 and Germany a whopping $142.
Even with the added funding proposed under the merger model, New Zealand’s per capita spend would have only stretched to $31.50.
The story in these numbers is that any hope of New Zealand delivering something akin to the BBC was fantastical at best based on the level of funding even our more generous politicians are willing to afford public media.
Those who complain about the quality of programming on television or the dearth of long-form journalism need to bear in mind that TVNZ is largely the product of the lack of political and public will to better fund public broadcasting in this country. That lack of funding has created a commercial beast, which must be funded by advertising – and advertisers don’t care about the title of a show as long as it attracts enough eyeballs.
This is a bit like the “cheap, fast, good” refrain often uttered in business circles. In broadcasting, it’s nearly impossible to have something that’s cheap, good and popular – particularly when pitted against the money machines driving Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
There’s always been a mismatch between the aspirations of politicians (and the public they represent) and the amount of money needed to do it - a dissonance that was reflected in two polls released earlier this year.
In November last year, 54 per cent of respondents to a poll from the Taxpayers’ Union and Curia said they were opposed to the state broadcaster merging. In contrast, a follow-up poll conducted by Research NZ on behalf of the Better Public Media Trust in December found that only 29 per cent of respondents did not support it.
The difference here lay in the way the questions were asked to the public.
The Research NZ poll asked: “The government is planning to merge TVNZ and RNZ into a new state-owned public media service, with an extra $109 million per year, which equals to $22 per person per year. If this organisation provided new content for niche, minority and regional audiences while keeping the current TV, radio and online services as well, would you support it?”
The Taxpayers’ Union poll did not provide that framing, which ostensibly contributed to higher levels of opposition.
The takeaway here is that New Zealanders do appreciate the need to fund local stories and support journalism, but they remained unconvinced that the merger was the best way to do that. The onus of bridging that logical gap lay firmly in the hands of the Government – and it fumbled the opportunity.
This brings us to the role of consultants in this whole debacle.
Consultants are a crutch, leaned on to avert the risk involved in making big decisions. Their independent reports and guidance give governments the justifications they need to explain decisions to the public and opposition politicians.
While consultants serve as a risk-aversion tool, they also don’t take on much of the risk themselves. Whether a policy fails or succeeds is ultimately irrelevant. They still get paid at the end of it all – and then wait around for the Government’s next big plan.
Despite having a business case to support their decision, the Government was never fully able to explain the justification for merging the entities together. This wasn’t helped by the revolving door of ministers that held the portfolio over five years – and it certainly wasn’t helped by the pandemic.
The learning in all this is that you can end up spending millions upon millions of dollars paying suits to come up with elaborate plans and business cases, but this is all rendered meaningless if you can’t get the public to believe what was written in those reports.
That responsibility, which at its core comes down to execution, is something that even the most risk-averse Government still can’t outsource.
