KEY POINTS:
It is fashionable to complain that the news media are responsible for most of the social ills on which they report, that the media somehow "make" the news. A version of the notion of shooting the messenger which is as old as the ancient Greeks, it is faulty because it is based on a faulty premise: that there is a unitary organism known as "the media". There is not. Rather, a wide range of different voices - ink on paper, sound in the airwaves, pictures on a television screen and bits and bytes streaming down the phone lines into a computer near you - allow us to sample various perspectives on the world around us.
It is also said, often scornfully, that we get the media we deserve. But it is more accurate to say that we actually get the media we want. Market research is a fact of life in many businesses these days, but no other industry more minutely scrutinises its customers' needs, desires and interests. Newspapers live only by their readers' consent; failure to be sensitive to what readers like and don't like is commercial suicide.
Of course, the content of any newspaper is everyday proof that no one can please all the people all of the time. Not for nothing are they called the "mass media" and something you don't like, your neighbour may live for. Equally, the article we feel moved to complain about must be seen in the context of all the stories we find compelling, fascinating and illuminating. The fact that the balance is, by and large, the right one is evidenced by the fact that New Zealanders, among the world's most voracious newspaper readers, keep on reading.
In the North Island at least, Sunday newspaper readers in particular are spoiled for choice: three titles offer a range of perspectives and viewpoints and, at the Herald on Sunday, we are proud that we have given that part of the newspaper market a royal shake-up in the three years since we began publishing.
And at the risk of resorting to that problematic collective term "media", it's worth saying that this has been a good year for the fourth estate. In recent weeks, this newspaper's sister publication the New Zealand Herald has taken a bold and principled stand against the ill-conceived and iniquitous Electoral Finance Bill.
In the end, the campaign did not achieve its objective: to persuade the Government to abandon legislation that was memorably described by former Labour Prime Minister Mike Moore as "using a sledgehammer to [crack] a few nutters".
But, in enduring the unsustainable charge that it was simply trying to protect a revenue stream from political advertising, the Herald was discharging an important obligation: alerting the public, by dint of careful well-argued analysis, to a Government move that will diminish the quality of our democratic way of life.
This newspaper has persisted and will persist in arguing for a reconsideration of the verdict in the so-called Sounds murders because we believe that the country is the worse for the widespread unease the case has generated about police and forensic procedure. And a rival organisation's paper, the Dominion Post, deserves recognition for the brave stand it took in publishing the leaked evidence in the "terror" inquiry. In a climate of commendable and continuing media scepticism about the police raids in October, that newspaper went farthest out on a limb in the public interest.
Decisions to proceed in matters like these are not easy to make and no newspaper editor would expect the unalloyed approval of readers for doing so. But it is worth noting that the decisions are not taken lightly. Unlike writers in the blogosphere, who occupy, often behind a mask of anonymity, legally murky territory, newspapers here have to operate under some of the world's most restrictive defamation legislation. They do so conscientiously and conscionably - in the belief that we should continue to get the media we all deserve.
