The science fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term “facebooked” to describe post-industrial societies that have their traditional media outlets destroyed by digital platforms. Because the algorithms curating the platforms optimise for virility and engagement rather than objectivity or truth, they degrade our public sphere and consensus reality – a shared, baseline agreement about what’s happening in the nation, and why – breaks down. Normal politics becomes impossible.
We got facebooked good and hard during the pandemic, with the rise of the anti-vax movement and the occupation of Parliament grounds, but normal life resumed after the lockdowns when everyone logged off and went back to work. The nation returned to its traditional media habits: scanning the headlines on a news website while waiting for Netflix to load, or half-listening to a radio bulletin while ironing a shirt.
But as the lights go out in newsrooms around the country, the paranoia and rage fuelled by algorithmic media are likely to return. Newshub is closing its doors (to be replaced on Three by a much leaner news team) and TVNZ is shutting down Fair Go and Sunday and downsizing news capability. Newspapers have gone through successive rounds of layoffs. The ad revenue that sustained daily news media over the past 100 years has migrated to the web – Google alone took in two-thirds of the nation’s $2.1 billion digital advertising spend last year – so newspapers and broadcasting companies are desperately seeking alternative revenue streams. Like every other troubled sector or sinking company in New Zealand, they hope to find them within the Beehive.
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill was introduced by Labour last year. It’s now wending its way through the legislative process. The logic behind the bill is that the platforms take a lot of media content – or at least link to it – don’t pay for it and then capture the ad revenue the content was supposed to generate. The bargaining bill incentivises the platforms to come to a compensation arrangement with domestic media companies. If they fail to do so, they’ll be subject to binding arbitration. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage estimated the scheme could deliver $30-50 million a year to the local media industry.
Google and Meta have both criticised the bill, with Google suggesting it might “reassess” its operations in New Zealand if it came to pass. When National was in opposition, its broadcasting spokesperson, Melissa Lee, dismissed the proposal as just another tax. But even though the global platforms take in hundreds of millions – sometimes billions – in revenue, they pay very little domestic tax, remitting almost all of their income in service fees to parent companies usually based in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland.
When Lee became Broadcasting Minister, her officials warned her that if the digital news bill wasn’t progressed, there would be collapses across the sector followed by requests for bailouts. Five months later, the bill is still in select committee and remains “under consideration”. The media industry is haemorrhaging jobs and Lee is maximally vague about what the government will do – if it does anything. There are rumours of a secret cabinet paper; of updating the Broadcasting Act (currently a pre-internet artefact, wildly obsolete) and whispered suggestions that the government may waive the millions of dollars in transmission fees it currently charges broadcasters.
Creative destruction
But there’s also a sentiment across much of the government that the decline of traditional media is simply the creative destruction of capitalism. The invention of the automobile saw the extinction of the horse-and-buggy industry and governments didn’t run around subsidising horse breeders or buggy cart manufacturers. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon keeps encouraging media companies to innovate, although he’s vague about how the nation’s newsrooms can outcompete Google at tech development.
There’s not much “creative destruction” in New Zealand’s economy: in the past few years, the government has subsidised or bailed out ski resorts, universities, video games, feature films, housing developments and steel mills. But the last media subsidy – Labour’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund – required applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a te tiriti partner” during a period in which Labour’s interpretation of the treaty and implementation of co-governance became polarising political topics. This created a widespread perception that the media industry had been bought off to support a controversial policy agenda.
Over the past four years, trust in the media has fallen further and faster here than in any of the 46 countries surveyed by international news agency Reuters. In a recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, 55% of respondents opposed bailouts for private media companies.
Balance vs propaganda
Journalists can be a little too infatuated with an image of themselves as the lone defenders of democracy – and this is hard to reconcile with the torrent of celebrity gossip and sponsored content offered up by some outlets. But most modern democracies acknowledge that there’s significant public value in balanced, objective journalism. They fund wire services and public broadcasters that strive for impartiality. We don’t have a wire service; the New Zealand Press Association closed back in 2011. The recent “Trust in News in Aotearoa” survey by AUT indicates RNZ has fallen behind YouTube as a source of news. The survey showed 58% of respondents sourced their news from TVNZ, but Facebook was right behind at 53%.
As the national broadcaster pivots away from journalism and doubles down on reality TV shows about dating and cooking, Facebook and its influencers, micro-celebrities and covert authoritarian propagandists are poised to become the nation’s primary news source.
Politicians may not like the daily news media, and even relish the prospect of the free market innovating them into oblivion – but they’ll miss them when they’re gone and our political system finds itself being facebooked on a frequent basis.
The Listener did not receive money from the Public Interest Journalism Fund and was not included in the AUT “Trust in News” survey.
