Peter Allan Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week
peterallanwilliams.substack.com
The Media Insider column on the New Zealand Herald website each week is a column, funnily enough, about the media. It is way too long and even as someone who has worked in the media for half a century I find a great deal it of yawn inducing and requiring the fast scroll.
It’s written by Shayne Currie, who for a long time was the editor at the Herald so knows all about the internal machinations of the place. In his latest edition he’s written about the front page advertisement placed by the Council of Trade Unions earlier in the week which was a direct attack on the the National Party leader Christopher Luxon.
Now let me say at the outset, I find the concept of the entire front page of a newspaper being an advertisement a major turnoff. Harvey Norman has been running those front page wraparounds for years. They annoy the hell out of me and have hardened my determination never to buy anything from Harvey Norman ever again.
I’m old enough to remember when newspaper front pages were all classified advertising. That was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then the owners of the papers saw the light and actually put news on the front page, and newspapers enjoyed their golden age.
The internet has killed that and the golden days will never return but the Harvey Norman wraparounds are, for me as a reader, hastening their demise. But once you’ve done it, you’ve surely got to allow anyone who wants to advertise to do so, as long as they pay and as long as the copy is clearly marked as an advertisement.
The Luxon attack ad did have the word “advertisement” across the top, so in that respect it did advise readers. But it was cleverly designed in bold font and with few words so that from a distance you could think it was news, or rather the newspaper’s political stance.
Frankly, I think it backfired because so many readers thought it was playing the man rather than the ball, as in policy. Previous third party attack ads, like those run by the Taxpayers Union attack policy, and the politician behind the policy, rather than the politician himself.
Personal attack ads not backed up by policy are a pretty dirty, and in my mind ineffective tactic. The preferred Prime Minister polls out this week suggest the ads did not work and more and more voters are are finding the prospect of Luxon as Prime Minister more appealing.
But back to the Media Insider column. Shayne Currie reports that NZME, the owner of the Herald, told him “that all advertising decisions are made from a commercial perspective and stand very separately from editorial”.
Which I would challenge most vociferously. Here’s a case in point. Both Family First and the group Stand Up for Women, SUFW, have wanted to run advertising in the New Zealand Herald, and in other papers too, which would contribute to the debate on transgender issues.
The Herald, in the days when Currie was the editor, would not run the SUFW ad for which the copy said “Woman: adult human female.” SUFW maintain it was Currie himself who stopped the ad running.
Only six weeks ago Family First wanted to place full page ads in six daily papers, including the New Zealand Herald, at the start of their “What is a Woman” campaign. The six publications, owned by NZME, Stuff and Allied Press originally accepted the advertising but then colluded to reject it at the last minute.
The Group Sales Manager at Stuff was at least honest. An email to Bob McCoskrie of Family First said “the campaign doesn’t align with the values of Stuff due to the sensitive nature of the content”.
An email from Allied Press, publishers of the Otago Daily Times, said, “NZME heard we got grief for running it, which we didn’t because we haven’t run it, so they pulled it then Stuff got wind of it and pulled it as well, this was from the editorial teams, not the commercial teams.”
Which is yet more evidence that what appears in the advertising space of a newspaper can be and is regularly dictated by editors.
If the contest of ideas and free speech is vital for a functioning democracy, censorship of advertising is the start of a slippery slope.
And if newspapers are in such a parlous financial state, isn’t it curious that they will not accept good money from some activist groups like Family First and SUFW, but they’ll take it from the equally activist Council of Trade Unions?