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Watchdog journalists?

Journalists aspire to be a watchdog for all citizens; sceptical about everything, particularly the statements and actions of the powerful. Despite this aspiration, our representative samples in 2004 and 2007 showed that the mass media acts as a watchdog for Pākehā interests and is rarely sceptical of Pākehā initiatives that breach the Treaty. Instead, mass media news is routinely sceptical of Treaty-based initiatives or points of view.

News values

Te Kaea and Te Karere used fewer politicians as sources and a much wider range of Maori sources than mass TV news. Māori programmes allowed sources to speak for longer, and used a less confrontational approach even though the same proportion of their stories were about conflict. Overall, they demonstrated the monocultural nature of the news values which mass TV news imply are universal.

‘Radical’ and ‘activist’

These negative labels were overwhelming applied to Māori in newspapers in 2007, and used largely by journalists rather than sources they quoted. The imbalance in these terms indicates an overarching adversarial perspective on Māori resource issues and a lack of alternative frames for these stories.

Waitangi Day

When mass TV news programmes in 2007 talked of unity, they portrayed a New Zealand nation in which Māori rights and aspirations were set aside. When Māori TV news programmes talked of unity, it was unity in diversity. They focused on tino rangatiratanga and challenged the Government to honour te Tiriti o Waitangi. Māori language news assumed that the fight for Māori rights and aspirations is a necessity that is not divisive or unjustified; the opposite assumption prevailed on mass news programmes

Pākehā perspective

Most newspaper stories in the 2004 and 2007 were written from a Pākehā perspective; Maori were often excluded from ‘taxpayers’, the ‘public’ or ‘New Zealanders’. Maori concepts about ownership of resources were rarely mentioned. Māori were commonly framed as a source of problems or conflict

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