Abstract
New Zealand’s 2014 general election campaign was seen by many observers as out of the ordinary: it was variously described as ‘weird’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘crazy’. However, did media coverage reflect the unusual nature of the actual campaign? This study’s content analysis of that coverage reveals that the news media’s concentration on ‘non-policy’ issues meant that much of it was dominated by alleged scandals, which were reported with a negative tone, and less space was devoted to policy. However, this does not indicate an extraordinary shift in New Zealand politics. Although seen by many as damaging to democracy and antithetical to a robust public sphere, these are now often features of the media-dominated ‘modern’ campaign.
Introduction
An attentive consumer of the news during New Zealand’s 2014 general election campaign would have found a wealth of coverage of scandals, colourful personalities and dramatic events, but less reporting or analysis of the various parties’ policies. The early part of the campaign was dominated by coverage of the fallout from the Dirty Politics book by journalist Nicky Hager, which was released with considerable publicity five-and-a-half weeks before the election. 1 It alleged unethical collusion between politicians/staff from the ruling National Party and Cameron Slater, the publisher of the right-wing blog Whale Oil Beef Hooked, commonly known as Whale Oil. The most prominent politician alleged to be directly involved in links with Slater was Justice Minister Judith Collins. After two-and-a-half weeks of continuous media coverage of those allegations, she tendered her resignation as a cabinet minister. Prime Minister John Key also came under considerable pressure from both the media and opposition politicians over the allegations in Dirty Politics, particularly in the early part of the campaign, and to a lesser extent up to polling day on 20 September. The last week was similarly dominated by the aftermath of an event hosted by the founder of the Internet Party, Kim Dotcom, titled the ‘Moment of Truth’ or ‘The Big Reveal’. He promised to make public information that would seriously damage Key, but, in the end, the Prime Minister shrugged off the allegations. The result on election night, with Key’s National Party shedding less than a third of a percentage of the total vote from 2011, and increasing its seats in Parliament, would indicate that most of his firm supporters, and many undecided voters, agreed with him, and that Dotcom’s stunt backfired. 2 A substantial amount of coverage in all outlets was devoted to the electoral partnership of the Internet Party and the Mana Movement, much of it detailing ructions between both the two constituent parties, and within the Internet Party itself. A standout of this was the coverage of an extraordinary outburst by one of the Internet Party’s press secretaries, Pam Corkery, in which she subjected two television reporters, one from each major network, to a torrent of abuse outside the alliance’s campaign launch. 3 Policy coverage, when offered, tended to focus on ‘bread and butter’ issues such as housing and the economy, but most particularly tax, with the two major parties attacking each other’s proposals (a small, deferred income tax cut from National and a capital gains tax from Labour) while defending their own.
The media is an integral part of the political process, especially in the lead-up to an election, when it is expected to provide ‘for accountability, for deliberation, [and] for representation’ of politicians, parties and their policies. 4 In this way, it contributes to a greater or lesser extent to the Habermasian idea of the ‘public sphere’. 5 However, the media is not an ideal disinterested conduit of political information to the voting public: its structures and practices mean that it can skew its coverage through agenda-setting 6 and framing. 7 Respectively, these tell the audience (i.e. the voters) what they should be thinking about and how they should interpret such content. If agenda-setting and framing are employed in a way that favours a particular party or politician in an election, then the media can rightly be accused of bias in their coverage, which can skew democracy due to a failure to be neutral and fairly represent the range of views and choices on offer. Furthermore, the media is expected to provide a sufficient degree of substantial policy coverage to fulfil its deliberative role, 8 and to avoid overemphasising coverage of less substantial non-policy issues, such as the ‘game’ components of elections – opinion polls, campaign activities and attacks by politicians on each other. 9
Bias can be structural, reflecting the organisation and financial make-up of news operations, 10 or it can be partisan, indicating a deliberate slanting of the coverage by journalists or their managers. 11 While this can usually be measured in the first instance by the amount of coverage an issue or politician receives, the tone of coverage then comes into play – whether it is positive, negative or neutral. Negativity, both in campaigning and coverage, has been on the rise for the past several decades, 12 and is tied in with increasing coverage of scandals 13 and a cynical, disdainful stance towards the political process on the part of journalists. 14 This has, in turn, led to decreased coverage of substantive policy during campaigns, and to increased coverage of the ‘game’.
Electoral politics in New Zealand have been characterised by mediated politics for the past several decades. 15 New Zealand Election Studies, including the latest in 2014, have consistently found that the majority of voters received their information from the news media. 16 Overall, television was the leading source in 2011, while newspapers were second at half the audience size of television, with radio third. By 2014, the Internet passed radio, but both were minor in comparison to the major sources, television and newspapers. 17 This study provides a detailed analysis of the content of the news coverage on the two main television networks and in the three biggest newspapers in New Zealand during the month-long ‘official’ campaign in August and September 2014, leading up to election day on 20 September. It examines the nature of New Zealand’s election coverage by analysing the issues of bias, tone and policy focus. Finally, it compares the 2014 campaign to that of 2008 to see if notable changes have occurred in New Zealand elections over this eight-year period.
Methodology
This study examines in detail the major sources of electoral information for New Zealand voters during the month-long election campaign of 2014: the 6 p.m. news bulletins on Television New Zealand (TVNZ) and TV3; and the election coverage from the three largest metropolitan newspapers – the New Zealand Herald (Auckland), the Dominion Post (Wellington) and the Press (Christchurch). During the campaign, the two television stations between them averaged 947,000 viewers. 18 This represented more than a fifth of the country’s population. For the three newspapers, the most recent circulation figures total 280,000. 19 However, readership, based on the most recent survey data (rather than actual print copies sold), covering both multiple print readers and online readers, gives a much larger figure of 1,089,000. 20
This study follows a similar methodology used in a previous study of the 2008 election campaign,
21
analysing the issues of bias, tone and policy focus (versus non-policy focus), outlined as follows:
The period of the 2014 analysis was from the official start of the campaign on ‘Writ Day’, Wednesday 20 August, to Friday 19 September, the day before election day. Television stories were selected from the first 10 stories in each bulletin; newspaper stories from the front page, ‘election news’ pages and the editorial and op-ed pages. 22 Each mention of a party, party leader, policy issue or non-policy issue in stories that were at least 50% about the election were counted as the study’s units of analysis (UOAs). The total data selected consisted of 15,468 UOAs from 958 stories. Of these, 4012 were from the two television networks, which had similar amounts of coverage. The remaining 11,456 were from the three newspapers: the New Zealand Herald had roughly twice as much coverage as each of the other two newspapers, and had more than a third of the all-media total, as shown in Table 1.
Media coverage of 2014 election campaign by source.
Note: n = units of analysis, that is, mentions of a party or party leader, or issue.
Each UOA was coded for: Day; Week; Source; Style (news or analysis); Party (segmented down into the nine parties either represented in Parliament or polling above 1%); Leader (segmented by name of leader(s) according to the same criteria as the party category); Policy Issue (selected from 19 issues, based on a review of media content from the 2014 study and categories from the 2008 and 2011 studies); Non-Policy Issue (selected from seven issues, based on a review of media content from the 2014 study and categories from the 2008 and 2011 studies); and Tone (positive, negative or neutral, based on keyword(s) tone match from 118 frames from both during the 2008 and 2011 studies and new frames from the 2014 study).
To check for reliability, a pilot inter-coder reliability test was conducted on a sample from the first week’s results, based on a second coder coding 153 UOAs on five key variables. The results of this are shown in Table 2. The highest reliability score was recorded for Policy Issue, with 100% agreement between the two coders and a Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient of 1, while the lowest was for Tone, with 83% agreement and a Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient of 0.734.
Inter-coder reliability testing.
Findings
The first issue studied was whether the various parties got a ‘fair’ share of media coverage or whether there was any media bias present in favour of any particular party or party leader. This, of course, raises the question of what is ‘fair’ and ‘biased’. In the era of New Zealand elections before the introduction of the Mixed Member Proportional voting system in 1996, it was simple: the two major parties, Labour and National, were assumed to get equal shares, and the overwhelming majority of the coverage between them, with some allowance for the rise of third parties in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, in the last first-past-the-post election in 1993, TVNZ had a formula of ‘2:2:1:1’ for its debates, which was also loosely applied to news coverage, where, broadly speaking, Labour and National got a third each of the coverage, and the Alliance Party and New Zealand First got a sixth each, with some allowance for other more minor parties. 23 Such a simplistic formula can no longer be applied in the complex electoral environment of MMP, with its plethora of parties in contention for seats in Parliament. In 2014, there were nine such parties, counting the electoral alliance between the Internet Party and the Mana Movement as one party. One simple way to assess the ‘fairness’ of coverage is to compare the amount given to each party and its leader (or co-leaders in the case of the Green Party and Internet–Mana alliance), and the share of the party vote in the final election count. These two figures can then be used to produce a ‘factor’ of coverage, being the percentage of total coverage divided by the party’s percentage of the final vote total. Therefore, the factors range from 0.53 for the Greens (meaning that they got just over half as much coverage as their final vote would indicate) to 5.8 for United Future. This is shown in Table 3.
Media coverage of parties and leaders versus election results.
Overall, National and John Key received about 3% less of the total coverage than its share of the final party vote. The gap for Labour and David Cunliffe was even larger, and the Greens got a substantial amount less, while New Zealand First showed the closest correlation between its coverage and vote of all the parties. All the ‘smaller’ parties got more coverage than their vote share would indicate. 24 This was especially the case for Internet–Mana and United Future, which each got more than five times more coverage than votes. It appears that the ‘smaller’ parties, that is, those that do not surmount the MMP threshold of 5% of the party vote, but come close to it (the Conservative Party) or already have members in Parliament (Internet–Mana, the Maori Party, ACT and United Future), are favoured with more prominence in the coverage than their vote would suggest. This may indicate a media inclination to subject those parties to slightly greater scrutiny than their support would imply given that they could be crucial to one of the major parties’ chances of putting together a governing majority in Parliament.
When coverage of parties (including other party members) is compared to coverage of the party leaders, some interesting results emerge (see Table 4).
Media coverage of parties versus leaders.
Party coverage for National was less than that for John Key, while the Labour Party got a slightly higher proportion of coverage than its leader, David Cunliffe. The minor parties, Green and New Zealand First, went in opposite directions, with the Greens as a party getting more than twice the share of coverage as that of its co-leaders, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei. On the other hand, New Zealand First’s leader, Winston Peters, got more than twice the share of coverage of his party. All of the ‘smaller’ parties got proportionately more party coverage than their leaders, with the exception of the Conservatives, whose leader, Colin Craig, dominated his party in a similar fashion to Winston Peters with New Zealand First.
As far as the leaders of the major parties are concerned, the results are no surprise. National ran a presidential campaign, heavily focussed on John Key, who was seen as the party’s major asset. 25 His proportion of coverage would have been even higher if it had not been for intense coverage of Justice Minister Judith Collins in the first half of the campaign because of allegations against her in the Dirty Politics book. Also, the media’s desire to fulfil its ‘fourth estate’ role of holding the powerful to account and exposing questionable conduct 26 drove some of the focus on the Dirty Politics elements of the coverage. The tendency of the media to concentrate on the party in power and its leader, termed the ‘advantage of incumbency’, 27 also came into play, although, in this case, the focus on Dirty Politics was probably more of a disadvantage, at least in the early stages of the campaign. Opinion polls showed National shedding support in late August, during the most intense focus on Dirty Politics. Initially, that support went to the smaller parties on the Left, such as the Greens and Internet–Mana, 28 but then seemed to shift to potential allies of National in a post-election coalition, notably, New Zealand First and the Conservatives. 29
Labour leader David Cunliffe had a lacklustre campaign, 30 and was nowhere as prominent on party promotional material such as billboards, pamphlets and the party website as Key was in National’s publicity. Labour, and even more so Cunliffe, were under-represented in the coverage because of the focus on National and Key as a result of Dirty Politics in the early part of the campaign, and again in the last week because of heavy coverage of Kim Dotcom’s ‘Moment of Truth’. 31 That event, also known as ‘The Big Reveal’, had the reverse effect for National of the earlier coverage of Dirty Politics: support flowed back to National, mostly from the parties to its left (all those parties except New Zealand First), with National’s vote on election night significantly up from what was indicated in the opinion polls published in the last week of the campaign. 32
The standouts in terms of under-representation are the Greens, with less than a third of the coverage for Russel Norman and Metiria Turei than the party vote would indicate, and coverage for the leaders less than half that of the party. Similarly, with Internet–Mana, although its leaders got three times the proportion of coverage compared to its vote, they got less than half the coverage that the party got. On the other hand, both Winston Peters and Colin Craig got a much higher proportion of coverage than their parties did. Where parties have co-leaders, that is, the Greens and Internet–Mana, the media makes more references to the party than the leaders. An additional feature in the case of Internet–Mana is that statements by or references to Kim Dotcom, the founder and bankroller of the Internet Party, were coded as ‘party’ as he was not a leader (and could not stand for Parliament as he is not a New Zealand citizen). As far as New Zealand First and the Conservative Party are concerned, both are commonly identified with their leaders, and are seen by many as personal political vehicles for them, with the remainder of their caucus or candidate list as hangers-on. So, the media, both television and print, often referred to the leaders as synonymous with the party, such as in opinion poll stories, where they would use lines like ‘now with Colin Craig, if he got to 5% …’, 33 where it would have been more accurate to say ‘if the Conservative Party got to 5% …’.
Tone of coverage
Examination of the ‘tone’ of campaign coverage has a long history, especially in the US, where successive studies have found a tendency for the news media to cover politics in a negative frame, concentrating on conflict, scandal and attacks by candidates on others. 34 This was reinforced by the preference of politicians and their campaign managers for negative advertising, particularly ‘attack ads’. 35 New Zealand studies have also found increasing levels of negativity and cynicism in the media coverage of election campaigns. 36 An increasingly commercialised media has shown a preference for conflict and personalisation, seeking out narratives that emphasise the ‘game’ of politics. 37 This leads to a more negative tone of coverage, both in terms of the stories that the media chooses to cover and in terms of the way in which they are covered. This is examined in Table 5.
Tone of party coverage.
Overall, the tone of coverage was more than 8% more negative than positive, with negative coverage the largest of the three tonal categories at 45%. National and Internet–Mana received significantly net negative coverage, in Internet–Mana’s case, more than four times that of the coverage of all parties, while National’s was almost three times higher. On the other side of the ledger, the Green Party got the smallest amount of coverage compared to its vote, but that coverage was significantly net positive, as was New Zealand First’s and that of the Conservative Party. Labour’s coverage was net negative by an almost identical amount to that for all parties, and therefore much less negative than that of the National Party. It seems to be that the two major parties (Labour and National) attracted more negative coverage due to being ‘large targets’. As they are the only two parties that could be expected to lead a governing coalition, and therefore have their leader become prime minister, it is reasonable to expect that both the major parties and their leaders are subjected to greater scrutiny and negative commentary, both from other politicians and the media. The coverage of the larger parties also seems to have been more polarised: the percentage of their neutral coverage was only in the mid-teens, while all other parties were in the 20s. Most of those parties also did not attract as much negative coverage, even though in the case of the five ‘smaller’ parties, their coverage share exceeded their vote. The obvious exception was Internet–Mana, whose proportion of coverage to its vote was much greater than any other party.
The coverage was also broken down into: ‘news’ stories, assembled according to the traditional journalistic norms of balance, fairness and objectivity, with a substantial amount of the content sourced from politicians and other sources, either indirectly or as direct quotes; and ‘analysis’ stories, where journalists write in the first person, expressing their own opinions, usually with bylines and photographs in print stories, and talking directly to camera (‘pieces-to-cam’ or ‘live shots’) in the case of television journalists. Analysis tends to be done by senior journalists with considerable experience, and although they express their own opinions, they still claim to adhere to the journalistic norms governing news stories. What becomes clear from comparing the two types of stories is that if we accept that the news stories adhere to journalistic norms, then so do the analysis stories overall. A comparison of the ‘All parties’ categories in Tables 6 and 7 shows that the analysis stories are only slightly more negative and less positive than the news stories, and are similarly neutral, meaning that the analysis coverage is more net negative than the news, but not markedly so. Given that the ‘analysts’ are writing in their own voices and expressing their own opinions, it is reasonable to expect their coverage to be more polarised than the news coverage, but it does not appear to be significantly the case.
Tone of coverage in news stories about parties.
Tone of coverage in analysis stories about parties.
Where the differences become clear is in the coverage of the individual parties. Analysis coverage was less negative than the news about National, about the same for Labour and less positive for the Greens. It was more positive for New Zealand First, less for ACT, the Maori Party, United Future and the Conservatives, and much more negative for Internet–Mana. So, although there are anomalies, there appears to be some bias in the analysis stories against the parties which are clearly of the Left (Labour, Green and Internet–Mana), all of which received more negative coverage (or less positive in the case of the Greens) than in the news stories, both in terms of the amount of negative coverage itself and in terms of the ‘net negative’ count, where negative coverage is subtracted from positive. Conversely, the analysis coverage of National was more positively skewed than news, but it is questionable whether this may indicate a bias to the Right corresponding to what appears to be one against the Left outlined earlier. It is more likely that the news coverage of National was more negative because of the focus on Dirty Politics, particularly the allegations against Judith Collins that led to her resignation as a minister and, later in the campaign, the fallout from Kim Dotcom’s ‘Big Reveal’. However, as explained earlier, while the attacks on John Key from Kim Dotcom and whom Key called his ‘henchmen’ (Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange) 38 got a full airing in all media, contributing to a spike in negative coverage of National and Key, the voters seem to have been counter-intuitively influenced, with a flow of support back to National. 39
Tone of coverage of party leaders
An examination of the tone of coverage of party leaders (see Table 8) also reveals some interesting features, particularly when compared to that of the parties (see Table 5).
Tone of coverage of party leaders.
Overall, the coverage of the leaders was more negative and less positive (but also more neutral) than that of the parties, demonstrating a net negative figure for the leaders almost twice that of the parties. Coverage of the individual party leaders was more negative (or less positive) in most instances, with the exception of the Maori Party (but only by a very slim margin) and the Internet–Mana alliance. However, once again, the latter result is largely attributable to the coding of the coverage of Kim Dotcom, which tended to be negative, as party coverage. The standouts in terms of negative tone for leaders are Winston Peters of New Zealand First and Jamie Whyte of ACT, both of whose parties gained significantly positive coverage while their own coverage was markedly negative. This was not just due to the tone of the commentary by journalists, or the framing of the stories. Both leaders were combative, frequently attacking the other parties and their leaders across the board. In one television story, Whyte managed in a single speech to attack six of the other eight parties in contention for parliamentary seats, including his party’s senior coalition partner, National. 40 This meant that the relevant UOAs were coded as negative both for Whyte and for the objects of his opprobrium. Similarly, Winston Peters was free with criticism of all parties and leaders across the political spectrum, with the same result in terms of negative coding.
Policy versus non-policy coverage
Early studies of presidential campaigns in the US looked at the dominance of ‘game’ coverage over that of policy, particularly concentration on the ‘horse race’, that is, opinion polls and the strategies of the candidates. 41 A comparison of electoral and media developments in the US and the UK found similar trends in the UK, producing a continuum from ‘prudential’ coverage that reflected uncritically what politicians were saying, through slightly more active ‘analytical’ coverage, to ‘reactive’ and ‘conventional’ coverage, which treated campaigning like any other news story. 42 This was further developed and simplified in the UK, with the concept of ‘sacerdotal’ versus ‘pragmatic’ coverage, meaning coverage that reflected uncritically and without interpretation the pronouncements of politicians and the policy platforms of their parties, as opposed to coverage based on a ‘news’ agenda of colour, controversy and conflict, often with little or no substantive policy content. 43 An additional theory has arisen in the last decade, that of ‘mediatisation’, which was developed mostly in the democracies of North-Western Europe, especially Sweden and the Netherlands, with proportional electoral systems similar to New Zealand’s MMP. It sees a traditional ‘political logic’ vying for dominance of both media output and politics itself with a newer, commercialised ‘media logic’. ‘Political logic’ is based on the rules and practices of political parties and their members, with emphasis on the development and implementation of policy, while ‘media logic’ is shaped by journalistic professionalism, commercialism and media technology. 44 This has been further refined to develop the concept of ‘electoral logic’, which takes into account the heightened promotion and marketing activity of politicians and their parties during election campaigns; this is further subdivided into ‘normative’ and ‘market’ logics, which apply to both the political and media establishments. This means that political parties, particularly the larger ones that are looking to be the dominant component of a governing coalition, are willing to lessen emphasis on policy during an election campaign and concentrate on ‘office-seeking’ activities. 45 National’s 2014 campaign showed elements of this ‘electoral logic’, with a campaign framed around its administrative record and the leadership of John Key, rather than fresh or innovative policy proposals. 46
An examination of the proportions of coverage of policy and non-policy issues on a week-by-week basis during the campaign reveals how this interaction of the political establishment and the media reflects their priorities (see Table 9). 47
Policy versus non-policy coverage by week.
Policy issues received just over one-third of all coverage, and non-policy issues received just under two-thirds. However, these proportions varied considerably in the course of the campaign, from a low of 24.5% policy coverage in Week 2, compared to a high of 42.1% the following week. This can be explained both by what was happening in the campaign and by what the media was choosing to cover. The week before the start of the official campaign was dominated by the fallout from the release of Dirty Politics, and while this was still prominent in Week 1 of our period of analysis, it had waned somewhat, and the official launch of National’s campaign in that week sparked discussion around its policies, notably, proposals to address the high cost of housing. Dirty Politics then returned to prominence in Week 2, culminating in the resignation of Judith Collins as justice minister on 30 August. Policy coverage increased considerably in Week 3, not least because that week contained three debates.
First, the Christchurch Press staged its online debate between John Key and David Cunliffe, which featured robust exchanges on policy, especially the respective tax proposals of each of the major parties. In addition, both television networks held their minor party debates in that week. Policy coverage dipped again in Week 4 in the lead-up to Kim Dotcom’s ‘Big Reveal’, but increased in the last three days of the campaign. In terms of overall coverage of policy versus non-policy issues, there were 5435 policy mentions, or 35% of the total of 15,468, while non-policy mentions numbered 10,121, or 65%. 48 The top four issues were all non-policy in nature, with tax the only policy issue in the top five (see Table 10).
Leading policy (p) and non-policy (np) issues.
Policy was dominated by tax, with Labour and National touting their respective plans (a capital gains tax in Labour’s case, a small, deferred tax cut in National’s) and spending a lot of time attacking the proposals of their opponents. The second-biggest policy category was defence/security, which included much of the coverage of allegations of government spying that came out of the Kim Dotcom ‘Big Reveal’ in the last week of the campaign. At that event, the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and the American ‘whistleblower’ Edward Snowden (appearing by satellite from Moscow) alleged that John Key and his government had not been transparent about surveillance of New Zealanders, particularly their electronic communications. 49 Defence/security was then closely followed by social and public services, which included policy proposals to address both the high price of housing and a shortage of housing for low-income New Zealanders.
Therefore, the coverage of the 2014 campaign by the news media was conventional or pragmatic according to the theories outlined earlier, rather than prudential or sacerdotal. However, it did not show the dominance of the ‘horse race’ that was found in earlier US studies. In terms of the elements of mediatisation, media logic would seem to have outweighed political logic, particularly regarding coverage of Dirty Politics and Kim Dotcom. However, these stories were not entirely driven by the media: politicians from parties other than National, to varying degrees, prosecuted the case on Dirty Politics. Furthermore, National and John Key, along with Winston Peters, were strident critics of Internet–Mana and Kim Dotcom, especially in the last week of the campaign. This demonstrated the ability of politicians to depart from the policy-centric norm of ‘political logic’ for the more combative ‘electoral logic’ when it suited their purposes to use negative ‘attack politics’. It is also worth examining the difference between the various news outlets. The two television outlets are fiercely competitive and commercial, locked in a nightly battle for ratings, which TVNZ consistently wins, usually by a margin of two to one or more. 50 However, their formats and content are very similar, and in the 2014 election campaign, the way in which they covered it in terms of their attention to policy and non-policy issues was almost identical (see Table 11).
Policy versus non-policy mentions by source.
The newspapers paid more attention to policy, but not particularly more so, with the exception of the New Zealand Herald, which is surprising given its format change since the previous election in 2011. The newspapers dominate their respective territories and have little competition within the same medium. Both the Dominion Post and the Press are broadsheet in format, and conform to that in the style of their coverage: serious and considered, if sometimes parochial, certainly in the case of the Press. The New Zealand Herald, however, went tabloid in format in 2012, accompanied by loud protestations by its management that the shift would not be accompanied by a change in style. 51 These seem to have been in vain, as the paper has indeed gone downmarket, with the front page frequently featuring scandal involving sportspeople and celebrities and a similar tone for the first several pages of the front section, attracting some criticism. 52 During the election campaign, however, while the Herald’s front page often featured such lowbrow news, it had extensive coverage of the election campaign, and especially policy, on its inside pages, often featuring double spreads. As can be seen in Table 10, the Herald is the standout in having significantly more policy and therefore less non-policy coverage compared to the other outlets, both print and television, although policy coverage was still in a minority. Furthermore, a re-examination of Table 2 shows the Herald’s commitment to political coverage, with significantly more than any other outlet, including more than a third of all coverage when measured by UOAs.
The biggest issue category was general coverage of the nature of the campaign, often described as ‘the game’ or ‘hoopla’, 53 with 2701 mentions. This was 17.5% of all coverage, when adding both policy and non-policy. The second-biggest category was coverage of the Dirty Politics book and fallout from it, at 13.6% of the total. If we add ‘other scandals’ (which mostly covered Kim Dotcom’s allegations of government misdeeds), then the total for Dirty Politics is 18.1% of the total. Total mentions for the two categories were 2823, that is, more than half that for all policy mentions.
Conclusion
Despite some journalists describing the 2014 campaign as ‘weird’, 54 it would seem to be the ‘new normal’. A comparison of this study’s findings with those from the 2008 study that it was based on 55 shows that the coverage of the campaign in the major newspapers and television news bulletins has become more negative and less ‘policy heavy’, reflecting changes in coverage in many other democracies overseas. The 2008 study found overall negativity at 32.3% and non-policy coverage at 49.6% of the total. This compares to 44% negativity and 65.1% non-policy in 2014. Some, but not all, of this can be attributed to the extensive coverage of Dirty Politics and other scandals. If Dirty Politics is taken out of the tone calculations for 2014, negativity still shows a rise on 2008, to 40.2%, and if it is taken out of the ‘non-policy’ category, this still constitutes 59.6% of the total – once again, a substantial increase on 2008.
The media’s coverage of the Dirty Politics story showed that there is a place for strong ‘fourth estate’ journalism in New Zealand, with concrete outcomes from the media’s pursuit of answers to the questions raised in the Hager book. A cabinet minister resigned in the middle of an election campaign, and an official inquiry was set up to look into some of the allegations. The normally unflappable John Key was thrown off balance, especially in the first television debate. 56 The coverage of Dirty Politics raised legitimate questions about accountability and credibility at the highest levels of government. However, it also probably reduced the space and time that could be devoted to the exposition and debate of policy. Television can claim some excuse given that it has a finite ‘news hole’ of one hour for each primetime bulletin (although much of that hour is taken up by advertising, promotions, weather reports and coverage of sport). Newspapers have more leeway, which the New Zealand Herald seems to have made use of in this election. Although election stories were often absent from its front page, it gave substantial coverage to all aspects of the campaign, including policy issues, to a much greater extent than its fellow big city newspapers. Election coverage in the two Australian-owned Fairfax titles, the Dominion Post and the Press, was thin by comparison, especially in the latter.
However, even without Dirty Politics and Kim Dotcom, the coverage of the 2014 election campaign would have been less ‘substantial’ than that of 2008. Media coverage of New Zealand election campaigns appears to be going through the same transformation that has been observed in the mature democracies of North America and Europe, with heightened coverage of gaffes and scandals, increased negativity, and a decrease in the coverage of policy. Whichever normative frame is used, game versus substance, pragmatic versus sacerdotal coverage, or mediatisation, the outcome is the same: what voters are seeing and reading has become more skewed to the ‘weak’ democracy side of the equation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.