Objectivity or Pakeha bias?

Tu Tangata, Issue 33, 1 December 1986, Page 42

Objectivity or Pakeha bias?

by Philip Tremewan

PUBLICATIONS

Philip Tremewan heads the Newspapers in Education unit for Wellington Newspapers. He is a teacher, journalism tutor and journalist.

Our media are under fire for their innate racism. The press, radio and television

are all institutions that operate along monocultural lines. They are run by Pakeha people for Pakeha people. Maori people can expect little or no representation in decision-making, little or no Maori news, little or no Maori language, rarely even a Maori point of view.

The Journalists Training Board has been encouraging more Maori journalists to enter the field in the hope of somehow altering things, but they usually end up in situations which only reinforce the racism of the system.

Being the sole Maori journalist in a newsroom, like being the sole Maori teacher in a school, puts incredible pressure on them and leaves all the other journalists feeling they don’t have to do anything about racism and“ Maori issues”.

The Maori journalist is often expected not only to do the Maori round but also to fit it to Pakeha conventions and Pakeha norms. It’s these conventions which rarely come under scrutiny.

The Pakeha debate instead has been a reaction to Maori criticism and has focussed on Maori claims. Pakeha have reacted either with guilt or with selfrighteous indignation, but done little to change their operational norms.

In fact many Pakeha don’t understand their own conditioning. They’re so monocultural that they don’t realise they have a culture and that the values at the core of their work are culturally based, not some universal, divinely ordained law.

On the world scene, this issue has led third world nations to demand a new world information order to break down Western media hegemony. In New Zealand, it’s led to a Maori request for a separate media system because Pakeha have proved unwilling or unable to adjust. So what are these cultural conventions that blinker the Pakeha media? Objectivety is an important Pake-

ha media myth. Ritual references are often made to it and it’s an underlying article of faith for many journalists. It is, like many articles of faith, a contradiction in its own terms. It assumes journalists work either like an omniscient deity or else are able to shed their limited knowledge and approach each story with a tabula rasa.

In fact, Pakeha journalists decide what is and isn’t news according to their own cultural definitions, they choose the angle, they choose who to talk to out of their limited range of contacts (who often include no Maori at all), and the outcome is inevitably racist.

It’s like the judicial system which has a similar impartiality myth but again the outcome has been clearly documented as racist with widely different treatment meted out to Maori and Pakeha.

Most journalists mistake the Pakeha debating model the adversary format for objectivity. If you have one speaker for and one speaker against, then surely that’s balanced news.

They assume there are only two points of view and leave no room for a hui model with people talking through to some sort of consensus. Just polarised and conflicting opinions which are not so much information giving as attentionseeking. Issues become a simplistic for and against, on a points scoring basis or a clash of personalities, not a discussion sorting through causes and solutions.

Pakeha also split news into hard and soft. Hard news is rated more highly and deals with immediate conflict and events, especially in connection with politics, economics, the police, accidents and fires.

Soft news deals with topics which can’t be neatly tied up into a punchy news package its spills out of any easy formulations. It expresses points of view and even feelings. It’s relegated to the inside pages of a paper or to off-peak times on air.

Soft news is often the category in which Maori and women’s stories are placed if they’re used at all, or if they’re even known about.

Media people lack information on Maori issues their libraries may have pictures and details of the most obscure Pakeha town clerks but nothing on key kaumatua.

And again language and culture are intricately interwoven so only English is heard or read in our main news services. TV and radio give a small ration to Maori, the papers give almost none, usually not even doing Maori people the courtesy of quoting their original statements with or without a translation.

Another cultural limitation for Pakeha is the quest for novelty and immediacy. Pakeha focus on the present and short-term future news must be now. This cuts out examination of the past and even the long-term future. Maori people, however, stand with their backs to the future and the present is interpreted through the past.

Pakeha are also preoccupied with chronological time. The way Pakeha have structured the news media means everything has to happen to fit predetermined time slots and deadlines with little allowance being made for human time, the time to gather people and talk things through.

The media are Pakeha controlled, they have a white history which only now is coming under scrutiny, they have a white philosophy and are firmly centered in Pakeha culture. If Pakeha people can acknowledge their culture and the way it shapes their thinking then there’s a chance of opening up the media to other ways of working.

In a year which has seen the Treaty of Waitangi emerge again into Pakeha recognition, it’s been disappointing to find the media lagging so far behind government departments, community organisations and the churches in responding to the Pakeha challenge.