The Press: a story about the stories

And does Jacinda Ardern have more in common with David Lange than with Tony Blair?

How come different news outlets tell such different stories?

Worth watching on Netflix is the feature movie The Post (director S. Spielberg, 2017). Set in 1971, it relates efforts by The Washington Post to acquire “the Pentagon Papers” – classified documents that revealed how Americans had been misled about the war in Vietnam. Its climax is the Post’s decision to publish what they’d learned from those papers, even though The New York Times had been barred from doing so by a federal court.

The movie takes a few liberties with historical facts, but, in the interests of good viewing, it has to hype up the narrative. Nonetheless, it’s a fair account, with the Post’s owner Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) and hard-boiled editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) emerging as heroes of press freedom – with help from the Supreme Court.

The movie illustrates how institutions of media governance, ownership and law combine with newsroom action and real-time politics and conflict. If you’re a child of the digital age, it may be of interest to see how things worked when there were only landlines. There are shots of the compositor at work too, and the physical type. It shows journalists frantically writing on portable typewriters to piece together stories from poorly organised photocopies.

The seventies were arguably the heyday of journalism, an industry that’s lately been in decline thanks to digital technologies and to global platforms that are sucking in most of the advertising dollars that funded news production.

“The news” is – and always has been – a set of stories pieced together from disparate events, facts and statements, under tight deadlines. Even a blow-by-blow timeline of events is still a constructed story, written up by someone. A lot depends on choices about “what’s in” and “what’s out” and about the words used to describe the events. For instance, is a crowd “violent” because someone set a car on fire, or is it still just a crowd?

The Post gives a dramatised account of how information detrimental to the US government’s official version made its way into print as “stories”. Those revelations in 1971 through to the Watergate scandal and then the resignation of President Nixon in 1974 correspond with a decline of Americans’ trust in government, according to surveys. And there’s also been a decline of trust in media.

Journalists brave enough to publish stories from classified documents – in the face of threats to prosecute individuals – would, one might think, be deemed trustworthy, as they were acting in the public interest. The facts about the war, and top-secret assessments of whether the US could actually “win” it, deserved to be revealed.

The heroism of a free press has since been supplanted, however, by accusations about “fake news”. In 2017, The Post was released in the midst of Trump’s first term, swimming against a current of scepticism about mainstream media.

The digital age produces such a variety of narratives and interpretations of events (and sheer hoaxes) that many consumers are left confused. We’re no longer limited to the local or national newspapers or broadcasters. With little effort we can now read The Jerusalem Post and Al Jazeera, for instance, and see totally different versions of events in Gaza. If anyone had thought that the news ought to be objective and to relate a singular or agreed version, then it may have come as a shock to learn that it’s not like that. Instead, it’s a highly contested and diverse set of narratives, differing depending on who’s producing it and for whom it’s produced. Looking at the variety of stories and opinions today, a perplexed reader might conclude that there must be something wrong with “the media”. Some of them, if not all of them, must be lying to us!

People are reacting – often negatively – to the revelation that “the news” is a set of stories or narratives which people have had to make up – normally in a hurry and with incomplete information. Anyone can now read, hear or view many different versions, catering for politically polarised and diverse audiences. And the incentive for news outlets is now to target one side of that polarised audience, or even to gain “engagement through enragement”.

Consumers were mistaking the map for the territory (to use Gregory Bateson’s metaphor) if they thought that news could ever be truly objective in a singular sense. “The news” as read, heard or viewed does not present “the events” as such. It is, and always was, a set of narratives constructed within politicised environments. The diversity of the digital age has just made that plain to see.

Why does it work that way? Humans need patterned and cohesive narratives for comprehension and memory, and to make sense of a complex world. We’re good at telling stories and at pretending. One of the first things we do as children is to propose “let’s pretend”. Grown-ups in a theatre audience don’t call for first-aid when they see someone writhing in pain on stage, because they know it’s pretended. And this only gets more sophisticated when people pretend that they’re not pretending. We may act as if what’s staged is for real, perhaps because we have little choice, and sometimes we end up believing in the artificial stuff that’s presented to us. Governments, churches, novelists, movie producers and news media all depend, to some degree, on our willing suspension of disbelief.

When there were only a few national broadcasters, “the six o’clock news” had orchestral introductory music and trained voices to make it sound serious, as if it conveyed “the events of the day”. Of course there really was a war going on in South-East Asia in the early 70s, but what viewers saw on TV was something other than that, constructed for purposes that went beyond “just keeping you informed”.

Trust-in-media surveys are irrelevant, as I’ve argued before. I’d never ask anyone to trust the media. What I do recommend is critically to read the media. Seek out a diverse range of sources, piece together what you can, and make up your own mind. We have plenty of sources to choose from.

It was different in the analog days. But not all that different.

And now, the Ardern Media Plan

As I’ve done straw polls of readers on both Tony Blair and Jacinda Ardern – in the context of their very different books on political leadership – it’s interesting to compare the results. In both cases, readers gave mixed feedback, but for Ardern it’s much more polarised. Of course, these numbers can’t be read as “accurate” or representative of any population, but here they are:

Blair isn’t exactly popular, but readers are more divided over Ardern. Blair was PM for about 10 years and won 3 elections; Ardern was PM for just over 5 years and won 2 elections – with the caveat that Labour won fewer seats than National in 2017.

To read their books about their leadership styles is to enter into two quite distinct world-views. Blair’s is about management and delivery, Ardern’s is personal and reflective. Other than a centrist’s fear of being seen as “radical”, Ardern seems to have little in common with Blair, despite having worked within his government for a while.

Ardern’s present media tactics are: stay on message about empathy, kindness and public service; don’t get drawn on any mistakes you might have made in office. An international audience doesn’t want to hear about details like policy and delivery.

A balanced review of Ardern’s memoir comes from Thomas Coughlan. Noting the polarised opinions, he writes in The Weekend Herald: “If Ardern’s cheerleaders are too quick to canonise her, her critics are too quick to damn”. Nonetheless, her government’s “lack of focus on the macro-economy ended up being the undoing of its central mission, poverty reduction”.

For the ordinary person, that translated into “the cost-of-living crisis” – the leading issue on people’s minds in 2023 according to polls. Covid-19 and vaccination mandates had become annoying memories by the time of the election, and voters were more concerned about the hard facts of prices, rents and healthcare. Meanwhile, co-governance was dividing the country.

Disinformation played no significant role in Ardern’s resignation, nor in Labour’s subsequent electoral loss, while those truly dreadful mysogynists who attacked Ardern hadn’t voted for her from the start anyway. To understand why Labour lost, we need to look at Labour’s policies, at economic and social consequences, and at Ardern’s poor political management – and hence at public discontent in reaction to valid information, not disinformation. A party in government doesn’t alienate hundreds of thousands of voters over nothing, and it’s better to treat voters as intelligent beings, not as the dupes of Russian trolls.

Labour were taking the country in a direction that people didn’t support and/or hadn’t approved at the ballot-box. Ardern may be compared, then, with another two-termer, former Labour PM (1984–89) David Lange: a popular figure who raised New Zealand’s profile (in that anti-nuclear moment), but who took the country in a direction that wasn’t expected, and who failed to keep control of a cabinet full of strong-willed ministers. Lange and Ardern bailed out once it became too obvious that they’d lost support as leaders and that defeat was inevitable.