Tina Ngata: New Zealand media is soaked in oil and racism

The New Zealand Herald has been widely (and deservedly) panned for publishing as its front page an incendiary and misleading advertisement from Hobson’s Pledge, a right-wing conservative group which has a history of splashing out on racially-divisive advertising.

Here, Tina Ngata looks at the role of the media in fuelling and upholding racism in Aotearoa. (Content warning: Contains racist media.)

 

We cannot overstate the importance of the news media in upholding colonial supremacy. It can set norms through promoting science and fact, but it can also shape public opinion by appealing to emotions, values or desires.

The media drives narratives — and from our earliest days, even as we sat around fires in caves, narratives have been a dominant form of social control. Media narratives shape how we make sense of, and respond to, the social issues and challenges around us. They communicate ideas of what is acceptable, and who we should aspire to be like, or who we should reject and revile.

For this reason, the person telling the narrative has always been very important. It is their perspective that will work its way into the hearts and minds of the people — and the will of the people will determine who will lead, and where that leader will take us.

Throughout history, we’ve seen the importance of how shaping the narrative of an issue shapes how it is responded to. This is the very point of propaganda, misinformation and disinformation — it’s not for its own sake, but to shape how people respond to an issue, including endorsing violent colonialism and acts of war.

Aotearoa is no exception to this. If we look to the history of the news media in Aotearoa, we see a recurrent theme: colonial land-grabbing. Some of our oldest news publications are tied into our history of colonial racism, the most pertinent of which, right now, is the New Zealand Herald which last week sold out its front page for advertising dollars from the right-wing conservative group Hobson’s Pledge, for this old, racist (and completely false and misleading) chestnut.

It’s a tried and true racially-divisive tactic that Hobson’s Pledge has relied on at regular intervals to stoke anxiety and direct hate and fear towards Māori.

To understand how and why the ad is false and misleading, it’s worth reading the full statement from Te Hunga Roia Māori / the Māori Law Society, signed by more than 170 lawyers and legal academics:

The Hobson’s Pledge advertisement in The Herald on Wednesday 7 August in relation to customary marine titles is likely to mislead, deceive or confuse consumers both explicitly and by implication, ambiguity, exaggeration and false representation. It is also likely to also fuel racism against Mãori.

Hobson’s Pledge are entitled to a “robust expression of opinion” but are not entitled to mislead and deceive consumers and, in our view, The Herald should have known, or investigated, whether the information was misleading or deceptive before the advertisement was published.

First, the advertisement calls for the “restoration” of the foreshore to public ownership. The foreshore has never historically been in public ownership: it is not owned by anybody, except for the areas of the foreshore that are currently in (mainly non-Māori) private ownership.

Second, the advertisement implies, on the front page, that “customary marine titles” give iwi, hapū and/or whānau the right to own parts of the foreshore. This is not true. On the contrary, the legislation’s effective extinguishment of Māori property interests in the foreshore has been found to breach their human rights by UN human rights bodies that oversee New Zealand’s human rights compliance.

Third, the advertisement implies that a “customary marine title” will prevent New Zealanders from accessing beaches, including to fish, to swim and to enjoy our coastal environment. This is not true. The legislation enabling the award of customary marine titles secures public access to the foreshore.

Fourth, contrary to the impression created by the advertisement, there are very hard legal tests to be met before a wāhi tapu (including a rāhui) will be recognised. Moreover, wāhi tapu are subject to statutory restrictions, and cannot, for example, prevent fishers from taking their lawful entitlement in a quota or fisheries management area.

Finally, in the light of the division and racism against Māori that resulted from the foreshore and seabed issue in the mid-2000s, we find the attempt to reignite that division and discrimination abhorrent.

The Māori Journalist’s Association Kawea Te Rongo also issued a swift condemnation and immediately reached out to Māori journalists at the Herald and NZME to offer support.

What I’d prefer to focus on, though, is the role of the media in upholding racism in Aotearoa, and perhaps one way we can tell that story is also through the Herald.

Founded in 1863, the New Zealand Herald eventuated out of a spat between partners William Chisholm Wilson and John Williamson, who together ran The New Zealander. Whereas John Williamson opposed the war on Māori, Wilson supported it. After going their separate ways, Wilson started the New Zealand Herald, calling the war the “native rebellion”. Wilson’s distaste for Māori rights was on full display in his very first Herald editorial, where he wrote:

An honourable and manly rivalry in the race of competition is fairly setting in, and the day is not very remote when New Zealand will win, and wear her as yet premature appellation,”The Britain of the South.”

And this little gem:

A fanatic few may believe in Maori determination, but no British soldier, sailor, or citizen will ever be brought to regard him in a higher light than that of an incendiary and an assassin, wriggling like a serpent, to circumvent, and dexterous as a fox to escape the punishment due for murder.

Even though it’s evident Williamson and Wilson felt differently, these were still not unusual sentiments for the average 19th-century European colonial “settler”, nor the average colonial editor.

Other contemporaries of the New Zealand media scene included Julius Vogel, a politician and avid supporter of “assisted settlement” — offering land and benefits for settlers to move here from the UK and Europe — and rapid acquisition of Māori land for those purposes. There was also Edward Wakefield, who was also a politician and the nephew of the infamous Edward Gibbon Wakefield who founded the New Zealand Company.

From the very outset, the New Zealand media has been not merely an observer, but an active participant in the political and economic dispossession of Māori.

The Wilson family would eventually become somewhat of a newspaper dynasty, eventually forming the media organisation Wilson & Horton, which would in turn become NZME (owner of the NZ Herald and 22 other regional newspapers). The Wilson family has remained prominent through the organisation, and today a descendant, Matthew Wilson, is NZME’s chief operating officer.

That’s not to point the finger at Matthew Wilson’s heritage, of course. That is merely one interesting facet in a multi-layered complex of influencing factors, including the stakeholders and board — as has been pointed out in social media this past week. If we look at the NZME board chair, Barbara Chapman, we see that she’s also the chair of Genesis Energy, which owns the Huntly coal-powered power station. Barbara is also the deputy chair of the New Zealand Initiative, one of two New Zealand partners to the anti-Indigenous, anti-climate justice Atlas Network. And she’s an independent director on the board of Fletcher Building (infamous for its attempted development of whenua Māori at Ihumātao).

Let us also look to the major stakeholders of NZME, the largest of which is Citicorp, which deals largely in mining and metals, and the second largest of which is Clearstream which provides financial services to Shell Oil. Together, these two groups hold nearly 36 percent of the shares of NZME.

In fact, if you look at the top 20 list of NZME shareholders, the vast majority are associated with minerals extraction companies, accounting for just over 70 percent of all NZME shares.

Of course, this story can easily be told by a timeline of racist material alone. Walking back from last week’s front page through history, we can pretty much just throw a dart at any week on the calendar and find racist material that is funded by the far right.

Remember this other false and misleading full page spread, funded by the far-right conservative “think tank” NZCPR?

Founded by the former Act MP Muriel Newman, NZCPR also paid NZME to run an advertorial in the Otago Daily Times, based on Don Brash’s “Iwi vs Kiwi” campaign slogan — and weirdly enough, the Herald then did a story on how racist that was.

And last year the Herald took more money from Hobson’s Pledge to run a full page advertorial which amounted to little more than “Māori are taking over”.

And we can also look to the media who drove public hatred towards Māori health reforms — a particularly disgusting media attack which framed our attempts to stop dying early from preventable deaths as being somehow unfair to Pākehā.

And, of course, there is the long history of racist cartoons about Māori.

So none of this is new, and in spite of numerous “mea culpa” statements, it has not changed. Media has always been a corporate tool to direct public opinion and influence politics. As Professor Daniel Nyberg points out in his paper on corporate lobbying as political corruption, corporations have tried to influence government policy ever since the corporate form of organising was established in the 17th century.

It’s important to note that this is also deeply rooted in colonisation, with some of the earliest and longest-running joint-stock companies being dedicated to the task of facilitating colonialism, and receiving a royal charter to do so — beginning with the East India Company, followed by many others including the Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Company, the Royal African Company, the Van Diemen’s Land Company, the Canada Company. And so on and so forth, until we reach the infamous New Zealand Company, which received its royal charter in 1841. Ironic, given that the rampant land theft by the New Zealand Company up to 1840 was a determining factor for the drafting and signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

When I say that corporate empire is fashioned on classic empire, I’m not being cute. The modern corporate business model is born out of turning colonialism into a joint-stock venture.

Nyberg’s paper points to the purchase of media space as being one of the dominant ways in which corporations hold more power than citizens when it comes to influencing government:

Speech in the public sphere is expensive, and opposing opinions can be crowded out with money . . . This direct and undue influence means that those with the greatest wealth can buy space in mass media, thereby providing a greater opportunity to influence opinions in the public sphere . . .  either by making direct arguments against public policies (e.g., regulation of tobacco or fossil fuels) . . . and public concerns (e.g., climate change) . . . or by funding advertisements for political candidates.

He points out that the rise in social media and free online content means that media corporations are even more dependent on advertising revenue than ever before, and this, of course, creates an even greater risk for political corruption through corporate-financed media.

When we’re also living under a government that prioritises privatisation of public assets, this gives corporations an even greater foothold in our political landscape — and all of it amounts to a system that is anything but democratic, all the while pointing to Māori, and other marginalised groups, as being some kind of threat to democracy.

This is because Māori rights, like all Indigenous rights, have always been the strongest roadblock to corporate mineral and freshwater extraction, and that is why we are consistently attacked in the media. The racism is not for its own sake. It functions to stoke the anxiety of New Zealand’s middle class, to weaponise them against us, and legitimise neoliberal, far-right policies and corporate extraction.

The threat to democracy and wellbeing is, and always has been, rich colonial capitalists.

 

Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) is a researcher and scholar, and the author of Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. Her work involves advocacy for environmental, Indigenous and human rights.

This piece was originally published on Tina’s blog.