SARAH LEE: Our next speaker now, which is Jim Tucker.
Jim is Head of Journalism down at Whitireia Journalism School,
down in Wellington, and I had the pleasure of catching up with Jim
last week, and being shown around,
and it's a very impressive, modern campus.
So yes, without further ado, welcome, Jim.
[applause]
JIM TUCKER: Thanks very much, Sarah.
I've had to put the pencil through some of what I've written
after hearing some of the things that Jane has said.
For instance, I had this very well-founded theory
that if you could reenact a suicide on a soap opera on television
that that would have much more potential for harm than,
my words here are, the second- and third-hand
accounts of officials and those known to a suicide victim.
But she's just proven that wrong, so that's been excised.
Tēnā koe, George. Thank you for your welcome.
I now acknowledge some of my colleagues from the media:
John Roughan from the Herald down here,
Jonathan Marshall from Sunday News,
Jenny Macintyre.
Shayne Currie was on the list. Is Shayne here?
From the Sunday Herald?
Given the events of the weekend, which have involved the news media
in some difficult legal decision-making,
today's forum is pretty timely.
In the case I'm referring to so obliquely,
questions arise over coverage of failed suicide bids,
presumably not covered by the Coroners Act:
reporting the activities of celebrities;
contempt of court, given that the person involved in this
faces an impending trial;
and a relatively new legal remedy that he and his family
may have available to them, the tort of privacy.
This was only recognised by the Court of Appeal of 2003
in the Mike Hosking versus New Idea case,
when Mike tried to stop pictures of his kids appearing in the magazine.
He failed, but the judges recognised
that the tort of privacy, which is...
A tort is... gives you the legal right, one Person A,
to sue Person B for damages,
and it's undeveloped in New Zealand,
so I'm not sure whether it applies in this case or not,
but it might do, so it'll be interesting to see
whether Sunday News cops it, or not.
Read my blog, there's more on it.
Okay, if you turned up today in the hope of hearing
something relatively rare in this country,
a journalist breaking ranks and dissing his own profession,
I use the word "profession" in quotes,
and those who purport to be its guardians and spokespeople,
then I'll probably disappoint you.
You've read the synopsis of what I was going to say.
Due to the demands of the printer,
that was written before I'd written this paper,
or done any research,
or had a chance to position my thinking.
I'm not an expert in this area.
What was expressed in the preview
came from something that happened once a year
in my hometown, New Plymouth,
when I taught journalism there for five years.
We had a thing called Death Week.
It was an idea borrowed from the Australians.
I went to a conference there, and I thought I heard
a journalism educator mention Death Week.
In fact, it was only Death Day, but we...
I found in our course there were so many times
when we were dealing with the coverage of
trauma, homicides, and road crashes, and ghastly things,
so we aggregated that into a Week.
And one of our best speakers was the local coroner,
someone who's long since disappeared
under the new system.
He was a bit of a renegade, this guy, and he was
a very straight talker, and he ran to his own rules, basically,
and they were not legally correct, but he didn't care.
And he said if the local paper, who complained all the time,
wanted to do anything about it, they could go to the Judiciary,
but he knew damn well they wouldn't,
because it would be too expensive, and they didn't.
But what he said, the phrase that resonates still with me, is:
"Suicide is nobody else's business".
And his rule was, even though the law said that he should
allow the name and the fact that the death was self-inflicted
to be published, he said no.
And he might make an exception if it was a local celebrity,
but that was a big "might".
The 2006 Act has tidied all this up.
We now have professional, or full-time, coroners,
and I presume now they're all kept in line by the Chief Coroner.
But in those days, the coroners were a law unto themselves.
You got a great variation around the country.
In his view, the family and associates of anyone who...
Sorry, I've used that word "commit"... who suicides...
We have to have a verb in there somewhere;
I don't like turning nouns into verbs, I'm sorry... So, commits suicide
suffer enough grief without having it played out
in the news media.
So where I stray from the media party line
on reporting suicide is that I think he was right.
I haven't had any personal family brushes with suicide
that inform that stance.
It's just my view as a human being
who happens to be a journalist.
They are human beings, believe me.
And as a teacher and media commentator.
I found it interesting, by the way, that very few people
have considered what this does to journalists, yeah,
but I think, in Australia, there's the Dart Institute,
is doing a lot of work about the trauma that journalists face.
I mean, we are seen to be inhuman,
possibly because of the things that we do, but...
So I won't, for what I'm saying today,
I won't get any thanks from the Commonwealth Press Union
News Media Freedom Committee,
because we're all aware that the Committee,
which acts on behalf of newspapers, radio, TV, magazines,
has been campaigning for a relaxation of
the suicide reporting rules.
And people like me are expected to sort of fall into line with that,
because it does seem on the surface
to be a reasonable case for an extension of
freedom of expression.
But I break the rules, partly for the reason given above,
and I'll explain the other reasons.
But I'd first like to look at what led to this stand-off
between the Ministry of Health and the news media industry.
It's obviously a lot more relaxed today
because of the work that people like SPINZ are doing,
but there is a stand-off situation there, believe me.
Prior to 1998, the matter of suicide coverage by the media
was settled and little debated within the industry,
as far as I'm aware.
The informal, self-regulating benchmark
was set in the late '70s by a couple of Press Council decisions
against, oddly enough, Sunday News.
The Council upheld complaints about the paper's lurid suicide stories.
To the best of my knowledge and experience,
these became the convention for any subsequent coverage
by any kind of media,
and we've used them ever since in journalism school
when we teach this to students.
Basically, it's report the name and that death was self-inflicted
and nothing more, if you're allowed to do that by your local coroner.
What happened in '98 was, unfortunately,
typical of the way some government bureaucrats
regard the news media.
My wife is one, and I know this personally.
She regards me with great suspicion.
The Ministry of Health issued a report
which set out the way journalists should
thenceforth report suicide.
Its mistake, unfortunately, was not consulting
the news media itself,
which is tantamount to standing on a melting ice floe
and poking a starving polar bear with a small stick.
At that time, the Newspaper Publishers' Association
Chief Executive, Phil O'Reilly,
he's the man who now pops up for Business New Zealand ubiquitously,
a man, I will tell you, who's not far short of a polar bear in stature,
and probably equal in terms of reaction time.
He headed up what could only really be called
a retaliatory campaign that not only attacked the Ministry
for its discourtesy,
but set about refuting its case for tighter media controls,
which is what they were seen as.
I think they're really just guidelines,
but the media's very sensitive
when someone treads on this sacred thing called press freedom.
A measure of refutation wasn't hard to achieve.
The Ministry's position seemed,
from the papers that I've been provided to prepare for this,
to rely on overseas research about media effects
and how these might apply here.
And I guess you could say that such an approach
is inevitably speculative.
Our news media landscape is different in subtle ways.
We have traditionally been 10 years behind the rest of the world;
it's probably only about 10 weeks now with the Web.
The impact of a less restrictive reporting regime
might vary from overseas experience.
When this debate was played out before Parliament,
Jim Anderton and his colleagues
took the conservative stance that,
while local research is not abundant,
or, on media effects, even existing,
overseas experience gave enough of a guide
to suggest doing nothing is the safer course.
In the face of evidence either way, that seems sensible,
and we certainly heard that from Jane today,
and the evidence is pretty plain.
But I think the Ministry appears to have made some mistakes.
One, I think, is that, in the papers that I've read,
it applies the word "media" indiscriminately,
whereas the news media is a separate sector
from those which use fiction, such as TV drama and film,
and we saw some distinction made there in Jane's presentation.
And I crossed out the next bit, because I had the theory,
as I said, that... anyway...
TV and film drama is also more likely to be seen
by that sector of the media audience
considered most at risk, young people.
The Ministry seems to ignore the rapid decline of
traditional, quotes, "mainstream" news media consumption
among those aged 30 and below, most of whom
now get their information from the Web
and their entertainment from DVDs, movies, and TV drama,
although that bit probably hasn't changed much.
I know that whenever I start a journalism course,
I know in my heart that 95% of my students have lied to me
when I interviewed them, when I said, "Do you read newspapers?"
And it's a complete novelty when we present them with
a copy of The Dominion Post every day to go through.
They're quickly hooked in,
but they don't, young people don't read newspapers.
And I think that is not reflected in the papers that I read.
The papers seem to be locked into the traditional news media area.
So what I'm saying is that the Ministry
appears to have paid little heed to the biggest paradigm shift
in the media since television appeared in the '50s,
and that's the growth of the Internet, and social networks.
Those in writing and researching before 2000 could be excused
for ignoring the latter, since social networks are a recent development,
but it seems inadequate for the debate to be held
without up-to-date data on this "new" branch
of the media, and the news media, the Web.
And I was very interested to hear what
Anil showed us, we'll see that today,
the incredible impact of your website.
That's a real clue to us, isn't it, that this is where
we need to be taking a real hard look?
Now the Ministry appears to be saying that it's done
little or no research on the New Zealand news media scene,
in relation to suicide effects,
and until today I was unaware of any intentions to correct this.
But talking to Brian, he's going to tell you
that they're about to, or that they've started a major research project,
so I won't... Sorry, I won't take the wind out of your sails there,
but what I would say is the work is overdue,
and it needs to regard the news media as a fairly complex animal,
whose impacts are felt on many levels of society.
A lot of this kind of research is done
on the mainstream metropolitan newspapers,
a few regional dailies, and the main television channels,
but I would urge Brian and his colleagues
to make sure they're looking at community newspapers.
There's zillions of them around the country,
and they are still doing well with the audience.
Ethnic media outlets, like Iwi radio stations.
There's 22 of those.
There's two Pacific radio stations.
There's Māori Television now, which is having a major impact.
Pay television, online news websites, and of course social networks,
like Facebook and Bebo, and a strange thing called Twitter.
Anyone in the room Twitter?
Yeah, Twitter is now the way that most news is broken worldwide.
The Chinese earthquake was first heard of via someone
under a desk somewhere, as the building was crashing around them,
Twittering to their network, sort of like text messages
sent out to a network.
And it strikes me that these are things
that the young people are into,
and the research needs to include that.
Now what about my friends in the news media,
how have they contributed to the debate?
Well, very defensively.
No primary research on the effects in New Zealand
has been commissioned by the Media Freedom Committee,
so far as I can see.
They had Jim Tully do a fairly limited review,
no more than a literature review, from what I could see.
The limited examinations I've seen have really concentrated on
trying to discredit overseas research
used by the Ministry's consultants and researchers,
a pretty big task, after what we saw today.
And the result's pretty pallid.
Someone picked up the fact that, in a paper,
a researcher had misspelled "causal" as "casual"
and was hugely excited about that.
But frankly I don't see that it was a fatal blow
to the credibility of the paper.
The news media industry as a whole in this country
does little, if any, primary research on anything.
They do... Individual media companies do a lot
of commercial research on readership and sales and stuff,
but you never get to see that.
So I'm not aware that they do any research on media effects,
and they're not interested.
It's too expensive.
So if they want to challenge the Ministry's position, frankly,
they need to spend some money and do some research.
I have a little bit of a problem with researching this topic, though,
because we have such a restrictive regime.
How can we really tell what the effects are
if there is no, in effect, news reporting of suicide,
other than name and the fact that it was self-inflicted?
So I'm not quite sure how you're going to gauge that, Brian.
I'm sure you'll explain, but it strikes me as a kind of Catch-22.
There have been some other problems with the press,
the news media's response.
The Press Council said that something had to be done about this
because of the increasing problem,
especially for young people.
It's a false premise.
If you look at the figures, they're all coming down.
So I don't know where the hell they got that from.
I was going to go into the Media Freedom Committee's campaign
to open the Family Courts,
which ended up being absolutely useless,
because they can get into the Family Court...
You can get into the Family Court as a journalist now,
but you can't report any names or any identifying factors,
so nobody goes, and the only coverage you get
is the documentary, or in-depth, sort of coverage.
So if they got a little bit more out of the courts,
I'm just not sure that it's going to make much difference;
however, I don't know, that's just a speculation.
Okay, I'm running out of time.
I'm going to put this up on my blog,
so if you want to read it all, that's fine,
and I'll skip over...
The final point, I think, is the way that the media approaches
ethical issues generally.
It tends to be utilitarian,
the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
They tend to forget the rider to that is
you shouldn't be doing any harm to people.
And I was reminded of how all this works when I went back
into the Sunday Star Times newsroom
for six months a couple of years ago.
I hadn't written in anger for about 20 years;
I thought it was time to go back.
And I just realised, after 20 years of teaching ethics in the classroom,
how easy it is to resolve ethical issues in the classroom
compared to a stress situation,
such as the one that Jonathan works in,
where you've got one of the most highly competitive markets,
as the Sunday's,
and all of my high moral ground occupation
disappeared almost instantly,
and I was urging people to do things
that were possibly questionable.
I have seen what happens when you do...
You can get a strange situation with some stories.
We had a case, when I was in Taranaki,
of a very prominent family.
Their son committed suicide in Sydney.
He was a prominent rugby player.
And because it happened in Australia, of course,
they weren't covered by the same rules.
The NZ Herald got into this
in an incredibly insensitive and speculative way,
and the family felt very battered and resentful.
The local newspaper treated it with real sensitivity,
didn't back off the story, it was on the front page,
reported that death was self-inflicted,
and the family was very grateful.
And I used that case when I was in Taranaki.
We brought in that reporter
and the uncle, the spokesman for the family,
to talk to us, so our students could see
what the impacts of that were.
So I have to speculate, if we liberalise the regime,
as the media want,
it's a safe bet that someone is going to push the rules to the limit,
in the name of media freedom and utilitarianism,
and it'll just be bad luck for any individuals
caught up in the gears.
Thank you.
[applause]
SARAH LEE: Thank you, Jim.
I've been looking forward with somewhat anticipation
wondering what Jim was going to talk about today,
but it's been fantastic.
I've taken a few points from that myself.
So thank you for that.
We can take one or two questions,
but remembering we've got the forum.
Any questions?
We'll save it 'til then. Great.