"The Public's Right to Know": Television News Coverage of the Ngapuhi Media Ban

Abstract

On February 5 1840 a large number of Maori chiefs met at Te Tii marae down the hill from the Treaty House at Waitangi to debate at length whether or not they should sign the Treaty ofWaitangi the following day. Ngapuhi, the local iwi, have continued to hold an annual hui at the marae on the days preceding Waitangi Day, February 6 to mark the significance of the day and continue to debate Treaty issues. In 2003 the iwi decided to ban all mainstream media journalists from the hui on the grounds of the mainstream media's continual inadequate and damaging coverage ofWaitangi Day and its related issues. Mainstream media had over the years continually overlooked what went on for several days at Waitangi, focusing instead on what was often merely a few moments of conflict. The response by these media to the ban ranged from apoplectic to bemused. This paper analyses TVl and TV3's coverage ofthe media ban in the context of previous coverage of Waitangi, and argues that while the ban was criticized by mainstream media professionals because it contravened "the public's right to know", the mainstream media, both in its historical coverage of Waitangi issues, and in its coverage ofthe media ban, itself denied the public information and perspectives that belong in the public arena. In earlier work I have argued that New Zealand mainstream television news has been mono cultural in that it has marginalized and/or misrepresented things Maori (Abel 1997). I argued that this mono cultural bias was not intentional; that news workers set out to do their job as well as they could given the constraints and conventions within which they worked. Rather, it was a result of these organizational and institutional constraints, of conventional and unconscious notions of news values, and of ignorance ofthings MaoriMaori on the part of a largely Pakeha news room