To infotain or inform?: television news and the public sphere in New Zealand in the twenty-first century

Abstract

This master’s thesis looks into whether the content of prime time television news within a commercialized broadcast market could be continuing to undermine the development of the public sphere in New Zealand. The research obtained data from 2015 to help analyse the content that makes up prime time news in terms of what news categories appear, the amount of hard and soft news, how bulletins are divided up, and how New Zealand politics is framed. The research closely studied prime time news coverage over a one-month sample period, with the data obtained in the study helping to enable further discussion to take place on the effects of news on the public sphere. The study focused on news coverage on One News and 3 News, and was carried out using a mixed methods approach in the form of a content analysis and framing analysis. It also looked at data from 2005 to allow for a brief comparison to be made between different periods of news coverage, ten years apart. The findings of the research showed that soft news content featured more than hard news, the amount of news content per-bulletin in the study averaged only 27-28 minutes, of which a majority was soft news, while news bulletins appeared to have more news content at the top of the bulletin, with an average of 45-49% of news content appearing before the first ad break. In addition to these findings, this thesis concludes that political coverage has been affected by the commercial reality of broadcasting in New Zealand, with politics being presented more in entertaining and dramatic ways at the expense of in-depth discussions on policy and political issues. With this, episodic framing was favoured ahead of thematic framing when covering political stories, while there was also a high rate of general reportage. Based on these results, this thesis argues that the content of prime time television news is continuing to undermine the development of the public sphere, but that more research is needed to fully investigate further how this could be impacting on the public sphere. It is hoped this thesis can be a starting point for this to occur and for further discussion to take place on the relationship between television news and the public sphere.