In Brief

How the media reached crisis point

As public media is being weakened, the ownership of commercial media is becoming more concentrated.

New Zealand's media has been under pressure for decades. Now the government is putting the boot in. How did we get here – and what does it mean for democracy?

Journalism everywhere is on the retreat as newsrooms shrink, media ownership concentrates, and a tidal wave of clickbait and AI slop threatens to wash real reporting off of our feeds.

In New Zealand, attempts to reform our public media system to adapt to changing times have stalled. Since taking office in 2023, the coalition government has tended more to attack public broadcasters than support them. All this while a right-wing billionaire buys up the country’s largest newspaper.

This week on Public Interest, Ollie Neas speaks with media scholar Peter Thompson about how New Zealand reached this point, why public media has become a political target, and what the decline of journalism means for democracy.

Watch the full conversation below and subscribe to Public Interest for more discussions making sense of politics and power in Aotearoa.

Research by William Bell-Purchas.

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New Zealand's media has been under pressure for decades. Now the government is putting the boot in. How did we get here – and what does it mean for democracy?

Read more

Is this privatisation by another name?

Undercurrents Ep. #7: What’s the government’s real education agenda?

Fifteen years after Pike River, New Zealand is dismantling the reforms it inspired

What the government's conservation U-turn really means