No points for guessing which book topped the best seller lists last week. After a hotly anticipated launch, Dirty Work by Nicky Hager missed the Waiheke ferry, and Paper Plus owner Ann McDonald and staff spent all Wednesday dealing with people wanting the latest book in the Dirty Politics trilogy.
I managed to get a copy in time to review it in my books page in this issue (page 9). Although I’m not going to re-review it, Hager’s reflections on the media are counterintuitive enough for me to explore here.
As the ultimate media insider, few understand it as well as Hager. From the inside, reporting on stories which shift the political dial, and from the outside, as a reader and also the subject (or more often target) of stories himself.
It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that Hager is among the legacy media’s stoutest defenders. It is, he writes, one of our “defences as a society”. In Dirty Work, he worries that this Maginot Line is disintegrating under a battering ram of lobby groups who are experts at shifting public opinion in ways very few of us understand. The book, he writes, “is, in essence, about democracy – ‘that ideal everyone in politics applauds, and few respect’. The rise of unregulated social media and dramatic collapse of traditional [mainstream] media (msm) have only made this problem worse.”
Is Hager the most maligned and the most celebrated journalist in the country? In 2014 he was called a ‘screaming leftwing conspiracy theorist’ by the Prime Minister (John Key). In 2023 he was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit. He is one of only two New Zealand members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (the other is Matthew Nippert, an investigative reporter covering white collar crime for the New Zealand Herald.
In many ways, Hager is an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter, the kind who works on stories for months (or, in this case, years) and never reveals his sources. His accuracy and security is legendary, as the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and the New Zealand Police learned to their cost. Both had to pay Hager an embarrassing amount of compensation.
Kids raised on Tintin and All the President’s Men used to hero-worship newshounds like Hager. Today fictional journos tend to be villains, like the sneaky tabloid journalist Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter. Rita is a beetle.
Perception versus reality is a central theme of Dirty Work. “The public,” writes Hager, “judges news to a considerable extent by the labels given to spokespeople and by the status and credibility the media organisation accords them.”
Thanks to Hager, sections of the commentariat are, I notice, beginning to refer to the Taxpayers’ Union, the group who inspired Dirty Work, in less than sympathetic terms. On Friday, Steve Braunias called it an “odious quango”.
This marks some kind of change. In June 2024, TU founder Jordan Williams was treated by Radio New Zealand as a go-to expert on parliamentary ethics! Even RNZ, as Hager writes, usually introduces hard-right lobbyists as experts, and left-wingers as ‘activists’.
Does this matter? Yes. While hiding their patrons and agenda from view, Hager says groups like the TU ruthlessly tapped anti-Māori racism, making a sophisticated campaign look like a grass-roots movement.
Did they simply exploit what was already there? Or was it worse than that? Did they actually increase hatred (for money!) distorting a discussion which was only ever meant to be about fixing water pipes? Conservative TU staff who were privy to its Three Waters campaign were appalled. They contacted, of all people, a “screaming leftwing conspiracy theorist” – the journalist famous for protecting his sources.
Hager may have been attacked in the mainstream media, but he never treats it as a mindless corporate beast. Instead, he is one of its warriors.
“There must be an end,” he writes, “to the faulty idea that journalists are ‘ideological’ and take party political positions in their news reporting. This is undoubtably sometimes true, but most good journalism is not on the side of the left or right, but on the side of the public interest. Good journalism holds all corporations and governments to account.”
This might sound trite, but it is true – and, I feel, an insight from the depths of Hager’s being.
Good journalism is not on the side of the left or right, but on the side of the public interest.
The very first people Hager acknowledges in his book are “former TU staff… These National Party whistle-blowers were likeable and principled, and I enjoyed long conversations with them.”
Dismissing every story in the media because it comes from the ‘corporate mainstream media’, and not your favourite podcaster won’t help you make sense of it all. There’s public interest and private interest, and Hager, like most reporters I have ever known, understands the difference extremely well.
This makes him the polar opposite of a “screaming leftwing conspiracy theorist”.
The news media, he argues, “are essential to the future of our democracy, and we must not give up on them… News must be treated as an essential public service and publicly funded like other essential services.”
What we need to call out is not the left vs right in journalism, he says – but wealth and power vs the rest of us.
• Jenny Nicholls
