I stop at the large orange banner inside the front door of the Waiheke Library, asking me to vote in the local elections. Don’t mind if I do! Advancing to an official looking box below the banner, I am about to cast my solemn vote before noticing a small sign fixed to the side: ‘umbrellas’. The other boxes were, on closer inspection, ‘mixed recyclables’ and ‘landfill’.
Thank goodness I remembered my glasses.
Apart from the non-trivial risk to myopic people of casting a vote into an umbrella stand, voting on Waiheke has a lot going for it.
It is, for example, ridiculously easy here to find out what really matters to the candidates on your voting paper, thanks to a running Q&A in this newspaper with candidates, and interviews on Waiheke Radio (88.3 or 107.4FM).
Compare this to the situation former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis finds himself in. “Where I live in Auckland”, he told RNZ, “there is now no community newspaper, and I have seen no interrogation of local board-level candidates.”
In other words, a guy with the research skills of a former newspaper editor is having trouble finding out about local political candidates in inner city Auckland.
Dr Ellis worries about the effect in New Zealand of growing ‘news deserts’ like those spreading across North America, Australia and the United Kingdom. His report for Koi Tū/The Centre for Informed Futures, where he is a research fellow, confirms that these regions “have seen significant decline in political participation and civic engagement.”
According to the report, seven percent of the UK population now live in news deserts after the closure of nearly 300 local newspapers in 20 years. In Australia, more than 200 regional newsrooms have closed in the past 10 years, and 27 local authority areas have no local news outlets. “We believe that, by the time [New Zealand] candidates begin campaigning for the 2026 General Election, the phrase ‘news desert’ will be in common use,” Ellis told RNZ Mediawatch.
Without the benefit of Gulf News and Waiheke Radio interviews with candidates, we would be stuck with online self-promotional biographies, social media and slogans on billboards.
The difference for voters between CV-style biographies and an interview with an experienced journalist is stark. As George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose [is] a constant struggle.” Our assumptions can be overturned with a single interview, which is why the BBC’s slogan is ‘making sense of it all.’
The Great Waiheke Radio Local Board Candidates Debate is well worth a listen if you haven’t already heard it, as is the Gulf News coverage and the Waiheke Radio debates with those standing for the city council in the Waitematā and Gulf Ward. During these interviews, candidates were taken to task, often by each other.
When local newsrooms vanish, it penalises the candidates with complex messages and promotes those who make simplistic, splashy claims which don’t withstand scrutiny.
In the US, news deserts have profoundly distorted the political landscape, and this has had global consequences. According to a State of Local News project from Northwestern University, by October 2024 there were 206 counties across the US without any local news source – that’s no newspapers, local digital sites or public radio newsrooms. As a result, almost 55 million people in the United States have limited or no access to local news.
These vast regions have made a fertile petri dish for one political candidate above all others. “Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in US history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche,” reports the Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.
A Politico special report back in 2018 found that Donald Trump “thrives” in areas that lack traditional news outlets. “The results show a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election… Politico’s analysis suggests that Trump did worse overall in places where independent media could fact check his claims.”
Trump has been remarkably successful in chilling media oversight, from banning outlets he doesn’t like from the White House press pool to restricting reporter’s access to the Pentagon. In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, devastating smaller TV and radio stations, many serving large rural areas. In July he sued the Wall St Journal for $10 billion; this month he sued the New York Times for $15 billion. A lucrative settlement with Paramount Global was followed by the swift cancellation of Trump critic Stephen Colbert. The temporary suspension of another Trump critic, the veteran comic Jimmy Kimmel is shocking but unsurprising, given the leverage Trump now has over even the most powerful media outlets.
As Trump sees it: “[The media] will take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal.”
• Voting in the 2025 local elections is open until 12 noon, Saturday 11 October.
