Sunday 14 July, 2013
 
Susan Wood interviews Nick Cater
 
Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE and one hour later on TV ONE plus 1. Repeated Sunday evening at 11:30pm. Streamed live at www.tvnz.co.nz.   
 
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Q + A – 14 July, 2013
 
NICK CATER
Journalist and Author: “The Lucky Culture”
 
Interviewed by SUSAN WOOD
 
SUSAN                         Nick Cater is a senior editor at the prestigious “Australian” newspaper. He’s written a book on the influence of a few in the mainstream, and he joins me now. Good morning to you.
 
NICK                             Good morning.
 
SUSAN                         So we had this fascinating case this week. There's a tweet. It becomes mainstream media. Once upon a time, I guess a rumour would have stayed very much a rumour. And then it becomes a headline. Is this the sort of impact we’re going to see more and more from social media?
 
NICK                             Well, I think social media’s going to have an increasing role to play. I think the speed at which it happens and the way in which increasingly I think people are able to game the system – so they get a story out through social media, get a journalist to put it— in order to bring on in this case, you  know, hopefully a leadership spill. I guess that’s what they were looking at. We’ve seen this in Australia too. So the idea that social media just reflects what happens out there is probably a little naïve. What it actually does is it can accelerate news events as well, so the reporting in a sense becomes part of the energy that goes to propel a story along.
 
SUSAN                         So where does it leave that very important word “accuracy”?
 
NICK                             Well, I think this is a big, big issue for all journalists and all media companies that we have to go back really to the fundamentals of our profession, which is, you know, the first and possibly the only responsibility of a reporter is to report the truth. And of course with social media you just don’t know. I mean, somebody came into my office at The Australian (newspaper), oh, it was a few years back now when Twitter first came in, and she said, “Is X happening?” And I said, “No.” She said, “Oh, I just thought I’d check because I read it on Twitter.” So Twitter was obviously so completely so unreliable that nobody was prepared to take it.
 
SUSAN                         One of the parallels I think we’re seeing here at the moment with Labour’s leader – and he’s of course Opposition leader here – David Shearer, and there's this constant undermining, and there's the drip, drip, drip of information – that being a piece, there was this “man ban” here. With what happened to Julia Gillard, are you seeing parallels with what's going on – a sort of undermining?
 
NICK                             Yes, there's clear parallels here. First of all, though, I think you’d have to say that if a leader’s in a strong position – if they’re in a strong position in the polls, if they’ve got, you know, their confidence up – then they’re almost impervious to this kind of thing, so it can't take place. So first of all there has to be some kind of underlying doubt or weakness in a leader. So it can't cause that, but, as I say, what it can do is be used to feed into it. And I don’t know if you have this here, but we’ve had situations where presenters live on TV presenting a story and saying, “I’ve just got a tweet in.” Well, which is fair enough, but if that tweet’s come from somebody who wants to topple the leader, then the presenter has become a sort of party to the whole leadership coup himself or herself, and that’s a dangerous position for a journalist to be in, I would have thought.
 
SUSAN                         How much do you think the media and social media and all the commentary was part of getting rid of Julia Gillard and how much was true dissatisfaction? Because media becomes part of the game, don’t they? They become pawns in it to some extent.
 
NICK                             Yeah, they do, and I think the other thing you’ve got to recognise with social media is it’s entirely unrepresentative. It’s not democratic at all. I mean, I checked on the number of Facebook friends John Key has. I think he has something like 70,000 Facebook friends.
 
SUSAN                         Knows a lot of people.
 
NICK                             Well, it sounds like a lot of people, but then that means that 98.5% of the population are not his Facebook friends, so as a democratic force, it’s probably not very representative.
 
SUSAN                         Now, your book “The Lucky Culture” – it’s about the loss of that great egalitarian Australian society and, if you like, a ruling elite, isn’t it, who have a very strong voice. Are you seeing parallels in this country?
 
NICK                             I think I detect them here. I should first say that when I talk about egalitarianism – because I just heard that discussion you had on equality – I mean something very specific here. I mean equality of manners, equality of respect. So egalitarian doesn’t mean to say that everybody’s got the same amount of wealth. What it means is that everybody deserves the same respect.
 
SUSAN                         So we value each other equally as people to some extent?
 
NICK                             Exactly, and in a democracy, everybody has one voice. Everybody— Nobody’s allowed to shout anybody else down.
 
SUSAN                         So you’re seeing those parallels in New Zealand?
 
NICK                             Look, I would hesitate, really, to comment on New Zealand, but, yes, you do see them, because this is common throughout much of the Western world. Wherever you’ve seen a great growth in higher education, as you have in New Zealand and Australia and the United States—
 
SUSAN                         So it’s educated kind of liberal elites you’re talking about, isn’t it?
 
NICK                             Yeah, people go through a higher education, typically get a degree and come out thinking about the world a different way. And of course those people who have the degrees tend to get the influential jobs in the media, in politics, in the law, and so a small proportion of people can come to dominate the conversation and discussion. It’s very much what happens in Australia and indeed in America and Britain, and I’m certain it’s probably here too.
 
SUSAN                         Very nice to talk to you, Nick Cater. Thank you for your time this morning.
 
NICK                             Thank you.

ENDS