Dec 5, 2024 Society
Metro: It’s been almost exactly five years since I interviewed you last, just as you were about to start at Q&A. In that time a lot has changed in the world — and in the news media industry — and I was curious what’s changed for the show.
Jack Tame: We have a very small team. Me and Whena Owen — who is the reporter on the show — we’re the only ones who are still working on it who were working on it back then. One of the big things that happened there is that my former executive producer Claire [Silvester] got brain cancer. Which was monumental — she was a friend and colleague. I had been in the United States for the last election [in 2020] and was coming back through MIQ. I was a day away from getting out and we were planning lunch for the next day and she just felt sick. She ended up going home and she never ever came back to the office. [Silvester died in February 2022.] So that was a huge change.
Obviously, a couple of other things have shifted. First of all, television is massively diminished compared to where it was even five years ago. Revenues were artificially propped up during Covid, but the full weight of the digital transformation has finally been brought to bear on TV revenue. And whereas TV used to feel like it had great resources and had a kind of distinguished and privileged position in the media landscape, I think, finally, we are experiencing, if not an existential change, then a massive reset in the place that traditional TV holds in New Zealand.
For our show, a few little things have changed it quite significantly. One is that we’ve started interviewing people for longer. When I started on Q&A, we’d have a 50-minute show to fill and would do five 10-minute segments. Over the past couple of years, we’ve shifted to a place where we’ll do 25 minutes with a Cabinet minister. And I’ll get to the end of that and think, Man, there were 50 more things I could have asked. By doing longer interviews, we have doubled down on the thing that probably distinguishes our show from lots of other media, in that Q&A was always the kind of nerdy, policy-focused, dare I say not visually exciting programme. And even though attention spans have for the most part shifted in the TikTok age, and people want to look at things that will make them laugh for five seconds and then move on to the next bit of content, at the same time there’s been this huge shift into podcasts and people really appreciating in-depth content that sometimes goes for hours.
At Q&A, we realised the people who were watching our show were not watching for the visual effects, the whiz-bang experience. They were watching because they were interested in policy; they were interested in seeing leaders put in a position where they had to explain themselves in more depth than we were getting in the daily news turnaround. So we have just leaned into that.
Metro: So was it a conscious decision? Was it a progressive move or did you at some point make a radical change?
Jack Tame: It’s probably happened over the last three or four years. And in part it’s because, after Claire’s death, the new executive producer, Alex [Braae], came on. He’d been producing ‘The Bulletin’ for The Spinoff, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knew less about television — he’d be the first to admit this — and he was open to making some of those changes. It also just kind of happened by osmosis. We’d do a 15-minute interview and I’d say, “Oh, man, I wish I had five more minutes.” And then we’d do a 20-minute interview — “Man, I wish I had five more minutes.” And after a while, we realised we were serving our audience better. I think politicians and the people we were interviewing actually had a better experience, not necessarily all the time but a lot of the time. I just think that all parties were better served by leaning into what distinguished us, which was being in-depth and considered, rather than trying to play into the daily news cycle or give people snackable bits of content, which they were getting elsewhere.
Metro: At the same time, you guys have done quite a good job of producing snackable bits of content. There is a lot of sharing of Q&A snippets.
Jack Tame: That’s probably fair. You put up a long interview and then pieces of that interview, or topics or themes or subjects from that interview, get snipped out, as opposed to lots of other daily news content, which is a three- or four-minute piece. If you listen to Morning Report or to Hosking, they’ll do a three-minute interview with someone, and they will absolutely go straight into the heart of an issue. First question: Why’d you fuck that up? Whereas we are able to work in a space where we can build context and build up to it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t get to that Why’d you fuck it up? question as well. And I suppose it’s probably easier than ever for people to choose the snackable bits and for those to be shared.
That’s the other big shift — we went from being a show that was focused on making TV that aired at the very glamorous time of nine o’clock on a Sunday morning to knowing that all our interviews are immediately up on YouTube and published as a podcast, and that people access the interviews in different ways. It’s not necessarily appointment viewing. We’re under no illusions that a million people are sitting down at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning saying, “Now’s the time to tune into Q&A.” By leaning in as much as possible to those other platforms, we know that our interviews reach people where they are more than they used to.
Metro: The most shareable part of the show seems to be interviewees answering a question poorly. There’s a lot of schadenfreude-sharing.
Jack Tame: People always see what they want to see. It’s our job to try to approach subjects in as balanced a way as possible. We try to commit to that. I’m not saying we nail it all the time, but we really try. I remember when I first started on the show, I would turn on Twitter after an episode, and perhaps I had been giving a Labour minister a hard time. I would have dozens and dozens of messages saying, “You’re so rude to that minister, you’re awful, how are you so mean?”, da da da da. And then the next week, I would treat an opposition National MP with a very similar kind of interview approach and all of the people who last week said I was a misogynist and an awful person were now saying, “Oh, this is so great!” Maybe it says something about the kinds of things that people have an appetite for on social media — that it’s more for politicians being under pressure than it is for politicians answering questions really well and succinctly. That’s probably just the nature of the business.
Metro: When Obama was president, Fox News thrived, and before that, when George W Bush was president, The Daily Show was a cultural force. Do you feel like who is in government impacts either how media is made or how people view the media?
Jack Tame: I just know there’s nothing I can do or say that will lead to people not accusing me of having bias. I accept that as part of the job. If anyone ever goes through my Twitter mentions or my emails or whatever, they will see that I’m someone’s hero one week and someone’s villain the next. There’s just no pleasing everyone. I think there probably are, at a low level, similar dynamics in New Zealand to the ones that you describe. Though I’m not sure that we have the tribalism that makes it so pronounced. Obviously, American politics is batshit crazy in a lot of ways but the tribalism there is so, so toxic and pronounced that I think so much of the coverage becomes quite binary a lot of the time.
Metro: But do you think who’s in government changes how people see your show? It feels natural that the media in general would be harsher towards the government — no matter who it is — than the opposition, because they have more accountability.
Jack Tame: I think that’s true, although new governments probably have a grace period where they are able to get by for the first six or eight months without the same level of accountability that they might expect after three years. But also, in the early stages of a new government, there are only so many things to be talking to the opposition about. It’s not like Labour has a new policy, like they know what their tax policy is going to be at the next election. You have all of these MPs who are in relatively new shadow portfolios who are feeling their way through things. And the opposition focuses almost entirely on criticising the new government — which is fully legitimate — but it means that holding the opposition to account is less relevant than it is before an election. The electorate has repudiated the previous government, or has, at the very least, voted it out. And so what is there to be gained in saying, “Remember you had that terrible GST-off-food policy that people didn’t like?” That’s not to say you don’t interview them, but there’s a shift in dynamics. When there’s a new government, you’re trying to feel your way through it.
It’s really obvious to me that there are some Cabinet ministers at the moment who are just doing so much and moving so quickly — the likes of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown and Shane Jones; they’re so prominent. If you look at the action plans and the stuff that has been achieved and the stuff that’s going before the House soon, there are a handful of Cabinet ministers who are doing 80% of the stuff. So then try to work out where that fits alongside some of their colleagues and who deserves scrutiny… It just takes time for everyone to feel out their new place.
Metro: You were talking about there being less tribalism in New Zealand politics…
Jack Tame: … I still think we have tribalism.
Metro: So how do you feel that politics itself has changed in the last five years, irrespective of who’s in government?
Jack Tame: I think one of the most significant things to happen in New Zealand politics in recent history is the speed with which this new government has unpicked the major reforms of the previous government. The only two big legislative things you could really say have endured are the Zero Carbon Act — which, let’s not forget, Act still does not support, and even though National says it does for the time being, people will have their views on whether their climate policies are going to put us on track to hit our targets — and the reforms of the healthcare sector. That was such a big shift that to unpick it now would be untenable, but as we stand here today, I don’t think anyone would say that it’s been an absolute raging success. But all the other stuff got turned around overnight. So quickly.
Previously, when you’ve had changes between Labour-led and National-led governments, there’s been a kind of incrementalism, and there might be some stuff around the fringes that gets rolled back — the 90-day trials, for example — but to just cut overnight all the big reforms —Three Waters, Te Pūkenga, even the oil and gas exploration ban, all of those things — is huge. Labour will be left considering the last two terms and what they might have done differently to ensure that some of that stuff was more likely to endure. And part of that speaks to the enthusiasm of this government to not make the same mistake.
Whereas Labour, arguably, dithered and had working groups and took a long time to get some of those reforms in motion, this government is moving very quickly with a couple of its big legislative changes, be it around planning reform, fast-track legislation, that kind of stuff. If stuff has been bedded in for a couple of years, you have a greater chance of holding on to those reforms.
It’s curious to me — I’ve thought about this a lot since James Shaw stood down this year — that of the big legislative achievements that have endured outside of the health reforms, the Zero Carbon Act stands out as a unique thing to have survived. How did it survive? It was put through by a minister who wasn’t even in Cabinet, who was not part of the major governing party, but who did it by building support across the House. We see that really infrequently in New Zealand. We have a select committee process that allows input from politicians from across the aisle, but it’s actually very uncommon for people to build bipartisan support around big legislative changes. I can only think of the Zero Carbon Act and the housing density — which ultimately fell apart. I think that speaks to tribalism and to partisanship.
Metro: Is that because the substance of the legislation becomes more widely acceptable to a greater portion of the public, or because it’s more embarrassing politically to wind back something you supported?
Jack Tame: It’s probably a combination of both. I just wonder if there were other opportunities where — if enduring change is the goal — the previous government could have sought to build more support across the House. With something like Three Waters, that problem hasn’t gone away. It is massive, and it’s going to stay a massive problem for successive governments. It’s probably not conceivable that you would have the Greens and Act agreeing, but at the very least, is it inconceivable that we could have worked out some solution and had the major parties support it?
Infrastructure is the big one. Everyone agrees that we’ve done an absolutely appalling job of funding infrastructure in New Zealand. Surely our major parties can come up with a pipeline of projects they agree to fund. Maybe National wants to build a four-lane highway up north, maybe Labour wants to do something else. You can clearly build up some sort of structure that allows for the pet projects of the respective parties to still come through while they’re in government. But surely we could reach agreement on projects that are in the national interest to fund. That hasn’t been prioritised, in part because, globally, there is absolutely a trend towards tribalism. And I don’t think that our constitutional structure disincentivises tribalism at all.
I even think about things like the way that debates in the House don’t really matter. No one’s watching Parliament TV. There are probably a dozen people watching it at any one time. But it always amazes me, following certain politicians on social media, how even if they’ve been rinsed in the debate, they’ll be putting up a choice clip from the speech on social media. That’s arguably more important to them.
Metro: My favourite is the MP with a great little quote but you see all the empty seats behind them.
Jack Tame: Yeah! What was the purpose of this? Who is this really for?
Metro: So the decline of television is happening in the broader context of the media in general and the news media in particular being under stress. One thing that strikes me about Q&A is maybe you’ve had the fortune of being prebuilt to be sustainable — there’s a small team, a desk and a couple of chairs. Sure, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes but it’s not like Stuff trying to replicate a 6pm news show on a fraction of the budget.
Jack Tame: The dollars-to-hours ratio, like what Q&A costs versus the total number of hours of television we produce, is very low. We still cost money. I am under no illusions. If we didn’t have the support of NZ on Air, I just can’t see how we would exist. And we are very fortunate to have that support. There are still no ads on Sunday morning, so we have literally zero revenue. Nothing. All we do is cost money.
Metro: It’s a good excuse, though. Then you’re not in the market.
Jack Tame: If we were more expensive, it would be, I think, harder to justify. I would like to think that, regardless of people’s political views, they can see value in having a publicly available TV interview show where the country’s most powerful people are questioned. TV still has some magic. And interviewing is a great example of TV, I think. Something is conveyed, even with a facial expression, or a pause, or a little smirk, when someone powerful is being interviewed that isn’t necessarily replicated in other forms. There’s real value in that. So idealistically, I would like to think that people — regardless of what they think of me — would see value in the format.
Metro: Without public funding and with a decline in advertising revenue, we then come to rely on media which is audience supported, which tends towards media telling people what they want to hear. How do you see the future of what you do?
Jack Tame: Like, will I have a job in three years?
Metro: Yeah! And where do you see current affairs and news media going?
Jack Tame: I think there are a couple of things. I watched with interest, obviously, when the Newshub changes were announced and then shows were cut at TVNZ. And there were a lot of people gleefully saying, “Oh, the media is all about observing; they should have observed this phenomenon a while ago.” It’s totally true. Anyone who’s had their eyes open will have seen that revenues in TV were declining. The thing that concerned me most is that it wasn’t as though every single person working in a journalism job at TVNZ or at Newshub immediately went into another journalism job elsewhere. A massive proportion of those jobs were gone, just totally gone.
So when I think about the future of media, the thing that concerns me most is that we’re on a trajectory whereby we continue to eat away at the overall number of journalist jobs. That serves the interests of powerful corporations and powerful people, but it doesn’t serve the interests of broader democracy.
I started working in TV when I was 19. I remember all of the old journalists would say, “Oh, you missed out on the golden years of TV.” But we still had crazy resources. I remember there was an accident on the West Coast of the South Island and I didn’t hesitate to hire a helicopter for a couple of days and fly from Christchurch. There’s no way on earth that would happen now.
I think I’ve always known in my bones that broadcasting is pretty tenuous at the best of times, even when revenues have been much stronger than they are today. Like so many of my colleagues, I’ve definitely been forced to reckon with what I would do in a world where I didn’t have this job, and where the pathways for journalism just don’t exist like they do now.
But there is opportunity that comes with all of this — like The Spinoffs and the Newsrooms of the world. And Bernard Hickey — what an amazing model he’s created for himself. My concern is that so much of journalism, and the news cycle, builds on the work of others. Even if it’s just having Tova [O’Brien] at a press conference with the PM and then they’re putting that online, and then Bernard writes a column off that. Or the PM says something at that press conference that gets picked up by another journo, who wouldn’t have picked up on it if a question hadn’t been asked by a previous journo. All of them pick up on threads that have been put forward because of someone else’s work. My concern is that if you keep on whittling down the number of journalists, you’ll get to a point where you just have nothing left.
