Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
A year ago, Stuff published a profile of National's new MP for Whanganui.
"A lot of the wins that we achieve out of this office ... are things that you can't go and shout about from the rooftops," Carl Bates told Stuff.
Last week, the New Zealand Herald revealed his family had a stake in some of those Whanganui rooftops.
Head of data journalism Chris Knox reported 25 houses were held in family trusts, "making Bates' family one of the biggest private landlords in his electorate".
But none of them were listed in the official Register of Pecuniary Interests.
Bates insisted he'd taken advice and declared everything required under the rules.
"I exited my business interests to focus solely on being an MP. This included selling my businesses and moving away from involvement in a family property portfolio," he told the Herald.
And in a comical follow-up, the Herald reported one person backed him stoutly in an online Facebook debate.
"He sought advice from the Registrar... and acted according to the advice he received. End of story. Keep up the good work Carl," said the comment.
"It was from Bates' official Facebook account - Carl Bates, MP for Whanganui," political editor Thomas Coughlan noted the next day.
"As people interested in politics often do, a member of my team meant to comment their view under their name without realising they were logged into my page," Bates explained to the Herald.
Apart from a little embarrassment and a highly supportive staff, Bryce Edwards of the pro-transparency group The Integrity Institute reckoned what the Herald had revealed "looked like a pretty large loophole in the transparency rules".
"An MP with a dozen rental properties might think twice about openly voting to, say, end the tax write-offs for landlords. But if those properties are quietly stashed in a trust, the conflict stays off the front page," he wrote.
"MPs in Parliament who get to vote on all sorts of laws and decide the future of our tax system and the incentives ... (and) are often personally incentivised in favour of the current tax-free status for capital gains on residential property," Bernard Hickey said in his outlet, The Kaka.
But when it comes to property, do the news media also have potential conflicts of their own?
Property content as a media asset
Media companies these days can't get anything like the income they used to get from advertising. Low-cost online platforms dominate that market now.
But publicising property is highly profitable for media companies, attracting big audiences in print and online.
A US real estate firm recently paid A$3 billion to Stuff's former owner in Australia for the housing and property platform Domain, which started out as the real estate supplement in its newspapers.
But that is dwarfed by realeastate.com.au, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and valued at about A$30b these days.
The sums are smaller here, but crucial to our biggest publishers.
Since 2018, OneRoof has become more and more important to the Herald's publisher NZME, which deployed financial firm Jarden to work out how to maximise the value of it.
And in June, Trade Me took a 50 percent stake in Stuff's digital wing - a deal based on the stuff.co.nz website's huge audience as a vehicle for publicising properties for sale on Trade Me.
And aside from the stuff in sections devoted to property, news stories about the housing market and housing affordability also get plenty of engagement for news publishers.
Who are the stories for?
Frequently, stories about slips and slumps in property prices have been reported as 'bad news' or 'a cause for concern'.
While general weakness in the economy is a problem for almost everyone, such stories often read like they're written for readers who are homeowners.
They might be good news for others who would benefit from lower house prices - or from shifting investment in an economy which Bernard Hickey has long called "a housing market with bits tacked on".
"For casual observers, New Zealand's news media appears to have a particularly strong focus on housing and property," Aeron Davis, professor of Political Communication at the Victoria University of Wellington notes in a news article published in the UK's Journalism Studies.
It's based on his study asking if "news content reflects wider public interest concerns and reports objectively on housing markets, or is it overly shaped by the property sector itself and promote ever-rising prices and booms?"
His study scanned more than 100,000 New Zealand news articles over 10 years, and analysed 600 articles on the 'housing crisis' from leading news outlets between 2016 and 2023.
Importantly, his study also conducted interviews with 35 regular news sources of housing stories, including journalists and editors who cover property issues.
Their candid - but anonymous - comments are as revealing as the numbers.
"I got a pretty fair spread across the main print news outlets. They came from Herald, the Post/ Stuff, the Otago Daily Times, interest.co.nz and the NBR. Some of those I talked to were also senior editors," Davis told Mediawatch.
"I tried one or two from radio or TV, but I didn't get a 'yes'. I tried to speak to people from the (housing) supplements, but no one on those would talk to me.
"Many of them were aware that it was aimed at a particular demographic. The ones more likely to buy the paper were also more likely to subscribe to the premium sections.
"For the content, I did a brief look going back 20 years - but the main content I looked at was over a 10-year period. I found that a large majority talked about housing in terms of markets and investment rather than sociopolitical issues.
"It is clear that the large majority of property stories frame housing as an investable commodity and discuss housing markets rather more frequently than they do housing as a social and political issue.
"The Herald wrote eight times and the Post nearly six times as many stories about property investment and housing markets than ones about politics and policy," Davis's article said.
"Forty percent of Herald articles covering all aspects of housing and property... were framed around things like the ups and downs of the housing market and whether it was a good time to invest or a bad time.
"Only 5 percent covered stories like homelessness, social housing problems associated, or consequences of having a difficult housing market.
"The Post (formerly Dominion Post) had 28 percent focusing primarily on markets and investment, and about six percent on sociopolitical issues."
The rest of the stories?
"A large part were 'soft' stories or advertorial about very interesting houses somewhere, or celebrity houses up for sale. That sort of stuff made up a large proportion of the others."
His reports said far more of the 598 stories that had the "housing crisis" in them - or were addressing that topic, looked at home ownership and affordability rather than issues like renters' rights, social housing deficiencies, or homelessness.
"Other issues - such as being able to rent, the conditions of housing, those were much lower down the scale."
Whose voices?
Davis also tallied the sources and the range of voices and data that were appearing in these news articles.
"The Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Housing New Zealand/Kāinga Ora are two of the top 10 sources most cited.
"But after that, it is dominated by the property sector - the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, CoreLogic, Quotable Value, Realestate.co.nz - these sorts of property-connected consultancies and advocacy groups.
"There's estate agents and also the banks themselves and a few construction companies like Fletchers."
Trade Me was in tenth place. Now that it is the co-owner of Stuff Digital, it seems unlikely to slide down the list.
But Davis's report concludes "the country's reporters and editors still appear strongly driven by the kinds of professional practices and values associated with the best traditions of the occupation".
"Whether writing in political or business sections, they attempted to investigate government policies and corporate actions and sought out a range of sources while covering a broad mix of issues," he added.
"There's lots of very good, strong journalists left trying to do a good job. The circumstances are against them.
"The journalists (are) trying to do what they can, but they're also aware that their bread and butter is about reporting the markets, reporting what will bring in advertising. So they're trying to balance that.
"So there's very real demands that journalists write stuff that brings in subscribers and advertisers, but also write stuff that takes advantage of what I call 'information subsidies' - all that material that comes from the sources and makes it very easy to whip out a story under pressure.
"All the journalists I interviewed did have these traditional values and tried to get balance and to really investigate stories. But the trouble is there's a large amount of stories produced by non-serious journalists."
Davis found only 1.2 percent of the articles in the Herald Homes weekend supplement referenced socio-political housing issues - not surprising given that it's all about houses for sale.
"Things were not that different in the main papers and news sites, although business and housing market-style stories took precedence over soft, consumer ones," his article notes.
"All journalists interviewed were aware of the soft, consumer-oriented content that dominated OneRoof, property inserts like (Stuff's) Homed and Herald Homes - and were critical of it, regarding it as 'property porn', 'fluff', 'bullshit', and 'not real journalism'," he wrote in his article.
"The agent has the final say in all that copy, and that's a very low form of journalism... It's just advertorial, but it makes so much money," one journalist told Davis.
"It's a great disappointment to me that we have had to follow it in the depth we do… [but] it's deeply embedded in Kiwi DNA, that an easy way to make money is [to] follow the housing market," said another.
Did any of them report getting pushback for journalism that might be counter to their clients' or sources' interests?
"Several said not really - but a few had threats of being sued, or the paper being taken to court and major advertisers threatening to pull their advertising.
"One said they lost all advertising for a year or two from a very prominent advertiser for covering a story contrary to their interests a few years ago.
"I don't know how widespread that is, but it clearly was there, hovering in the background.
"The study didn't research how consumers of news actually interpret those articles... but my feeling is it normalises the idea that houses are investable assets rather than places to live - and perhaps helps create a hierarchy whereby homeowners are on a better rank hierarchically than people who don't own their own home.
"So much of the content has done that over many years, I think it must have had an impact.
"We know there's a great problem of declining numbers of people watching and reading news. There are all sorts of theories as to why that's happening, but I would imagine one is the fact that news is... catering for a particular audience and at the same time putting off a larger audience potentially."
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