The Stuff media organisation has issued an apology to Māori this morning for what it calls decades of monocultural journalism.
The organisation has gone back through decades of journalism, as far back as the 1860s, to analyse its reporting.
Tā Mātou Pono, or Our Truth, was led by Pou Tiaki editor Carmen Parahi and editorial director Mark Stevens.
Stuff holds itself accountable for wrongs to Māori Tā Mātou Pono | Our Truth Photo: Stuff
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“We hold the powerful to account, we decided we should hold ourselves as well,” Stevens told Nine to Noon.
“We looked right back to our oldest papers 163 years old our first paper The Taranaki Daily News, across print and digital.
“We went into it with our eyes open, we didn’t really know what we would find, but it didn’t take too long for Carmen and her team to establish that it wasn’t great reading.”
Parahi says journalists trawling through the archives were disturbed by what they read.
“Some of them would send messages and say ‘I can’t believe we said that, how could we do that? Why did we do that? This is our legacy, this is who we are.”
An overarching picture emerged as numerous stories were analysed – an absence of Māori voice, Parahi says. As well as quite blatant racism in the earlier editions.
Coverage of Parihaka in the Taranaki newspaper was particularly biased, she says.
“We now know that is one of the darkest periods in New Zealand history what happened at Parihaka.”
More recent coverage showed lack of balance had endured in the reporting, Parahi says.
“I call that one of our darkest eras the 1990s and early 2000s.
“We looked at our papers where there are land claims issues, where there were race relations issues we were siding with the Crown, which is weird, we’re supposed to hold the power to account.
“To see that body of work during that time clearly showing a bias for the Crown and mainstream Pākehā against Māori was hard to see, but it was good for us to see it, because we know we need to be really careful and mindful that a whole body of work can make a huge impression.”
Editors and journalists thought they were reporting independently, Parahi says.
“But when you looked at the stories, what was happening is that again we were taking the position of harassing the Crown, but we weren’t taking the position of finding out what was going on with Māori”
Coverage of Te Urewera painted Māori as the enemy, she says, and the amplification of criminality on Māori reporting is a thread running through all reporting from the 19th century to recent times.
“We’ve actually done that right from the beginning of our papers until now, Māori were always seen as the stirrers, the activists, the criminals, the people wo were not doing what they were supposed to do the way we want them to do it.”
Māori voices were also absent from stories, she says.
“We talk about Māori, we have photos of Māori but we don’t actually have Māori voices in the story
"Or we put the Pākehā person at the top of the story and put the Māori person further down the story and we don’t give them full quotes we give them partial quotes, it’s those sorts of things that all add up to a picture.
“And those are the things that are so subtle and so small that we actually don’t think we’re doing it, until somebody points it out."