Editorial Representations of the National Standards Education Policy

Abstract

This article analyses newspaper editorial representations of the New Zealand education policy National Standards. Following Laclau, it argues that the coverage constructed a populist articulatory logic where “parents” functioned as a synecdoche (a part representing the whole) for “the people”. “Parents” became the hegemonic name for the alignment of demands between the media and government fields, an identificatory signifier which partly required the exclusion of educationalists for its cohesion. Overwhelming newspaper support in the 42 editorials analysed is argued to be strongly linked to the policy’s carving out of a niche for the New Zealand journalistic identity in its traditional role as liberal democracy’s fourth estate. This is a form of political agency which uniquely affords its disavowal, permitting its deferral to a constructed public, who desires the neutral transmission of data in order to make informed consumer choices. Hence, the analysed discourse exhibited significant boundary-crossing between the concepts of the parent, the citizen and the consumer. The article concludes by considering the benefits of furthering dialogic, rather than instrumental, relations between journalism and their publics.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• education
• objectivity
• New Zealand
• journalism
• newspaper
• teachers
• identity

Notes

1 As neoliberalism is not the specific focus of this article I do not have space here to define how I would conceptualise it in any detail. See Phelan (2014) and Davies (2014) for approaches to neoliberalism which closely align .with the definitional stance taken within this article.

2 Studies in the media and populism continue to allocate it a passive, or at the best promotional role (see Mazzoleni 2003, 2007).

3 The Official Information Act 1982 enshrined in law the transition from a colonial view of information held by government agencies, which viewed it as belonging to the crown, to a populist view whereby the information should be available on request to any member of the public. More recently New Zealand has consistently been placed very highly in terms of transparency in government, by agencies such as Transparency International.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Massey University Doctoral Research Dissemination Grant.