Pulled two Ways: Norms of ‘Pacificness’ and Journalism in New Zealand's Pacific News Media

ABSTRACT

By looking at how Pacific media producers position themselves in different contexts, this paper identifies complex identity politics within the communities of practice of New Zealand's Pacific news media production. Interviews with 23 Pacific news media producers reveal a tension between two fields of journalistic and Pacific norms that hinge upon different locative practices – strategic ploys to locate oneself and one's media in relation to community and to other Pacific and mainstream media – and appear to depend on each media outlets’ positioning in relation to language, mainstream institutions and their ethnic community. Analysis of these locative practices helps to reveal some of the power relations embedded in Pacific media outlets’ structural, cultural and ideological contexts. Unlike members of the dominant group, who have arguably more stability in identity, Pacific peoples’ identity is always negotiated, and in ways that must continually answer back to the different forces that position them.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• identity
• Pacific media
• locative practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Tara Ross is a senior lecturer and head of the journalism programme at the University of Canterbury, where she is also a research fellow with the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies. She was an award-winning senior reporter for The Press and the Sunday Star-Times newspapers, and has worked as both a freelance writer and editor, as well as for community news publications. She is of Pākehā and Tuvaluan descent, and studies journalism, diversity issues, ethnic minorities and Pacific media. @taraross_nz, orcid.org/0000-0002-6664-711X

ORCID

Tara Ross http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6664-711X

Notes

1 Note, these categories are messy and are viewed here as orientations rather than fixed categories. The Niu FM producers interviewed for this study worked on English-language programmes and considered themselves as English-language media producers, though the station's night-time programming is in a variety of Pacific languages. Likewise, the TNews producer quoted here identified as a Pacific language producer and was oriented to a minority-language media space, despite also producing a companion programme in English (Pacific Viewpoint).

2 Pākehā/European.

3 The TVNZ charter, implemented in 2003, required the state broadcaster to show programmes that reflected New Zealand's culture and identity, while still maintaining its commercial profitability. By 2006, it was considered a failed experiment, and it was formally abolished in 2011 (Dunleavy 2014).

4 Tu'ungava'e in Tongan.