While we're overdosing on the death of the Duke, we're being starved of news of a possible changing of the guard in our backyard, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell
Samoa may have its first female Prime Minister, but do not let that distract you from the news that Prince Philip designed his own hearse.
Samoa’s election result is on a knife-edge, but here’s the Queen laughing at bees. Bees! LOL.
The longest serving Prime Minister of Samoa since it became independent of New Zealand could be ousted but WILL MEGHAN GO TO THE FUNERAL?!?
You’d be forgiven for thinking New Zealand was a collection of small islands off the coast of England over the weekend and that the only thing happening in the Pacific, the region in which our small islands are actually located, was a funny wee tribe of funny wee brown people in Vanuatu deciding to deify Prince Charles following the death of his father.
So, to confirm, there was an election in Samoa and it’s a more significant story than which tribe deified which royal. It hasn’t been any old election either. It’s shaping up to be historic. It’s incredibly close, with plenty of newsworthy angles. They might not trump the Queen looking at bees and William’s apparent dig at Harry for entertainment value - Samoa doesn’t have the budget to compete with one of the world’s biggest media franchises - but they should warrant some prioritisation over the increasingly asinine royal fare we’ve been served over the past few days.
Samoa and the rest of the Pacific Island nations aren’t just holiday destinations for those looking to avoid winter in New Zealand. There is the slight possibility that the four percent of the New Zealand population who identify as Samoan, and who exist to do more than provide colour to our bold claims of diversity and lend design motifs to our reports on it, may have some interest in the election results in Samoa. There's also a strong argument that it should be of interest to the rest of us. The Pacific Islands are geopolitically significant, described by former Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, as “a more crowded and contested strategic space”.
It may be that those of us who do not quite understand that as much as we’d like to, need some help. I certainly went looking for it over the weekend as my Twitter feed alerted me to what was happening in Samoa, Like a lot of people, I went to some of our largest online news websites as the first port of call.
Based on my last count across a couple of the main sites, Stuff and the NZ Herald, there was a combined total of over 70 stories on the death of Prince Philip over three days. There were three on the Samoan election on each site over the same time period. Coverage of the Royal news was fulsome on air across TVNZ, NewsHub and RNZ, but TVNZ and RNZ both found more space than others for the Samoan election with TVNZ offering up seven stories, four of which were from Tagata Pasifika. RNZ, whose commitment to news from around the Pacific has always been impressive, had 11 or so stories, with several more in the lead-up to the election.
I don’t begrudge a certain amount of coverage of Prince Philip’s death. We are still a constitutional monarchy, no matter how many of us think it’s time for that to change. The Prime Minister does have to get up and say it’s profoundly sad and that the Prince was a globally significant figure. As much as I might think our attachment to the monarchy is somewhat ridiculous and that their main contribution to the world is the export of British cultural imperialism, I have human sympathy for a woman who lost her husband, and admiration for both the Queen’s and Prince Philip’s commitment to a life of service.
I can understand that it’s of interest to a lot of people and that it is news. I just don’t think it's 70 stories’ worth of news. At 70 stories we’re in inane, good-for-metrics-at-the-expense-of-collective-knowledge, celebrity gossip territory. Which ironically reduces the role of the monarchy to precisely the opposite of what royalists would argue it still performs.
I’m not ignorant to the realities and resource constraints of being a commercial media player. The people want what the people want and eyeballs equal advertising revenue. The fact that RNZ remains diligently committed to covering the Pacific might highlight the obvious difference in mandates between state-funded and commercial media. It’s also a great argument for ensuring we have strong state-funded media. Call me naive or overly optimistic but I still want to believe that our large commercial news producers have a role to play in educating us. Scan the recent Voyager Media Awards nominations and you’ll find plenty of examples of exactly that from some of our outstanding journalists.
I also want to believe that that role should include guiding us towards that which might further our understanding of the world around us. In a digital news environment that might mean an editorial decision to actively bump up stories that aren’t yet another churn of the same syndicated content wheel. It might mean investigating content sharing arrangements with a wider and more diverse range of media. If we can arguably access news from anywhere in the world, including the Daily Mail, do we really need those kinds of stories fire-hosed onto our homepages at the expense of more locally relevant and important news? Surely promises of trustworthy journalism could extend to sometimes curating and prioritising content based on what should be important or not just what our lazy, drama-loving eyeballs want?
Media are rightly vocal about the danger of misinformation on social media and offer themselves as an alternative to the information you might find there. But if you belong to a community that could argue it’s being underserved by our mainstream media, can you really be blamed for choosing to source your news and information from the growing base of alternative sources?
By all accounts, Prince Philip was interested in the Pacific. You’d probably classify that interest as colonialist and paternalistic these days but still, you can’t help but wonder whether he might be somewhat horrified to see the news pipes here so clogged with stories of his death, that the democratic machinations of one our closest neighbours could barely be seen or heard above the hum of his Range Rover hearse or the buzz of the bees that so amused his wife.
