Mediawatch: Media milking butter battle

RNZ News

a day ago

Big money for butter - as seen on TV on 1News on Tuesday, reporting the bitter butter battle turning political.
Photo:
screenshot / TVNZ 1News
"How much is a block of butter?" a reporter from Stuff asked as things wrapped up the prime minister's post-Cabinet media conference on Monday.
The tension was palpable. This was a high-stakes moment.
"About $8.40 in New Zealand at the moment," Christopher Luxon responded.
Close enough, thankfully for Luxon. Woolworths' in-house salted butter is $8.50, and you can get 500g of Rolling Meadow at PaknSave for $8.29.
The consequences for getting it wrong would undoubtedly have been dire.
In case you've been living under a rock inside a cave on the planet Venus during a solar storm - while wearing a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones - our entire nation and nearly all of its media organisations have been fixated on the price of 500g of pure concentrated uncut dairy.
The price has risen
nearly 50 percent
in a year and that's caused quite a few conniptions back home on Earth.
Stuff actually ran
a story
on Luxon getting the price of butter right.
Meanwhile journalists accosted Fonterra boss Miles Hurrell out in the open with questions about the cost of his company's yellow gold.
First he had to
fend off TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman
, not once but twice, ahead of a heavily-promoted meeting with finance minister Nicola Willis at Parliament.
Hurrell got away, only to encounter RNZ's political reporter Giles Dexter afterwards - and by then he was pretty fed up.
"I'll talk to media in the morning," he replied tersely to Dexter's enquiries. (Two more days passed before he actually did).
But the media's intense interest in that meeting was understandable. It had been billed as a kind of
'please explain'
and the finance minister told RNZ's
Checkpoint
she would grill Hurrell on the price of butter.
"Sometimes we're seeing cheaper prices in British or Australian supermarkets and I'm interested to understand how much of that is about the lack of supermarket competition here - and how much is about the prices that Fonterra is passing through," she said.
But that tough talk got the goat of Newstalk ZB morning host Mike Hosking during
his weekly interview
with the prime minister on Monday.
"No she's not," he responded, after Luxon said Willis was doing a good job on food prices.
"She's off to Fonterra this week to meet who? Miles. And what's she going to talk to Miles about? She's going to talk about the price of butter. I can tell you why the price of butter is the price of butter, and I don't know why we have a finance minister who doesn't know. We get the international price for butter."
"Nicola has this penchant for saying stuff that might lead you to believe she could produce an uzi out of a handbag and blitz the room," he said later in
a two-minute-long Mike's Minute
.
The following morning Willis
was keen to tell RNZ's
First Up
her meeting with Hurrell was just a regularly scheduled catch-up.
But the Fonterra boss was pursued around Parliament and the streets of Wellington nevertheless.
It didn't deter our media from delivering blanket coverage of the meeting and post-butter discussion analysis - and the price of butter more generally in news bulletins, commentary and
explainers
.
The
Herald
's Liam Dann implored the media to have a little bit of perspective in his weekly
column
in the
Herald on Sunday
last weekend.
He said high butter prices are actually only costing many families about $4 a week and other price rises hit harder.
He told
Mediawatch
we might be overreacting to the incredible cost of a spreadable product.
"If you're going to get worked up about a food product in New Zealand, it's going to be dairy. There's a sort of cultural connection to dairy and this feeling that we produce so much of the stuff that it's not fair that it costs so much."
Dann said high dairy prices were a net positive for the country's economy, with the current spike expected to bring in an additional $10 billion in export revenue over this year and next. Politicians - including former Fonterra employee Nicola Willis - were well aware of that.
But he acknowledged those gains were less tangible and visceral than the sight of a $10 block of butter in the supermarket aisle.
The high price of butter was also emblematic of the wider cost of living crisis, he said.
"I'm certainly not downplaying the cost of living crisis... but if you actually do the maths and crunch how much discretionary income's coming or going based on your butter consumption, we're talking cents."
"Perhaps it is just that we need something to focus on, to channel that anger around what's happening to the overall supermarket sector."
Dann has pleaded with politicians to "
raise the quality of debate
" and focus on structural economic issues rather than the price of butter.
But surely that goes for the media as well?
Liam Dann didn't want to blame the media, but said the wider issue of New Zealand's low wage and under-productive economy was far more important and worthy of analysis than individual commodity prices.
"How do we organise the system so we've actually got a thriving domestic economy, people are paid more and can afford to eat these products that we've grown up culturally seeing as our own?"
Good question. For now though, the media is firmly focused on butter.
The meeting between Hurrell and Willis, in particular, would have been a friendly one rather than the adversarial encounter some stories suggested. But that reporting was driven by the intoxicating allure of thousands of clicks.
"We see that the butter story is what everybody's clicking on... and it becomes a topic that gets momentum. We start asking economists about the butter, and then that gets into people's heads," he said.
"We get a sort of a media spiral going where it just becomes a bit of a phenomenon in its own right."
That may not be as edifying as a discussion of the economic conditions behind our lagging wages, but it's certainly a lot more clickable.
In the end, just like Fonterra, the media is a business too - and it also follows the money.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter
curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.