"Having dedicated health reporters in key newsrooms makes a huge difference, and giving those reporters the time to cultivate their contacts, to dig through documents, to make OIA requests."
#RachelThomas, 2025
https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=61d7c2a9-7bca-435a-b796-b5d87c90ca92
(1/?)
#podcasts#RNZ#MediaWatch #healthcare#NewsMedia#HealthReporting
The NZ Labour party claimed in 2024 that the contractor count at Te Whatu Ora had an ...
"... increase in People and Communications functions, the bill for which grew from $8.5 million to nearly $30 million – an increase of 243 percent."
https://www.labour.org.nz/hypocrisy_as_te_whatu_ora_contractor_bill_balloons
$30 billion on communications people, yet according to the outgoing Ombudsman quoted by MediaWatch, they're worse at responding to OIA requests than almost any other public entity. How?
(2/?)
What if at least 50% of TWO communications funding had to be spent on health reporters? Hired and managed independently by newsrooms, like the reporters under the Local Democracy and Open Justice programs. So for every $1arse-covering upper management spend a spin, $1is spent on transparency.
In fact, this could be a blanket communications requirement, across both public agencies, and any company or NGO that has contracts with one.
(3/?)
This could have 3 obvious benefits;
* Reversing the incentive to spend public money on reputation laundering
* Improving the accountability of public services, without micromanaging them
* Increasing funding for independent reporting on all provision of publicly-funded services, without necessarily increasing overall public spending
(4/4)
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
