Shock of the news - and the state of the arts

A new report says the arts and culture get just half of the space in our media that's devoted to sport. Mediawatch asks a leading local culture critic if the arts are just a 'nice to have' for our media now - and why he's warned cultural criticism could disappear with the older Pākehā blokes like him. A new report says the arts and culture get just half of the space in our media that is devoted to sport. Mediawatch asks a leading local culture critic if the arts are just a 'nice to have' for our media now - and why he is warned cultural criticism could disappear with the older Pākehā blokes like him.Creative New Zealand inadvertently picked a pretty intense week to release a new survey showing the media coverage of arts and culture issues is dwindling. One day earlier the media were finally able to publish a flood of stories about the crimes of multi-millionaire arts benefactor and patron Sir James Wallace, following a four-year legal tussle over name suppression that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The crimes were described by many in the media as a "worst kept secret" but on Morning Report the next day longtime arts writer and RNZ producer Mark Amery pointed out plenty of people engaged in the arts - including in organisations Wallace backed - would not have known the truth.Amery also pointed out Sir James' financial input into the arts was such that the revelation raises significant questions about future funding which arts writers will now have to confront as well. "I think that's good. I think there's a lot of silence for artists (who) don't want to bite the hand that feeds. There's a very interesting tension in the arts over where the money comes from," Amery told Mediawatch. How the arts are covered in our media had already been on Amery's mind when - before the Wallace revelation - he wrote his final weekly arts column for the capital's daily The Post this week. "Like journalism, the arts ask us to consider other perspectives. Both our differences and commonalities become more visible in the media and we need to report them with care - something we currently struggle to resource," he said. That was thrown into sharp relief by Creative New Zealand's Visibility Matters survey of arts and culture coverage in New Zealand media, which Amery himself suggested to the national arts funding body. Isentia's breakdown of media content in the year to June 2022 found 25 percent of our media coverage is about sport - but arts and culture only accounts for half as much. It said the arts coverage was "diluted and sparse" and about three quarters of it was consumer-focused stuff about TV, film and music. …Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details