How do we rebuild community after the divisions created following the mandates and the Wellington protest? That’s a question we attempted to answer last month on the morning show with regular contributor and local counsellor Maree Haworth.
(Listen to the full interview below:)
With so many of us having strong feelings about the protest we took the approach that, as you do in a mediation, we needed to make sure all sides of the debate were understood by the other sides.
This has been very hard to do with the one-sided view the media has been giving us of the protests. Shouldn’t surprise us to see bad press for a protest, it’s very normal for the media to side with the establishment when reporting protests, they’ve always done it – the only difference this time was the amount of ammunition they were given by some of the protestors.
Luckily for us Maree had been to the protest and from her perspective as a counsellor what she saw was community building in action: People were taken care of, there were “no drugs or alcohol” signs at the entry points, there were things for children to do and everyone was well fed thanks to a well-managed food produce brought in from outside the protest
Clearly this is so different to the view the media presented that I’m expecting people to feel a sense of disbelief - but please understand this is very normal for reporting on a protest and there’s a reason for it.
What was really happening in Wellington before the police went in was a PR battle. The government and police would have been very reluctant to use force if there had been more public support for the protesters. Luckily for them the lack of discipline amongst a minority of the protestors gave the media a steady stream of ammunition.
To underline how normal this kind of reporting is lets go back to the less controversial anti-GE protest in 2003 in Auckland. According to the organisers 40,000 people attending, according to the police there were 30,000, the Sunday Star Times said it was 25,000 and the good old Herald claimed there were only 11,000.
A complaint was also made to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about a TV report on the march. The BSA agreed that the report was biased but strangely said they weren’t going to take any action.
Coming back to the recent protests; aside from the distorted view from the establishment media as they tried to help the government with the PR campaign, we also shouldn’t underestimate how the need for online clicks has changed the way news is presented. Inducing a strong emotional response in news consumers is now the major technique to keep people engaged. Unfortunately it also triggers the fight or flight response where our rational brain goes offline and the emotional and survival responses take over.
This physiological response is great when we’re in real physical danger but absolutely terrible when we’re trying to assess the usefulness of new information.
The actual details of who was right and wrong aren’t as important to me as the fact that we’ve become very divided. We need to remember it’s perfectly normal for people to have different opinions and that getting uniform agreement about any issue simply never happens. Normally we cope OK with this fact of life so maybe we need to reflect on how media bias and sensationalism, combined with the government use of fear to drive the vaccine program pushed us to the to the point where we can’t even talk to each other anymore.
As Maree always reminds us we’re all doing life together, these issues will eventually pass and we’ll still have all the same relationships we had beforehand. The question is how do we want those relationships to be working.