Voter apathy and journalism student survey results
by Justin Henehan 
There is something perverse about a world where, in one country, democracy activists are shot by the military and then abducted from hospital for interrogation, while in another country, only 41 per cent of people bother to vote in their local body elections.
Voter apathy is the term most bandied about.
There are a lot of factors that determine whether a person votes or not.
Media coverage, information about candidates, election issues, voter fatigue, ease of voting, education, poverty – all pay a part in determining how many people exercise their democratic right to vote. It seems a lot more complex than just not caring.
After the local body election the postmortem began immediately.
“These local elections are likely to be remembered by voters as the most boring ever, if they remember them at all, and the turnouts were abysmal,” the Sunday Star Times said.
Local Government New Zealand called it disappointing.
“Local government affects people’s lives so profoundly but it’s a bit like housework, it’s only noticed when it’s not done.”
The inference one can take is, as the Dominion Post put it, “a considerable swathe of the population feels the actions and direction of their local authority is of insufficient importance to motivate them to vote”.
There are many obvious differences between a place like Burma and any of the western advanced-capitalist nations. In New Zealand it seems that we just don’t think there’s much at stake when we go to the pols. The debilitating effect this has on a democracy should not be underestimated.
This from a 2006 study by Dr Helena Catt and Peter Northcote of the New Zealand Electoral Commission on encouraging voting among young people:
“A strong finding from Franklin’s (Franklin 2004) study was the persistence of early behavior: those who voted when they first could were more likely to repeat the behavior and those who did not vote were likely to not vote again (Vowles 2006).”
They find that voting or not voting is an habitual behavior. Apart from the frightening vacuousness of the ‘habit-vote’, where the act of voting is akin to finger-nail bitting or nose-picking, what this implies very few people are politically motivated when they vote.
If people aren’t voting politically, then it’s little wonder that dubious government legislation, like the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill, a bill which blurs the definition between legitimate political activism and terrorism, is read in parliament with nary a cocked eye-brow.
Here are the results of my informal survey of AUT University journalism major and graduate diploma students. The question:
Journalism is political.
Agree?
Disagree?
Why?
Five respondents of 72, two agree, one disagrees and two disagree and agree.
Here are their responses:
Agree 1.
“Yes I think it’s political - not neccessarily in a literal sense, such as Italian media being controlled by the government, but political in a sense all workplaces and ‘communal’ industries are.
“You have to play along certain rules, follow certain diplomacies, but at the same time be willing
to slit the competitions throat.
“Political as in it has a sense of rules everyone follows - not necessarily the rules set by law. e.g. the satire rules for media in parliament, and how media banded together to tell the government to fuck off, or how journalists universally won’t betray a source - it’s a matter of playing it to your advantage.”
Agree 2.
“Journalism is politics with a raging hard-on! It is the padding for advertising - which is the cornerstone of consumerism.
“And consumerism is fossil fuel on the structure fire of capitalism. (it’s a metaphor fruit salad)
modern Journalism enables the delivery of the “YOU NEED MORE!” message.
and it’s immolating the planet.
“And then there’s the content. Most of it performs the essential function of maintaining the status quo. That is; propping up capitalism, the nation-state, and sustaining the new colonialism.
“And finally there’s the individual bias of each journo, editor, publisher and owner.”
Disagree 1.
“I disagree: i think journalism reports on politics and can even affect it but is not and should not be political in itself.”
Agree and Disagree 1.
“Politics is a PART of journalism, just like it’s a part of life. But not the only part.
“I don’t think everything needs to be made blatantly political (even if underlying it is political values) because you just turn people, who aren’t interested in politics, off. Especially in the case of Te Waha Nui, that sometimes comes across as being political for the sake of being political.”
Agree and Disagree 2.
“Disagree. Well, not that all journalism is political. The stories in community newspapers are often not political (i.e. a family who’s dog ran away a month ago and returned recently). Though the major newspapers/magazines often have a tendency to be politically aligned.”
What do you think?