Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Ex-Salient editor Michael Appleton

Interview

Sunday, 19 October, 2003

Russell Brown: The student press, once a rare voice for youth and a breeding ground for feisty journalists, has much more competition and, consequently, a lower profile these days.

But it can still yank the chain sometimes, as an interview with Prime Minister Helen Clark in Victoria University's Salient magazine has shown. The lengthy story, by the magazine's editor, Michael Appleton, is based on a half-hour interview with the Prime Minister. In it, Appleton describes Clark as "intolerant", guilt-ridden over the loss of her left-wing ideals, authoritarian and a "cognitive miser".

The story certainly got a response: the Prime Minister's Press secretary, Mike Munro, wrote to Salient to denounce it as "a parade of opinions, assumptions and half-truths." Appleton, he said, had filled it with opinions he had lacked the courage to put to his interview subject. The magazine received about a dozen phone calls from angry readers.

Others liked it: Salient says it got calls of congratulation from journalists and academics, one of whom said it was the best portrait of Clark he had ever read. And National MP Simon Power quoted it approvingly in Parliament this week.

Michael Appleton has just left the editor's chair and taken up a scholarship at Cambridge University, he joins us now on the phone. So, Michael, how's it feel to be quoted in Parliament by one of National's young turks?

Michael Appleton: Well, it feels a bit strange because I'm not a natural ally of the National Party at all - our politics don't coincide at all, but I guess Simon's an opportunist so he'll take arguments from wherever they come.

RB: Did you anticipate this story creating the stir that it has?

MA: Not really. I mean, the response, both written and verbal, to me surprised me by the extremes that it came in. It did surprise me that people would call up and say ... I mean I'm sure they didn't mean it and it was probably students playing a joke, but saying that I didn't deserve to live because I'd written something about the Prime Minister like this, um, so yeah it certainly surprised me.

RB: What did you set out to achieve with the story?

MA: I guess to put the Prime Minister's achievements and also Helen Clark's political career in some kind of overview and offer an account - and I'm very, I'm very upfront that it's only one account and many other journalists could go to this job, or go to the same task and come up with other accounts. But offer an account of where she's come from and where she might be going.

RB: Did you see yourself in any kind of provocative tradition of the student press?

MA: Kind of. I mean, I certainly knew that the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister's office wouldn't like what I'd written. But referring specifically to what Mike Munro wrote in his letter to my having pre-conceived ideas about the Prime Minister when I went in, certainly the shape that the article took didn't take form until after the interview. And I did a lot more reading after the interview with the Prime Minister and sort of came to these conclusions. But I mean when it came to writing it and the conclusions I'd drawn, I certainly knew that it would be provocative, but that wasn't certainly the intention of the piece.

RB: I think one criticism of the story might be that you brought rather too much of yourself to it. In a six thousand two hundred word story I counted up the words that are from Clark, from the interview - just over eleven hundred. It seems a rather odd balance for a feature interview. I mean, as you point out, a story offering analysis and commentary is of rather more use for a reader than a straight Q and A, but there seems to be rather a lot of analysis in there.

MA: Yeah, and I mean I guess the thing about it that is rather unusual is that it's kind of a mix of a profile and an opinion piece. I think we flagged that reasonably well on the contents page where it said that I was arguing a point of view and it said 'Michael Appleton argues blah blah blah ...' Um, so I think that was reasonably well placed and I don't see any problem with doing that. It might be unconventional, but so long as the readers know that that's what it is, I don't see any problem with that.

RB: And you're glad you did it?

MA: I certainly am. It was an enjoyable experience and I guess one thing about the Prime Minister I guess is ... um, one good thing one can say about Helen Clark is that she's certainly a lot more open to the media than other heads of government. No other student magazine in the world presumably, would be able to talk to their head of government as I did. Having said that, I don't think the media should re-pay that openness by being subservient to her and, you know, not criticising her 'cause they want that access to continue, and I guess that's one thing. Luckily for me I won't be working as a journalist in New Zealand for the rest of Helen Clark's reign most probably.

RB: Would you have expected some impact if you were working as a journalist?

MA: Certainly. I mean I think you see, there have been very few journalists who work in the press gallery for example, who have been very hostile towards the Prime Minister and certainly there were many journalists who were hostile towards Robert Muldoon, or towards um, even Jim Bolger, so certainly that hasn't been the case with the Prime Minister. The way it is might have something to do with some, you know, correlation between the views of journalists in the press gallery and the Prime Minister, but I think it also probably has a little bit to do with the reaction she has had when criticised in the past. Most notably I guess, in the Corngate case, yeah.

RB: I suspect that her reaction would also be that if you're going to be as critical as you were of her that you would be accurate in doing so. You said that she seldom bothers showing up in Parliament and that her attendance record there has been worse than any Prime Minister in living memory. That's actually not borne out by the figures we've obtained. Where did that come from?

MA: Well, that was ... it's not borne out by the figures you've obtained who had a worse attendance record. Um it was borne out mainly through ... um I mean, I read a lot of political journalism in New Zealand and it was borne out by comments that were made in I guess, the major daily newspapers, plus what else? I read North and South and the Listener I guess so it was borne out from that. So um ... and the Prime Minister herself has said that she tries to come in only a couple of days a week so she can be out there in the community a lot. Certainly I think her attendance at Question Time has been worse than others but um, if you have figures saying otherwise then I guess that's an inaccuracy.

RB: You place quite a lot of significance in the story on what you describe as her outbursts on Iraq - the Al Gore comment in an interview and the 'law of the jungle' thing in the Guardian. Now, I have to say, these weren't really outbursts, they were straightforward answers to specific questions, as we've shown on this show. In both cases the words actually came from the interviewer.

MA: Yeah well with the um, the law of the jungle thing, sure, but certainly they both constituted ... and I mean I agree that they were certainly over-egged by the Opposition here too, the significance of them, but certainly they constituted criticisms, and I think fairly strong criticisms that I'd agree with of the Bush administration. And that's certainly something that as the war was getting underway that she wasn't going to do.

RB: Erstwhile editor of Salient, Michael Appleton. Salient was judged the overall winner and best designed in the recent student media awards.