Hobbling the News: A Study of Loss of Freedom of Information As a Presumptive Right for Public-interest Journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand

Public-interest journalism is widely acknowledged as critical in any attempt at sustaining actually-existing democracy and is reliant on access to State-held information for its effectiveness. The success of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Official Information Act 1982 contributed to domestic and international constructions of the nation as among the most politically transparent on Earth. Early narratives, partially heroic in character and woven primarily by policy and legal scholars, helped sophisticate early understanding of the notably liberal disclosure law. However, they came to stand in stark contrast to the powerful stories of norm-based newsroom culture, in which public-interest journalists making freedom-of-information (FOI) requests bemoaned an impenetrable wall of officialdom. Set against a literature that validates its context, inquiry and method, this thesis explores those practice-based accounts of FOI failures and their implications for public-interest journalism, and ultimately political transparency, in Aotearoa New Zealand. It reconstructs FOI as a human right, defines its role in democracy theory and traverses the distance between theory and actually-existing FOI. The research employs field theory in its approach to FOI as a site of inter-field contestation, revealing that beyond the constitutional niceties of disclosure principles, agents of the omnipotent field of political power maintain their status through, in part, the suppression of those principles. Those agents of the previously autonomous public administrative field, in relative terms, are subsumed into the field of power to act in its principal agents’ interests. The instruments of power that allow the agency of State officials to become dominant over the agency of skilled and experienced public-interest journalists become visible through the investigation. A thematic analysis of rich data generated from transcripts of 18 semi-structured interviews lies at the heart of the empirical and phenomenological research. This analysis is ...