It takes talent to lose listeners in a medium still drawing three and a half million Kiwis a week. But Radio New Zealand has managed it with aplomb. Its live audience has fallen every year since 2021, now sitting eighth behind Newstalk ZB and six music stations.  

A confidential review helps explain why. RNZ has “no shared understanding” of its audience. Many staff even believed live radio was in long-term decline — a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Mike Hosking commands a 20.5 percent breakfast share. Meanwhile, RNZ’s Morning Report has embraced “a patchwork quilt of taupe.” 

The review’s prescription reads like a consultant's guide to the blindingly obvious: audit presenters (“some people shouldn’t be on air”), hire one high-profile voice “to signal ambition,” target people aged 50 to 69, shift Morning Report to Auckland and introduce shorter bulletins.  

Most of this is self-evident – though perhaps not to a broadcaster that has built its identity in the Wellington beltway. Audiences prefer presenters worth listening to.  

The review does not use the word bias, but RNZ needs to confront it. Polls show most journalists lean left, and RNZ is no exception. They approach centre-right ideas – that markets work, that success should be celebrated, that wealth creates jobs – as if they are a foreign language. 

Anecdotes are not evidence. But a personal experience sums up RNZ’s problem well. A few years back, an RNZ business reporter interviewed me about “whether billionaires were good for New Zealand.” Really? We scaled it down to a corner dairy: jobs, taxes, community contributions. Billionaires, I suggested, were dairies grown large. “Fascinating,” she said, “could we get that on tape?” As if the thought that wealth might be socially useful had never previously occurred to her. 

RNZ can relocate to Auckland, refresh its line-up and even import a star. But what it has not confronted is that audiences left not just because the sound is tired, but because it is narrow.  

For a broadcaster devoted to “diverse voices,” RNZ has mastered only one kind of diversity: diverse ways of agreeing. The town square became an echo chamber with expensive acoustics. 

Still, the review’s irony is cruel. After years of preaching to the converted, RNZ must now win back the conservative-leaning over-fifties who tuned out long ago.  

The real lesson from the review is simple: if you don’t have anything relevant to say, people switch off.