Why New Zealanders Are Tuning Out and Why Your Portfolio Should Too

Trust in New Zealand's news media has collapsed. According to the Trust in News in New Zealand 2025 report by Auckland University of Technology (AUT), only 32% of New Zealanders now trust the news in general, down from 53% in 2020. Meanwhile, 73% say they actively avoid the news at least some of the time. This decline matters because the same headlines eroding trust are also shaping investor behaviour, and the financial consequences are measurable.

The incentive model driving modern newsrooms is structurally opposed to the incentive model of a successful investor. You need calm, long-term thinking. The media's commercial model rewards urgency, fear, and catastrophe. Understanding this mismatch is the first step toward protecting your attention, and with it, your financial outcomes.

Why NZ Media Trust Has Collapsed

The AUT data suggests the decline is a response to the quality and tone of media output itself. News fatigue has moved from a fringe complaint to a mainstream reality. One driver in recent years has been saturation with overseas political drama; many New Zealanders have expressed exhaustion with the Trump-centric nature of global reporting. When a domestic outlet devotes more column inches to a social media post from a politician in Florida than to local infrastructure problems, it signals a move away from public service and toward entertainment. For investors, the cost is subtler: offshore culture wars crowd out coverage of local interest rate decisions, tax changes, and economic data with a direct bearing on household wealth.

Another factor is lingering doubt after the 2020 to 2023 pandemic period. The $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF), a taxpayer-funded support package administered by NZ On Air, ran from 2021 to 2023. Its first listed general eligibility criterion was a "Commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner." The fund has since closed, but many New Zealanders concluded outlets receiving taxpayer funding had a structural incentive to align with the government providing it. Perception of bias can be as damaging as actual bias, and this particular shadow has outlasted the programme itself.

A Structure Unlike Most Comparable Countries

A piece of context many New Zealanders may not fully appreciate is how unusual our media structure is. The country's two largest broadcasters, Television New Zealand (TVNZ) and Radio New Zealand (RNZ), are state-owned enterprises. Additional government funding flows through NZ On Air. In Australia, the UK, and Canada, the public broadcaster exists alongside a large, competitive private media sector. In New Zealand, the private counterweight is thin: NZME, Stuff, and the remnants of MediaWorks.

The government is the dominant funder and the dominant owner.

For investors, this matters because media coverage shapes public sentiment, and public sentiment drives behaviour. If the dominant information sources carry a structural tilt, the financial commentary flowing through those same channels may carry it too. At minimum, it is reasonable to diversify your information sources with the same discipline you would apply to diversifying a portfolio.

The Incentive Mismatch: Media vs Investor

Our brains carry an evolutionary negativity bias, a survival mechanism prioritising threats over opportunities. The media's commercial model exploits this architecture. Fear generates engagement; engagement generates advertising revenue. A headline predicting a steady return attracts no audience, but one forecasting a crash spreads widely before morning.

The late investor Charlie Munger put it: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." The media's incentive is to capture your attention. A quality financial adviser has the opposite incentive: to keep you calm, invested, and focused on the next two decades rather than the next two hours. Volatility is the media's raw material, but compounding is yours.

Financial publications cluster their boldest predictions around year-end, when outlook pieces draw peak readership. Consider this sequence of real headlines from major publications, each published in December of the respective year:

• 2013 MarketWatch: "Market could be hitting a dangerous triple top"
• 2014 Money Morning: "Stock Market Crash 2015: 7 Charts You Can't Afford to Ignore"
• 2015 The Fifth Person: "4 Warning Signs the S&P 500 Might Have Run Out of Steam"
• 2016 Yahoo Finance: "Stocks have only been this expensive during the crash of 1929, the tech bubble, and the financial crisis"
• 2017 Forbes: "4 Reasons You Should Run Away From S&P 500 ETFs"
• 2018 Business Insider: "A crash could wipe 60% from stocks"
• 2019 Business Insider: "A plunge is on the horizon"
• 2020 Business Insider: "'Overextended' S&P 500 will suffer a 70% crash"
• 2021 Medium: "Should You Sell Everything Now to Avoid a Stock Market Crash?"
• 2022 Market Insider: "Wall Street giants are expecting stocks to crash more than 20% next year"
• 2023 Business Insider: "Prepare for the S&P 500 to plunge 23% by mid-2024"

Over the same period, the S&P 500 delivered a total return of approximately 480%, in nominal USD terms with dividends reinvested. An investor who put $10,000 in at the time of the first headline and ignored every subsequent one would hold roughly $58,000 today. Decades of market data confirm the pattern: the cost of reacting to short-term predictions consistently exceeds the cost of ignoring them.

The Real Cost: KiwiSaver Scheme Switching

This is where the abstract becomes concrete. In March 2020, as pandemic headlines dominated every screen, the New Zealand financial regulator, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA), documented a surge in KiwiSaver Scheme fund switching driven by loss aversion: the well-documented tendency for people to feel the pain of losses roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of equivalent gains. Members rushed from growth funds into conservative options. On a single day, 22 March 2020, providers processed the equivalent of 20 normal days' worth of switches. Over 70% moved to lower-risk funds.

Global equity markets recovered most of their losses by late 2020. Most switchers did not. The FMA found only 9% returned to growth by August 2020. Westpac, which processed 18,140 switch requests during this window, reported 27% have never returned to a growth-oriented fund. Their projection for someone with a $25,000 balance who switched and stayed in a conservative fund: approximately $225,000 less at retirement compared to staying put. This figure assumes long-term returns consistent with historical averages; actual outcomes will vary with fees, tax, inflation, and future market conditions.

The people who switched most were aged 26 to 35, the very group with the longest time horizon and the most to gain from staying invested. These were ordinary New Zealanders reacting to what the media was telling them. The media's incentive was to amplify the crisis. The investor's interest was to sit still.

What to Do Instead

What we consistently observe across our client base is a pattern: the households building wealth most effectively are poorly informed about the daily news cycle but thoroughly informed about their own financial position. They could not tell you this morning's NZ Herald headline, but they know their savings rate, their investment asset allocation, and when their next portfolio review is scheduled.

Three principles worth adopting:

• Set a review cadence and hold it. A well-constructed portfolio should be reviewed quarterly or semi-annually, never in response to a headline. If you find yourself checking your balance because of something in the news, you are following the media's rhythm rather than your own. The news cycle runs on minutes; wealth compounds over decades.
• Interrogate the source before you act on the signal. When a market commentator appears on screen, ask what they are selling: a product, a political position, or advertising revenue. Step outside the local bubble when forming a view. More importantly, primary data from the Reserve Bank, Stats NZ, and Treasury is freely available. You can check an OCR decision directly rather than reading three headlines interpreting it. You do not need someone else to filter it for you.
• Write your plan down. In practice, people with a written financial plan behave measurably differently during volatility. The question shifts from "what should I do?" to "does this change my plan?" Almost always, the answer is no. The plan becomes the filter the media cannot penetrate.

The AUT report highlights a growing segment of the population actively avoiding the news. Journalists tend to frame this as civic failure. We see it differently. The report's own respondents said the news was too negative, too biased, too repetitive, and damaging to their mental health. Choosing to step away from a low-quality information source is often a rational act, and for investors, frequently a financially productive one.

New Zealanders Are Tuning Out. Your Financials Will Thank You For It

New Zealand's media has a transparency problem: in its funding structures, its ownership, and its incentive model. This does not require a conspiracy theory, it requires only the ordinary mechanics of institutional incentive. Your response as an investor is straightforward: build a plan, set a review rhythm, and let the headlines pass. The difference between a headline-driven decision and a plan-driven decision can be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars over a New Zealand household's lifetime.

Become Wealth works with New Zealand households to build this kind of framework: evidence-based, behaviourally aware, and designed to hold through market cycles and media cycles alike. If you would like to explore what this looks like for your situation, start a conversation with our team.