How is New Zealand’s political ‘reality’ being described?

Influence

New Zealand’s media landscape is dominated by a handful of major outlets. According to Roy Morgan research:

• Stuff,
• NZME and,
• ODT

collectively reach millions of New Zealanders — yet in an era obsessed with misinformation and disinformation in the social media space, we rarely stop to ask how traditional media shapes our understanding of who holds power, how decisions are made, and whether those in charge are being held to account.

This is exactly what Socialherds seeks to explore — drawing on data from Victoria University’s Democracy Project to create visualisations that reveal the patterns, priorities and blind spots in how New Zealand’s political reality is constructed and told.”

Visualisations

Data visualistions allow us to move behound individual headlines and see the bigger picture.  From wordclouds revealing the most prominent Journalists, Media Organisations and Topics to Sankey diagrams mapping the flow of narratives across outlets, network graphs showing relationships between journalists, media orgasiations and the political figures they cover, and timeline lines charts tacking how coverage evolves – each technique unlocks a different dminesion of the narrative the media is telling.

Together the visualisations help us:

Identify the topics and voices dominating public discourse, track how coverage of issues shifts and evolves over time, reveal whether media groups frame stories similarly or diffierently, examine whether headlines reflect diverse perspectives or a narrowing of the debate and interrogate whether those with power and influence are receiving the scrutiny the public expect.

How New Zealand’s Political Narratives Are Shaped: 2026 Analysis”