The easing of restrictions on pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants after the Covid traffic light went 'Orange' this week was celebrated by media urging us to 'put on our dancing shoes'. Owners and industry reps' approval was also front and centre - but not the people working at the front desk or front line.
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As the Labour government loosened Covid restrictions on Wednesday, TVNZ's Simon Dallow urged viewers to "get those dancing shoes ready".
"In just under six hours you'll be able to rock the dance floor at bars and clubs as New Zealand finally moves to the orange traffic light setting," he said.
Newshub at 6's coverage had a similar tone.
"A toast to orange," said its political editor Jenna Lynch. "Do a little dance New Zealand, the government has given the nightlife the orange light."
The TV networks weren’t alone in honing in on the deregulation of dancing.
A front page headline in Thursday's the Dominion Post read ‘Dancing returns to Wellington bars’, with the story going on to claim - somewhat questionably - that the alert level move had been met with “unanimous and unbridled joy” by “young Kiwis desperate to get back onto dance floors”.
The shift to orange was also met with unbridled joy by hospitality owners desperate to get back into profit.
On RNZ’s Checkpoint, Restaurant Association chief executive Marisa Bidois said her industry was "very very pleased to hear that this is happening".
"It's a huge relief for the hospitality industry which continues to struggle under the red level restrictions."
The rest of that report quoted a range of political leaders, but no health experts, worker representatives, or anyone - besides Green Party leader James Shaw - who wasn’t either celebrating or asking for still more freedom.
Not to be outdone, the Christchurch Press carried a story which quoted three business association spokespeople, four hospitality business owners, the chief executive of a theatre, and zero workers.
Meanwhile, the Timaru Herald carried the headline ‘Hospitality operators celebrate relaxing of rules ahead of Easter’ in a story which quoted a pub owner, two business association spokespeople, and no-one else.
This sort of one-sided reporting has been par for the course when it comes to coverage of the country’s alert levels.
In recent months, dozens of stories and interviews have been published which focus solely on the concerns of business owners, and the associations that represent their interests, with little balancing comment from other groups whose health and wellbeing will be affected by our Covid restriction levels.
There are some exceptions, like this story from TVNZ’s Breakfast, which featured a woman with cancer, a girl with diabetes, and a man with a heart condition, speaking on how they felt about the prospect of everything opening up.
Often though, these sorts of voices have been drowned out in the media by cries of “get back to normal”.
The businesses making those calls have an important perspective.
But it can feel like other people with skin in the game - like hospitality workers, the immunocompromised, or just people who really don’t want to get Covid - are being forgotten or ignored.
Back in March, Stephen Judd joked on Twitter about setting up a group - The National Association of People Who Just Don’t Want To Get COVID - to make sure the interests of that little-surveyed cohort get more airtime.
He said the joke had a serious subtext.
"News is a beast that you need to keep feeding and it's much easier to keep feeding when you have a list of people who will answer the phone, especially if they get in touch to say 'hey I'm waiting by the phone'."
Business owners and the people who represent their interests often belong to that group that's waiting by the phone, he said.
"But there's also the people who benefit from staying well and in a healthy community, and that's the people where there's no-one obvious to call."
Ellsie Coles is a senior hospitality worker and advocate at Raise The Bar Hospo Union, who recently recovered from a bout of Covid that left her hospitalised.
She’s been frustrated seeing so many stories where workers like her don’t feature, including in the coverage of this week’s switch to orange.
"A lot of the time the views of the bosses are not actually accurately reflecting how workers are feeling," she said. "There's been such a huge push on just opening up, and I can understand why employers want that. Their businesses can't survive if they're closed all the time. But for employees, that's a health and safety risk."
Employees were already dealing with increased workloads due to colleagues catching Covid or becoming household contacts, and looser restrictions increased their already high risk of catching the virus, Coles said.
She understood why people didn't want to write about the ongoing negative effects of the pandemic after more than two years.
But the celebratory coverage discounted the risks and struggles still being faced not only by hospitality workers, but also workers in sectors like healthcare, she said.
"I don't blame people who don't want to read about negative things. We're all really tired. However, it's too far in the opposite direction and now it's a huge celebration, and I don't think hospitality workers are celebrating yet."
The Spinoff’s Charlotte Muru-Lanning has regularly highlighted worker voices in her stories on hospitality's struggles during Covid.
She has also been on the sharp end of one-sided media reporting while working in a restaurant at the beginning of the pandemic.
About two weeks before Aotearoa's first lockdown, she saw a lot of stories which gave restaurant and bar owners a platform to complain about the lack of business coming through their establishments.
"We were getting a lot of customers coming in [as a result], really well-meaning, but I think that we were as workers really anxious at that time and it would've been maybe helpful for those stories to include how worried workers were," she said.
Muru-Lanning said journalists struggled with churn and constant deadlines, and that made it tempting to lift quotes from PR releases or pick up the phone to an easy on-call spokesperson.
Even so, she urged journalists to reflect on whether they're reporting the range of perspectives within hospitality and other industries.
It wasn't hard to get a worker on the phone - but it might mean stepping outside your comfort zone or adjusting your traditional ways of setting up stories, she said.
"Telling stories about this industry without speaking to workers - you 're missing out on a lot of colour in the industry. You're not telling a full story and I think people are left without a full understanding of what's happening, and I think that has huge ramifications," she said. "These are the people who keep the industry ticking. I don't think you can really talk about the industry without talking to those people who really keep it going, who get the food from the kitchen to your table or who actually make the food."
