tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84424300643591972792024-03-18T22:48:34.014+13:00Karl du FresneKarl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.comBlogger1519125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-88973781098250011092024-02-22T18:22:00.015+13:002024-02-23T10:41:59.883+13:00The case for objectivity in journalism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg01BrFuwLo0D1isT0JGXIRNAfApnSU3fcL2gvWZS8-yOQxUuNUexB9HoKYJldnrHW9HrRhwEd45pqSw5aNf72ojEp9zuyG1qzk6fv-Oyv2MQSRH6zR3WdX8eto5YIi0q99xvFJ6gZD1Rg1FBRDluZgM_54Qcitv3TjC7eoTvmQv9QdnKo_59oTY9gr4Z4/s574/John%20Campbell.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="323" data-original-width="574" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg01BrFuwLo0D1isT0JGXIRNAfApnSU3fcL2gvWZS8-yOQxUuNUexB9HoKYJldnrHW9HrRhwEd45pqSw5aNf72ojEp9zuyG1qzk6fv-Oyv2MQSRH6zR3WdX8eto5YIi0q99xvFJ6gZD1Rg1FBRDluZgM_54Qcitv3TjC7eoTvmQv9QdnKo_59oTY9gr4Z4/s320/John%20Campbell.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span><p style="font-size: x-large;"><span><span style="font-size: medium;">The cover story in the latest issue of </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>North & South</i><span>, headlined </span><i><b><u><a href="https://northandsouth.co.nz/2024/02/19/john-campbell-objectivity-in-journalism/" target="_blank">A matter of opinion</a></u></b></i><span>, takes up an issue raised by me twice in recent weeks</span><span>. The story is subtitled </span><i>Did John Campbell cross a line? </i><span>and occupies eight pages.</span></span></p></span><p></p><span style="font-size: medium;">The catalyst was <a href="https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-john-campbell-question.html" target="_blank"><b>my blog post of January 23</b></a>, in which I said it was wrong that TVNZ, a publicly owned media outlet, provided a platform from which its highest-profile journalist was allowed to pursue a campaign against a democratically elected government. This was after the TVNZ website had published a series of trenchant opinion columns in which Campbell made it clear he thought New Zealand voters had made a grievous mistake by electing a centre-right government. <br /><br />I wrote that Campbell, who has the vague and all-encompassing title of TVNZ’s Chief Correspondent (which presumably gives him licence to range over any subjects that take his fancy) should be sacked for abusing his privileged position by engaging in what I called a highly personal political mission. I said his columns should be seen as a gesture of contempt to all the deplorables who voted for a change of government because they didn’t like what had happened under Labour. I also suggested that the TVNZ directors should be invited to resign, since they were complicit in his misconduct. <br /><br />Crucially – and this is a point often overlooked, I suspect wilfully, by critics of my piece – I have said that Campbell is entitled to his opinion about the government, and indeed anything else. As I wrote in an earlier post, my objection was to his views being promulgated on the website of a taxpayer-owned broadcaster which has an ethical obligation to observe editorial balance and political neutrality. To put it another way, my argument was with his misuse of his status to promote personal opinions which, when all is said and done, have no more legitimacy in a democracy than those of a bank teller or bus driver. <br /><br />The central issue here is not that Campbell keeps attacking a centre-right government (of which, incidentally, I’m not a supporter, although I think it's a huge improvement on the last lot); it's that he has publicly expressed a political opinion at all. “I’m appealing,” I wrote, “for a return to traditional journalistic values of impartiality and balance, the decline of which can be blamed for steadily diminishing public trust in the media.” <br /><br />I was in Australia in the weeks following my post so can’t claim to have kept close track of the reaction, but the column attracted attention both in mainstream media and online. Former <i>New Zealand Herald</i> managing editor Shayne Currie picked up on it in his <b><u><a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/media-insider-john-campbells-curious-career-twist-at-tvnz-radio-breakfast-host-departs-stuff-sports-staff-face-layoffs-black-clashs-amazing-ratings-oz-ad-agency-eyes-nz-jack-tames-wedding-party/ZVB4K57SMJG5BC6OKHP62SLLIU/" target="_blank"><i>Media Insider</i> column</a></u></b> and RNZ’s <i>Mediawatch</i> discussed it at least once. It was republished on the Bassett, Brash and Hide website, where it attracted more than 6500 views, and provoked an <b><u><a href="https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2024/01/28/the-ongoing-attempt-to-cancel-john-campbell/" target="_blank">entertainingly splenetic rant</a></u></b> on Martyn Bradbury’s <i>The Daily Blog</i>, accompanied by a string of comically inaccurate readers’ comments. (According to Bradbury, I’m a “brownshirt crypto-fascist”. He’s the equivalent of the court jester in a Shakespeare play, babbling incoherently most of the time but occasionally fluking an astute observation – just not in this instance.) <br /><br />Now <i>North & South </i>has weighed in with a piece in which freelance journalist Jeremy Rose explores the tension between the principle of journalistic objectivity – which, broadly speaking, means impartiality, fairness and balance – and the supposed right of journalists to express their opinions. <br /><br />As Rose acknowledges at the start of his article – in fact recounts at length over 22 paragraphs – he and I have something of a history, dating back to his time as an earnest leftie producer and presenter of <i>Mediawatch</i> in 2008, when I mentioned him <b><u><a href="https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2008/08/mediawatch-fails-squeaky-clean-test.html" target="_blank">in one of my very first blog posts</a></u></b>. That there’s an element of score-settling going on here is apparent from his reference to me as a “provincial New Zealand version of Hedda Hopper – the Hollywood gossip columnist infamous for outing reds under the bed”. <br /><br />But at least Rose disclosed his bias. And to be fair, once he gets past his apparent antipathy towards me, he presents a balanced picture of the issues and takes the trouble to present my arguments fairly and accurately. Most importantly, he has helped kick-start an overdue debate about the value of objectivity in journalism, which can only be good. <br /><br />What's striking about Rose's piece is that several of the people he approached for comment about Campbell – people I might have assumed to be on the broadcaster’s side – voiced misgivings about the increasingly blurred line between fact and opinion in journalism. <br /><br />Former RNZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh, for example, is described as being concerned by the trend to publish more comment masquerading as impartial news coverage. “Removing objectivity from journalism is a very dangerous trend in an increasingly complex world,” Cavanagh is quoted as saying. “I have no doubt that it’s the blurring of the lines between fact and opinion that is driving the growing distrust many now have of mainstream media.” <br /><br />This is no crusty reactionary speaking. Cavanagh ran a left-leaning RNZ and previously served as head of news and current affairs for Australia’s impeccably woke SBS. <br /><br />Rose also quotes his former RNZ <i>Mediawatch</i> colleague Colin Peacock, who says Campbell’s <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/11/25/john-campbell-i-hoped-to-be-surprised-actually-im-amazed/" target="_blank">November 25 column</a></u></b> savaging the new government “does kind of cross a line for me”. He accurately describes the column as “very condemnatory and very personal – the sort of thing you might see in <i>Metro</i> magazine rather than in the opinion and analysis section of a publicly owned broadcaster”. <br /><br />Victoria University media studies professor Peter Thompson (like those mentioned above, no right-winger) is another who sees a risk that TVNZ’s publication of strident opinion pieces by its most senior journalist could erode public trust. While noting that Campbell is a very capable journalist (which I don't disagree with), Thompson says there’s a conflict between his role as an opinionated commentator and his other function, which involves him in the production and presentation of news. This, he says, can lead to mistrust of the media and perceptions of bias. <br /><br />You’d think TVNZ would be alert to this danger, especially given its fragile financial health, but there’s no sign that its bosses and directors are remotely concerned. I think they’re detached from reality. <br /><br />Strangely, Thompson then muddies the waters by saying he doesn’t think Campbell’s columns are a very serious issue, because they’re clearly labelled as opinion. It’s an argument others have used and it misses the point entirely, which is that Campbell is misusing his privileged position as a public broadcaster. This imposes obligations of impartiality that Campbell and his employer either don’t recognise or fail to accept. As Ita Buttrose, the high priestess of the Australian media and chair of Australia’s (left-leaning) Australian Broadcasting Corporation, pointedly said in a lecture last year, “being a journalist means that you give up your right to be an activist”. <br /><br /><br />PARTICULARLY interesting, for me, are the comments in the <i>North & South</i> article by Al Morrison, RNZ’s former political editor (and before that, a writer of editorials and feature stories for <i>The Dominion </i>and chief reporter for the <i>Evening Post</i>) who went on to head the Department of Conservation and later took a high-powered job in the State Services Commission. <br /><br />Al and I worked together at both the <i>Dominion</i> and the <i>Evening Post</i> and he was probably the first journalist I had met who rejected the idea of objectivity, a subject on which he and I civilly disagreed. Al, like John Campbell, had bypassed the traditional entry route into journalism, arriving in the newsroom after previously working as a teacher and then completing a post-graduate course in journalism at Canterbury University. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">He hadn’t served the customary newspaper cadetship and therefore hadn’t been inoculated with the view that journalists must set their personal views aside. He represented a new breed of university-educated journalists who brought to the job an intellectual and ideological framework that distinguished them from ordinary hack reporters who took the view that their job was to tell stories, report facts and convey other people’s opinions, but never their own. <br /><br />Al pushed the now-fashionable view that all human beings have their own inbuilt and often unconscious prejudices that influence our decision-making and that it’s therefore impossible to make strictly objective judgments. Rose in his article takes a similar line, writing that “every journalist is somewhere on the left-right spectrum”. Yes, but generations of journalists were trained to keep their own opinions to themselves. Newspaper readers would have been hard-pressed, for example, to discern the political views of most leading press gallery reporters. I didn’t know myself, and I worked with some of them. <br /><br />According to the “objectivity is impossible” argument, all decisions in journalism – which stories to cover, how much prominence to give them, what editorial angle to take, who to interview, what to emphasise in the headline and so forth – are subjective and thus at risk of being distorted by personal perspectives. Ergo, objectivity isn’t worth even attempting. <br /><br />My response is that at every step in the editorial process, journalists can (and mostly do, even today) set aside individual biases. There are well-established rules and principles that ensure they do, in the same way that judges, police officers and even sports referees are expected to carry out their duties impartially (and generally do). Politics and ideology should never intrude in editorial decision-making and readers or viewers shouldn't be put in the position of wondering whether the news has been subjected to political spin. <br /><br />Journalists have understood and operated by these principles for decades. New Zealand has a Media Council (formerly the Press Council) to adjudicate in cases where journalists are alleged to have abused the rules. The very existence of a regulatory body charged with upholding principles of fairness, accuracy and impartiality is evidence that the rules are clearly defined and workable. But no one should be in any doubt that those principles are under sustained attack from within the media, and the assault on the supposedly unattainable ideal of objectivity is a key part of that. <br /><br />Judging by his comments in <i>North & South</i>, Al hasn’t retreated from his views on the futility of striving for objectivity. Yet he concedes, rather contradictorily, that it’s “an ideal to be pursued”, just as long as you accept that it can’t be achieved. Tellingly, Al also acknowledges there’s a problem because “consumers of news” can find it difficult to distinguish straight reportage from a journalist’s opinions. <br /><br />Exactly. I would argue that one leads inexorably to the other. Once you allow journalists to abandon the principle of objectivity, you open the door to a confusing melange of fact and comment that leaves viewers and readers scratching their heads, resenting the spin, distrusting mainstream journalism and turning to social media in the hope of finding the truth. (Good luck with that.) <br /><br /> Journalists of a previous generation didn’t incur this risk, because they stuck to clearly understood rules. The principle of objectivity is our only protection against politically motivated journalists spinning the news in whatever way suits their ideological agenda, which can only diminish media credibility and contribute to the further decline of a previously vital civil institution that should play a central role in the affairs of the nation. There are no winners here, apart perhaps from malevolent players in the shadowy online demimonde. <br /><br /> <br />ROSE’S piece recalls a quote from Campbell, back in his <i>Campbell Live</i> days on TV3, in which he said: “I’ve never met a journalist who didn’t want to change the world and make it a better place. Without exception that’s why they get into journalism.” <br /><br />Here he inadvertently pinpoints a generational change that has transformed journalism, and not in a good way. I entered journalism more than 20 years before Campbell, and I can’t recall any journalists then who thought they were on a mission to change the world. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">That’s an attitude that began to emerge in the 1970s, gathering momentum through the 80s and 90s to the point where it’s now entrenched. It coincided with the gradual academic takeover of journalism training, which had previously been done in the workplace. American ideas about the function of journalism, often promulgated by leftist sociologists, were highly influential in this process and have partially supplanted the British model that previously held sway. <br /><br />It was in the late 1970s that I first encountered colleagues who saw journalism as a tool for the promotion of political causes, but the great majority of the hundreds of journalists I worked during my career simply wanted to tell stories. Many took pride in regarding journalism as a trade rather than a profession and bristled at the latter description. Politics and ideology rarely, if ever, intruded on their work and in most cases I had no idea of my colleagues’ politics. Those who did air their political views in the pub were mostly left-wing (hardly surprising, given that many journalists came from working-class backgrounds), but they never considered it their role to pursue political agendas on the job. What drove traditional journalism was a belief in the public’s right to know, which has nothing to do with ideology. <br /><br />If there was a political dimension to their work, it was simply the belief that journalists had a duty to provide people with important and useful information about what was going in their local communities, in the nation and in the wider world. Of course this sometimes involved reporting things that people in power would have preferred to keep secret. To that extent, news often had political repercussions, but that was a consequence rather than an explicit purpose. <br /><br />The idea that journalism was all about championing aggrieved minority groups (aka identity politics) and challenging oppressive power structures came much later. The result, as I see every day in my local paper, is that we now have a generation of young journalists who are incapable of writing a simple, straightforward news story (this, after spending a year supposedly learning how to do it) yet feel competent to produce personal comment pieces masquerading as editorials. <br /><br />As recently as 20 years ago, the exact reverse was true. </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Was the public better served then? I think so, but many younger journalists would disagree. Problem is, most of them didn’t experience that era, so wouldn’t know.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Watergate, which fostered the romantic idea that journalism was all about bringing down corrupt people in power, had a lot to answer for. The advent of journalists' bylines, often accompanied by their mug shots, exacerbated things by boosting reporters' egos and inflating their self-importance.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br />CAMPBELL, significantly, was not a product of the era when old-school chief reporters and sub-editors pulled ambitious young thrusters into line. According to his Wikipedia entry he received no journalism training, obtaining his first broadcasting job (in which capacity I first met him) after completing a BA with Honours in English literature. <br /><br />Clever, charming and confident (all of which is still true), he was fast-tracked to celebrity status. I think his lack of any grounding in the traditional culture, ethos and discipline of journalism – yes, discipline – is reflected in his belief that his position at TVNZ gives him licence to pontificate at will. It’s possible he has become such a household name that he thinks he has escaped the constraints accepted as a matter of course by lesser journalists. <br /><br />But as I said in response to a recent comment on my blog: “The moment someone like John Campbell accepts a very senior position in a publicly owned media organisation, he relinquishes his right to promote his personal views. He's still free to say what he thinks at a private dinner party, but it’s improper as well as arrogant to push his personal opinions (which is all they are – personal opinions) using a very powerful platform which, by well-established tradition and convention, is expected to be neutral.” <br /><br />This is not just my view. In the aforementioned lecture last year in honour of a former ABC journalist, Ita Buttrose observed: “Good journalism is never about lecturing the public on what they should think. Good journalism is about reporting, just the facts – not opinion. It is about listening to community concerns and fashioning them into powerful stories that inform and illuminate; stories that are backed by evidence and take a fair and impartial point of view.” Note those crucial words: fair and impartial. <br /><br />Coming from the woman who chairs a powerful media organisation (the equivalent of our TVNZ and RNZ combined) that’s regarded by conservative Australian commentators as overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Left, Buttrose’s statement had a particular resonance. And she’s not alone in her view that journalists should keep their personal views out of their work. In a recent furore over the sacking of an ABC host, even the ABC Alumni – an association of former staff – issued a statement saying it “understands and respects the principle that staff at the ABC should not allow their personal opinions to intrude on their work”. On this crucial issue, our Australian neighbours – even left-leaning ones – may be ahead of us. <br /><br /><br />I WAS pleased to hear that Emile Donovan, the new host of <i>Nights </i>on RNZ, seems to get this. Discussing my blog post on <i><b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018923260/midweek-mediawatch-h-ha-over-hui-coverage" target="_blank">Midweek Mediawatch</a></u></b></i> with presenter Hayden Donnell, Donovan gently challenged Donnell’s assertion that “you can’t insist that people [such as Campbell] don’t have opinions”. Donovan countered: “Isn’t that the skill set of the journalist – to hold personal opinions but to strive for the ideal of objectivity?” Precisely. <br /><br />It was interesting to hear Donnell then subtly shift his ground even as he was having a crack at me. He ended up conceding that if a prominent TVNZ columnist criticised a left-wing government – a highly unlikely scenario – there would be an outcry from the Left. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Donnell’s proposed solution to the tension between objectivity and the right to hold an opinion is that journalists should act as “fair brokers”, whatever that means. To that, I would say it’s surely better to have clear, sharp, unambiguous rules than to rely on vague, fuzzy terms like “fair broker” that journalists are left to define for themselves. <br /><br />A few other points arising from the <i>North & South</i> article: <br /><br />■ It quotes former <i>Auckland Star </i>editor and veteran journalism tutor Jim Tucker as suggesting, in the 1999 journalism textbook <i>Intro</i>, that objectivity in journalism was unattainable. But I’m sure that in his earlier days as an editor, Jim (who’s an old mate of mine) would have insisted, like all his contemporaries, on adherence to the principles of objectivity. I suspect that after he moved into academia he fell prey to the American influence that contaminated New Zealand journalism teaching. If so, he wasn’t the first. (Jim himself ended up getting an MA in media ethics.) <br /><br />■ Rose highlights an old magazine interview in which Campbell ridiculed the notion that journalists should always seek the other side of the story. “At the liberation of Auschwitz, would you give the SS the right of reply?” Campbell asked rhetorically. I’ve seen this argument before and it’s pure sophistry, because it chooses the most extreme example imaginable (as Campbell more or less admitted). A more relevant analogy might be the 1981 Springbok Tour. Almost everyone accepts that apartheid, like Nazi genocide, was evil, but the question of whether New Zealand should maintain sporting contact with South Africa was far more nuanced. Would supporters of the tour be allowed their say today? Judging by the way the media have collectively agreed to shut down legitimate expressions of scepticism about climate change, I couldn’t confidently answer that question in the affirmative. (For the record, I marched against the tour.) <br /><br />■ Both Rose and Donnell pounced on my statement that TVNZ is “the government’s most potent communication medium” and inferred authoritarian overtones, as if I were endorsing some sort of Russian or North Korean model of state control. I suspect they wilfully misread a rather clumsy choice of words. I wasn’t implying that TVNZ should function as a state propaganda arm; anyone who knows me would realise that’s absurd. What I should have said was that TVNZ is a potent communication medium owned by the government, which conveys a rather different shade of meaning. <br /><br />■ A TVNZ spokeswoman quoted in Shayne Currie’s <i>Herald </i>article said that opinion pieces such as those on the TVNZ website “play a role in holding power to account, reflecting different perspectives and driving huge digital audiences”. She went on: “John’s pieces are doing that – they’re resonating with New Zealanders who agree or disagree with the perspective and driving huge digital audiences. Given du Fresne also engages in this style of reporting himself, the irony is not lost on us.” This is an example of false equivalence and I suspect the TVNZ spokeswoman knows it. I’m a private, unpaid blogger with no official standing and an average 2000-odd readers a day; Campbell is a highly paid national celebrity, the Chief Correspondent of a powerful, state-owned organisation, with formidable resources behind him and a massive potential audience reach. Besides, I don’t purport to “report” on anything. What I write is clearly my opinion and in contrast with Campbell, it risks no confusion with reportage. TVNZ compounded this dishonesty by telling <i>North & South</i> that its opinion columns “bring a broad range of perspectives to the forefront”, but I’ve yet to see it publish any opinion that could be described as remotely conservative. (Interestingly enough, at least two of Campbell’s most inflammatory anti-government columns seem to have disappeared from the TVNZ website. Is this an acknowledgement that the criticism is striking home and the objections to his naked bias are valid?) <br /><br />■ Campbell responded to written questions for the <i>North & South</i> piece rather than being interviewed. His answers are rambling and replete with references to “right-wing, Pakeha men” and “cultural hegemony”. He cites, as an authority for his rejection of objectivity, an American journalist who wrote about editorial decisions being made “almost exclusively by upper-class white men”, which may have been true in the US but not, in my experience, in New Zealand, where I have never experienced an "upper-class" editor but have had the pleasure of working alongside some exceptionally competent female editorial decision-makers. It would be helpful if we stuck to examples that are relevant here. Campbell also makes the mistake of suggesting that because lots of other people write opinion pieces, he should be free to do so too – sidestepping the vital distinction, as highlighted by me and others interviewed for the story, that he’s employed by a public broadcaster. <br /><br />To summarise the above, what we have here is a clash between two competing models of journalism – one that has endured for generations and another of relatively recent origins. I think I know which of the two models serves the public interest better and which is more likely to ensure the media’s survival. That is, if it’s not already too late. <br /><br /><i><b>Footnote: </b>This is my last post, at least for the foreseeable future. I am placing my blog in indefinite recess. This has nothing to do with John Campbell or any other issue that I’ve written about. The truth is that after coming back from a recent holiday with family in Queensland, I realised that my heart’s no longer in it. This doesn’t mean I don’t feel as strongly about the issues I write about; rather, it’s the act of writing that I can no longer muster the energy for. Fortunately there’s now no shortage of other conservative (or should I say crypto-fascist?) bloggers, such as <b><u><a href="https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/02/graham-adams-media-chiefs-struggle-to.html" target="_blank">Graham Adams</a></u></b>, to take up any slack. I extend my heartfelt thanks to all those who read me (more than three million views since I started blogging in 2008), and in particular to those who have taken the trouble to contribute often thoughtful and erudite comments. I can’t guarantee that nothing will happen to make me burst back into action, but for now I’m signing off. (The blog will stay online and any comments on this post will still be welcome.)</i></span></div>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com54tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-61158116333844412262024-01-26T11:04:00.002+13:002024-01-26T13:39:30.564+13:00My little spat with Philip Matthews <p>The news and comment website Newsroom published an article yesterday in which Philip Matthews reviewed a new and slightly revised edition of Michael King's celebrated <i>Penguin History of New Zealand</i>. (Matthews is a Christchurch-based Stuff journalist who occasionally contributes to Newsroom.)</p><p>The review was entitled <i>History is a culture war </i>and looked at how well King's book - now <i>The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand - </i>had stood up in a time of rapidly shifting cultural and ideological attitudes. Matthews devoted part of his piece to the use of the name Aotearoa and commented that several "right-wing culture figures" - he named Peter Williams, Michael Bassett and me - had "enlisted King as support for their argument that New Zealand should not become Aotearoa".</p><p>This would be all very well, except that I've never said New Zealand shouldn’t become Aotearoa and don't recall ever citing King in that context. My position, stated several times over the years, is that I'm open to a name change just as long as it's supported by a referendum - in other words, democratically mandated, rather than imposed by a political/media/academic elite.</p><p>When I emailed Matthews requesting a correction, he tried to defend himself by citing an article I had written for <i>The Spectator Australia </i>in which I noted that Aotearoa was a name of "dubious authenticity". When I pointed out that this fell a long way short of opposing its adoption, Matthews astonishingly responded by saying my position made it hard to argue that I supported a name change. So now, apparently, it wasn't just a case of me being accused of <i>opposing</i> a name change (although I hadn't); I had apparently flunked the ideological test by failing to <i>support </i>it.</p><p>Except that even this wasn't correct, because I've written on this blog that "there are good arguments for adopting Aotearoa".</p><p>At about this point, Matthews lost interest in the argument and suggested I sort it out with Newsroom - a cowardly cop-out, since the mistake was his, not Newsroom's. They had quite reasonably assumed that a senior journalist would take care to get his facts right.</p><p>I did take it up with Newsroom, and to their great credit they immediately amended the article and added a footnote saying the original version had not accurately reflected my opinion. Though the correction didn't quite capture my position (it said I would accept a name change if the public voted for it, but implied I would do so grudgingly), I appreciated co-editor Tim Murphy's prompt remedial action.</p><p>Why am I recounting this? Partly because some people will have seen Matthews' piece in its original form and been left with the wrong impression; but also to illustrate the danger of ideologically motivated journalists letting their prejudices get in the way of accuracy. Personal antipathy may have played a part, since Matthews and I have a history. I think it suited him to characterise me, along with Peter Williams and Michael Bassett, as a stubborn old white supremacist. He's a capable journalist and I suspect in this instance, he was more than simply careless. </p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-72825697623617542772024-01-23T09:09:00.004+13:002024-01-23T09:32:36.095+13:00The John Campbell question<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once again, state-owned TVNZ has obligingly provided a
platform from which its best-known (and no doubt highest-paid) journalist, John
Campbell, can <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/01/21/john-campbell-i-saw-peace-joy-and-10000-people-uniting-to-say-no/" target="_blank">flail the government</a></u></b>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk156840373;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is
extraordinary and unprecedented. The government’s most potent communications medium
has been hijacked by one of its employees and co-opted in a highly personal
political mission.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Campbell’s
anti-government agitation is more than simply provocative. It can only be seen
as a direct challenge to the government and a gesture of contempt to all the
deplorables who voted for change because they didn’t like where
we were going under Labour.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Campbell <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/10/28/john-campbell-what-exactly-has-the-tide-brought-in/" target="_blank">clearly decided on October 14</a></u></b> that New Zealand had made a grievous mistake in electing
a centre-right government and set himself the task of leading the Resistance.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Someone in authority
should have told him then that this was not his function as a journalist. If he
refused to accept that, he should have been told to pack his bags.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That this didn’t
happen tells us that TVNZ is happy for its Chief Correspondent, aka the nation’s
Hand-Wringer-in-Chief, to continue his crusade. Now we’re in the unfortunate situation where
someone in government may be tempted to strike back, because no government is likely to tolerate
a situation where one of its own employees is so feverishly working to
undermine it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Journalism is in a potentially perilous situation here. Battles between
the state and the media rarely turn out well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The danger of
vindictive politicians punishing troublesome journalists hardly needs to be
pointed out. But Campbell has put us in this
invidious position by brazenly abusing his power and thus inviting retribution.
A combative politician like Winston Peters, whose early role model was media-baiter
Robert Muldoon, would need little encouragement to retaliate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The finely balanced
relationship between journalists and the government, whereby politicians accept
the inconvenience of a critical press as the price of an open democracy, is at
risk of being destabilised when one side is seen as wilfully defying the
established norms – which is what Campbell has been doing with his series of
assaults on a government that’s ideologically not to his liking. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The danger for the
government is that unless it acts to deter egregiously partisan journalism from
its own media outlets, Campbell and others like him – including some in RNZ –
will feel emboldened to continue. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">As a product of the
corporate world, Luxon will be familiar with the management maxim that “What
you accept, you approve”. Well, it applies here. As long as Campbell and others like him feel
empowered to attack the government with impunity, National and its coalition
partners can expect to endure a prolonged and self-inflicted form of Chinese
water torture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lest this article
be misinterpreted, I’m not presenting an argument for more pro-government
journalism. That phrase is a contradiction in terms, because it is not the function
of journalists to support governments.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Neither am I
rushing to the defence of this government because I support it. I didn’t vote for it and I have little confidence in it, but the government was legitimately
elected and it deserves a fair shake. It's impossible not to be struck by the sharp contrast between media attitudes toward the previous government and this one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Rather, I’m
appealing for a return to traditional journalistic values of impartiality and
balance, the decline of which can be blamed for steadily diminishing public
trust in the media. Contrary to what budding journalists are taught in
universities (of which Campbell is a product), journalism is not activism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Campbell’s attacks
on the government – and in a broader sense, the sustained offensive from the
media at large since last year’s election – place National and its coalition
partners in difficult territory. Convention says the government shouldn’t
interfere in the editorial decisions of its media outlets. Any such intervention would be portrayed as
an intolerable attack on freedom of the press.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">There would be
uproar from the media and their academic fellow-travellers. Those with long
memories would recall the bad old days of the 1960s, when the New Zealand
Broadcasting Corporation was firmly under government control.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Fear of such a
backlash is what Campbell and his bosses will be counting on to prevent the
government from acting, but there comes a point when Campbell’s moralistic
crusade becomes so brazen and arrogant that it can’t be ignored.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The question then
becomes, what would be an appropriate response? In different circumstances, a stern word in private with TVNZ management might have done the job. But Campbell’s
adversarial attitude to the government is so public and so obvious that a
low-key strategic retreat is not possible. We’ve moved beyond that point. In any case, TVNZ is complicit in his misconduct.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Besides, this
is an open democracy and the conduct of government affairs shouldn’t be carried
out via covert, <i>Yes, Minister</i>-type
manoeuvrings. If action is to be
taken, it should be done in such a way that we can all see it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That points to the
nuclear option: a brutal, decisive and very public sacking on the basis that Campbell
has betrayed the fundamental duty of impartiality that the public is entitled
to expect of journalists in a state-owned media organisation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">If the TVNZ
directors objected – as they would presumably feel bound to do, given that they
have at least tacitly condoned Campbell’s activism – then they should be encouraged to
go too.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In those
circumstances, the government would need to be cleaner than clean in its
appointment of a new board. Nothing would destroy its credibility more surely
than the recruitment of political favourites and brown-nosers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">All this must sound
odd, coming from someone who has written two books about the importance of
media freedom (the only ones, to my knowledge, that examined the issue in a New Zealand context). The suggestion that a journalist should be fired because of his political
views goes against the grain. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But media freedom cuts both ways. </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Journalists must be
able to report vigorously and fearlessly on matters of public interest.
Generally speaking, in New Zealand the law allows them to do so.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But if the media
are to retain the trust of the public, they must demonstrate that they can be
relied on to report on issues of public interest in a fair, balanced and non-partisan
way. Once the media betray that trust, they put their protected status at risk.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It goes without
saying that Campbell is as entitled as anyone to say what he thinks about the
government. The crucial difference, in his case, is that his personal opinion is seen as carrying the weight of a major state media organisation which is supposed to
be apolitical.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">He would be in a
very different position if he worked for a privately owned media outfit, but
employment by a state-owned organisation imposes a special obligation of
impartiality. TVNZ is owned by the people, whose allegiances and sympathies
cover the entire political spectrum. It takes a special type of hubris to
assume that being the Chief Correspondent (whatever that title means) for such
an organisation entitles him to impose his own narrow political biases on his
audience.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Mention abuse of media
power and people tend to think of press barons such as Rupert Murdoch, but
Campbell is guilty of abuse in a more subtle form. In fact it could be argued
that Murdoch is a more honest abuser of power because he doesn’t seek to
disguise his actions behind an ostentatious façade of morality and compassion.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Campbell presents
himself as the conscience of the nation, but by positioning himself as the
implacable opponent of a democratically elected government, he’s effectively
spitting in the faces of the majority of his fellow New Zealanders who voted
for it. He clearly regards himself as
above them and above democracy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">He appears to
interpret media freedom as giving him licence to wage a divisive and
potentially disruptive political campaign, with the backing of a powerful state
institution, against a government that he doesn’t think deserved to be elected.
It needs to be made clear to him and TVNZ that his position is offensive and
untenable, even in a liberal democracy. If that means sacking him, so be it.</span></p>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk156840373;"></span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-91839832123279525372024-01-17T12:14:00.003+13:002024-01-17T13:42:33.191+13:00The striking outpouring of media empathy for Golriz Ghahraman<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Rarely has the media’s all-pervasive pro-Left bias been demonstrated
more emphatically than in the outpouring of empathy for Golriz Ghahraman.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In the past 24 hours, the tone of media commentary on the
scandal surrounding the former Green MP has shifted with striking uniformity. The
focus has conveniently been diverted from the wrongness of her actions – there’s
barely a mention of that – to the supposedly cruel nature of a political
culture that, we are told, placed her under acute stress.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ghahraman says she cited her mental health problems not
as an excuse but as an explanation. In fact she doesn’t need to use stress as
an excuse, because her legion of media sympathisers have obligingly done it for
her.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Greens have copped flak for <b><u><a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/media-insider-how-the-greens-pr-machine-completely-blew-up-over-golriz-ghahraman/T3L5IKQUNBH4ZAPDHKVXEAUVL4/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">not front-footing the issue</a></u></b> of
Ghahraman’s shoplifting, but in reality the controversy has been something of a
PR triumph, thanks to the media’s eagerness to justify her conduct. Who needs spin
doctors when the commentators are already on board?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The excuse-makers, apologists and hand-wringers are out in
force. Ghahraman’s conduct has been explained as the almost
inevitable consequence of an oppressive, racist system that’s dominated by
white males and seeks to destroy capable but vulnerable women.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">For an example, check out <b><u><a href="https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/17-01-2024/the-dramatic-exodus-of-brown-women-from-parliament-is-no-surprise?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">Madeleine Chapman’s column</a></u></b> at <i>The
Spinoff</i>, headlined <i>The dramatic exodus of
brown women from Parliament is no surprise</i>. The implication is that Kiri
Allan and Elizabeth Kerekere were victims of the same syndrome, although the
article makes no attempt to substantiate that claim.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ll wager, though, that if an opinion poll were taken
today, it would find that women are just as offended as men by Ghahraman’s
behaviour and by the media’s eagerness to absolve her of blame. Certainly she
won’t get much sympathy from a struggling working mother on the minimum wage
who wonders how she’s going to pay the supermarket bill but never thinks of
resorting to dishonesty.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">For what it’s worth, my own inclination, initially at least,
was to feel some sympathy for Ghahraman. That feeling has now almost completely
evaporated. I’ve concluded she doesn’t need my sympathy when she has virtually the
entire media in her corner.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">You have to look very hard in the welter of comment to find
any mention of the irony that a woman whose parliamentary salary puts her in
the top 1 per cent of income earners resorted to theft. And not theft of everyday
essentials, but of high-end fashion items marketed to the elite. It all looks decidedly
at odds with the political creed of an MP who has positioned herself as a
champion of the poor.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It didn’t help that when the scandal broke, Ghahraman was on
holiday overseas; exactly where, we haven’t been told. What has emerged is a
picture of privilege and entitlement that sits very awkwardly with Green Party
ideology.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nowhere in all the commentary have I seen reference to the
fact that countless thousands of New Zealanders deal with mental stress without
feeling tempted to steal. As <b><u><a href="https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/01/the_most_uncontrite_resignation_ever.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">David Farrar put it</a></u></b>, “<span style="background: white;">Trying to excuse what happened as being due to stress from
the job is insulting to all the people </span>who are also very stressed
but don’t shoplift”<span style="background: white; font-family: Georgia, "serif";">.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nowhere is there any mention that shoplifting is a massive drain
on the economy. Research in 2017 put the cost at $1.2 billion a year, and you
can bet it’s a lot higher now.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nowhere does any commentator consider the danger that if Ghahraman
is allowed to use mental health as an excuse for theft, anyone else feeling
under stress will now consider themselves entitled to steal.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Having a bad morning? Go and pinch something. If a
high-profile politician can use stress as an excuse, then so can you.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-64716282362150967012024-01-03T12:39:00.009+13:002024-01-05T10:38:16.022+13:00The Crewe murders revisited<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpvAA4-cxNf0EOYNbdgmzbtPaOmvtOt4L-R4TFvr4z6Hoy6R9N7IkvLQTTOwv-SSCnoXqEq6-VF9t5DNboe0Tkuasb83Pk9KL8x6qWYRLTYjqFt_bfTw7xcFIzA_JwRClh3Wu2EY2MN9ueq8C5GMlmmMCUvCFLgR0k7KY9qWGmAOUyJI0O1YMRmxja-w/s220/Harvey_and_Jeannette_Crewe.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="147" data-original-width="220" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpvAA4-cxNf0EOYNbdgmzbtPaOmvtOt4L-R4TFvr4z6Hoy6R9N7IkvLQTTOwv-SSCnoXqEq6-VF9t5DNboe0Tkuasb83Pk9KL8x6qWYRLTYjqFt_bfTw7xcFIzA_JwRClh3Wu2EY2MN9ueq8C5GMlmmMCUvCFLgR0k7KY9qWGmAOUyJI0O1YMRmxja-w/w400-h267/Harvey_and_Jeannette_Crewe.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">No criminal case in New Zealand history has been more
thoroughly worked over than the Crewe murders. The killing of Jeannette and Harvey
Crewe (above) in their Pukekawa farmhouse in 1970 has been the subject of multiple
trials, appeals, inquiries (including a royal commission), books, documentaries,
countless newspaper and magazine articles and even a feature film. Could there
be anything left to say?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Well, yes. Nothing startlingly new, necessarily – but <i>The Crewe Murders: Inside New Zealand’s Most
Infamous Cold Case</i>, is still a gripping read.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The book, by journalists Kirsty Johnston and James Hollings,
presents no compelling fresh theories and uncovers little in the way of
previously unreported evidence – not surprisingly, given the degree to which
the crime has been scrutinised over more than half a century. Crucially, the
authors reach no conclusions about who was guilty of the murders, for which Arthur
Allan Thomas served nine years in prison before being granted a royal pardon. But
it’s a significant piece of work for all that, simply for the painstaking way Johnston
and Hollings have reconstructed the crime and attempted to sift known facts from
speculation, theory, rumour and scandalously flawed (and even faked) evidence.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiErDjVr2K3vDV3akmM0En58qwvxHwbnG_9U2CQMJtkHaqVE7i-zZ4UvQtofgyzNo_gSN2GWSvUbNsL7bz_mySOt8FONPSUoBCuXmAJqnIEy4UIS4Vuopy9K2nc_sB-tH3WUPi41ltedPUF0Lm4KhJpKte_MrJ0KL5RVyQ9P7Esm4l-yQI85xRG38Zz1oM/s1240/Arthur%20Allan%20Thomas%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="1240" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiErDjVr2K3vDV3akmM0En58qwvxHwbnG_9U2CQMJtkHaqVE7i-zZ4UvQtofgyzNo_gSN2GWSvUbNsL7bz_mySOt8FONPSUoBCuXmAJqnIEy4UIS4Vuopy9K2nc_sB-tH3WUPi41ltedPUF0Lm4KhJpKte_MrJ0KL5RVyQ9P7Esm4l-yQI85xRG38Zz1oM/w400-h225/Arthur%20Allan%20Thomas%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span><span><i>Arthur Allan Thomas</i></span></span><div><span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-size: medium;">The passage of time and the deaths of almost all the protagonists
(Thomas himself being an exception – he’s still alive at 86) have taken much of
the heat out of the Thomas controversy and enabled the authors to take what one
hopes is a clearer, more detached perspective than was possible when it was a <i>cause celebre</i>. Nonetheless, the powerful and inescapable
impression left by the book is that in its determination to protect itself and
preserve the stability of “the system” (the authors’ term), the New Zealand establishment
closed ranks. </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;">A gruesome double murder
had been committed, leaving a baby orphaned, and a perpetrator needed to be
found even if it meant constructing a palpably flawed case and ignoring its multiple
failings and contradictions.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">As the arguments against Thomas’s conviction became ever
more compelling, police, judges, Crown lawyers and even prosecution witnesses resorted
to increasingly desperate and shameful measures to cover shortcomings in the
way the case was investigated and prosecuted. Cronyism and conflicts of interest
repeatedly got in the way. Vital information was withheld from the defence or
suppressed outright, police blatantly courted jurors and when serious questions
arose about dodgy police exhibits, they were conveniently dumped at a tip and
buried forever.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The government eventually so lacked confidence in the
integrity and ability of the legal and judicial fraternity that it went to
Australia to find a judge who could be trusted to head a royal commission of inquiry.
The commission’s report came as a bombshell, describing Thomas’s conviction on
the basis of false evidence as “an unspeakable outrage” – a phrase that deserves
to be ranked alongside Justice Peter Mahon’s “orchestrated litany of lies” in
respect of Air New Zealand’s evidence at the Mt Erebus inquiry.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_XYrBqhMQfbb-Hvr_jpwbnOe1Uo3m-tj4sGvPd6xT9N-oot46lsUtoXCff8d-RAxAy2zz4aXv_OYYHlYtJMYDeM4y809Z2q4PdLd9daGjqq3W7lC_oUyKmU6PTl92GdRA5seEx3kESEvBglRaYAt8-fWaJabZFQ6n6wNJ_G037uqondEavssR_CsW838/s1440/Bruce%20Hutton.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="810" data-original-width="1440" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_XYrBqhMQfbb-Hvr_jpwbnOe1Uo3m-tj4sGvPd6xT9N-oot46lsUtoXCff8d-RAxAy2zz4aXv_OYYHlYtJMYDeM4y809Z2q4PdLd9daGjqq3W7lC_oUyKmU6PTl92GdRA5seEx3kESEvBglRaYAt8-fWaJabZFQ6n6wNJ_G037uqondEavssR_CsW838/s320/Bruce%20Hutton.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><i>Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton outside the Crewe farmhouse.</i></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">All this came on top of an incompetent police investigation
and multiple glaring inconsistencies and far-fetched scenarios in the evidence.
It’s now accepted that Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton, who headed the murder
inquiry, planted the cartridge case that helped convict Thomas. The royal
commission said so. (Not only was Hutton never prosecuted, but then police
commissioner Mike Bush paid tribute to him as a man of “integrity beyond
reproach” at his funeral in 2013.)</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In the end, it wasn’t the institutions that society trusts to
uphold the law – the courts and the police – who ensured that justice was done
in the Crewe case, but the media and a dogged group of citizen activists. Oh,
and a couple of politicians: Robert Muldoon and his young justice minister Jim
McLay, who made the courageous decision to issue Thomas with a pardon.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Decades later, all this makes sobering – no, make that
chilling – reading. But <i>The Crewe Murders</i>
can also be appreciated as an absorbing piece of social history. Pukekawa emerges
as a feral sort of place – a New Zealand Ozarks with a history of Gothic
murders where dark, clannish feuds, rivalries and suspicions simmered. (As an aside, I once visited
Pukekawa in the late 1970s without knowing where I was. I was covering an international
motor rally for <i>The Listener</i> and
pulled in at an isolated service station to buy petrol and cigarettes. I spoke
briefly to two surly men and got the distinct impression outsiders weren’t
welcome. I came away with an inexplicably creepy feeling that I’ve experienced only
two or three times in my life. It was only when I saw a sign a couple of
hundred metres down the road that I realised where I was.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ultimately the book doesn’t get us any further, insofar as it
doesn’t identify the killer(s) or even speculate on who it might have been, though
you sense the authors were hoping they might break the case open, as any
investigative journalist would. Notwithstanding his pardon, Thomas still can’t
be definitively ruled out. (Hutton may have genuinely believed him to be guilty; what was unforgiveable was the fabrication of evidence against him.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">At the end of the book, I was left with one nagging thought.
Harvey Crewe was a big man and his wife wasn’t slightly built. A dead body is an
extremely awkward, cumbersome thing, not easily manhandled, yet someone managed
to shift the two bodies from the Crewe farmhouse, wrap them in blankets, manoeuvre
them into a vehicle, take them to the banks of the Waikato River and dump them
in the water. It struck me that all this was highly unlikely to be accomplished
unobserved by someone acting alone, yet the book is silent on this intriguing
aspect of the case. Perhaps, after all, there’s yet another book still to be
written … </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The Crewe Murders is published by Massey University Press and sells for $45.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p></div>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-14390927204133875662024-01-01T12:52:00.003+13:002024-01-03T12:52:53.710+13:00An epic display of dummy-spitting<p><span style="font-size: medium;">As a believer in free speech, I would never question John
Campbell’s right to unburden himself of a <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/12/30/john-campbell-are-we-on-the-cusp-of-something-new-or-something-old/" target="_blank">long, whiny lament </a></u></b>about where New Zealand is going under the
new government.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I do object, however, when it’s published on the website of a
taxpayer-owned broadcaster, TVNZ, which has an ethical obligation to observe editorial
balance and political neutrality.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">If you wanted proof that brazenly activist journalism is not
only accepted but encouraged, even by state-owned media, there it is, right
there. Clearly, TVNZ is untroubled by the fact that the man it calls its Chief
Correspondent adopts an unashamedly political posture and sets himself up as
an outspoken adversary of a democratically elected government. It’s a measure of his ego that he can
take such a provocatively defiant stance and expect to get away with it.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">And it’s not as if this was the first such column. In an epic display of dummy-spitting, Campbell has
grizzled repeatedly about the election outcome – <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/10/28/john-campbell-what-exactly-has-the-tide-brought-in/">here</a></u></b>, <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/11/07/john-campbell-maybe-the-time-without-a-govt-is-the-best-time/" target="_blank">here</a></u></b> and <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/11/25/john-campbell-i-hoped-to-be-surprised-actually-im-amazed/" target="_blank">here</a></u></b>. I’m
surprised he hasn’t demanded we vote again and keep doing it until we get the right result.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That he doesn’t like the new government is not so much the
issue here. That’s his right as a citizen. What’s offensive is that he misuses
his position as a high-profile journalist – one who has spent a large part of his career in the state-owned broadcasting system, with all the power and privilege
that confers – by petulantly and very publicly railing against a government
that his fellow New Zealanders voted for. The Labour Party may be beaten and
demoralised, but that’s okay because Campbell has set himself up as the de
facto Opposition.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It possibly doesn’t occur to Campbell – nor to TVNZ,
obviously – that his political partisanship seriously compromises his journalistic
credibility among the many New Zealanders who voted Labour out and welcomed the
policy U-turns that he finds so egregious. What chance do New Zealanders have
of hearing politically neutral comment from the state-owned TV network’s Chief
Correspondent? What chance of a straight, unbiased account of any contentious issue
about which Campbell holds strong opinions? The answer, it seems, is zero. That
being the case, shouldn’t it matter to TVNZ that viewers who object to Campbell’s
posturing are likely to switch off or turn away whenever his face comes on
screen?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nearly three months on from the election, Campbell still appears
unable to accept that the country voted emphatically for change. I suspect that
like many journalists, six ecstatic years under Labour misled him into thinking
that a radical left-wing government was now the natural order of things. He
exemplifies the elitist metropolitan commentariat which, for those six years,
so dominated media discourse that dissenting opinion was all but smothered. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nowhere in his anguished lamentation does Campbell
acknowledge that the government he objects to was legitimately elected by ordinary
people exercising their one chance in every three years to influence public
policy. Perhaps he avoided mentioning this because he’s too polite to come
right out and say his fellow New Zealanders are thickos, racists and reactionaries,
although the implication is clear enough.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The falsity of his carefully crafted image as a Man of the People
has thus been laid bare. He displays nothing but contempt for the government
and, by extension, for the people who elected it. He has made a career out of
oozing empathy, but his goodwill toward his fellow New Zealanders stops short of
accepting their right to vote for a government he doesn’t approve of.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Having said all that, let’s give Campbell his due. He writes
very well, albeit a bit too emotively. He is achingly sincere. You can feel
his pain. I think he genuinely cares about his fellow New Zealanders. The thing
is, so too, no doubt, do Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and – who knows? –
perhaps even Winston Peters. That presumably is why they entered politics.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The mistake Campbell makes, as is frequently the case with
the sanctimonious Left, is that he thinks he has a monopoly on virtue and compassion.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">On a broader note, the government has a problem. It owns two
powerful media organisations, TVNZ and RNZ, that are essentially hostile to it
and will function as centres of resistance to its policies. Democratically
speaking, this is intolerable. The obvious solution is for the government to send
a signal by sacking the TVNZ and RNZ boards, but the question then becomes: would
it replace them with strong, competent, independent directors, or would it succumb
to the temptation to install political toadies? I wish I could be confident of
the answer.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">To finish on a personal note, I hesitated for a long time
before writing this because my wife and I were good friends of John Campbell’s
parents. They are (or were, in the case of his late father) lovely people. The
two degrees of separation that characterises New Zealand society sometimes makes
things awkward, but there it is.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com46tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-65384615614112453812023-12-30T07:57:00.001+13:002024-01-02T07:12:26.145+13:00A grotesque irony in the honours list<p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">I have just sent the following letter to the Wairarapa Times-Age. It will be interesting to see whether they publish it.</span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I would like to point out a sad and grotesque irony in the
New Year Honours list.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Professor Frank Bloomfield of Auckland University has been
made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to neonatology.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Dr Simon Snook of Carterton has been awarded the same honour
for services to reproductive health, which is a polite way of saying he has
been honoured for promoting abortion.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In other words, one recipient is on the honours list for
saving babies’ lives. The other is on the list for terminating them.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I know which of the two men I believe has done more to earn the
honour and respect of his fellow New Zealanders.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>Footnote: To its great credit, the Times-Age published my letter on January 2. If it had been Stuff, I doubt it would have stood a chance.</b></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-45783411206650609052023-12-20T11:37:00.007+13:002023-12-21T08:53:50.232+13:00The gentle whirring of ebikes on the Timber Trail<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Io-f0dH9d3fa-UPvdkbllGxcajtn9ZzsnWLCLfQjmQrUpAwwNeLHlMCTL6ZUxKjor2Lp4m4IGoOT6-5h61gDqqIF9wv1l0axjMeSKRkz5QUIViIkBpjnxh9hqGhThoUcujdwwzntGDXqmGOgL4xcB_hEEK39q7OfwWYphGHjIGW3acea5d6TAytEhpM/s1599/Timber%20Trail%20pic%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1599" data-original-width="899" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Io-f0dH9d3fa-UPvdkbllGxcajtn9ZzsnWLCLfQjmQrUpAwwNeLHlMCTL6ZUxKjor2Lp4m4IGoOT6-5h61gDqqIF9wv1l0axjMeSKRkz5QUIViIkBpjnxh9hqGhThoUcujdwwzntGDXqmGOgL4xcB_hEEK39q7OfwWYphGHjIGW3acea5d6TAytEhpM/w225-h400/Timber%20Trail%20pic%201.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><br /><span><i>A typical scene on the Timber Trail. (Photo: Barnaby Maass)</i></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If you look up the acronym oobs, you’ll see that it stands
for out-of-band signalling, a term likely to be familiar only to technology
geeks.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I use it to refer to something quite different. Oobs is my
abbreviation for oldies on bikes – a rapidly proliferating demographic cohort
of affluent superannuitants who have discovered, or rediscovered, the joys of
cycling.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I often see groups of oobs riding past my place on the
outskirts of Masterton in their high-vis jackets. Many of them have seized on
battery-powered bikes as an incentive to get back on a bike for the first time
in decades – and who can blame them? It’s healthy, pleasurable and virtuous,
enabling people to enjoy the scenery and fresh air without burning fossil fuels
or raising a sweat.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Though I say battery-powered, you still have to pedal, but
the battery does much of the work. The harder you pedal, the more the battery
supplements your efforts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The best systems flatten hills – or so I’m told. I’ve never
ridden an ebike myself, but I have two friends who bought an expensive
battery-powered French tandem several years ago and have covered much of the
country on it. It’s very heavy, but the batteries (they carry two) enable them
to cover vast distances at surprising speed and in relative comfort.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I encountered the oobs phenomenon close-up last week when my
grandsons and I rode the 85 km Timber Trail, a mountain-bike route through Pureora Forest in the central North Island.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In the course of the two-day ride I became accustomed to
being overtaken by grey-haired riders on ebikes, sitting in a quaintly upright posture (they put me in mind of Miss Gulch in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>) and pedalling as sedately as if they were on a Sunday morning excursion on
Oriental Parade. All I heard was the gentle whirring of electric motors as they
passed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">There were dozens of riders on the trail and in terms of age
they were a wide mix, from teenagers (my grandsons) to at least one
octogenarian. A variety of accents testified to the fact that many were from
overseas, although there were plenty of New Zealanders doing the ride too.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">We arrived at our overnight accommodation at the Timber
Trail Lodge, the halfway mark on the trail, to see a couple of dozen bikes
hooked up to chargers. We were the only guests not riding ebikes, though we had
seen plenty of riders – mostly younger ones – who were doing it the
old-fashioned way, like us.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">We shared our dinner table that night with a middle-aged
couple from Colorado and the 80-year-old from Dunedin. We didn’t see any young
riders at the lodge, so they must have overnighted elsewhere. There are several
accommodation options on the trail, including campsites, although none of the
younger riders we saw were carrying camping gear. Presumably it had been
dropped off for them by a shuttle service.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Timber Trail (I bridle against that American word “trail”,
but have to accept it’s now in common usage) is part of a comprehensive and
rapidly proliferating network of bike trails that have been developed around
the country in response to the booming popularity of multi-day recreational
cycling. The best-known remains the Central Otago Rail Trail.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">A sophisticated support infrastructure has developed around
these trails, providing transport, accommodation and bike hire. Timber Trail
Shuttles took us from their base at Ongarue, north of Taumarunui, to the start
of the trail at Pureora and then dropped our overnight bags at the lodge, which
is one of the few points on the trail accessible by road. The next
morning the shuttle picked up our bags again and took them to the finish.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">At the Timber Trail Lodge we were provided with very comfortable
accommodation, hot showers and an excellent dinner. The young staff are
friendly and helpful and there’s a licensed bar and a roomy lounge with an open
fire and a spacious deck overlooking the bush. They even sent us off the next
morning with a tasty packed lunch. To someone whose previous experience of multi-day
MTB rides mostly involved carting all my own gear and pitching a tent at the
end of the day, this was sheer luxury.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The trail itself is superb. <b><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pureora_Forest_Park" target="_blank">Pureora Forest </a></u></b>is a magnificent
stand of largely unspoiled native bush that stretches almost all the way to
Lake Taupo from northeast of Taumarunui. It first sprang into public
consciousness in the 1970s, when environmentalists protesting against logging proposals camped on platforms in the treetops. The Muldoon government sensibly responded
by giving the forest protected status.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Mountain bike trails are rated from one (easy) to six
(extreme). The Timber Trail is classified as 2-3, but that doesn’t mean it’s a
pushover. The track is wide and relatively smooth for much of the way and doesn’t
require technical riding skill, but the first part involves a steady and at
times steep climb to the highest point (971 metres) on the flanks of Mt
Pureora. You need to be reasonably fit, although battery assistance doubtless
helps.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>You also need to be reasonably well prepared. You wouldn’t want
a mechanical failure, a serious accident or a medical misadventure, because it’s
a remote area and cellphone access is almost non-existent. </span><span> </span><span>Shuttle operators recommend personal locator
beacons in case of emergency and have them available for hire at a reasonable
cost.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Day two is relatively cruisy, being almost all downhill and
mainly following the routes of bush tramways that were built to haul logs out. For
riders unsure of their fitness, the 40km ride from the midway point at Piropiro
to the finish would be a great introduction to the trail, although they would
miss seeing the most spectacular, untouched tracts of forest.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Apart from the bush itself, highlights include several impressive
suspension bridges, three of them more than 100 metres long, spanning deep gorges.
There are numerous stopping points with views of bush-clad hills appearing to
stretch into infinity and in one spot, a glimpse through the haze of distant
Lake Taupo.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiki2SUq9-ou5ntUufV9TMkhogtVGIxT6Nx8cW8X2h8F7afr_-4OHACWpwH38usk_td8vJ4EMAPeSAQRwLM9jLVdlwagwYt4ikOiXodd8WfZfMj1YeUDSbqOrBCudL7rexFXV0nNUv9YOdsVSh3s2ntyAesbb6htvrYMGklQG_uAgfaggBESQ7eYzb-v_c/s2016/Timber%20Trail%20pic%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="2016" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiki2SUq9-ou5ntUufV9TMkhogtVGIxT6Nx8cW8X2h8F7afr_-4OHACWpwH38usk_td8vJ4EMAPeSAQRwLM9jLVdlwagwYt4ikOiXodd8WfZfMj1YeUDSbqOrBCudL7rexFXV0nNUv9YOdsVSh3s2ntyAesbb6htvrYMGklQG_uAgfaggBESQ7eYzb-v_c/w400-h225/Timber%20Trail%20pic%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><i>One of several impressive suspension bridges. (Photo: Gabriel Maass)</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>On the latter part of the trail, as you get closer to civilisation,
points of interest change from natural and purely scenic as evidence of human
intervention, such as remnants of old logging settlements and milling activity,
becomes more conspicuous. </span><span> </span><span>DOC has made a
good job of providing information panels.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">DOC has also made sure the trail is well-marked, and here’s
a tip: if you don’t see the distinctive trail symbol every few minutes, you’ve
probably taken a wrong turning. We did, and wasted a frustrating 40 minutes getting
back on course. (My fault for making an assumption that a subsidiary track
would take us back to the main one. It didn’t.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Pureora is noted for its native bird life, but we saw and
heard disappointingly few birds. Kaka could be heard in the treetops at the
start of the ride but after that, the bush was mostly silent. I was hoping to
see or hear karearea (the native falcon), kokako or whio, but no such luck.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">One last thought. In 2014 I rode the Heaphy Track and
concluded at the finish that as good as it was, you needed to walk it to appreciate
it fully. I felt much the same about the Timber Trail (which is part of the Te
Araroa Trail from North Cape to Bluff, so you can expect to see walkers as well
as cyclists). On a bike, you’re focused for much of the time on riding. I
couldn’t help thinking that the Timber Trail invites the more immersive, contemplative
experience that only walking can truly provide.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">You can read about the Timber Trail <b><u><a href="https://www.timbertrail.nz/site_files/21379/upload_files/FD_Timber_Trail_Tear_Pad_A3_0821.pdf?dl=1" target="_blank">here.</a></u></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Footnote: In case
anyone gets the wrong idea, this trip was not what journalists call a freebie. My grandsons and I paid our
own way.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-55919546732770754412023-12-18T10:10:00.002+13:002023-12-18T10:10:41.006+13:00Peter Bush: one of the greatest of a great generation<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9H2WD0AI2xmf41Jte6KPsw3Uc7GVl2DYoJ4uCvDJsR278hu5c9wGmfVqEZJjSh3n2OFId095WZPc-x2Dee3O0diJsKTn0srJyEn4XNFyObQjfZYYgDRqL68dU2T-n4gaSXy82zX1begHOi-fIKH0fo1FIzVzLkshyphenhyphen1-jGDN0oloYSmyH7Z-rl67Z78E/s465/Peter%20Bush%20pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="465" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9H2WD0AI2xmf41Jte6KPsw3Uc7GVl2DYoJ4uCvDJsR278hu5c9wGmfVqEZJjSh3n2OFId095WZPc-x2Dee3O0diJsKTn0srJyEn4XNFyObQjfZYYgDRqL68dU2T-n4gaSXy82zX1begHOi-fIKH0fo1FIzVzLkshyphenhyphen1-jGDN0oloYSmyH7Z-rl67Z78E/s320/Peter%20Bush%20pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><div><i><br /></i></div>The great Peter Bush, one of the last survivors of a generation of outstanding New Zealand press photographers, has died aged 93. I wrote the following article for The Listener in 2011 to mark the opening of a touring exhibition of "Bushy's" rugby pictures. </i><br /><br />“Bushy, you’re one of us.” <br /><br /> The man to whom this tribute is addressed has a tanned, weather-beaten face and a silver beard. He has dressed up for this special occasion in a smart dark suit. His eyes are gleaming with delight and he is beaming from ear to ear. His name is Peter George Bush, and the accolade he has just received, from former All Black captain and coach Sir Brian Lochore, is an indication of his rarefied status among sports photographers – an acknowledgment that for this man, the no-go zone that the All Blacks have traditionally erected around themselves didn’t apply. <br /><br />The occasion is the launching of <i>Hard on the Heels</i>, an exhibition of 100 rugby photographs taken by Bush in the 60 years since he covered his first test match (New Zealand v Australia at Eden Park) for the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> in 1949. The venue is Masterton’s Aratoi gallery – an appropriate location, given Bush’s obvious preference for old-style heartland rugby over the modern professional game. <br /><br />Selected by curator Rod McLeod from thousands of photos (or “images”, as Bush reluctantly calls them, deferring to the terminology favoured in gallery circles), the mostly black-and-white pictures capture the essence of the sport that, for many New Zealanders, still helps define the national character. <br /><br />In a career that still hasn’t completely run its course, Bush has achieved the rare, if not unique, distinction of becoming better known than many of the players whose pictures he took. He has photographed them in the white-hot cauldrons of Loftus Versfeld and Cardiff Arms, in steamy, sweaty changing rooms and at home on their farms. Along the way a mutual respect developed between Bush and his subjects. As Lochore explains, the All Blacks allowed Bush access to their inner sanctums because they were confident he wouldn’t betray their trust. <br /><br />The opening night is more than just a celebration of Bush’s photographs. It’s suffused with the golden glow of rugby nostalgia. Speakers talk fondly of an era when test matches were played in daylight, muddy grounds rendered players virtually unrecognisable (unheard of with today’s impeccably prepared playing surfaces) and referees weren’t second-guessed by video replays. <br /><br />Bob Francis, a former Masterton mayor and ex-international referee who was instrumental in having the exhibition launched in the Wairarapa town, identifies the 1963 and 1967 overseas tours, led by Wilson Whineray and Lochore respectively, as two of the greatest in the history of the game. In a gentle dig at the pampered stars of the professional game, he notes that in Whineray’s and Lochore’s time, the All Blacks would arrive home after a long tour and get straight back into club rugby the week after. <br /><br />Lochore himself takes a good-natured poke at the modern game. “On tour we had a manager and a coach. No doctor, no physio, no mentor, no trainer. Now there are at least 12 guys as padding.” Players looked after their own gear and jerseys would be hung out to dry on heaters in hotel corridors. “You knew where the All Blacks were,” Lochore wryly remarks. <br /><br />Bush, he recalls, was one of a tight team of journalists who accompanied the All Blacks on tour. “We had Bushy, Alex Veysey, Terry McLean [rugby writers] and Morrie Hill [the official photographer]. These guys were part of our team. Bushy was one of the very few who got into our dressing room. We trusted him.” Bush, now 79 but still looking lean and fit, is the last survivor of that group. <br /><br />Lochore and Francis are not the only rugby luminaries to speak in Bush’s honour at the opening. Sir Colin Meads is there too, regaling the crowd with war stories from an era when there were no instant TV replays to incriminate on-the-field enforcers who, to use a famous All Black maxim, made a point of getting their retaliation in first. <br /><br />In fact Meads gets so carried away with an anecdote about his French nemesis, Benoit Dauga, that he forgets what he’s there for. MC Keith Quinn has to grab the Te Kuiti rugby knight as he strides off and pull him back to the podium to declare the exhibition open. (For the record, Dauga left the paddock in 1968 with a broken nose, a black eye and minus one tooth after Meads took revenge on the Frenchman for opening up the back of his head in a ruck. It was only later that he discovered Dauga wasn’t the perpetrator.)</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV-fQ5m6J5kOtYeZCVX2ccmXELjy2e20dc5trTqaWhKMGu9N69XlhrgCdJab3U0qiHK25TzV4K0dyhfiatyAJ7JaSsTtxaMOcAh0BVxRNrltJtdMuVjp-wnEK_KOomO1PXHrAeCOQSp7a9TuGEmVMAxe02Ggri69pTRuzq8XbHk2-FYzD3IbAxVF8g2zE/s1200/Peter%20Bush%20rugby%20pic%20%232.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="898" data-original-width="1200" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV-fQ5m6J5kOtYeZCVX2ccmXELjy2e20dc5trTqaWhKMGu9N69XlhrgCdJab3U0qiHK25TzV4K0dyhfiatyAJ7JaSsTtxaMOcAh0BVxRNrltJtdMuVjp-wnEK_KOomO1PXHrAeCOQSp7a9TuGEmVMAxe02Ggri69pTRuzq8XbHk2-FYzD3IbAxVF8g2zE/w400-h299/Peter%20Bush%20rugby%20pic%20%232.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>A classic Peter Bush rugby pic from the days when mud was king. Good luck identifying the players ...</i><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Of Bush’s photographs, exhibition organiser Mark Roach observes that they record more than just rugby. “There’s an element of social history in them.” <br /><br />Take the crowd shot Bush took at Athletic Park in 1956 when the All Blacks played the Springboks. There’s not a female in sight. Nearly all the men are wearing hats and gabardine overcoats and many are smoking. In the background, attached to the scoreboard, is a big advertising hoarding: “Time for a Capstan” (a popular cigarette brand of that era). <br /><br />Roach also notes an edgy quality to some of Bush’s pictures that takes them out of the realm of conventional sports photographs. One striking example is his photo of a young All Black side, led by Ian Kirkpatrick with a remarkably boyish-looking Joe Karam behind him, waiting to take the field in Northern Ireland in 1972 – the height of the “Troubles” – while a British Army sharpshooter stands by with an automatic rifle at the ready. <br /><br />Another is Bush’s photo of a solitary Keith Murdoch, the All Black prop famously banished from that same tour after an altercation with a Welsh hotel security guard, walking along a Bristol railway platform before catching a plane home. (Murdoch subsequently disembarked in Australia and melted into the Outback, thus cementing his almost mythic place in rugby history.) Bush points out that in the picture, Murdoch is wearing his official team blazer with the silver fern removed. “Some say he unpicked it on the train.” <br /><br />It was the last known photo of Murdoch and Bush says that in some ways he wished he’d never taken it. Like others on that tour, he remains deeply affected by what many felt was the unfair treatment of a player whom the British rugby establishment wanted to make an example of. On the excellent DVD documentary that accompanies the exhibition, Bush studies his photo of Murdoch intensely as if looking for something. Then he puts it down and starts to say something, but is overcome by emotion and leaves the room. <br /><br />An entertaining raconteur as well as a great photographer, Bush tells guests at the exhibition opening about his first visit to the Meads’ King Country farm in 1967. Colin and his brother Stan, also an All Black, were drafting sheep in the yards. “I was nervous because I had no appointment. I thought they might tell me to bugger off.” Instead, Meads got Bush to pitch in and help. Later they all sat down to lunch prepared by Meads’ wife Verna. <br /><br />That was the day Bush photographed Meads toiling up a steep hillside with a strainer post under each arm, thus creating a piece of Kiwi iconography. Bush was impressed by the hard physicality of the Meads brothers’ farm life. “They had a mental and physical hardness on and off the farm. What a waste of energy it would have been to take these men to a gym,” he says – a gentle dig at the gym-fit players of the modern era. <br /><br />Mind you, Meads wasn’t always so friendly. On the DVD documentary, Bush tells interviewer Quinn about the time he overstepped the mark at a 1964 test match between the All Blacks and Australia. Bush went onto the field at half time and got a picture of the New Zealand captain John Graham giving his under-performing side a tongue-lashing. As this was happening, the customary plate of orange pieces was handed around the players and Bush cheekily helped himself to one – at which point the “ominous shadow” of Meads loomed over him. “I don’t remember seeing you pushing in the scrum, Bushy”, Meads growled. Bush – not a man to be easily intimidated – recalls slinking away to the sideline. <br /><br />He makes no secret of his admiration for the hard men of rugby. Some of the toughest games he ever photographed, he says, were trials matches in which players competed for the right to wear the black jersey. “For the chosen it meant glory. For the others it was back to the desk or the farm. There was no quarter given.” <br /><br />Particular players he admired? Apart from the aforementioned, Buck Shelford was one. “What a player – he epitomised the supreme athlete who gave everything. The Greeks would have cast him in stone.” And Jonah Lomu. Bush recalls Lomu visiting an old people’s home and making a point of kissing every old lady in the room. “Forget about his prowess on the field; he was equal to it off the field.” <br /><br />Bush’s admiration for the players of the game is matched by his contempt for the occasional small-mindedness and vindictiveness of rugby officialdom. He recalls with disgust that two women accompanying the British Lions – one a player’s wife – were turned away from a rugby function in Southland because it was men-only. <br /><br />Some of Bush’s pictures came at a cost. One example is the shot he took of Meads exchanging jerseys with the formidable Springbok prop Andy Macdonald under the stand at Lancaster Park (which Bush still calls Lancaster Park, with blithe disregard for sponsors’ naming rights) in 1965. Access to the changing rooms was ferociously controlled – “not even a fox terrier could have got past the guardian on the gate” – but somehow Bush slipped through amid the big Springbok forwards, hidden by the bulk of Lofty Nel. <br /><br />But it was an era of officious men in rugby union blazers who didn’t take kindly to being thwarted. “That photo had me barred by the Canterbury union from 1965 through till 1971. They couldn’t keep me off the field but they barred me from everything else.” <br /><br />Still, he’s particularly proud of that photo and you sense that Bush regarded the disapprobation of small-minded provincial rugby officials as a price worth paying.</span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p></div>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-21674487194588700852023-12-06T15:01:00.006+13:002023-12-06T18:14:08.170+13:00A massive gesture of contempt for the voters<span style="font-size: medium;">It’s said that great minds think alike. Unfortunately the same is true, by definition, of conformist minds. <br /><br />As an example, take the political news headlines of November 29. They were strikingly similar. Almost without exception, the mainstream media pounced on the new government’s decision to axe Labour’s ambitious (but possibly unworkable) plan to make New Zealand smokefree.<br /><br />Not only did the major media outlets agree, as if by consensus, on what should be played up as the big story of the day. Even the wording of the headlines was often virtually identical. <br /><br />And so we got <i>Health experts furious over government’s plan to scrap smokefree measures</i> (Newshub): <i>Government’s smokefree law repeal ‘a massive step back’ – health orgs</i> (1 News); <i>Disbelief as a smokefree generation slips away</i> (The Detail, RNZ); <i>Top Pasifika doctor Collin Tukuitonga slams plans to repeal smokefree laws – says most vulnerable will suffer</i> (NZ Herald); <i>Government defending the indefensible in scrapping smokefree efforts – health leader</i> (RNZ); <i>Experts warn health system will bear burden of government abandoning smokefree regulations</i> (Newshub again). <br /><br />There was also a predictable anxiety attack over what the rest of the world might think. <i>Smoking laws: what international media is [sic] saying about NZ’s scrapping</i> (the Herald); <i>Smokefree laws: what the world is saying about NZ’s ‘shock reversal’</i> (1 News); <i>What the world’s media says [sic] about new government’s plan to scrap smokefree laws </i>(Newshub). In other words some overseas media disapproved, therefore the governing coalition must have got it hideously wrong. How embarrassing for New Zealand; how shameful.<br /><br />True, the BBC, <i>Time</i> magazine and America’s National Public Radio all took the line that the new government was foolishly (or callously) snuffing out progressive laws that had been passed by Jacinda Ardern’s enlightened administration - laws that were seen as a blueprint for the rest of the world, or so the journalists pronounced. How could anyone take such a retrograde step? That was the dominant tone of the overseas coverage. To be fair, though, the overseas stories were nuanced, balanced and contextualised in a way that was generally lacking locally. New Zealanders reading them would have been considerably better informed than by their own domestic media. <br /><br />The following day, November 30, brought an even more striking example of media groupthink. A selection of headlines: <i>Luxon honeymoon rained on by Peters and cigarettes</i> (Toby Manhire, The Spinoff); <i>Winston Peters killed Christopher Luxon’s honeymoon with anti-media antics</i> (Jenna Lynch, Newshub); <i>Christopher Luxon tries to get his plan and honeymoon back on track without Winston Peters butting in</i> (Claire Trevett, the Herald); <i>Winston Peters making it look like Chris Luxon has lost control</i> (Tova O’Brien, Stuff); <i>Winston Peters’ bad behaviour overshadowing Christopher Luxon, David Seymour</i> (Audrey Young, the Herald); <i>Christopher Luxon refuses to pull Winston Peters into line over anti-media comments, laughs it off</i> (Jenna Lynch again, taking a second swipe). <br /><br />This time two themes were competing for the excitable journalists’ attention. One was that Peters was hijacking Luxon’s moment in the spotlight; the other was that the deputy prime minister was defaming the media with false claims that they had been bribed by the previous government’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, and Luxon was doing nothing to rein him in. Why wasn’t the PM defending the media, or at least telling Peters to pull his horns in? (As if ...) <br /><br />How do we know Peters’ statements about the media were false? Because Jenna Lynch told us so, more than once. She didn’t explain how they were false; they just were. We were supposed to take her word for it. <br /><br />The NZ media now automatically insert that word “false” in every story about Peters’ accusations about the PIJF, just as the US media inserted the word “false” in every story about Donald Trump complaining the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. (We can now be reasonably confident those claims <i>were </i>false after several courts ruled they were. But that wasn’t the case when the US media, almost without exception, began using the word. They took upon themselves the right to assert it as an established fact.) <br /><br />A previous generation of journalists, both here and in the US, would have said the claims were alleged to be false or had been condemned as false. They would have explained who was alleging they were false and why, then left the public to make up its own mind. The court of public opinion was the ultimate arbiter.<br /><br />Not anymore. The media decide what’s false and what can be regarded as credible. As with Lynch, we’re expected to take their word for it. <br /><br />The claims about the PIJF may indeed be false, as was the case with Trump. But the media have taken a dangerous leap into new territory by acting as if contentious issues are definitively settled when in the public mind they may not be. In effect, they have assumed a mantle of omniscience. <br /><br />Climate change is another case where the mainstream media have decreed there’s no room for dispute and that, accordingly, no contrary views will be given space or air time. I’ve been a journalist for 55 years and I can’t recall any previous issue on which the media arrogantly asserted the right to shut down all public debate on the basis that an issue was “settled”. But this is the new normal. <br /><br />It’s an attitude that flows from the emergence of a new priestly caste of university-educated journalists who reject the idea of objectivity, contemptuously dismissing it as <b><u><a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2023/12/04/the-responsibility-to-not-report-irish-journalist-calls-on-colleagues-to-suppress-immigration-stories/" target="_blank">“bothsidesism”</a></u></b>. Former generations of journalists were trained to present both sides of a story, but to the priestly journalistic caste now in control, this risks giving an aura of legitimacy to opinions and ideas they fear and despise. They have therefore taken upon themselves the right to determine what the public can safely be allowed to read or hear, and thus to proscribe modern heresies such as climate change scepticism or Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. <br /><br />Journalists seem to think that simply by baldly asserting that statements they disagree with are false, they will convince the public. Certainly some of the public, such as RNZ’s steadily diminishing number of rusted-on devotees, will need little persuading. However it’s more likely the media will simply get a lot of people’s backs up. What many journalists don’t grasp is that most of <b><u><a href="https://www.aut.ac.nz/news/stories/trust-in-the-news-slips-further" target="_blank">the public no longer trust them</a></u></b> and wonder, quite reasonably, why they should believe them – a state of affairs made worse by the media’s rush to sign up to the Ardern government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund, which brings us back to Peters’ claims of bribery. <br /><br />Was it “bribery” to accept government money in return for a commitment to a highly politicised interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi, as Peters says? At worst, his use of the word could be described as hyperbole. But the indignant chorus of howls from the media can’t disguise the fact that by taking the money, they laid themselves open to the accusation that the government had bought their support. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Even if some media outlets convinced themselves they were behaving honourably, the mere acceptance of government money created a very damaging public perception. I don’t think media bosses gave sufficient thought to the harm that would be done to their credibility, especially in a febrile political climate highly charged by divisive identity politics and dissent over such issues as the vaccine mandate. And their image wasn’t helped by the perception that the media were giving Ardern’s government a conspicuously easy ride. <br /><br />That the PIJF was at heart a propaganda exercise (I called it the Pravda Project) is not in any doubt. Raewyn Rasch, who ran the fund on behalf of NZ on Air – and who, for the fund’s duration, became one of the most powerful figures in the New Zealand media – <b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018917877/claims-of-media-bribery-derail-new-government-on-day-one" target="_blank">admitted as much</a></u></b> on RNZ’s <i>Mediawatch</i>. In an interview with Colin Peacock after the first funding round in 2021, she said NZ on Air wanted to encourage conversations about the Treaty, but those conversations had to “come from an understanding of what the Treaty is about”. And who decided what the correct “understanding” was? Why, Rasch and NZ on Air, that's who. <br /><br />Rasch argued that this didn’t preclude anyone from taking a critical view of Treaty issues – but if you’re dictating how the Treaty is to be interpreted, and therefore limiting the parameters of the “conversation”, to use Rasch’s cute term, you’re choking off the scope for legitimate debate and automatically excluding most, if not all, dissenting opinion. <br /><br />Some of what Rasch said in that interview was nonsensical and contradictory. She said the fund didn’t dictate how applicants should cover Treaty issues, but then almost immediately and quite unabashedly told of a PIJF-funded documentary about the South Island Alpine Fault that fell short of the fund’s expectations because it included no Maori input. Rasch’s team “went back and had a chat” – how chilling those words can sound – with the documentary makers, as a result of which they then “engaged” with Ngai Tahu. Even Peacock, an apologist for the Pravda Project, seemed surprised that a documentary about seismology had to pay homage to NZ on Air’s idea of the Treaty principles. But oh, yes: “Te Tiriti comes into everything,” Rasch declared. So there you are.<br /><br />Now, back to that remarkable media consensus on the story of the day. On November 29, it was the scrapping of Labour’s idealistic but impractical anti-smoking legislation; on November 30, the focus was on Peters’ attacks on the media, and the implied weakness of Luxon for not silencing him. <br /><br />The election of any new government almost invariably precipitates an avalanche of news – this one more so than most because it brought together three parties which, despite often incompatible ideologies, agreed on an ambitious programme of change. <br /><br />There were 49 items on the 100-day plan announced by the government on November 29. The media latched onto one – the smokefree reversal – and almost ignored the other 48. Why? <br /><br />The same uniformity was notable the following day in the coverage of Peters’ bribery claims - a story of importance primarily to self-absorbed, hyper-sensitive journalists. <br /><br />I wonder, do parliamentary press gallery reporters confer among themselves to decide which subjects to cover and what line to take? The homogenous tone of the coverage suggests so, but I doubt it. Conspiracy is too strong a word, implying some sort of secret agreement. However it surely says something that so many journalists come away from an announcement and all spin it the same way. If that doesn’t suggest groupthink, I don’t know what does. <br /><br />Fortunately there remain a few thoughtful, independently minded press gallery journalists who don’t hunt with the pack and who develop their own angles. I won’t put them in a difficult position by naming them. <br /><br />All this took place against a backdrop of wall-to-wall weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the election of a government that the priestly media caste doesn’t approve of. I can’t recall any new government being confronted with such intense, naked hostility from people whom the public expect to be fair, neutral and balanced. <br /><br />State-owned media are some of the worst offenders. Throughout last week, RNZ’s <i>Morning Report</i> featured a daily parade of the aggrieved and disaffected: renters, unionists, public transport lobbyists, climate activists, teachers, academics, health and disability advocates, Treaty crusaders and environmentalists, all beating their breasts in despair – egged on by sympathetic interviewers – at the depredations wrought by a government of barbarians. As <b><u><a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/richard-prebble-slash-red-tape-and-watch-the-economy-take-flight/NOG3VHTNHFDX7IGT5O4FM4V2QY/" target="_blank">Richard Prebble perceptively wrote</a></u></b> in a column, “power and privilege are never surrendered voluntarily”. <br /><br />TVNZ is no better, giving more air time to politicians the electorate rejected than to ones who were elected – and often needling the latter and trying to trap them with “Gotcha!” questions. The state TV network also makes space on its website for <b><u><a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/10/28/john-campbell-what-exactly-has-the-tide-brought-in/" target="_blank">whiny opinion pieces</a></u></b> by the nation’s Hand-Wringer in Chief, John Campbell. Make no mistake, the media will ensure that the coalition parties are punished for their electoral success. <br /><br />Note too the deafening media silence over incendiary statements from Maori politicians – among them, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer’s allegations of “systemic genocide” and “state-sponsored terrorism”, which bordered on unhinged, and Willie Jackson’s threats of “war” and civil unrest “five times worse” than the 1981 Springbok tour, which were tantamount to an incitement to violence. <br /><br />These intemperate verbal eruptions pass unremarked by the media high priests, as did the circus at the swearing-in of MPs yesterday when the Maori Party wilfully made a mockery of parliamentary procedure. Those same Maori MPs would not take it well – and neither should they – if visitors to a marae refused to honour protocol and tradition. Why do they not show the same respect for the institution to which they have been elected? And why do media commentators appear united in their determination not to denounce the debasement of the House of Representatives that sits at the heart of New Zealand’s system of government? <br /><br />All this follows six years during which the mainstream media gave a free pass to probably the most extremist government in New Zealand history. Time and again under Ardern, dodgy law changes went unreported and issues that reflected badly on the government were either treated as invisible or played down until exposure by online platforms made them impossible to ignore. Now journalists have suddenly and miraculously rediscovered the critical scrutiny mechanism that inexplicably lay dormant for two terms under Labour. <br /><br />To finish, three points: <br /><br />1. I didn’t vote for this government (I didn’t cast a party vote at all) so can’t be considered blindly loyal to any of the parties in the coalition. I did, however, welcome the ousting of the former government and believe that its successors, who were legitimately elected under the system the country voted for in 1993, are entitled to a fair shake. <br /><br />2. Where are the boards of directors and CEOs of media organisations? Directors are rightly reluctant to interfere in editorial decisions, but the unprecedented media animosity toward an elected government is unhealthy for the body politic. Hubristic presenters and political journalists are out of control and intoxicated by their own imagined power. It has reached a point where more senior figures need to step in for the sake of democracy, to say nothing of their sagging corporate reputations. This is especially true of the state-owned media companies TVNZ and RNZ. If those boards allow things to continue as they are, they should be shown the door on the assumption they are hostile to the government that employs them. (The boards are politically appointed, of course, and we can't discount the possibility that at least some directors were chosen because they were on board with Labour's agenda.) I never imagined myself advocating boardroom intervention in newsroom decisions, still less political appointments to media organisations, but this is what we’ve come to. <br /><br />3. Ultimately, it all comes down to democracy and respect for the will of the people. For six years New Zealand had a government the media approved of. Voters emphatically signalled on October 14 that they wanted a change, but the priestly media caste is tone-deaf to the public mood and can’t bring itself to accept the decision. The petulant media campaign of resistance against the coalition government is, above all, a massive gesture of contempt for the voters. Or should I say the deplorables?</span></div>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-64933077566937720702023-12-01T13:45:00.005+13:002023-12-01T16:26:53.783+13:00What's behind the media’s low-key treatment of the mosque shootings inquest?<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Has anyone else been struck by the extraordinarily low-key media
coverage of the inquest into the Christchurch mosque massacres?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Day after day, major news outlets have, at best, played down
the proceedings. At worst they have ignored the inquest altogether. The
coverage has been so conspicuously subdued that I can only conclude it’s deliberate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">RNZ is an honourable exception, but even there the coverage
has been relatively light. Television has reported the inquest only spasmodically
and you have to search the Stuff and NZME websites for any reference to it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is perplexing. March 15, 2019 was one of the most traumatic
days in New Zealand history – arguably more so than previous tragedies such as Pike
River, Mt Erebus or the Wahine sinking, because it was the result of a deliberate
act. Only the Aramoana massacre of 1990, in which 13 people were shot dead
compared with the 51 in Christchurch, comes close.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It follows that the nation has a vital interest in knowing
not just how and why the mosque killings happened and whether they could have
been avoided, but also in establishing whether the response by police and emergency
services was adequate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">A royal commission of inquiry in 2020 dealt with those first
questions, but it falls to the inquest under deputy chief coroner Brigitte
Windley to investigate the latter issue.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">What has emerged in evidence so far is not encouraging. Witnesses
have told of confused, chaotic, slapdash and even heartless responses to the
shootings; of indecision, communication breakdowns and rigid adherence to health
and safety rules that meant medical help for the surviving victims was delayed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Until yesterday, perhaps the most disheartening revelations were
that paramedics didn’t enter the Deans Avenue mosque until 30 minutes after the
killer had left and that surviving victims were abandoned altogether for 10 minutes
after reports came through of the second outbreak of shootings and police left
the scene to rush to Linwood.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018917662/counter-terrorism-experts-give-evidence-at-inquest-into-the-murders-of-51-worshippers" target="_blank">Now it has emerged </a></u></b>that distraught relatives of the victims at
Deans Avenue were told to leave the scene and even threatened with arrest when
they wanted to comfort the wounded. An American police expert on terror attacks
told of “heartbreaking” witness statements and gave his opinion that people who
were already inside the mosque should have been allowed to stay unless they
were interfering. Another overseas counter-terrorism expert said there was no
excuse for leaving the shooting victims alone.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">No doubt the inquest has also been told, or will be told, of
acts of heroism and compassion by first responders, including the two courageous and quick-thinking police officers who apprehended the killer. It’s likely too that
the coroner, in her findings, will make the point that this was an unprecedented
event and that confusion and errors of judgment were probably inevitable.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That Brenton Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the
shooting began, and before he could continue his murderous rampage at Ashburton,
was remarkable. Failings by police and ambulance staff should never be allowed
to overshadow or diminish that fact.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But at the same time, the public is entitled to know where the system failed and how it might be improved. That’s what makes
the news media’s apparent lack of interest so puzzling.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In past eras, an event such as the Christchurch inquest
would have been given saturation coverage. Reporters would have been present
throughout and filed blow-by-blow accounts of every witness statement.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That this hasn’t happened is partly an inevitable result of
the hollowing-out of newsrooms and the shrinkage of newspaper space. But the
level of coverage also reflects editorial priorities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Not so very long ago, news editors would have regarded the
inquest as an essential “running” story – one that automatically commanded daily
prominence. Now it has to compete for space with such essential news as why you
should <b><u><a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/133376526/avoid-french-and-italian-the-dos-and-donts-of-drinking-wine-on-planes" target="_blank">avoid French and Italian wines </a></u></b>on aircraft and the <b><u><a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/301017208/the-wedding-of-the-century-that-cost-almost-100-million" target="_blank">$100 million wedding</a> </u></b>of a woman even Stuff admits no one has heard of.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Clearly reporters are present at the inquest for at least some
of the time, and equally clearly the stories emerging from the inquest are a compelling
matter of public interest. </span><span> </span><span>Yet far from
being highlighted in news columns and bulletins, those stories are given
surprisingly subdued treatment. Why?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">For once, I’m not suggesting there’s any ideological or political
factor involved. More likely it’s a simple matter of editorial judgment, in
which case I think it’s badly flawed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I can’t help wondering whether the national memory of March 15, 2019
is considered so painful that media decision-makers decided we should be spared
any unnecessary reminders. Or are the shootings regarded as a stain on the
nation’s reputation that has now been made worse by the shame and embarrassment of
an inept response, and therefore something to be reported grudgingly and reluctantly
– if at all?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-22265988140997280002023-11-29T11:03:00.004+13:002023-11-29T11:14:32.612+13:00The media's war on the new government<p><span style="font-size: medium;">We are in an extraordinary situation where the mainstream
media are openly at war with an elected government. This has never happened before in my lifetime, and to my knowledge never in New Zealand history.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Having adopted a nauseatingly sycophantic approach to the former
government, consistently ignoring issues that showed it in a bad light and
subjecting it to only the gentlest scrutiny while mercilessly savaging the
opposition, the media are now in full-on attack mode.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The level of hostility toward the Luxon-led government is striking.
All pretence of balance and neutrality has been abandoned.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The message is clear. The mainstream media are sulking
because they think the voters elected the wrong government. They are angry and
indignant that despite all their efforts, New Zealand swung right on October 14.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">They are wilfully tone-deaf to the public mood because they
think they know better. It means nothing to them that the voters had had enough
of Labour’s ideological excesses. At best, the high priests of the media (or should
I say high priestesses, since the worst offenders are female) are indifferent
to democracy; at worst, they resent it because it gives power to the hoi-polloi
– the deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s word.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In effect, the media are functioning as the opposition. A shattered and demoralised Labour Party has disappeared to lick its wounds, so the press
gallery has loyally stepped into the vacuum.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">War was declared on the day the coalition’s ministers were
sworn in. The tone of the media coverage over the ensuing three days has been
relentlessly carping, petty, quarrelsome and negative. We are seeing ministers
baited and goaded in a way that never happened under Labour.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The sheer aggression is likely to rattle Luxon and his
National ministers, none of whom have previously shown much spine in standing up
for themselves against media hit-jobs. They will need to harden up fast.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">David Seymour will cope far better and Winston Peters, of
course, will revel in the combat. Peters is a graduate of the Robert Muldoon
School of Media Relations and a lightning rod for the media's antagonism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Government ministers and MPs must understand that they don’t
need to ingratiate themselves with their press gallery tormentors. They should
remind themselves that having been elected, they have a moral legitimacy the
media can never enjoy. No one voted for the members of the press gallery and
they are accountable to no one.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">They are not even well-liked. I suspect that an opinion
poll taken today would show that respect for the media has slumped to a
new low, which would be quite some achievement. If their purpose is to hasten the mainstream media's descent into irrelevance and ultimate oblivion, they are going about it in exactly the right way.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-85781354246841441612023-11-28T09:01:00.007+13:002023-11-28T11:32:17.188+13:00The left-wing media needed a line of attack, and they found one<span style="font-size: medium;">The left-wing media pack wasted no time identifying the new government’s weakest point. <br /><br />Seething over an election result that they didn’t like, they have searched for a convenient line of attack and found one in the proposed repeal of Labour’s extremist smokefree legislation. <br /><br />This has been a running story for the past two days. The media have collectively decided to frame the government’s proposal as an <b><u><a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/talanoa/top-pasifika-doctor-sir-collin-tukuitonga-slams-plans-to-repeal-smokefree-laws-says-most-vulnerable-will-suffer/USONMCETMJATXB5H2PQGISVIBQ/?lid=e7vc7snmojgm" target="_blank">attack on the poor</a></u></b> to benefit the rich. Even <b><u><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67540190" target="_blank">the BBC</a></u></b> picked up on it. <br /><br />National obligingly played into their hands when Nicola Willis acknowledged on <i>Newshub Nation </i>that money saved by scrapping the laws, and therefore restoring $1 billion worth of government revenue from tobacco sales, will go toward tax cuts that National previously hoped to fund with a tax on wealthy overseas home buyers – a plan vetoed by New Zealand First. <br /><br />It will have been a sharp lesson for the inexperienced and possibly over-confident new Minister of Finance. Never give the media pack an opening. <br /><br />Predictably conspicuous by its absence from the media furore is any consideration of the flaws in Labour’s legislative package, which would cut the number of tobacco outlets from 6000 to 600, ban sales to anyone born after 2008 and cut the amount of nicotine allowed in tobacco. <br /><br />Retailers breaching the law would face fines of up to $150,000 and a lifetime ban. Regardless of your personal attitude toward tobacco, which I regard as a pernicious addiction, it’s a piece of legislation that uses the pretext of good intentions to justify authoritarian overkill. As C S Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” <br /><br />Who decides which corner dairies will be allowed to sell cigarettes and which won’t, and on what basis? What will be the impact on local communities if store owners, deprived of vital revenue from tobacco sales, go out of business? What are the risks of even more ram raids, given that tobacco will become an even more precious commodity? And how did Labour propose to counter the black market, doubtless controlled by gangs, that would inevitably flourish? <br /><br />Obviously these are minor technicalities that must not be allowed to intrude on the dreamy idealistic vision of a tobacco-free New Zealand. Neither should they get in the way of the media’s determination to portray the new government as unfeeling and regressive.</span>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-82694129541688417472023-11-27T12:57:00.003+13:002023-11-27T13:02:32.015+13:00A few random thoughts post-election <span style="font-size: medium;">■ My friend and former boss Robin Bromby, long domiciled in Australia but still a keen observer of New Zealand affairs, makes an interesting point in an email. <br /><br />He asks, “When has a Wellington MP led his party to an election win? The last Wellington area MP to become PM after an election was Walter Nash in 1957. But the job now seems to be taken mainly by Aucklanders.” <br /><br />Robin’s right, of course. Auckland dominance of politics used to be a point of controversy; now it seems to be accepted as the natural order of things. Jim Bolger was the last elected PM not from Auckland. <br /><br />Chris Hipkins is from the Hutt, but he wasn’t elected as prime minister. Bill English – Wellington-based, though originally from Southland – is another who became prime minister as a result of his predecessor’s resignation. The same was true of Jenny Shipley, another South Islander. <br /><br />Metropolitan dominance continues in the newly formed government. Shane Reti (Whangarei) and Louise Upston (Taupo) are the only senior ministers from outside Auckland and Wellington. The days of political heavy hitters from the provinces such as Norm Kirk and Keith Holyoake are long gone. <br /><br />■ On <i>Morning Report</i> this morning, RNZ deputy political editor Craig McCulloch described the new coalition government as “a much more right-wing government than New Zealand has seen for some time”. <br /><br />It was a revealing choice of terminology. Technically it’s accurate – but who can recall RNZ political reporters (or any mainstream media journalists for that matter) referring to the former government as "left-wing", still less noting that it was arguably the most left-wing in the country’s history? <br /><br />In recent years the media have tended to favour the polite term “centre-right” for the National Party. Perhaps the inclusion of ACT and New Zealand First in the coalition means journalists will now feel justified in using “right-wing”, which carries unmistakeable connotations of disapproval. But why wasn’t the same labelling criterion applied to Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party? Is it, to paraphrase George Orwell, a case of left-wing good, right-wing bad? <br /><br />To his credit, though, McCulloch made a point of highlighting the fact that seven of the 20 ministers in the new cabinet are of Maori descent – more than under Jacinda Ardern. <br /><br />■ Later on the same show, Corin Dann interviewed James Shaw about the Green Party’s opposition to the proposed lifting of the ban on oil and gas exploration. The questioning could be described as friendly, gentle and polite. Shaw was allowed to speak virtually uninterrupted, as should be the case if you accept that the primary purpose of an interview is for the subject to get his or her points across. <br /><br />That was followed by Ingrid Hipkiss interviewing oil and gas industry spokesman John Carnegie on the same issue. The tone was markedly different: more interruptions and generally more interrogative. Of course that may simply mean Hipkiss has a different interviewing style, but the contrast was noticeable. <br /><br />Next up was the new prime minister, and this time Corin Dann adopted a much more adversarial approach than with Shaw – not hostile, exactly, but certainly a lot more aggressive, and with frequent interruptions. At times, especially on the subject of tobacco sales to minors, it was hard to avoid the impression that the rather excitable Dann was pushing a line of questioning driven by personal feelings. <br /><br />At what point does an interview cross the line between being searching but neutral and one where personal opinion seems to get in the way? There’s no definitive answer to that question, but it’s worth recalling that Geoff Robinson spent nearly 40 years as host of <i>Morning Report</i> and never found it necessary to adopt a hectoring approach. He was never less than calm and polite and no one ever had a clue what his own feelings were. Were his listeners any less informed? I don’t think so. <br /><br />More to the point, however: was Jacinda Ardern, in her regular appearances on <i>Morning Report</i>, subjected to the same robust treatment as Luxon this morning? I don’t recall it happening, but no doubt that’s my faulty memory. </span><br /><br /> Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-68945602034616801772023-11-26T10:16:00.004+13:002023-11-26T10:28:38.396+13:00Kim Hill's exit interview<span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503211/watch-kim-hill-s-final-saturday-morning-show" target="_blank"><b>Kim Hill signed off yesterday</b>. </a>Her legion of fans will be bereft.<br /><br /> I am not one of them. Hill is ferociously intelligent and can be an incisive interviewer. The problem is that she used her skills very selectively – purring with approval for people she liked, but occasionally eviscerating those she didn’t. <b><a href="https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2017/12/dominatrix-vs-dinosaur.html" target="_blank">Don Brash comes to mind.</a></b><br /> <br /> Hill has a long memory. During the last segment of her final show, my name came up. (I didn’t hear this; a friend told me.)<br /> <br /> The following is from <b><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018916887/playing-favourites-with-kim-hill">RNZ’s account </a></b>of Hill's exit interview<a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018916887/playing-favourites-with-kim-hill"> </a>with her colleague Bryan Crump:<br /> <br /> "Her punchy and penetrating interviewing style has not been without critics, she says.<br /> <br /> "The British writer Tony Parsons, who hung up on Kim during an interview before saying 'You've got your head up your arse' [I think that should have been <i>after </i>saying 'You've got your head up your arse'] and New Zealand journalist Karl du Fresne, who once called her [a] 'dominatrix', come to mind.<br /> <br /> "'[du Fresne] hated me because I hadn't given a very nice interview with [former Australian prime minister] John Howard and also I say 'filum' [an Irish pronunciation of 'film'] ... Because he criticised me saying 'filum', I've never been able to stop in case he thinks he's won. So I do it all the time now.'"<br /> <br /> I’m sure she didn’t mean to be taken literally when she said I hated her. Just for the record, I don’t hate anyone. But I think it says something about Hill that she still remembers something I wrote 13 years ago. I’ll take that as a back-handed compliment.<br /> <br /> For what it's worth, my column about that 2010 Howard interview is <a href="https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2010/11/howard-deserved-more-balanced-treatment.html"><b>here</b>.</a></span>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-37143842671857300282023-11-25T09:36:00.002+13:002023-11-25T09:46:09.761+13:00There's no reason why this government shouldn't go the distance<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Notwithstanding everything pessimistic that I’ve said over the past few
weeks, I rather like the look of this new government.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">At first glance, there are some extremely encouraging policy
commitments (enough for my wife and me to punch the air several times while watching
the news last night) and some promising ministerial appointments.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s especially pleasing to see ACT’s Nicole McKee in
cabinet and Karen Chhour with a significant responsibility (children and family
violence), albeit outside cabinet. Andrew Hoggard, too, should bring some useful
real-world experience and insight to agriculture, although his responsibilities
are narrow.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The solution to the deputy prime minister conundrum was, as
Peter Dunne put it, elegant. David Seymour will be able to spend the first 18
months getting to grips with his ministerial priorities and Winston Peters, the
Great Tuatara of New Zealand politics, will be able to wind down in the latter
half of the triennium, perhaps with a view to retirement. (Ha! We shall see.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The three parties have found enough in common to agree on a
way forward. It’s reasonable to conclude that between them, ACT and New Zealand
First have stiffened National’s spine and given Christopher Luxon’s party the
moral courage it previously lacked to confront pernicious ideological issues.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The crucial thing now is for the three coalition partners to
set egos aside and focus relentlessly on the imperative that brought them together:
namely, the urgent need to undo the damage of the past six years. If they can do that - and I realise I'm eating my own words saying this - there’s no reason why this government shouldn’t go the distance.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-309148103812764872023-11-22T16:27:00.002+13:002023-11-23T17:20:53.793+13:00You call that a walk?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVeieftvcTxqpRCUqy-5pN-4JbmHe7Z6fw4nO_yPjTKHVbVg1QZl7asUaPM92PTvQa4c-8OH8y-Idk_K90NWGogDMgDvlb0FFuYRKjsI9D5MPBckLsQdCENkihn2YkS27S5Vc8eGrDHJRDMJAjRC7XmLwCpXycIpY_kqYccewRfZC2z0mrvpvuDjUhuZM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="915" data-original-width="631" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVeieftvcTxqpRCUqy-5pN-4JbmHe7Z6fw4nO_yPjTKHVbVg1QZl7asUaPM92PTvQa4c-8OH8y-Idk_K90NWGogDMgDvlb0FFuYRKjsI9D5MPBckLsQdCENkihn2YkS27S5Vc8eGrDHJRDMJAjRC7XmLwCpXycIpY_kqYccewRfZC2z0mrvpvuDjUhuZM" width="166" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Te Araroa website calls it “the walk of a lifetime”:
Cape Reinga to Bluff, 3026 kilometres.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Walk”? Don’t believe it. Walking is something you do to buy
a bottle of milk from the corner dairy. But judging by Tim Pankhurst’s book <i>Every Effing Inch</i>, Te Araroa – “New
Zealand’s Trail” – is a challenging, arduous trek that tests stamina and resilience
to the limit. At times it can be life endangering.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It must test relationships too, but in this case the three protagonists
were, miraculously, still on civil terms at the end.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Tim is a former colleague of mine. He and his wife Sue, with
their good friend Kerry Prendergast, a former mayor of Wellington, completed Te
Araroa in stages over two summers.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Tim,
Sue and Kerry are all of pension age. True to the title, they covered every
inch of the route. If they couldn’t complete a section because of snow or
flooded rivers, they returned later and had a second crack.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I asked Tim a few days ago whether it was worth it. “Hell yes,” he replied. “The
privations and strains on old bodies fade but the experiences and sense of achievement
remain vivid.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Tim
records some of the vital statistics at the end of the book. Days on the trail:
141. Longest day: 13 hours. Longest distance in a day: 42km. Toenails lost: 7.
Bones fractured: 4. Weight lost: 18kg (combined). Nightmares: frequent. He
could have added falls: innumerable.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
places, they were pushed to the limit of their endurance and nerve. The
Richmond Range, southeast of Nelson, was clearly an ordeal that bordered on
traumatic. Yet one of the striking things about <i>Every Effing Inch</i>, for me, was that for every gut-busting climb, vertiginous descent and
every breath-taking alpine or coastal vista, of which there were plenty, there
also seemed to be periods of tedious slog through country that had little to
commend it in terms of scenic value. In places, the three adventurers also had
to share busy roads with fast-moving traffic that gave them little space.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Wherever
possible, they treated themselves to luxury accommodation. Kerry’s husband Rex
was often waiting patiently at the end of the day’s tramp to drive them to warm
beds and hot showers. But on 38 nights in more remote places, they had no
option but to stay in back-country huts, the standard of which varied wildly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This
served as a salutary reminder of why tramping has never appealed to me. The
physical demands are manageable, but you have no control over the people you
might end up sharing a hut with. My greatest dread, always, was the prospect of
being confined with bores, but it seems that boors – noisy, selfish oafs who
booze and play loud music when others are trying to sleep – are a greater
hazard.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The
journalist in Tim emerges when he augments his account by regaling the reader with sometimes
dry background information about the places they pass through. These diversions
can get in the way of the main narrative, but he also enriches the story with
sketches of interesting and significant characters who pop up along the way.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The
mere fact that he wrote the book at all – that he had the energy and commitment
to record in detail each day’s experiences and observations – commands respect.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Similarly,
it’s impossible to read <i>Every Effing Inch</i>
and not be awed by the efforts of another journalist, Geoff Chapple, whose idea
it was to create a walking route that ran the length of the country – not to
mention the many thousands of nameless intrepid trailblazers, dating back to
pre-European times, who created the network of tracks that made it possible.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Hang on - did I just say "walking" route?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Every Effing Inch</i> is available from <b><u><a href="https://www.theundergroundbookstore.nz/Every-Effing-Inch-Fear-and-loathing-on-Aoteroa-New-Zealands-long-trail-the-3012km-TE-ARAROA-p589278619" target="_blank">the Underground Bookstore</a></u></b> for $40.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><br /><p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-49847724914769209132023-11-21T11:47:00.002+13:002023-11-21T13:48:47.621+13:00Memo to RNZ: the country has moved on <p><span style="font-size: medium;">I wonder, does RNZ realise that the government changed five
weeks ago? Its editorial judgment suggests not.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The story that led its bulletins this morning – in other
words, the news item that RNZ’s editors considered the most significant of the
day – revealed that new National Party MP Cameron Brewer had made an election night
speech in which he celebrated the return of the “stale, pale male”. Someone had recorded the speech and leaked it.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/502875/new-national-mp-cameron-brewer-celebrated-victory-for-stale-pale-males-after-defeat-of-sri-lankan-born-rival" target="_blank">RNZ reports </a></u></b>that Brewer, who was elected in the Upper
Harbour (Auckland) electorate, could be heard declaring himself “a glass
ceiling breaker” to laughs from the crowd.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">“I’ll be the first male MP for Upper Harbour," he said to
cheers. “Stale, pale males are back!”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The tone of the story, by deputy political editor Craig
McCulloch, was implicitly judgmental. It presented Brewer’s comments against a
backdrop of “scrutiny” – mostly by the media – of a lack of diversity in the
National caucus, where 70 percent of MPs are men and 80 percent are Pakeha.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The 8am version of RNZ’s story even implied that Brewer was
crowing at having displaced the Sri Lankan-born former MP, Labour’s Vanushi
Walters. It introduced a racial element into the story that wasn’t
substantiated.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That was reinforced by a headline on RNZ’s website: “New
National MP Cameron Brewer celebrated victory for ‘stale, pale males’ after
defeat of Sri-Lankan-born rival”. But there was nothing in the story to suggest
that Walters’ ethnicity was anything other than coincidental.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">At worst, this was a harmless but politically ill-judged remark at a private
function by an inexperienced new MP hardly anyone has heard of. He was speaking
amid the euphoria of an election victory, probably after having a few
celebratory drinks.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Brewer explained it to RNZ as a poor attempt at humour. He
would hardly be the first novice politician to be embarrassed in the cold light
of day by an injudicious comment made in a moment of heightened emotion.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Let’s take him at his word and accept that his statement was
intended humorously. But even if it wasn’t, it was surely neither surprising nor
outrageous that a conservative male MP should welcome a change in a political
environment where the now-ousted dominant caste and its media cheerleaders often
gave the impression they regarded maleness as toxic.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, this was a legitimate news story – but the lead story
on the state broadcaster’s morning bulletins? Really? The purpose, clearly, was
to portray National as a party of unreconstructed white male triumphalists. (My
personal view, for what it’s worth, is that National does have a surfeit of
brash, privileged young men in its caucus – but that’s for the party to sort
out if it thinks they are an electoral liability. Ultimately, the voters will
determine whether these are the sort of people they want to be represented by.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The question posed at the start of this post shouldn’t be
misinterpreted as suggesting RNZ should kowtow to the new government. That
would be a betrayal of journalistic principles. No one wants a return to the
era of Robert Muldoon, when the media were browbeaten and intimidated.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Rather, the point of the question was that the election result signalled an emphatic change in the mood of the
country. For six years, wokeness ruled largely
unchallenged. The media generally reflected the ethos of the governing elite. A
story such as the hit job on Brewer would barely have raised an eyebrow.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But the election result was a rather big clue that the
public had had enough and wanted something different. It’s no longer business as
usual. RNZ needs to realise that and catch up.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">All mainstream media ideally should strive to reflect the society
they serve, but state-owned media especially. Stories that pander to the
prejudices of the bullying metropolitan Left strike a jarring note now that the country
has moved on.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-54167865713779750452023-11-19T10:24:00.004+13:002023-11-20T12:44:54.407+13:00Never heard of the puteketeke? Me neither<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Has there ever been a more absurd and contrived hullabaloo than the one over New Zealand’s so-called Bird of the Century?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The tiresome attention-seeker John Oliver – a man who
manages to irritate in the same way yappy small dogs do – must have been
rubbing his hands with delight at the way the New Zealand media obligingly lapped
up his hijacking of Forest and Bird’s competition.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The line was spun that Oliver was making a point about
American interference in foreign elections. Bullshit. He was doing what he has
habitually done: making fun of a country he obviously regards as quaintly
eccentric. What could be a more perfect symbol of New Zealand’s weirdness than the puteketeke, a reclusive native bird that engages in bizarre mating dances and eats its own
feathers then vomits them up?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Even if there was a serious point behind Oliver’s prank, which
I don’t believe for a moment, it was totally lost in the ensuing media fever. “Look,
an overseas celebrity is paying attention to us!” It’s a ploy that never fails
to excite gullible New Zealand media. And why not? It beats the hard yards of
real journalism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Most New Zealanders – i.e. those not employed in newsrooms –
would have been left scratching their heads in puzzlement and asking what all the
fuss was about. Most had never heard of the puteketeke and wondered whether it
even existed. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Had the bird been referred to by its common name, the crested
grebe, some would have recognised it. As it was, many wondered whether the
puteketeke was a hoax – a non-existent species created so that Oliver could
have a laugh at New Zealand’s expense, which was the real purpose of the
exercise.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">They might also have quite reasonably asked why, in 2023, we
were being asked to name the bird of the century. There are 77 years still to
go.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Forest and Bird will doubtless argue that its competition
served the purpose of promoting awareness of vulnerable bird species. We
certainly now know what a puteketeke is. But by buying into Oliver’s stunt, the
media were complicit in an exercise designed to mock our odd little country on
the edge of the planet.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That’s okay though, because it gave the team on TVNZ’s <i>Breakfast</i> show an excuse to wet
themselves with excitement when the entirely predictable winner was announced.
God help us all.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-74265316503892976552023-11-17T11:31:00.005+13:002023-11-18T06:35:47.935+13:00Those coalition talks: so far, so bad<span style="font-size: medium;">The coalition talks are playing out just as might have been predicted. Or to put it another way: so far, so bad. <br /><br />Right from the outset the omens didn’t look good when it was revealed that Winston Peters hadn’t responded to David Seymour’s attempts to make contact. Did anyone really believe that Peters refused to answer a text from the ACT leader because he thought it might be a scam? <br /><br />Even in the unlikely event that the explanation was true, what did it say about Peters’ commitment to the coalition-forming process that he couldn’t be bothered checking? Or that his staff hadn’t ensured he had Seymour’s number stored in his phone the moment it became clear the three party leaders would need to talk to each other? <br /><br />A more plausible explanation for this failure to communicate (to borrow <b><u><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=what+we+got+here+is+failure+to+communicate&sca_esv=583112150&sxsrf=AM9HkKkIvcEmL6sgj_KLJV2Ymqezt3TRug%3A1700169153875&source=hp&ei=wYVWZc2KM8iG-QaKh6noDg&iflsig=AO6bgOgAAAAAZVaT0TAABh8tEgwljSdckFPqaUUNtfx-&oq=What+we+got+here+&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IhFXaGF0IHdlIGdvdCBoZXJlICoCCAAyBRAAGIAEMgUQLhiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAESLkhUABYvhNwAHgAkAEAmAGJAqABqxmqAQYwLjEzLjS4AQHIAQD4AQHCAgcQLhiKBRgnwgIHECMYigUYJ8ICDhAAGIoFGLEDGIMBGJECwgIHEAAYigUYQ8ICDRAAGIoFGLEDGIMBGEPCAhEQLhiABBixAxiDARjHARjRA8ICCxAAGIoFGLEDGIMBwgIEECMYJ8ICCBAAGIoFGJECwgIOEC4YigUYsQMYgwEYkQLCAgQQABgDwgILEC4YgAQYsQMYgwHCAgoQABiABBgUGIcCwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwE&sclient=gws-wiz#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1a1d0410,vid:452XjnaHr1A,st:0" target="_blank">a famous line from <i>Cool Hand Luke</i></a></u></b>) was that Peters was just being Peters: putting Seymour in his place and letting him know who was boss. In other words, indulging in gamesmanship – as you do when your name is Winston Raymond Peters. This was entirely in line with Peters’ character and history. <br /><br />For his part, Seymour was paying the price for his many dismissive comments, dating back years, about Peters and NZ First. They included his description of Peters as “the least trustworthy person in New Zealand politics”. <br /><br />If the ACT leader has a politically problematical flaw, it’s his propensity to say what he thinks without regard for the possible consequences. Under MMP, you never know who you’re going to end up having to pretend you’re friendly with – and no one holds a grudge like Peters. <br /><br />The NZ First leader doesn’t have the same power in these talks as he did in 2017. As Pattrick Smellie pointed out on <i>BusinessDesk</i> shortly after the election, he’s no longer the kingmaker. Having to work with the centre-right fundamentally changed Peters’ negotiating position from his usual dance (as Smellie put it) between National and Labour, playing one side off against the other. But that didn’t stop him from playing hard to get or deny him the chance to throw a few spanners into the works. <br /><br />And so we then had the pantomime of Peters staying in Auckland this week when everyone expected him in Wellington for further coalition talks. This time it was on the pretext that a mysterious VIP visitor from the Pacific leaders’ forum was passing through Auckland and wanted to see him – a person so important, apparently, that his visit necessitated a further delay in negotiations on the formation of a government. <br /><br />If true, that again says something about Peters’ priorities. Alternatively, it was more gamesmanship. <br /><br />The latter is far more likely. Certainly, Peters’ no-show has been portrayed in the media as a deliberate snub and, in Tova O’Brien’s words (yes, I’m quoting Tova O’Brien) a humiliating display of political brinkmanship aimed squarely at Christopher Luxon, who was forced to spend the day cooling his heels before flying back to Auckland. <br /><br />On top of all this we are now told, by Matthew Hooton in today’s <i>Herald</i>, that the coalition talks were almost stillborn because of Luxon’s assumption that he would be calling all the shots. According to Hooton, the prime minister-elect went into the talks with little regard for what the other parties might want. <br /><br />“Act, NZ First and National insiders say Luxon is a talker rather than a listener,” Hooton wrote. “He never asked how Act or NZ First thought negotiations should proceed, or what they wanted from them.” <br /><br />This is not a clever approach when you’re dealing with someone as touchy as Peters or as seriously ambitious for his party as Seymour. Even allowing for Hooton’s obvious animosity toward Luxon, his column, even if only half accurate, gives no cause for optimism about the solidity of the putative new government’s foundations. <br /><br />Observing this masquerade, it’s hard not to be reminded of the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. As in the coalition talks, the bits just don’t fit together. <br /><br />We have three parties with different cultures, different ideologies and different priorities. And no matter how desperately Luxon and Seymour try to sound positive, it stretches credulity to think the parties can overcome their fundamental compatibility issues and form a “strong, stable government”. <br /><br />Simply repeating that phrase ad nauseam, as Luxon does, doesn’t magically make it happen. Short of the return of Labour and the Greens, this ragtag and bobtail arrangement is arguably the worst possible election outcome. <br /><br />We’re supposed to believe that the advent of MMP ushered in a glorious new era of compromise and consensus. MMP’s bright-eyed promoters – predominantly leftists frustrated by New Zealanders’ annoying habit of electing centre-right governments – told us so. In fact MMP, because it yokes together parties with conflicting objectives, is too often a formula for political paralysis and inertia that leaves all players vaguely dissatisfied. <br /><br />The first-past-the-post system it replaced was, by common consent, flawed. But it had the singular advantage that the electors knew what they were voting for and that whatever government was elected was free to push ahead with its agenda unhindered by minor parties. <br /><br />Contrast that with a situation where all bets are off once the election result is declared and no one knows which policies and promises are going to survive the secretive coalition talks. At worst, this renders the entire business of election campaigns meaningless. <br /><br />Arguably even worse, in terms of respect for democratic values, is the spectacle of a minor party (NZ First won only 6 per cent of the party vote) again wielding wholly disproportionate power and even dictating the course of negotiations. <br /><br />Should we then revert to the FPTP system? Not necessarily. The past three years stand as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a government is given absolute power. In my lifetime, no government – not even that of Robert Muldoon – has done more damage than that of Jacinda Ardern. <br /><br />But we should remind ourselves that New Zealand was competently governed for much of its history by parties elected under the FPTP system – certainly no less competently, and arguably with a lot more stability, than since 1996. <br /><br />FPTP had the virtues of clarity, certainty and finality. Who would say that about the current opaque post-election manoeuvrings? And given the history of one of the personalities involved, who could have much confidence that whatever hotchpotch government emerges will go the distance? </span><br /><br /> Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-91898933709317658322023-11-15T09:23:00.005+13:002023-11-16T09:16:30.631+13:00A richly deserved honour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmtG3m5-175shyphenhyphen9cmi1IrMXeDU5GC1IoiBRIspDXk_3zSZPBmNjHfQbBx-UMZy2Zqhr9v39esT0RKiUG8mTAvGeqZjk8hC9cOWCrBYjpRFA0lotEwwjrt4Bp8218JnOeqK0TBJhvuarefCgrccDN_AXwwdiYmnLhuqdzcMmhk1bknteHT7JvQn1gu8wrY/s200/Mohan%20Dutta%20II%20(Massey%20pic).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmtG3m5-175shyphenhyphen9cmi1IrMXeDU5GC1IoiBRIspDXk_3zSZPBmNjHfQbBx-UMZy2Zqhr9v39esT0RKiUG8mTAvGeqZjk8hC9cOWCrBYjpRFA0lotEwwjrt4Bp8218JnOeqK0TBJhvuarefCgrccDN_AXwwdiYmnLhuqdzcMmhk1bknteHT7JvQn1gu8wrY/s1600/Mohan%20Dutta%20II%20(Massey%20pic).jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><span style="font-size: medium;">I’m sure all readers of this blog will join me in extending hearty congratulations to Professor Mohan Dutta (above) of our own Massey University, who has been <b><u><a href="https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/professor-mohan-dutta-receives-award-for-applied-communication-scholarship/#:~:text=Professor%20Mohan%20Dutta%2C%20Dean%27s%20Chair,Gerald%20M%20Phillips%20Award%20for" target="_blank">announced as the 2023 winner </a></u></b>of the Gerald M Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship. <br /><br />The award is sponsored by the Washington DC-based National Communication Association and named after a former professor of speech communications at Penn State University. It honours scholars responsible for authoring “bodies of published research and creative scholarship in applied communication”. <br /><br />There could surely be no more richly deserving recipient than Prof Dutta, whose official title is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University. <br /><br />Followers of this blog, being familiar with Prof Dutta’s <b><u><a href="https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/opinion-the-far-right-misinformation-and-academic-freedom/" target="_blank">winningly pellucid and succinct rhetoric</a></u></b>, will agree that he boldly cuts through the dense, obfuscatory jargon that characterises most scholarly discourse and has a set a standard for all other academics to aspire to. <br /><br />Doubtless the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised, whose cause Prof Dutta tirelessly champions, will rejoice at this tribute and will be there in spirit with him at Saturday’s award ceremony in the exclusive waterfront resort of National Harbor, Maryland. The freedom fighters of Hamas will presumably be delighted too, having recently been <b><u><a href="https://www.fsu.nz/don_t_push_hatred_underground_expose_it" target="_blank">applauded by Dutta</a></u></b> for their "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance".<br /><br />The latest award is only the latest of many showered on him. We should all take vicarious pride in the fact that this humble scholar from a New Zealand university with lowly agrarian origins is feted on the global mortarboard circuit – a fact attested to by <b><u><a href="https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/professor-mohan-dutta-delivers-gravlee-lecture-at-colorado-state-university/#:~:text=Professor%20Dutta%27s%20lecture%2C%20Decolonisation%20as,of%20Democracy%20and%20Civic%20Engagement." target="_blank">a recent lecture </a></u></b>he delivered at Colorado State University, entitled “Decolonisation as organising radical democracies: Centering health, resisting climate colonialism, securing food systems, and resisting hate”. <br /><br />It’s not surprising that Massey acknowledges Prof Dutta’s international standing by publicising his many achievements on its website. It is surely entitled to bathe in his reflected glory. <br /><br />In my misguided past I have written on this website that “award-winning” are the two most meaningless words in the English language. In the light of this latest announcement I now realise that was mean-spirited and churlish, and accordingly apologise for my misjudgement.</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-23367314198945756442023-11-10T12:38:00.004+13:002023-11-10T12:44:25.386+13:00My experience of censorship and what it tells us about the new culture of journalism<p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">The Free Speech Union
held its annual general meeting last weekend in Christchurch. I was part
of a panel that discussed free speech and the media. The following were my
introductory remarks, which refer to incidents previously covered on this blog. </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Two years ago I was invited to write a regular opinion
column for the </span><i>National Business Review</i><span>,
a paper for which I had once worked in the distant past. A contract was signed
and I duly submitted my first column.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It was also my last. The co-editors of <i>NBR</i> disagreed with a couple of points I had made and wanted to
delete two crucial paragraphs. I refused, the column never appeared, and the
contract was torn up.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">My column, ironically enough, was essentially about the
culture wars and their chilling impact on public debate. In it I said, among
other things, that a truly honest debate about race relations in New Zealand
would acknowledge that while Maori had
suffered damaging long-term consequences from colonisation, they had also
benefited from the abolition of slavery, tribal warfare and cannibalism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I also said that an
honest debate would acknowledge that race relations in New Zealand had mostly
been harmonious and respectful. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the two co-editors
proposed to delete those two paragraphs. I was told by email: “We want to avoid
a hostile response for no real gain”. Now there’s editorial courage for you.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In fact it turned
out that the real problem was that he disagreed with what I had said. It was
his opinion that cannibalism, slavery and tribal warfare would have ended
anyway regardless of colonisation, and he disputed my opinion that race
relations had been mostly harmonious – this from a Scottish expatriate who had
lived in New Zealand only a relatively short time, so had limited experience on
which to base his opinion.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I invite you to
consider the irony of my being contracted to write an opinion column,
presumably because it was felt I had something worthwhile to say, and then
being censored because my opinion was one the editor didn’t share. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In a past life as an
editorial executive with a metropolitan daily newspaper, I spent more than 10 years dealing
almost daily with columnists of every conceivable political stripe. In all that
time, no column was censored because the paper disapproved of what was said.
All that concerned us was that the columns shouldn’t be defamatory or factually
incorrect.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">It seems that on <i>NBR</i>, two other factors must be
considered: the column must be one the editors agree with, and it mustn’t risk
offending anyone.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">My second example of
censorship occurred last year. Some of you will be familiar with <i>NZ Politics Daily</i>, which is a collection
of political news stories and opinion columns compiled by the respected political
scientist Bryce Edwards and distributed every day by email. It’s an influential
guide to what’s happening in politics.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">A senior political
journalist, a member of the parliamentary press gallery, objected to the fact
that <i>NZ Politics Daily</i> sometimes
included pieces that I had written and surreptitiously emailed Bryce Edwards
urging him not to publish them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This journalist
described me as a racist and a misogynist. He concluded with the line: “I think
your readers would do well not to be served up this trash.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This was another
first for me. It’s hardly unusual for journalists to disagree with each other
or engage in bitchy personal rivalry, but to call for someone to be cancelled because
you don’t approve of what they write crosses a very perilous threshold.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This journalist’s
sneaky, would-be hatchet job – which Edwards rightly rebuffed – reinforced my
suspicion that some journalists are more than merely ignorant of the importance
of free speech in a liberal democracy. They are actively hostile to it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">To return to the <i>NBR</i> episode, I should say here that I absolutely
defend the right of newspaper owners to decide what they will or will not
publish. They must be free to say what they want, within the law, and even to
suppress material they don’t like. That is part of the package of rights known
as freedom of the press. But they must accept that it comes with a proviso.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Media owners need to
understand their vital role in a liberal democracy as enablers of
robust public debate. They also need to accept that if they abandon that role
by taking it upon themselves to dictate and restrict the opinions the public is allowed to read
and hear, they risk relinquishing whatever credibility and public respect they
enjoy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ve written two
published works about press freedom in New Zealand, one in 1994 and another in
2005. When I wrote those, any threat to press freedom was seen principally as
likely to come from the state.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But here we are in
2023, and press freedom is being steadily undermined from within, by people who
seem not to value the traditions of openness and free speech that give the
media their legitimacy and moral authority. They have repudiated a tradition of
balance and fairness that has existed for the best part of one hundred years,
and in the process they have fatally compromised their own standing. I don’t
think anyone saw this coming.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The key problem
here, as I see it, is that the media have abandoned their traditional role of trying
to reflect society as it is. Instead they have positioned themselves as
advocates for the sort of society they think<i>
</i>we should be. This almost inevitably
requires the exclusion of opinions that stand in the way of that vision.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Public opinion has
become largely irrelevant. The media have set themselves above and apart from
the communities they purport to serve, and in the process they have severed the
vital connection that gives them their legitimacy. They have so compromised
themselves that I think their future must be in doubt. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The centrepiece of the Free Speech Union
meeting was the keynote address by the distinguished British jurist and
historian Lord Jonathan Sumption, which can be read <u><a href="https://www.fsu.nz/free_speech_and_its_enemies" target="_blank">here</a></u>. It was a masterful
and compelling summary of the attacks being made on freedom of speech and the
reasons why they must be opposed.</span></b></i></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-80326374658262389532023-11-08T15:45:00.008+13:002023-11-09T08:48:44.348+13:00Remembering Fred Tulett<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Fred Tulett, <b><u><a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/133247754/former-southland-times-editor-dominion-chief-reporter-fred-tulett-has-died" target="_blank">a former <i>Southland
Times</i> editor who died on Monday</a></u></b>, has been described as “old school”. It was
an apt description and one that should be regarded as a compliment.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Fred, who died in his Central Otago home aged 77, edited the Invercargill daily for 15 years until his retirement in 2013. He led the paper with great verve and ensured it was a force in the region at a time when the provincial press was generally in decline. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Before that he was chief reporter of <i>The Dominion</i>, which was when I worked with him.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">He was a tough, savvy, quick-thinking newsman with the
voice, appearance and manner of a regimental sergeant-major. I probably wouldn’t
agree with <i>Stuff </i>CEO Sinead Boucher
on many things, but her description of Fred as a warhorse of the newspaper
industry was spot on.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">She also said he was a representative of a past era in New
Zealand journalism. That could have been interpreted in two ways, one of them not complimentary, but it too was true. We didn’t realise it then, but it was a golden era.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">As chief reporter of the Dom, Fred could be brusque but had
a reputation for backing his staff. Two former Dom reporters who contacted me
yesterday commented on his staunch defence of them when they were under attack.
Fred didn’t lose many battles.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">He was noted for his collaboration with the late David
Hellaby on a series of investigative stories that exposed a white-collar crime ring
– the so-called Gang of 20 – that was centred on a dodgy company called
Registered Securities Ltd. Several of the principals ended up in jail.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But the episode I remember when I think of Fred is the
sensational exclusive story he wrote for the <i>Dominion Sunday Times</i> – the Dom’s stablemate – about the affair that
caused the collapse of David Lange’s marriage.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Fred just happened to be in the office tidying up his desk on
a quiet Saturday in 1989 when the phone rang. The call was from an angry and resentful
Naomi Lange, who wanted to expose her husband’s relationship with his speechwriter,
Margaret Pope. Lange, who had only recently stood down as prime minister, had
announced two days earlier that the marriage was over but hadn’t indicated why.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Cool and quick-thinking as ever, Fred’s first reaction – counter-intuitively
– was to ask Naomi to hang up so he could call her back. We had the Langes’ home
number in our files and he wanted to be sure it wasn’t a hoax call.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">In Lange’s own words in his autobiography, Naomi “poured out
her anger about me and Margaret” in her interview with Fred. Naturally his story was all over the front
page and dominated the national conversation for days. It
seriously damaged Lange’s reputation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I remember thinking it was extraordinarily lucky that Fred
was at his desk when the call came in. The only reporter in the office at
the time was timid and inexperienced and might well have hung up in fright, but Fred was a born newsman and knew exactly what to do.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-83761172335062433032023-11-08T11:20:00.004+13:002023-11-08T11:24:27.132+13:00Accessibility and transparency are two different things<p><span style="font-size: medium;">There was a time in living memory when New Zealand
politicians rarely spoke to the media. Press conferences were unusual events. Prime
ministers and members of Cabinet would occasionally grant interviews to
individual reporters but felt no general obligation to communicate information or
opinions to the public at large.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Prior to the advent of television and the inquisitorial approach
taken by impertinent interviewers such as Brian Edwards and Simon Walker (both
of whom were from Britain, where journalists were accustomed to holding politicians
accountable), the media’s relationship
with those in power was respectful and even deferential.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Consider the striking contrast with the situation today,
when not only is the prime ministerial press conference an established ritual,
but journalists consider it their right to intercept politicians whenever the
opportunity arises – most obviously on “the tiles” at Parliament, named after
the strategically located area where the
press gallery pack lies in wait.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Politicians have never been more accessible, which in theory
should be welcomed as a triumph for accountability. But are the public necessarily
any better informed? Politicians give the appearance of being more open than
they used to be, but in reality they are often simply a lot more skilled at
saying nothing. They are coached by teams of media advisers to stick carefully
to agreed lines that typically conceal more than they reveal.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">I was reminded of this while listening to <b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/first-up/audio/2018914274/nicola-willis-coalition-still-under-negotiations" target="_blank">Nathan Rarere interview Nicola Willis</a></u></b> on RNZ’s <i>First Up</i>.
It was an exercise in futility. Rarere wanted to know what was going on in National’s
coalition talks with ACT and NZ First, but Willis batted away his questions
with well-rehearsed and entirely predictable lines. We heard the familiar “strong
and stable government” mantra twice, followed by a recitation of familiar objectives
from the National manifesto. The interview added nothing to what we already
knew – or perhaps that should be what we <i>didn’t
</i>know. In which case, what was the point? I wonder whether politicians ever
consider the novel notion that, like Mister Ed, they should only speak when
they have something to say. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is not to suggest that politicians retreat behind a
wall. There’s always the possibility that a clever question will catch
them off-guard and provoke a revealing response or an unexpected morsel of
information. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves that accessibility equates with
transparency. As with so much in politics, the media standup is often mere political
theatre, conducted more for drama and entertainment than enlightenment.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">As a <b><u><a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018911843/take-me-to-your-leader" target="_blank">recent RNZ interview </a></u></b>with veteran political journalist
Richard Harman reminded us, useful information is far more likely to be
ferreted out by the old-fashioned means of cultivating good contacts – digging beneath
the surface – than by the showy but often pointless ritual of the press gallery
scrum. For the current generation of political reporters, however, cultivating contacts, like covering select committee meetings and debates in the House, may seem too
much like hard work. Far easier to point a camera or microphone at someone and
ask fatuous questions that elicit meaningless replies.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8442430064359197279.post-22717305443933391022023-11-07T15:14:00.005+13:002023-11-07T18:18:49.535+13:00The Christchurch mosques inquest: what we know so far<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The inquest into the Christchurch mosque massacres has unexpectedly
become a source of national shame and embarrassment.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">A procession of witnesses has appeared before deputy chief
coroner Brigitte Windley with evidence of a confused and chaotic response from
police and ambulance services. New Zealand has no reason to feel guilty about the
atrocity itself, which was the act of a lone outsider, but the failings of the
first responders have come as a shock.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Perhaps the most damning revelation so far is that
paramedics took half an hour to enter the Al Noor mosque, apparently because it
was St John’s ambulance policy not to enter unsafe scenes.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Several police witnesses told of calling for ambulances, to
no avail. One member of the armed offenders squad ran out onto Deans Avenue
several times to see why no ambulances were coming. He could see them parked up
the road, presumably waiting for the all-clear.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">When bystanders asked why no ambulances had arrived, the
police officer told them to put the wounded into private cars and rush them to
hospital. Think about that: amateurs had to be asked to save lives when skilled professionals were standing by, only a stone’s throw away.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The inquest heard that a wounded survivor, Zekeriya Tuyan, was on his phone to emergency services for half an hour before medical help arrived. Tuyan himself died weeks later.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Eventually a St John’s paramedic entered the mosque knowing
he was acting contrary to instructions. “There were human beings inside that
needed help,” Dean Brown told the inquest.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Was this an example of the precautionary principle that
appears to have taken hold of the bureaucratic mind? The precautionary principle
holds that all risk must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards – even, it
seems, in emergencies where insistence on following the officially prescribed procedure
can be the difference between life and death.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thank God there are still situations where human initiative,
courage and compassion kick in and the rulebook is set aside. Dean Brown was a
shining example and so were the helicopter pilots who defied a bureaucratic edict
by risking their lives rescuing survivors from Whakaari-White Island – another tragedy
that showed by-the-book New Zealand officialdom in a very poor light.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Almost as shockingly, the dead, the dying and the wounded in
Christchurch were abandoned altogether for 10 minutes after the police left Al
Noor to respond to reports of the second massacre at the Linwood mosque. An AOS
member told the survivors that help was on the way, which he assumed to be true.
It’s impossible to imagine how they must have felt: dozens dead, others dying,
and they were left alone with not even a reassuring voice to comfort them. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">These were the most startling revelations of the inquest so
far, but there have been others. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">They included the disclosure that an inexperienced police
call-taker who took a 111 call giving advance information about the shootings,
from an email sent to Parliament by the perpetrator Brenton Tarrant, treated it
as only priority 2. The inquest was told the call-taker may have been influenced
by a suggestion from the caller, a parliamentary staff member, that the email
was from a nutter.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That call obviously came too late to prevent the slaughter at
Al Noor, but it might have given the police time to get to the Linwood mosque
before Tarrant struck a second time. A police dispatcher seemed to think so,
and that things might have turned out differently if the call had been
categorised as priority 1. It will fall to the coroner to decide whether that
was a missed chance.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Astonishingly, the police inspector in charge of national communications
centres at the time defended the categorisation of the call as priority 2
because it was “general” in nature. In fact it wasn’t; Tarrant’s email was
detailed and precise, even identifying the three mosques that he intended
terrorising (the third was in Ashburton).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course it’s easy to be wise after the event. There was no
precedent in New Zealand for the Christchurch mosque massacres. The Royal
Commission of Inquiry in 2020 established that they couldn’t have been
anticipated. Events unfolded with bewildering speed and police couldn’t be sure
at first whether Tarrant had accomplices who might still be at the scene.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Human error in such circumstances is hardly surprising. Only
those present at the carnage and its immediate aftermath could know how traumatic and confused it was.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">That said, police and emergency services are supposed to be prepared
for unexpected and extreme events. That’s the nature of their job. Evidence
given at the inquest points to shortcomings, such as a known communication problem
between police and St John’s, that were recognised and could have been obviated.
The frustration of some witnesses was obvious.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">On the upside, we shouldn’t forget that Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the shooting started by two courageous and quick-thinking country
cops who happened to be in Christchurch for a training day. Their actions,
which thwarted Tarrant’s intention to attack the Ashburton mosque, served as a
reminder that for all the benefits of thorough planning and training, there’s sometimes
no substitute for intuitive, decisive, on-the-spot action.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">But in other respects the response appears to have been almost
scandalously shambolic, which may shake New Zealanders’ confidence in the people
we rely on to protect human life. Only two weeks into the inquest and with another
four to go, it’s already obvious that Windley will have a lot to chew on.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Update (6.15pm)</b>: In <i>News First</i>'s report of the inquest tonight, the acting paramedic in charge at the scene said police were concerned about the possibility there was an IED (improvised explosive device) at the mosque. He appeared to acknowledge that waiting for the scene to be made safe could have cost lives, but he disputed that the ambulances were "simply stopped" a block from the mosque. He said they were treating victims there. </span></o:p></p>Karl du Fresnehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05054853925940134404noreply@blogger.com10