The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Printing the paper in Christchurch and then freighting it north by truck and ferry, as Stuff apparently proposes to do, will be death blow to a paper whose heritage dates back to 1865. I was tempted to use the phrase "coup de grace" rather than death blow, but strictly speaking, a coup de grace is a swift and merciful end for a person or animal that is suffering. This will more likely be a cruelly slow and inevitable decline, and painful to watch for anyone who values newspapers.

The proposed move means The Post’s final editorial deadline would be pushed back to the early afternoon, at best. Nothing that happens after that time will be covered in its news columns. It will therefore abandon any claim to be a genuine morning newspaper, or even a newspaper at all. Whatever “news” it contains will be withered and stale by the time it reaches any remaining readers.

The Post will be forced to rely even more on soft, flabby content that isn’t time-critical. This means more long-winded and ultimately pointless opinion columns, more cheap filler material lifted from overseas sources and irrelevant to New Zealand, and more lifestyle-oriented fluff – such as articles about movies, television, the arts, gardening, interior design, food and fashion – that used to be the preserve of glossy (for which read women’s) magazines.

Already the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald consistently carries more – and sharper – Wellington news. Wellingtonians who want to be informed on what’s happening in their own city have to read a paper published 500 km away.

And The Post won’t be the only title affected by the move. Stuff’s other North Island dailies – the Taranaki Daily News, the Manawatu Standard and my own local, the Wairarapa Times-Age – will also be printed in Christchurch and trucked north, which means they too will be subjected to the uncertainties of Cook Strait weather, ferry breakdowns and the inevitable road delays caused by a New Zealand Transport Agency that seems blithely indifferent to the impact of its endless and needlessly disruptive roadworks.

Those newspapers will therefore lose even more of the vital sense of “localness” that makes them relevant to their communities. Already their newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where coverage of local news is scant and superficial. With the shift to Christchurch, the factors of time and distance will mean the papers become still more remote from the readers they supposedly serve.

This is madness. Much as I feel for the journalists still employed on these papers, some of whom I know personally, it might be more merciful – and more realistic – to shut the papers down now and abandon the pretence that they will continue to mean something in their terminally enfeebled state.

How did Stuff arrive at this dismal juncture? The immediate cause is the acquisition by the wealthy property investor Troy Bowker of the land and building that houses Stuff’s Petone printing plant. Bowker is not favourably disposed to Stuff, I assume for ideological reasons (Stuff is left-wing, Bowker is decidedly not), and I sense that he derived some satisfaction from giving the company notice to clear out next year and take its printing press with it.

He would have known very well that this created an existential predicament for Stuff, notwithstanding Stuff owner Sinead Boucher’s insistence that the company was ready and prepared for it and will take it the massive disruption and expense in its stride. Bowker obviously doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do either.

But the real origins of Stuff’s decline lie much further back. It began with the creation in 1999 of Sam Morgan’s Trade Me, a bold use of digital technology that deprived newspapers of a vital revenue stream from classified advertising – those lucrative pages of small-type ads for jobs, cars, properties and second-hand goods. In Australia, classified ads were famously described as “rivers of gold” and the same was true here.

That was followed by a much wider migration of advertising from print to online. Display advertising – the industry term for big ads, often occupying a full page, placed by department stores, car manufacturers and big corporates such as banks and telecom providers – soon dried up too as advertisers realised they could target their ad spend more effectively online.

Simultaneously, newspaper publishers were panicked into a suicidal rush to place editorial content online at no charge to readers. The assumption was that advertisers would follow in due course, to the benefit of newspaper websites. They didn’t.

The result was that newspapers were left with the same cost structure (because good journalism, after all, costs money) accompanied by a catastrophic slump in advertising revenue and income from newspaper sales – because why would people pay for a paper when they could read the news free on their PCs and mobile devices, and hours before the paper came out?

It didn’t help that some key media leaders – Boucher was one, as was Paul Thompson, now chief executive of RNZ but then executive editor of Stuff’s precursor, Fairfax Media – had an almost evangelistic faith in the digital revolution. The old newspaper model was being deconstructed and it was assumed that a brilliant new one would replace it. We’re still waiting.

Another baneful development was the sale of Independent Newspapers Ltd’s chain of newspaper titles – the ones now owned by Stuff – to Sydney-based Fairfax in 2003. INL was controlled by Rupert Murdoch but it was run by New Zealanders with a fierce commitment to newspapers.

Fairfax showed no such commitment either to newspapers or New Zealand. When the print media business became just too tough, the Aussies fled back to Sydney. They showed just how much they valued their New Zealand titles when Nine Entertainment, which by then had merged with Fairfax, sold them to Boucher for a token sum of $1. (The Petone building wasn’t included in the deal, for reasons that escape me.) 

Boucher herself then showed how much she valued her papers by changing the company name to Stuff. A company that took newspapers seriously wouldn’t have demeaned them by giving the company a frivolous name originally created for the INL website by whiz-kids from the advertising agency Saatchi, no doubt over a few bottles of expensive wine.

There have been other missteps along the way. Stuff recklessly alienated previously loyal readers by abandoning traditional journalistic principles of objectivity in favour of an overtly left-wing line that permeated all its news coverage and editorial comment. This coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, declining levels of public trust in the media overall. Stuff’s breast-beating front-page apology to Maori in 2020 for decades of supposedly racist coverage was dishonest as well as disgracefully unfair to generations of journalists who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

This was consistent with the ignorance and disregard Stuff has regularly displayed for its editorial heritage. In 2023 it announced that The Dominion Post would be renamed The Post, a bland and meaningless name that conveyed no sense of the paper’s notable history. In fact it was a conscious disowning of the paper’s past. “We are under no one’s dominion,” then-editor Caitlin Cherry pompously pronounced, in a spectacularly fatuous statement that reflected the paper’s ideological obsessions. Cherry’s time as editor was short-lived and the inane change of masthead is the only reminder that she was ever there. The pointlessness of the change is evident from the fact that three years later, people still refer to the paper by its old name.

So now the paper formerly known as the Dom Post, and before that as two competing titles, The Dominion and The Evening Post, is about to take another step on its slow march to oblivion. It saddens me because I love newspapers and want them to survive; but it angers me too because at so many points along the way, the company that owns the paper has needlessly hastened its demise. And society as a whole is all the poorer for losing what was once a crucial source of reliable information about events of significance.

I often pass the Stuff printing plant on my way to Wellington on the Wairarapa train. It still displays the name of The Dominion Post. I was in that building on the night the new, state-of-the-art German press was used for the first time in 1990, when I was editor of the Dominion. It was a time of optimism and faith in the future of print. Now the press is to be dismantled and the building, by the sound of it, will be converted into apartments.

Much of what has happened in the years since the first papers rolled off that press was unavoidable. It was inflicted on the industry by the advent of digital technology. But the effects of the digital revolution could have been mitigated with better editorial and managerial judgment. Newspapers don't need to die; well-managed titles are still thriving overseas. 

For now, the Petone building is a poignant reminder of a time when newspapers mattered in New Zealand and the print media thrived; when the local paper was a vital part of daily life. Once the printing press and the Dominion Post sign have gone, the memory of that time will gradually recede to the point where it will be erased altogether. And The Post itself, which is already only a ghostly echo of what it used to be, will fade away too. Moving to Christchurch won’t save it, and anyone who says it will is either in denial or dishonest.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Sinead Boucher bought the Stuff papers from Fairfax Media. In fact the seller was Nine Entertainment, of which Fairfax had by then become a part.

A masterclass in damage control, and Labour's PR flunkies didn't have to lift a finger

It has been fascinating to observe the media’s treatment of allegations against Labour leader Chris Hipkins by his ex-wife.

The first thing to note was the uniformity of the coverage. It was as if the political editors of the mainstream news outlets hurriedly got their heads together when the news broke yesterday and decided on a common approach.

The stories were all brief and couched in “nothing to see here, folks” language. They all made the same points: that the claims were “unsubstantiated” and that no one was accusing Hipkins of doing anything unlawful.

All the reports focused on Hipkins’ denials of his former wife’s damning claims. But crucially, not one explained what the allegations were. So the public were left in the dark.

Labour’s media team couldn’t have asked for a more obliging response. It has been a masterclass in damage control, and for all we know the Labour PR apparatchiks didn’t have to do a thing.

The stories also emphasised that the private Facebook post by Hipkins’ ex-wife, Jade Paul, had since been taken down – the clear implication being that at the very least she had had second thoughts, or that her claims were defamatory or untrue.

She has now said, however, that she stands by her post, which appears to have been triggered by a Labour Party election policy statement that she regarded as hypocritical.

“So many women are hurt by high profile men who just do what they want with no consequences,” Paul wrote in a subsequent post.

“We get told all of the time that if we speak out then our lives will be ruined, our kids will be impacted. We get labelled as ‘crazy’ or defamatory when we tell the truth.

“Today I have had enough.”

So what are Jade Paul’s claims? Essentially, that Hipkins treated her cruelly – for example, leaving her to drive herself home in a bloodied hospital gown after she miscarried because he was too busy to visit her and bring her clothes, and refusing to help after their brief marriage ended when she couldn’t afford groceries, saying their two children were her responsibility in the weeks she had them.

If true, the allegations are a damaging reflection on Hipkins’ character. In a brief statement, he rejected them “entirely” and said he didn’t intend to make any further comment. The stories also reported that Hipkins was taking legal advice (subtext: “I am the wronged party here”).

Will that be enough to settle public questions about the man who wants to be our next prime minister? I don’t think so.

The tone of the media coverage was summed up by a headline on the RNZ website: “Chris Hipkins’ ex-wife makes series of unsubstantiated claims about him”. It accompanied a relatively brief story by RNZ’s deputy political editor Craig McCulloch*.

It was a very peculiar headline in which the key word was “unsubstantiated”. It’s a word I don’t think I’ve seen before in hundreds of stories reporting accusations against politicians.

It neatly shifted the focus from the claims themselves to the fact that they were “unsubstantiated”. This could have been read as meaning they had no basis in fact (which is in itself unsubstantiated), or at the very least that they lacked credibility.

But “claims” are, by their very nature, unsubstantiated, and the media are not in the habit of inserting this loaded word in stories about allegations relating to politicians. Was this a case of RNZ acting on over-cautious legal advice, or did it decide the claims couldn’t possibly be truthful, that Hipkins’ reputation had been unfairly tarnished and it was the media’s duty to protect him by shutting the story down?

Here’s another thing to consider: would RNZ, and the media at large, have been so deferential if the accused politician had been, say, David Seymour? Hmm.

The claims against Hipkins presented the media with a crucial test. Public trust in journalists, as measured by opinion polls, has never been lower. That low level of trust is at least partially attributable to the public perception that journalists overwhelmingly lean left and that they give politicians of the left a free pass.

This perception was cemented during Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, when Beehive press conferences were an exercise in sycophancy and voices of dissent against the government were marginalised, ignored and shunned as pariahs. Bizarrely, National in opposition was subjected to harsher scrutiny – some of it merciless – than the party that was in power.

The government has since changed, and with it the tone of political reportage. Journalists and broadcasters who were obsequious toward the former government are notable for having magically rediscovered their killer instincts. Government politicians and policies are subjected to a level of aggressive scrutiny that was markedly absent during the Ardern years.

The disclosures by Hipkins’ ex-wife gave the media a chance to redeem themselves – to restore public faith in the willingness of political journalists to apply the blowtorch to the left as well as the right. And they blew it.

They could have reported the nature of the claims against Hipkins while making it clear they were unsubstantiated. That’s how the media in previous times would have dealt with the story.

There is a crucial matter of public interest here, and I don’t mean mere idle curiosity about the private lives of party leaders.

The accusations against Hipkins go to the heart of his character. New Zealanders are entitled to know what sort of man is putting himself forward to lead the country.

The claims against him may be false or unfair, but in other comparable countries – Australia, Britain and the US – you can be sure they would have been all over the front page. The public would have been told what he was accused of, Hipkins would have been given ample opportunity to defend himself and in due course the court of public opinion would have reached a verdict.

But no, not in New Zealand. Here the media try to extinguish the story as a non-event and expect the public to accept soothing assurances by a leading female Labour MP, Barbara Edmonds, that “marriage break ups are hard”, the implication being that Jade Paul has lashed out in anger because she’s hurting.

The tone of Edmonds’ statement struck me as patronising. It also raised an interesting question about Labour Party feminists and their solidarity, or lack of it, with a woman who claims to have been badly treated. Perhaps loyalty to the party takes priority over all other considerations.

I don’t know whether Jade Paul’s claims are true, although to me they have the ring of truth. They don’t strike me as the sort of stories someone would make up. But the bottom line is that the public are entitled to know what she has alleged, and it’s the media’s duty to tell them.

*The original version of this post wrongly described Craig McCulloch as RNZ's political editor. 

Stuff's operating model: cheap and lazy

(Estimated reading time: 10 minutes)

Last Tuesday’s edition of my local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, devoted an entire page to an Associated Press (i.e. American) feature story about affluent middle-class professionals taking extended career breaks.

The people mentioned in the story are representatives of an elite US metropolitan class who can afford to put their careers on hold while they spend months enjoying a “reset” in exotic locations such as Egypt and Brazil. It’s hard to imagine a story less relevant to readers of a paper in a New Zealand provincial town where many people are struggling.

Stuff, which provides most of the content in the Times-Age, made a half-hearted and thoroughly unconvincing effort to dress up the article as something important by labelling it “The Global Read”. That it was published in the Times-Age was an insult; in fact a double insult. It was insulting to the paper’s readers first because it was a lazy way to fill space, and second because of its complete lack of empathy. People who worry about being unable to pay the grocery or electricity bill are hardly likely to relate to stories about privileged lifestyles that they could never dream of emulating.

The article lacked even the saving grace of being well written. In common with much American journalism produced by earnest university graduates, it was turgid and overlong. I couldn’t imagine a single Times-Age reader persevering to the end. Most would have given up after the first few sentences, the subject matter being only marginally more compelling than a doctoral thesis on nematodes.

For this, the small editorial staff of the Times-Age are blameless. The paper is owned by Stuff and much of its content is generic, being shared with other papers in the Stuff chain. Local (i.e. Wairarapa) input is generally restricted to three or four news pages at the front, plus letters to the editor, an occasional opinion column, some featherweight community-contributed content (the “Thought of the Day” is popular) and a bit of sport. The rest is centrally generated by Stuff and relies heavily on syndicated content from overseas providers such as the aforementioned Associated Press. The editor of the Times-Age has no control over it and his opinion of its merit is not known to me.

Stuff papers are – excuse the pun – stuffed full of content that’s shovelled into the pages with little concern for relevance and even less for attractive display. Turn the pages of any Stuff paper and you’re bound to be confronted by great slabs of dull grey type devoted to subjects of minimal interest, typically illustrated with lifeless, static pictures downloaded from an online image library. Filling the space seems the sole imperative, and Stuff’s editors appear to grab whatever happens to be available.

It’s cheap and it requires minimal effort; that seems to be Stuff’s operating model. Never mind what the readers might want. Who cares?

Let’s return to Tuesday’s Times-Age. Eager to read something interesting and relevant after the AP snorefest, readers would have turned the page to see a double-page spread, this time reproduced from Britain’s Sunday Times, about Ukraine creating underground classrooms where children can learn without the disruption caused by Russian missiles and drone attacks.

I didn’t have the patience to do a count but I would guess the story ran to at least 2000 words, which is far too much to ask of a provincial newspaper reader on a weekday morning. (Note that the original British version was published on a Sunday, when people have the luxury of time – and bear in mind that the Sunday Times is read by the leisured class.) And while the subject was interesting enough, the story could have easily been crunched down to a quarter of its length without losing any crucial information (hint: it’s called editing).

And so it continued. The following page was another grey slab – this time a wordy opinion column on aged care, accompanied by another file picture retrieved from an overseas image library. More laziness.

Further on, another two-page spread: a travel article about a remote location in Queensland. Travel pieces are a handy way of padding a newspaper with fluff. The writers are often prepared to accept a token payment because their principal reward is the free trip (or junket, in journalistic parlance).

The Wednesday paper wasn’t much better. This time, the full-page “Global Read” was about Singapore Airport’s introduction of a levy to pay for sustainable aviation fuel. Really? An entire page, in a paper serving provincial New Zealand? Couldn’t they find something a little more germane to readers’ lives and interests?

Oh, but hang on – there’s more. A few pages further on, there’s a full-page opinion piece – running, I’d guess, to about 1500 words – by a university lecturer from Leicester, England, about the potential harm done by social media. And opposite that, another full-page piece of similar length by another university academic, this time an Australian-based American writing about cyber crime.

Most readers of the Times-Age will have flicked over these pages with barely a pause because they offered nothing to lure them in. The vital principle that a successful newspaper reflects its community appears to have been forgotten or ignored.

Thursday’s paper brought yet another double-page spread, again from the purveyors of stodge at Associated Press, about an American man raising twin boys with autism. It was labelled with the tag line “In depth”, as if that magically made it something people in provincial New Zealand would want to read about. And on the following page, an opinion piece by a University of Auckland academic about slavery laws. Academics, like freelance travel writers, are a handy source of cheap copy because they’re keen to get published and in their case, the taxpayer picks up the tab because the writers are on the public payroll.

This is a rip-off worthy of the attention of Consumer magazine. People in the Wairarapa (and come to that, in Wellington and the Manawatu and the Waikato and Christchurch and Timaru and Nelson and Invercargill too, all of whom get served the same dross by their local Stuff papers) don’t buy their daily paper to read wordy articles by academic non-entities about subjects far removed from readers’ real-life interests and concerns.

Another “In depth” piece on Friday – from The Times of London – was a dispatch from Greenland about how Donald Trump is making the locals nervous. Again, a legitimate subject – but two pages? And further back in the paper, another two pages devoted to newly released movies that may never be screened in the Wairarapa.

People pay good money for their paper. They deserve better than to be presented with pretend newspapers that contain barely a skerrick of hard news. Every one of those esoteric non-stories occupied precious space that in a previous era would have been filled with content of genuine interest and value; information vital to the functioning of informed communities. Even as recently as 10 years ago, no self-respecting paper would have wasted space on them.

To use a biblical analogy, we’re being fed lots of chaff but precious little wheat. Even the few supposed news pages come up short. In seven years as a news editor on daily papers, I always held to the view that on a typical day there were probably about half a dozen stories of such national interest and importance that they had to be in the paper. They might be stories about politics, crime, business takeovers, fires and fatal car accidents or whatever. You could be confident that if you read a daily paper in any of the major cities or provincial centres, you’d be informed about them. And if you didn't see them, by definition you were not well informed.

That operating principle was abandoned years ago. News coverage is now a random, hit-and-miss affair. You might read about a major event or you might not. We literally don’t know what we’re missing. Vast areas of the country are black holes; we hear virtually nothing about them. (The demise of the New Zealand Press Association, which used to ensure that all news of significance from anywhere in the country was promptly distributed nationwide, is a separate tragedy of its own.)

The American journalist Walter Lippman once said that without the news media, we would live in an invisible society; we wouldn’t know anything. We haven’t quite reached that point, but we’re heading in that direction. We know less about ourselves than at any time since the emergence of the popular press in the 19th century.

In place of news, we now get bulky opinion pieces from Stuff journalists. Too often they take a partisan political or ideological line. The short, sharp, punchy news story, which previous generations of reporters could write in their sleep and once filled papers, is virtually extinct.

In the case of Stuff papers, there’s a disproportionate preponderance of content from the Press. The Christchurch paper has become the engine room of the Stuff chain, with the result that Stuff papers carry a lot of Christchurch news that’s of zero interest to readers elsewhere.

Obituaries? Don’t get me started. I frequently see full-page obits for Americans and Brits whom most Stuff readers will have never heard of. The deaths of notable New Zealanders, meanwhile, pass unnoticed.

I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the pages devoted to soft, lifestyle-oriented content that used to be the preserve of glossy magazines: articles about gardening, interior design, food, fashion and relationships. The Times-Age, like other Stuff papers, also devotes acres of space to movies and TV shows that most people will never watch. In the days when everyone viewed the same free-to-air television, stories about programmes and personalities made sense. Not so, however, when most TV content is streamed on subscription platforms and viewing patterns have become hopelessly fragmented.

A few of the Stuff journalists who edit all this generic copy (if editing is the appropriate word, given that much of it is lifted holus-bolus, headlines and all, from other sources) are old enough to remember when newspapers were full of stuff that mattered. I can’t imagine all of them are happy to be processing editorial content whose sole purpose is to fill space.

It seems hard to believe that with its resources, Stuff can’t present the readers of its papers with a more compelling editorial product. I’m therefore forced to the conclusion that the company is run by people who don’t care much about newspapers and may even regard them as a tiresome anachronism that they would rather be rid of. I get the impression print readers are deemed far less important than those who “consume content” – a hideous phrase – online (Stuff owner Sinead Boucher was an early convert to digital).

How have we come to this? That’s a long, sad story that can wait for another time. Suffice it to say that newspapers were hit by a digital technology revolution that fatally undermined their profitability, and their decline was hastened by owners who were panicked into doing the wrong things – such as making content available free online.

The strange thing, in view of all the foregoing, is that I still value the Times-Age enough to keep paying my subscription. Reading it with my first coffee of the day, although it takes far less time than it once did, is a morning ritual. But more than that, the local paper – even in its tragically feeble and eviscerated state – is still a valuable means of keeping communities connected. With a bit more care and commitment from their apparently indifferent owner, Stuff papers might yet avoid the inevitable fate that otherwise confronts them.

Will a new RNZ board stop the rot?

The Treasury has publicly advertised vacancies on the RNZ board for a new chair and two “governors” (I presume that means directors). The appointees will replace current chair Jim Mather and board members Jane Wrightson and Irene Gardiner, all of whom were installed during the term of the Ardern government. All three are well-connected Wellington insiders who were never going to upset the status quo by insisting RNZ fulfil its obligation to cater to a wider audience than the privileged “progressive” class – I use the inverted commas deliberately – from which the state broadcaster draws its core support. The question now is whether the government will appoint people willing and able to do the job the current board clearly had no interest in tackling.

The advertisement for candidates is notable for its use of the word “trust”. It mentions that RNZ “plays a vital role in fostering a strong national identity through trusted journalism, current affairs, and cultural programming”. Later, it says applicants should have an understanding of “media and public sector dynamics, public trust, and audience engagement”.

Trust has emerged as a crucial issue for media credibility. Judging by the wording of the ad, it seems to be assumed that RNZ enjoys wide public trust, but that’s not necessarily the case. While RNZ can claim to be the “most trusted” New Zealand news source, according to a 2025 survey conducted by the Auckland University of Technology, it’s merely the best of a bad lot. RNZ was given an average score of six out of 10, zero being not at all trustworthy and 10 being beyond reproach. So barely a pass mark.

RNZ itself published a piece by the authors of the AUT report noting that New Zealanders’ overall trust in the news had declined “precipitously” – from 58 per cent to 32 per cent over the past five years. Mather, who has chaired the RNZ board since 2018 (in other words, a period coinciding with that decline), acknowledged in RNZ’s annual report that trust in the media had been shaken globally and said it was incumbent on public media, in particular, to address this.

The AUT survey also revealed that despite generous taxpayer funding and the great marketing advantage of not being encumbered by crass, intrusive advertising, RNZ trails well behind its private-sector competitors in the news business. Last year it was the sixth most popular news source in New Zealand, lagging behind Stuff, TVNZ, the New Zealand Herald and even Facebook and YouTube. That indicates there’s a lot of ground to gain. Trust could (and should) be a vital factor in winning back all those New Zealanders who have turned sour on the media.

So what is RNZ doing to rebuild public confidence? Er, not a lot. It signalled last month, when it announced the appointment of John Campbell as co-host of its flagship news and current affairs programme Morning Report, that it was wilfully blind to mounting public concerns about political bias in the media and the tendency in recent years to blur the lines between news and opinion, of which Campbell is a master practitioner. RNZ either didn’t grasp or chose to ignore (either is inexcusable, but it was far more likely the latter) the reality that Campbell is a polarising figure who has done nothing to disguise his political leanings, and in particular his dislike for the government that his fellow New Zealanders chose to elect in 2023. 

Coming immediately before the start of an election year, when the quality and fairness of political journalism will be under intense scrutiny, his appointment should be seen as an act of provocation and defiance - not so much against the government (since journalists in a liberal democracy owe governments no loyalty), but more importantly against the many thousands of New Zealanders who, like me, were once RNZ devotees but gave up listening because they felt they could no longer rely on it to be fair, balanced and impartial. To that I might add … and also against the millions of New Zealanders whose taxes pay for RNZ but who never listen to it, and indeed may not even realise it exists, because for decades it has ignored them, preferring to position itself as a bastion of cultural privilege. (I will here insert my usual qualification to the effect that there are people at RNZ, including some journalists, whom I respect, and who I believe do their jobs conscientiously and professionally. This article is not about them.)

The New Year brought fresh evidence of RNZ’s disregard for basic principles of editorial balance and impartiality. A story broadcast on January 3 noted that there had been a 37 percent increase in the number of abortions – up from 12,948 to 17,785 – since the few remaining legal impediments were lifted in 2020.

This was presented as a benign, indeed positive, trend. The sole source quoted in RNZ’s story was Dr Simon Snook, whom the lobby group Voice for Life identifies as the man who set up the 0800 Dial-an-Abortion service and has spent years lobbying for an increase in the number of abortion facilities around the country.

Snook’s own company, Magma Healthcare, provides medical abortions through a service funded by Health New Zealand (i.e. the taxpayer). It’s hardly surprising, then, that he put the best possible spin on the surge in abortion numbers, saying it reflected "improved access to care" rather than an increase in demand.

Referring to the tendency for women to obtain medical (i.e. drug-induced) abortions rather than invasive surgical ones, Snook was reported as saying: “I think what we are seeing now is people who previously would have wanted an abortion and couldn’t get one for their own reasons are now getting it. We are getting the abortion numbers correct for the country’s need.”

To quote a celebrated line from Mandy Rice Davies of Profumo scandal fame, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” Of course Snook is going to spruik an increase in the number of abortions as a good thing. No doubt he would argue that he’s approaching the issue from a position of sympathy for women, but there’s no getting around the fact that it's good for his business. That doesn’t rule him out as a legitimate source, but his credibility needs to be judged in terms of his vested interest in the lucrative abortion business.

A competent, fair-minded reporter would have recognised this and sought to balance the story with comment from someone with a different perspective on the abortion trend. Failing that, someone further up the editorial chain should have insisted on it.

After all, it’s not hard: Voice for Life, the country’s main anti-abortion lobby group, has been around for decades. It has a website with an email address for media inquiries. And it’s not as if VFL is some lunatic fringe group: it tells me it has 30 branches, more than 8000 newsletter subscribers and more than 14,000 followers on social media. (I’m not a member, although my views on abortion are reasonably well known.)

Here’s the thing. Setting aside personal views, abortion remains a highly contentious and divisive issue in New Zealand. Responsible editorial decision-makers would recognise that and realise that any story on the subject calls for balance. RNZ failed that elementary test. Small wonder that VFL described the RNZ story as “a shocking example of woefully biased pro-abortion propaganda, where one of the very people who should be held accountable by the media for the massive increase in abortions is effectively allowed to wave away the harm he has actively contributed to by claiming this increase in harm is a good thing”.

Of course VFL’s statement didn’t get published. Journalists now routinely ignore people whose opinions they disagree with. This became especially noticeable during the term of the Ardern government, when lobby groups dissenting from ideological orthodoxy valiantly kept pushing out media statements knowing they were doomed to languish unseen.

There’s a striking contrast here with previous generations of reporters who went out of their way to seek and report opinions and statements that they often heartily disagreed with. That the current generation doesn’t bother – in fact is often taught by journalism tutors that there’s no need for impartiality and balance – is a prime reason why trust in journalism has collapsed.

It needs to be stated repeatedly that RNZ, as a publicly funded news organisation, has a special obligation to be neutral and balanced; to publish stories that reflect the diversity of public opinion rather than those that conveniently correspond with its journalists’ own views. Mather's statement seemed to tacitly acknowledge that public media operate to different criteria from their private competitors.  Companies such as Stuff and NZME (publisher of the Herald) can make their own rules, as long as they’re willing to risk consequences such as loss of trust and declining readership. RNZ (and TVNZ, but let’s not go there) has no such latitude.

Will the new appointees to the RNZ board recognise all this and do something about it, or will they meekly accept advice from RNZ functionaries that editorial practices are an operational matter, therefore none of their concern, and sit uselessly and impotently on their hands? We shall see.

(Footnote: The original version of this article has been slightly tweaked to insert a new point and clarify an earlier one.)

RNZ's boss gives New Zealand the fingers

A few thoughts on the announcement that John Campbell will take over next year as co-host of RNZ’s Morning Report:

■ RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson had a choice. He could make a polarising appointment or a non-polarising one. He chose the former. In doing so, he gave the fingers to the large (and I suspect growing) number of New Zealanders who neither like Campbell nor trust him as an impartial journalist and commentator. Disregarding RNZ’s obligation to serve all New Zealanders, Thompson made an appointment that he must know will alienate people and almost certainly lead to a further loss of faith in RNZ. He didn't have to do it; there were alternatives.

■ Thompson is either tone-deaf or indifferent to public opinion. An alternative explanation is that he is a weak manager who has yielded to internal pressure to appoint someone the RNZ establishment will be comfortable with. Certainly Campbell will be seen as a compatible ideological fit with other leftist RNZ broadcasters. (I don’t know what Thompson’s personal political views are or whether he even has any, but they may have played no part in his decision.)

■ It’s not just Campbell’s politics that are polarising; it’s also his style as a broadcaster, which alternates between gushingly ingratiating and finger-waggingly pompous and condescending. He professes to be a man of the people and to speak for ordinary New Zealanders, but he’s not and he doesn’t. He proved that when he spectacularly spat the dummy in 2023 because his fellow New Zealanders elected a centre-right government.

■ According to Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column in the New Zealand Herald, RNZ says it’s confident that Campbell is committed to impartial journalism and “like all employees of RNZ, will be held to that high standard through our comprehensive editorial policy”. At best, this is meaningless PR flannel; at worst, it’s plain dishonest. If Campbell has demonstrated anything in recent years, it’s that he’s incapable of impartial journalism. He doesn’t even believe in impartial journalism.

■ Currie also reports that Campbell’s appointment was the subject of “robust discussion” by the RNZ board, but that the directors ultimately deferred to Thompson’s right as CEO to make the call. It’s not hard to surmise which board members are likely to have supported the appointment and which of them resisted it. Those in the former category are likely to be gone once their current terms expire, but by then the damage will have been done to RNZ’s already tarnished reputation.

Death Wish 2025

I did something last Sunday that I hadn’t done for probably a year or more. I listened to RNZ’s Mediawatch.

There was a time when I tuned in to the show every week. But as with so much RNZ content, I grew disenchanted to the point where I simply decided I was better off without it.

For a start, it has never been clear why we were supposed to regard Mediawatch presenter Colin Peacock, who has hosted the show since about 1890 (or so it sometimes seems; actually it was 2007), as an arbiter of journalism standards. He previously worked for the BBC, which would impress the impressionable at RNZ, but as far as I can tell he had precious little on-the-ground experience of journalism in New Zealand. (Then again, his predecessor, Russell Brown, whose background was in student radio and the punk music fanzine Rip It Up, had even less.)

I’ve had a bit to do with Peacock and I have no doubt he’s fundamentally a decent person, but several things about him irritate me: his air of omniscient certitude as he sits in judgment each week, his excruciatingly tedious and self-indulgent interviews about issues of interest to only a tiny handful of media insiders, and his conspicuous tendency to spare his employer the same holier-than-thou scrutiny he brings to bear on other media organisations. But what finally put me off altogether was Peacock’s habit of gratuitously sniping at NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking.

I’m no fan of Hosking and don’t listen to him, but that’s neither here nor there. For Peacock to use his privileged, taxpayer-funded position as a platform for petulant attacks on a rival (and one who shows RNZ up by pulling a much bigger audience than the state broadcaster’s Morning Report) is an abuse of power for which he should have been pulled into line long ago by his boss, Paul Thompson. (It goes without saying that Peacock’s apparent obsession with Hosking is a backhanded compliment to the NewstalkZB host and unlikely to keep him awake at night.)

But that’s all by way of a preamble. Last Sunday’s episode of Mediawatch included a telling item on the recent annual conference of the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ), which represents academic teachers of journalism. Included in the proceedings was a panel discussion on “Journalism and the Far Right”, which examined the supposedly baneful influence of conservative media outlets and commentators “in New Zealand and beyond”.

Strangely enough, I don’t recall the nation’s journalism tutors ever voicing similar alarm about the influence of the far left, despite it being all-pervasive in the media for years. This is because they are the far left and regard their ideologically based concept of journalism as the norm – indeed, the only morally correct approach.

The conference session highlighted the extent to which journalistic paradigms have been upended. The model that prevailed for decades – that of balance and neutrality – has been trashed in favour of one that’s blatantly politicised and sees journalism as a moral crusade driven by left-wing fixations such as identity politics, hate speech (so called) and climate change.

Under this new model, objectivity is disdainfully dismissed as “that old shibboleth” (a phrase reportedly used earlier this year in a radio interview by Massey University journalism associate professor James Hollings, one of the conference organisers). Balance and impartiality, principles that characterised the mainstream media for decades, are now dismissed as tools that serve the interests of the right.

Journalists are instead encouraged to choose, on the basis of their own often narrow and rigid world views, which issues should be covered and which should be ignored. Similarly, they are entitled under the new paradigm to decide which groups and individuals should be allowed to contribute to public debate. The rest can be marginalised, demonised or excluded.

We saw this elitist, exclusionary approach to journalism in full, rampant cry during the term of the second Ardern-led government, slyly assisted by the shameful buy-off of the media under the innocuously named Public Interest Journalism Fund.

There are now occasional encouraging signs that the degradation of traditional journalism values may be abating, at least in some mainstream media outlets. There seems an increasing willingness, albeit a grudging one, to cover stories that were previously untouchable and to give space and airtime to voices and opinions that were formerly deemed beyond the Pale. The instinct for self-preservation may finally be kicking in as audience numbers and newspaper readership continue their precipitous decline and opinion surveys confirm a devastating loss of trust in media organisations.

Unfortunately none of this seems to have registered with the cloistered custodians of journalism training, who display a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. Death Wish 2025 would have been an appropriate alternative name for their recent gathering.

The lineup of participants in the JEANZ discussion tells you all you need to know about the ideological tone of the event. Speakers included another Massey associate professor, Sean Phelan, who first came to this blog’s attention for his impenetrable Marxist gibberish in 2009; Prof Mohan Dutta, also of Massey, who deserves some sort of celebrity status for the unhinged fanaticism of his writing (and who never responded to my invitation to debate with me in 2023); Nicky Hager (say no more); Stuff’s Paula Penfold, perhaps best remembered for her conspiracy-obsessed and deeply flawed 2022 propaganda documentary Fire and Fury; and political reporter Marc Daalder of Newsroom, who can unfailingly be relied on to promote “progressive” ideas and seek to discredit policies and politicians he disapproves of.

Where was the conservative voice on the panel? There was none; not even the fig leaf of a token one. In that respect the discussion accurately mirrored the mainstream media’s abandonment of its commitment to balance. In the warped perspective of the academic left, “conservative” now equates with “far right”. Perhaps someone should point out the inconvenient truth that New Zealanders in 2023 elected a centre-right government, as they have done in the majority of elections during the modern era.

It’s worth noting too that although this was a conference of journalism educators, at least two of the panellists (Phelan and Dutta) are not – and to my knowledge never have been – journalists, while Hager could more accurately be classified as a professional activist, given that he has never pretended to be balanced or impartial.

Not one of the participants conformed even remotely to most New Zealanders’ ideal of journalistic neutrality. Yet these are the people we’ve entrusted with the training of the next generation of journalists – in which case the question must be asked: is the damage now irreversible? Are we living in a post-journalism era?

Of course Mediawatch asked none of these questions, preferring to report the discussion without comment or analysis. Given Peacock’s usual predilection for interposing his own opinion, this could only be interpreted as a sign that he saw nothing to disagree with. No surprises there.

We heard brief audio clips from some of the participants. Phelan, who is Irish, sounded as if he was hyper-ventilating as he squawked about the urgent need to call out what he called the “far-right political project”. Dutta, who is Indian, was quoted as saying that the right-wing media was an ideological project with colonial roots (well, of course he would say that; pernicious colonialism is at the root of everything bad). Daalder, who is American, lamented that aspects of extremist news had made their way into “mainstream pulpits”. Ring the alarm bells!

All this is rich, given that what we’re now seeing in the alternative online media is simply a natural and inevitable backlash against the overwhelming preponderance of the far left. No one should be in the least surprised that media outlets such as the Platform, the Centrist and Reality Check Radio (none of which I follow, incidentally) sprang into life as a reaction against the silencing of conservative voices and the shutting down of legitimate dissent.

It should be pointed out that there was never any need for alternative platforms in the past, since the mainstream media functioned as a “broad church” that made room for all voices. People like the JEANZ educators gleefully danced on the grave of that admirable model and now have the gall to wail about the resulting polarisation and loss of public trust in the media.

On one level, it’s tempting to dismiss the over-excited participants at the JEANZ conference as players in a piece of absurdist theatre, acting out their paranoia far removed from the real world. Regrettably it’s not that simple. Academic courses remain the mandatory gateway to careers in the media, and as long as journalism training is controlled by extreme leftist zealots and charlatans (for charlatans is what some of them are, in my opinion), the media industry has no prospect of ever regaining the respect and trust it commanded in the past.

Media companies cannot escape culpability for this. In the distant past I served on an industry liaison committee that maintained oversight of the journalism course at what is now Massey University and took an active part in the appointment of tutors. If such consultative arrangements still exist, it’s a damning indictment of the industry that it has stood by and done nothing while journalism training was systemically hijacked and corrupted from within by academic white-anters.

 

 

 

What privilege looks like in 2025

Two weeks ago, in a blog post headlined What privilege sounds like in 2025, I made the case that the broadcasting organisation formerly known as Radio New Zealand is the embodiment of privilege. 

I argued that the dwindling number of New Zealanders who listen to the state radio station are in fact doubly privileged. Not only are they able to hear taxpayer-funded content that’s carefully curated so as not to offend their sensibilities or challenge their cosy assumptions, but they are spared the indignity of being bombarded with crass, intrusive advertising. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who choose to tune into commercial radio (which, in this context, essentially means NewstalkZB).

I also noted that despite this disincentive, NewstalkZB’s audience keeps growing at the expense of RNZ. You’d think someone at the top of RNZ might have noticed this and started asking the obvious question – namely, why are listeners abandoning us? But even if they’re asking that question, the evidence suggests that they can’t bring themselves to answer it honestly.

As if to prove this, when my old colleague (and former broadcasting journalist) Barrie Saunders linked to my blog post on Facebook, RNZ board member Jane Wrightson sneeringly responded: “Oh good grief!” In doing so, she obligingly illustrated the problem.

I suspect that Wrightson, who has had a glittering career at the heart of the Wellington public service, inhabits an insular world that is largely deaf to critical outside scrutiny. They can’t see anything wrong, therefore there’s no problem. Wrightson apparently doesn’t pause to wonder why people like me no longer listen to RNZ.

For decades my radio was permanently tuned to the state broadcaster. I habitually listened to it at home and in the car. I should be RNZ’s target audience.

I miss some RNZ programmes and would gladly become a loyal listener again, because it still does some things well. I miss Jim Mora and I still sneakily listen to Phil O’Brien when no one’s around. But for me the entire organisation is fatally contaminated by the naked, systemic bias inherent in critical areas of its programming – most notably in its choice of presenters and in the way it deals with touchy political and ideological issues such as race, climate change and gender.

RNZ’s partisanship in favour of what are smugly and misleadingly labelled “progressive” values is evident not just in the issues it chooses to cover and how it deals with them, but just as critically in the issues it prefers to ignore and the people it refuses to engage with.

The parallels with the beleaguered BBC, currently grappling with the reverberations from a damning report exposing embedded biases on issues such as Gaza, crime and immigration, are obvious.

As a board member, Wrightson should be asking why RNZ has lost so many listeners like me (and you can be sure there are countless others. Not only do the audience figures bear that out, but I meet them all the time). But she prefers to dismiss criticism with an airy wave of the hand. “How tedious”, she seemed to be saying. It was what you might call a Marie Antoinette response.

But RNZ is hardly the only media organisation whose editorial priorities scream of privilege. If you want to know what privilege looks like in 2025, just read Stuff.

The Post’s Saturday magazine Your Weekend, in particular, wallows in privilege. I have no doubt that its editor and staff sincerely see themselves as champions of the marginalised. But this sits awkwardly with their choice of content, which invariably reflects the interests and preoccupations of a narrow demographic group consisting largely of affluent, young, educated, left-leaning, middle-class Pakeha women.

This highlights a besetting fault that pervades much of the New Zealand media. Editorial agendas are too often determined by journalists writing for and about people like themselves; people with the same interests, priorities, values and tastes. This is not a formula for success, since it ignores the rather substantial part of the community that doesn’t fit that profile.

Every time I look at Your Weekend (which I do quite often, because there are few things more satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed), I’m struck by the incongruity of editorial content that vacillates between earnestly woke on one hand and breathtakingly puerile, trite and self-indulgent on the other. YW appears unable to decide whether it’s a progressive socio-political pamphlet or an adolescent fanzine, slavishly pandering to elitist, designer-label consumerism.

A flick through a couple of recent editions reveals a preoccupation with actors, writers and artists (oh, and a burlesque queen last weekend and the weekend before that, a social media “influencer” and a food forager). In other words, a snapshot of an effete metropolitan café society that enjoys a lifestyle shared by a privileged few.

Nowhere is that privilege better encapsulated than in the sections devoted to subjects such as fashion, makeup and wine. Here you might see a pair of women’s shorts that costs $550, shoes priced at $595 and a handbag with a tag of $430. In the wine column I rarely see anything priced at less than $30, and often much more. I wonder, how many Your Weekend readers can afford the prohibitively expensive stuff the magazine promotes?

I accept that YW is targeted at a particular demographic group, but I would argue that it doesn’t even reflect the broad interests of that target market; merely a carefully selected subset of it.

A similar self-centred blindness to real-world interests and concerns seems to permeate the entire Stuff universe. Last Saturday’s Post, for example, included a wordy review of an esoteric Te Papa exhibition, a half-page by the same writer devoted to the woke podcaster Toby Manhire, another half-page about an obscure Australian musician (ah yes, obscure, but a close associate of Nick Cave, darling of the rock music cognoscenti - say no more), and an interview with the director of a Wellington food festival in which she listed all her favourite places in the city – mostly trendy bars and cafes, but with a sauna venue and a dance-fitness studio thrown in.

That last-mentioned item was a quintessential reflection of Wellington as it’s experienced by a well-paid, hedonistic, apartment-dwelling elite. I wait in vain for one of these regular “My Wellington” pieces to feature a checkout operator or a bus driver. Perhaps the Post assumes such people couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say.

This type of non-journalism set a new bar earlier this year with a series of Post articles called “The Yummy Mummy”, in which a Stuff journalist who’s also a first-time mother visited various Wellington cafes with her baby to assess their suitability for “Mums and their pint-sized partners”. This was peak self-indulgence, speaking to a tiny minority of readers who share the Stuff editors’ strange ideas about what’s relevant, important and interesting.

As someone who recalls when the Post’s precursor papers, the Evening Post and the Dominion, were stuffed full of actual news stories – stories about court proceedings, council meetings, car accidents, crime, parliamentary debates, business and the economy, cats up trees – I naturally couldn’t help thinking how many such stories could have been accommodated in the hectares of space lavished on these overwritten and often pointless articles.

Of course it’s true that newsrooms have been hollowed out and that papers no longer have the resources to cover the stories they used to. Nonetheless we can draw our own conclusions from the fact Stuff chooses to squander its limited editorial resources pandering to a segment of the market that doesn’t reflect New Zealand society at large.

There’s a word for this: privilege.