I've just caught up with this opinion piece by Oliver Hartwich of the New Zealand Initiative. It deserves a wider audience.
A nation talking to itself | The New Zealand Initiative (nzinitiative.org.nz)
I've just caught up with this opinion piece by Oliver Hartwich of the New Zealand Initiative. It deserves a wider audience.
A nation talking to itself | The New Zealand Initiative (nzinitiative.org.nz)
7 comments:
Thanks for sharing this article. The media in New Zealand are now almost uniformly Left Wing and their journalists simply paid propagandists. Ardern and Robertson have both now attempted to "cancel" into irrelevance two of the few remaining centre-Right broadcasters. I sincerely hope this tactic backfires on them. New Zealand's democracy is indeed in serious trouble. Much of the blame can be attributed to the universities where many journalists were indoctrinated and "Wokism" is now the official religion The French conservative magazine Valuers Actuelles this week described French universities as "a laboratory for lunatics". The same could be said here no doubt. However I don't believe most centre-Right New Zealanders would be drawn to media like Breitbart. They actually want accurate reporting and intelligent commentary that looks at issues from different perspectives. New Zealand "journalism" is a desert in that regard.
Dont know if it relevant, but. I was posting a comment on the DomPosts website about my opinion of the New Zealand art scene of today.
I meant to write Art Mafia, but wrote Art Nazi's instead.(a Freudian slip perhaps).
My comment was immediately rejected for having breached their code of conduct.
Ive shut the gate and pulled the blinds and told the wife to not answer the door if someone starts pounding on it demanding I open up.
No worries mate. It used to be beer rugby and racing. Now thanks to the conscience collective especially regarding "News Readers" such as Phillip Sherry, Dougal Stevenson.....we now have "Opinion Readers" such as Tova O'Brian and Jessica Mutch.
It's no wonder why Mexicans and pretend fake refugees on holiday from Iran via Malaysia chose to live here...politicism is a career path without the actual hard graft let alone the integrity, conviction or reality.
Money for Jam at University these days especially when it comes to ""Media Studies"" aka 'propaganda studies'
In the last week there has been discussion about how unsafe it is for women to walk around Wellington. This appears to be the result of gang members being put in emergency accommodation in the City in hotels and motels. What the media don't say is that this is because the prisons are being emptied out. Something like a 20% drop in numbers as a result of Labour's policy.
It’s worth a moments reflection on why the Media has drifted leftwards over recent years, and I’d like to suggest the following possible reasons:
Most Journalists are University graduates, where amongst lecturers ‘progressives’ outnumber conservatives by at least 2:1 according to Stuff. Furthermore, I suspect that progressives dominate the arts subjects, including journalism, whereas conservatives are more likely to be found in the STEM subjects. This is mainly conjecture on my part, but also tempered by first-hand experience. Consequently the progressive narrative dominates in the journalists training ground.
Why are people ‘conservative’ as opposed to ‘progressive’? and again, this is just intuition tempered by observation and engagement with friends of both persuasions, but I find progressives to be more idealistic, somewhat utopian, often working in State funded institutions, like nursing, teaching, government departments, local government, and are often secular in their outlook. By way of contrast, my conservative friends typically are more pragmatic, self-employed, or working in business, or have a measure of faith, or some combination of the above.
Youth and idealism often go together, and perhaps unsurprisingly many journalists now appear to be young. Activism is a natural by-product of this mix, however what is surprising is that more senior Editors now appear willing to support it.
The other thing driving political activism amongst mainly secular, young, progressive journalists, is that absent the transcendent, their horizon has been shortened to their personal three score years and ten, plus some years by good management or good fortune. With no sense of the eternal, everything must be accomplished in this life – now.
Finally, the MSM is in decline everywhere. Without government funding, it is probable there would have been company failures in the media. Who is going to start a New Zealand version of The Australian, a conservative leaning newspaper in this climate?
Sky News and the Bolt Report, or Credlin or similar is probably the best we can hope for in broadcast media for the time being.
Yes Brendan, add to that the high level of childlessness to the shortened (and narrow) outlook.
Chris Trotter recently had this to say:
"The free market, no less than Mother Nature herself, abhors a vacuum. Wheels are already in motion to set up New Zealand’s very own equivalent of the Fox News Network. Backers described as having “very deep pockets” are determined to set up a right-wing media alternative as “fair and balanced” as RNZ, Stuff, MediaWorks and, now, the NZ Herald.
With the evidence of the arrival of “cancellation culture” mounting by the day, the marketing plan for this new venture will, almost literally, write itself. Just how committed all these “right-on” business leaders are to the id-pol principles they have so publicly signed-up to will be properly put to the test the moment they begin to calculate the sheer number of eyeballs their noble gestures are keeping their advertising messages away from. At that point we shall see how keen they truly are to have the Woke cut off their commercial noses to spite their “racist” readers’ faces.
The right-wing political parties would be wise to reconsider their ideological positioning should such a viable voice for conservative values be established in New Zealand. The silence of National and Act in the face of the Bassett ban is instructive. Rather than take up his cause with the all the political energy it deserves, the parties of the Right appear to be looking over their shoulders at the news media – fearful, perhaps, that they, too, will be cancelled. Such naked (not so say cowardly) prevarication will be hugely disappointing to those New Zealanders relying upon their representatives to uphold core democratic principles."
Hi David
Yes, it continues to amaze me how servile and useless National have become on matters relating to our civil and political freedoms, particularly around freedom of expression. The one small item of good news I read recently is that National MP Chris Penk has begun to champion the NZ Bill of Rights and the need to test all proposed legislation against this benchmark. Hopefully this will provide some checks and balances on the relentless march towards the policing of opinion that is now taking place in both the media, and shortly (if this government gets its way) in the entire public domain.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300254369/national-wants-to-bring-bill-of-rights-debate-to-parliament
Post a Comment