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.
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.
The level of hostility toward the Luxon-led government is striking. All pretence of balance and neutrality has been abandoned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
30 comments:
I was very interested in the different coverage of Winston raising the $55mil the last government spent on the legacy media. RNZ - to its credit - very carefully took a neutral approach. Newshub did not even pretend to be balanced.
Linked to this over at No Minister, with some additional comments:
In his first book, The Public Eye (1971), journalist Brian Edwards, said exactly that about the TV current affairs show Gallery, which was running in prime time on our only TV network, NZBC, and for which Edwards would eventually gravitate to being the prime interviewer. The three-time loser Labour Party of the day (and soon to be a four-time loser) were so hopeless that Edwards and company felt they had to be the Opposition, since nobody else seemed to be willing or able to hold the National government’s feet to the fire.
Given the overwhelming small-c conservative nature of the country, which Edwards failed against in the book, I can see his point. But that culture for which he fought has overwhelmingly won, although at the cost of all those cosy socialist things like the MOW, Department of Forestry, telcos and half-a-hundred other government-owned businesses.
The Left has never let go of the hope that somehow, some way, that world can also be revived to go with all the Lefty cultural power. I've sometimes wondered if there were Labourites who saw He Puapua as a path.
Hence the MSM reaction.
Stuff simply calls it untrue . Yet the sequence of events since the 2020 election raises questions. Stuff promptly did its mass apology series (while Te Hapua was lurking in the background, most unaware of it).
Stuff had been sold several months earlier to Sinead who embarked on turning it into what it has become, an activist web site with bits of road crashes and celeb garbage and lightweight items thrown in.
Primarily an activist site . That is fine BUT it received taxpayers funds. The slant of its outpourings since late 2020 (it was drifting activist before that even when I was there) confirm it. It should stop pretending to be ''fiercely independent'' and be up front. It is an advocacy site for various causes.
Someone should start a boycott week - where people avoid going to Herald/Stuff/TV3 etc
While many don't go to the sites for proper analysis, they often will just to check any general proper local news - but not too hard to set aside a week to avoid them totally.
Would send a message
To Tom Hunter,
I believe you are correct re He Puapua and this view I get from strongly Labour-Green associates of mine who are not part-Maori. They say democracy does not work for Maori and because Maori (now all mixed) are the first ''nation'' they should have oversight and final say on policy.
I put it to them that they are using Maori as a leverage to gerrymander voting in their favour ie Labour.
Hence the wards and unelected , appointed clip-on seats with voting rights at various levels of council operations .
Because the vast majority of ''Maori'' are seen as ''Left'' or allied with it one way or another, it means local authorities can be swayed or taken over, especially if treaty partner principles (decided by sympatheic judiciary and parliament) must be adhered to. Same at education and state agencies. Most councillors here in Taranaki simply fold and go along with it all.
At national level a republic with a constitution incorporating ''treaty principles'', as defined by those in power at the time, that is Labour, could be used to create a second tier of Maori reps ...a Senate?... who would hold final say over govt policies, and or various clip-on bodies that must approve ALL laws.
The associates have no problem with that because democracy ''doesn't work'' any more and is a colonial construct for ''white racist'' rule . That is Nats etc. All opposition is an ist of one sort or another. And it won't be tolerated because the opposition is ''intolerant''.
They were quite smug about it .
It could also be used to require anyone standing for Parliament to swear allegiance to the constitution, thereby making it impossible to change it ''legally''. A bit like the Socialist constitutions of the old Eastern Bloc or of Islamic States .
The problem for more traditional Labour or even old hippy Greens is this: They may think they are manipulating ''Maori'' but the hardliners such as the TMP have their own agenda of tribal rules and goals. Including business. At some point they will conflict with the genuine old style Left as opposed to the new race/gender/social engineering bloc.
The election result is a nuisance. A pause for three years before, as one comment on Facebook put it....the racist, fascists (it went on) are removed . I am sure RNZ, our TV channel activists, Stuff and a chunk of NZ Herald are waiting eagerly for that.
Labour, the Greens, the MSM & much of the Public Service now comprise the Bourgeois Woke faction of the Establishment ... a Professional-Middle Class as self-seeking, financially-greedy & power-hungry as the Merchant Right ... but far more committed to PR & image management - masquerading as virtuous 'Moral Exemplars' ... aggressive posturing around dubious, abstract notions of good vs evil Identity groups to disguise that dogged self-interest ... in particular, the decidedly *in*egalitarian scapegoating of poorer & working Pakeha, Asians & other non-Maori into a degraded second-class citizenship.
Worth checking the NZH where there has been some quality analysis but too often the heading is in contradiction of the story below and provokes the view that the headline writer is aiming for, charitably, "click-bait" or alternatively a government denigrating angle.
Bruce Kohn
The thing that amuses me about the self-proclaimed "fiercely-independent" site that is Stuff is their begging bowl mentality, which is on public display at the bottom of news items, asking readers to support their particular slant on the news. This tells you a lot. If you can't stand on your own two feet without sticking out the alms bowl then you really shouldn't be in the newspaper/media business. While we are witnessing the 'generational' death of newspapers in favour of subscriber-led websites (Good Luck with that), the abundance of fact-based sites has shrunk while personal-interest websites pretending to be 'newsworthy' has grown. Social media is the evil of our times in this respect. Wait until AI goes full throttle, now that genie is out of the bottle. Many people do not seem to be as discerning or questioning as they once were because the lines between fact and fiction have been greatly blurred, often along political lines and the media in this country have clearly taken sides. Public trust and confidence surveys of the past used to have journalists down with car dealers, loan sharks and insurance salesmen while firefighters, police and medical staff were always near the top rung. Police have probably fallen a bit in the Public Trust Stakes due to having been taken over by academics who are more likely to be spending taxpayer funds on virtue-signalling while closing down police stations, but that's a whole other story and we need not traverse it here. Suffice to say journalists/media would probably be running last if current public perception/trust is anything to go by - and in a democracy that is a very sad state of affairs indeed.
Bruce Kohn,
I agree there are journalists at the Herald, and even one or two at Stuff, who make a genuine attempt at balance, and who stand out like beacons because of it.
I should have added neutrality.
I concur. Over the last 6 years often I have shaken my head at Labour cock ups, disinformation ,obfuscation and downright lies which pass by the media with barely a passing glance.
Jacinda Ardern had an incredibly charmed run. Only the venerable Barry Soper of the press media did the fact checking and asked the uncomfortable questions. Because she had such a fawning press media she could get away with a "sorry Barry you've had your question - now Tova, Jessica".
Imagine if National had been running the country during this time (particularly during Covid). They would have had to extend the 6 o'clock news to two hours to fit in all the vitriol ,outrage and condemnation that could be mustered.
Thank goodness for Newstalk ZB during that period - most of their presenters were prepared to swim against the tide and criticise the government. Of course Hosking was too much for Ardern who bailed in a very cowardly fashion. Would Helen Clark have done the same - no, even if you didn't like her politics she at least had intestinal fortitude.
the media are enemies of this government and will try to fight the will of the people.
"Government ministers and MPs must understand that they don’t need to ingratiate themselves with their press gallery tormentors"
This needs to be said at every cabinet meeting for the next 100 days. Upon leaving the cabinet room, I would ignore the media Scrum for the most part, until behaviour improves. At the moment it's an ambush.
I would deliver most press releases primarily through a free, publicly available medium, with legacy media events being secondary.
This could change once press behaviour improves.
Karl, any suggestions what the public can do to successfully address this?
In countering media bias, government spokespeople would be more effective if they gave specific cases, for example:
1 Siouxie Wiles had flagrantly cocked a snook at the Level 4 Auckland Covid lockdown regulations , when she sat close to a journalist friend on an Auckland beach, but this was ignored by the media, and they refused to raise the issue, on the grounds that she was 'not a politician'.
2 Media gave no more than a passing mention of Ardern's statement that on Covid, her gov't was the 'sole source of truth', as was Pravda in the Soviet Union.
3 Media gave Hipkins a free ride re his statement that 'no was compelled to take the Covid jab'. Like the business owner who 'agreed' to give money to the Mafia to protect against having his business burnt down.
Fred Williscroft's comment above is right on the mark.
I endorse every word he wrote.
I see that Willy J. is now claiming that the requirement by PIJF recipients (basically the entire legacy media) for no dissent from what was essentially government dogma around co-governance/treaty issues had nothing to with the government. It was all a complete surprise, apparently, that his handpicked NZ On Air board just did it without the minister being even aware. Yeah Right!
Note: I originally posted this comment on Bowalley Road.
Karl, Seriously how can this situation be addressed? Is a complaint to Broadcasting Standards a waste of time?
Unfortunately I think the incoming government, ministers and MPs alike, simply have to grit their collective teeth, stiffen their collective spines and practise beaming benignly at the members of the "Jessica & Tova show" et al as they continue to tantrum and throw their toys out of their cots. They have been spoon-fed propaganda, especially the last three years, many are too young to have worked under and learned from journalists who practiced balance and neutrality, and have been inculcated with postmodernism and critical theory. They are not willing to scrutinise the reality of the PIJF and the consequent huge advertising revenue it generated for those who signed up: remember the full-page covid ads in print media and on TV? Of course it was bribery and of course they were bought and of course this contributed to the diminishing trust in their utterances. But that will never be acknowledged by those who most vociferously deny it, because to do so would mean they'd have to adjust their world view to include the notion that debate means giving space to uncomfortable, possibly threatening, ideas.
The government should publish information on a single website.
Luxon and the other ministers should limit their media exposure to no more than one scheduled press event per week.
Engaging with the media on a daily basis is exactly what the media wants and needs, and serves only to allow them to indulge in their petit egocentric behaviour .
Demand repayment of PIJF, before XMAS. Not following governments mandate. Contract breach.
I agree with Alex (above) - the government needs to have its own news outlet, seeing it cannot trust the current msm to show any semblance of impartiality and integrity.
The trouble with a government-operated 'news' site is that it eventually becomes a propaganda outlet, so how it might be managed in order to avoid political interference and intervention is a brain-strain beyond me.
Cognitive dissonance; to a greater or lesser degree has become an art form among journalists in the new age of trading woke dribble to the gullible of society.
What part of truth do these ink slingers not understand. For it has become increasingly difficult to observe a moral value among any of them that operate within the bowels of the Beehive.
Can the training in journalism really be as easy as creating a Monkey see Monkey do philosophy among the budding students.
I recall just before or just after Trump was elected and the Brexit vote( like him or not he was a catalyst in this) about 150 media outlets worldwide that deemed themselves ''progressive'' for example NYT, Stuff, Guardian etc, said that they would be covering news differently in light of a (rightwing, racist etc presumably) threat posed, in their view, by ''the right'' (Far, alt whatever as they deem it).
It was made clear from their viewpoint their perceived threats to the existing order (pro EU, pro Obama, various ''progressive'' reforms) required opposition by them (as no doubt the guardians of good) . As one commentator on TV in the US said words to the effect there should be no balance in coverage, citing Hitler as an example. Presumably that puts classes all opposition as being as bad as Hitler.
I am trying to find that ''progressive'' news pact online but having difficulty
Terrific comments on a terrific post. I have nowt to add!
YES! People have power!
Great article! The main stream media here in NZ is a disgraceful bunch of losers. They must be living in some kind of woke bubble where the worst kind of sycophantic sickness is spreading. The sooner they are all sacked the better.
The Stuff propoganda here in Taranaki re the TMP protests is quite blatant in the story spins
Tū mō te ao Māori: Taranaki to stand with te ao Māori
We are all on board with protests. Apparently.
Funny isn't it. A couple of years back we were told co-governance ''nothing to see here'', all made up. Now it is an established ''fact'' of the treaty.
Days before the 2014(?) election I stood dumbfounded as Katie Bradford looked down the camera and said
"after all we've said, after all we've done - the polls haven't changed...."
The media now regard the public as the enemy. Until they vote 'correctly'
All government press releases go up on a government web site..... Dont need a news agency.... Point of Order blog covers them regularly...
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