Steve Braunias and the Auckland media priesthood

Back in the early 1980s, I was invited to run a feature-writing course for journalism students at what was then Wellington Polytechnic (now part of Massey University). The three full-time tutors didn’t think they had the requisite experience to teach this form of journalism, and in hindsight I’m not sure I did either. But for six weeks or so, one afternoon a week, I would trudge up to the Polytech and try to pass on to the students what little I had learned about writing feature-length stories.

At the end of the course, the tutors were keen to know which students I thought stood out as potential feature writers. I named two. One, if I recall correctly, was the daughter of the poet Lauris Edmond; the other was Steve Braunias. At the mention of the latter name, the tutors almost literally recoiled in astonishment. They’d written Braunias off as hopeless. In fact he was a classic square peg in a round hole – stubbornly resistant to all attempts to make him write in the formulaic manner required for news stories, but clever and funny when he was freed from stylistic constraints.

Braunias of course went on to become a high-profile writer and satirist and is now feted in literary and media circles. I’m not aware of anyone else on that feature-writing course who has made an impact in journalism. So while I take no credit for Braunias turning out the way he did (if my tutoring had been inspirational, others on the course would presumably have shone too), at least my judgment was vindicated.

I mention this episode because Braunias himself recalled it in a recent interview with an admiring Duncan Greive on the online news and commentary site The Spinoff.  But it’s what Braunias went on to say that interested me. Here’s the relevant passage, from the section of the interview in which Braunias talked about that journalism course:

“I couldn’t tell a news story. I had no nose in news. I didn’t have the hunger for it, or the gall. I just didn’t have what it takes whatsoever. I was just kind of a dimwit.

“The feature writing course, that was appealing and I kind of got saved there in a way. I got first place in the feature writing thing, and it was marked by a guy from the Listener magazine, Karl du Fresne. He became a bit of a shocking, right wing, redneck, reactionary goose. It was a bit of a shame that my saviour was writing opinions so inimical to me, and so awful to read.”

Braunias seems a bit conflicted here. He calls me his saviour, but in the same breath denounces me because of my supposedly loony right-wing views. The way he tells it, I was sagacious enough to recognise his talent, but then something mysterious happened that apparently fried my brain and turned me into a drooling right-wing imbecile. A goose, to be precise. Pardon me, but how does that work?

Let me attempt an explanation. In the circles Braunias moves in, namely the Auckland media priesthood, the only legitimate journalism is that which conforms to a left-wing template. Deviation is heresy and must be countered with scorn and ridicule.

The rationale is that if someone is right wing, it can only be because they’re stupid or nasty or both. (The term redneck, which Braunias used to describe me, unmistakeably implies rank ignorance as well as conservatism.) This is the smug, Pharisaical way in which members of the Auckland media elite dismiss any opinions that don’t concur with their own.  

Braunias is not the only offender and certainly not the worst. Others include Russell Brown – Auckland’s leading prig – and former Listener editor Finlay Macdonald.

My blog in September on the death of Graham Brazier, from Hello Sailor, triggered a frenzy among the left-wing Auckland twitterati, Brown and Macdonald joining the pack with gusto.

I committed the sin of questioning the media’s deification of Brazier and suggested Hello Sailor weren’t the band they were cracked up to be. To the Auckland media elite, this was heresy on a grand scale. But rather than address any of my arguments, they ran the line that I must be thick as well as reactionary. (They were conspicuously silent, surprisingly, on Brazier’s record as an abuser of his female partners, although I’ve no doubt that they all see themselves as staunchly pro-women.)

“Christ he’s an idiot,” tweeted Brown, referring to me. Elsewhere, on his Hard News site, he called me an ass. This is apparently the only way Brown can explain the fact that someone else sees things differently from him.

“Careful, we mustn’t speak ill of the brain dead,” tweeted Macdonald. Giovanni Tiso and Philip Matthews weighed in with similarly puerile jibes, yapping like toy poodles. Braunias chimed in too. All the usual suspects, in other words.

In another Twitter feed, Macdonald called me an asshole. This guy’s the New Zealand head of a major publishing company, for heaven’s sake, and here he was indulging in the digital equivalent of poking his tongue out and making faces, like the leader of a school playground gang.

These people fondly think of themselves as liberals, but in truth they’re anything but. Quite the reverse: they’re bigots whose carefully constructed liberal façade conceals an angry, sneering intolerance of any opinions that conflict with their own. I think they're gutless, too. They share their views with people they know will agree with them, because there’s safety in numbers. They hunt in a pack and compete to come up with the cleverest putdown of anyone they don't like.

And here’s another thing. If the explanation for my deviant, redneck opinions is that I’m too stupid to know any better, should they be mocking me? Wouldn’t it be more consistent with their sanctimonious pseudo-liberalism if they took pity on me? Shouldn’t they, as caring people, be wrapping me in a warm embrace of inclusiveness?

On second thoughts, scratch that. The thought is too frightening to contemplate.

 

Planet Tiso (continued)

Today I revisited Giovanni Tiso's series of  tweets last week about Jane Clifton's Listener column on Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics. Here are some of the words he used: "turgid", "shit", "supercilious", "cynical".

Clifton is a hugely experienced and well-informed observer of New Zealand politics. She's also astute, even-handed, eloquent and funny, which explains why tens of thousands of Listener readers turn to her every week to make sense of events that would otherwise leave them scratching their heads. I thought her column on the Dirty Politics furore was one of her best. But such judgments are subjective and Tiso is entitled to disagree, even if his language is intemperate.

Could his manic attack on Clifton (I counted 35 tweets over a short period, which sounds dangerously close to obsessional) be upheld as fair comment, then? Well, perhaps it could have been, except for a couple of things.

One is that he implies she's a sociopath. Tiso quotes a line from her column - "They are both advancing a political cause" (a reference to Hager and Cameron Slater) - and then adds: "And if you think that, you're a sociopath". I've read this several times and don't see how it can be construed as meaning anything other than that Clifton is a sociopath, which my dictionary defines as "someone affected by any of various personality disorders characterised by asocial or antisocial behaviour".

Okay, you could argue that in the Wild West of the twittersphere, even insults like "sociopath" are acceptable. I'm sure Tiso didn't mean it literally; he was indulging in hyperbole for rhetorical impact.

But hang on. What happened when I took a poke at Tiso in this blog, using a similar rhetorical device against him? (I said he shouldn't be allowed out in public without a minder, and suggested someone should adjust his medication.) He howled that I was being cruel - "vile" was his exact word - because he had a daughter with an intellectual disability, which he claimed (wrongly) I was aware of. Then he had the gall to whimper about people being unpleasant and indulging in ad hominem arguments.  Well, hello.

Let's get this straight then: it's okay for Tiso to call a respected columnist a sociopath because he doesn't like her take on the Dirty Politics affair, but it's mean and horrid to suggest that he might be a bit doolally himself. That's taking unfair advantage.

There's a term in boxing for people who love to throw punches but crumple when anyone hits back. They're called crystal chins. Tiso is a crystal chin.

But here's the other thing about him. It obviously eats him up that people like Clifton are allowed to express opinions that don't conform with his. The same zealous intolerance drove his successful campaign to have two RadioLive hosts taken off the air because they asked questions Tiso didn't like.

He was pleased with himself over that one. What could be more satisfying to a Marxist than having weak-kneed capitalists capitulate at the expense of free speech?

Perhaps he thought  he could pull it off again, because he was clearly pushing on Twitter at the weekend for the Listener - one of my sources of income as a freelance journalist - to punish me for hurting his feelings. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that I'm a free agent, and that this blog  has nothing to do with the work I do for the Listener. 

Keep it up, Gio. If you carry on like this I really will wonder whether you've got some sort of personality disorder.

Rules of engagement

It's surely a sign of Giovanni Tiso's overweening self-regard that he assumes I remember every detail of his interview by Kim Hill earlier this year, in which reference was apparently made to his intellectually disabled daughter (see his comment in response to Planet Tiso on Friday). As it happens, I don't remember that detail - or much else from the interview, for that matter. Tiso's just not that interesting. I simply recall thinking that he sounded surprisingly normal. 

For the record, then, my comment about Tiso's medication had nothing whatsoever to do with his daughter. I feel very sorry for anyone with a disabled child. I'm not insensitive to mental disability or illness, as I think I've demonstrated in newspaper columns here and here. But if Tiso thinks he can dish out bile with impunity while  somehow being protected against retaliation because of his unfortunate personal circumstances, he's dreaming.

Planet Tiso

I recently heard the self-described Marxist blogger Giovanni Tiso being interviewed by Kim Hill. (Fancy that, you’re thinking; a left-wing guest on Kim Hill’s show. Who’d have thought?) On that occasion Tiso gave a remarkably convincing impersonation of a sane man. Almost had me fooled. Then someone drew my attention to his angry stream-of-consciousness yapping on Twitter about Jane Clifton’s latest Listener column. I’m now convinced that he’s unhinged and shouldn’t be allowed out in public without a minder.

Tiso can barely contain his fury that the Listener’s respected political columnist should have a different take on the Dirty Politics affair from his own. Such is the far left’s embrace of free speech. But you have to allow that Tiso is at least consistent in his intolerance of views that don’t square with his own. This after all is the man who, to his surprise and delight, managed to get two RadioLive hosts pulled off the air because he didn’t like what they said during the Roast Busters furore.

What's most intriguing is Tiso’s apparent conviction that an eager world constantly awaits his latest pronouncement. He appears incapable of leaving Twitter alone for more than a few seconds. Given that he clearly doesn't have enough to do, perhaps some kind soul could offer him an honest job; he’s bound to have a doctorate in something useless. Or, failing that, at least adjust his medication.

Tampering with the democracy that attracted them here

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 13.)

THE LATEST census confirms what was already obvious: New Zealand has quietly undergone a profound demographic revolution. From being one of the world’s most homogeneous societies, it has become one of the most diverse.

One in four New Zealanders was born overseas – an astonishing statistic that makes us one of the world’s most immigrant-friendly societies. Asian ethnic groups have almost doubled in size since 2001.

The change is most dramatic in Auckland, where a 2011 study found that 40 percent of the population was born in another country.

What’s even more remarkable is that, in contrast with Britain and Australia, this has been accomplished without any obvious social or racial tension.

Apart from the pressure on housing prices, New Zealand has painlessly absorbed the new arrivals. Our embrace of ethnic diversity confirms that we are essentially a liberal, tolerant and easy-going society.

Yet that social harmony is potentially under threat – and the great irony is that the threat comes not from conservative New Zealanders, but from people purporting to represent immigrant groups.

On Jim Mora’s Afternoons programme on Radio New Zealand this week, Dr Camille Nakhid, chairwoman of Auckland Council’s ethnic people’s advisory panel (to which Bevan Chuang, erstwhile paramour of mayor Len Brown, was also appointed), talked about the need for ethnic groups to have more say in local government.

No one could object to such groups having an advisory function, but Dr Nakhid, an academic who lectures in something called social sciences (no surprises there), was talking about much more than that.

She believes ethnic representatives should be given a statutory role in decision-making – just like Auckland Council’s non-elected Maori statutory board, whose two members recently exercised a casting vote in favour of a living wage for council employees.

Dr Nakhid talked airily about not compromising democratic principles, but in fact was advocating exactly that. She seemed to draw a self-serving distinction between democratic “principles”, which she believes justify special rights for ethnic groups, and something less important called the democratic “process”.

Apparently the tired old idea of one person having one vote doesn’t quite cut it anymore.

She talked about the need for ethnic minorities to have “separate but equal” representation with Maori in Auckland – in other words, compounding what is already an abuse of democracy. And she didn’t really answer Mora’s question about how ethnic representation could be arranged when Auckland has an estimated 200 ethnic groups. A minor technicality, no doubt.

If Dr Nakhid had deliberately set out to create friction where currently there is none, she couldn’t have found a better way to go about it. Nothing is more likely to arouse resentment of immigrant groups than demands for privileged treatment.

And here’s another thing. We can safely assume one of the reasons so many people immigrate to New Zealand is that it’s an infinitely more democratic society than the ones they left behind. To then call for a change in the way our governance is organised seems downright perverse.

* * *

OUTRAGE is the defining mood of our time. Upset by the way you’ve been treated by a bus driver or an airport security officer? Go to the media and your grievance will be on tonight’s news bulletin and tomorrow’s front page.

Offended by a throwaway line from Bob Dylan in a year-old interview about the way some Croatians behaved in World War Two? If you’re fortunate enough to live in France, you can get the state to prosecute him on your behalf under laws governing “hate speech” – one of the most chilling phrases in the language.

Spotted an opportunity to kneecap a couple of talkback hosts you don’t like? Orchestrate a social media campaign to frighten weak-kneed companies into withdrawing their advertising and intimidate the station into taking the hosts off the air.

Avowed Marxist Giovanni Tiso did just that in his campaign against RadioLive hosts John Tamihere and Willy Jackson, and must have been thrilled at how easily he was able to make capitalism look gutless. Mass bullying has never been easier than in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

* * *

A LATE CONTENDER has come to hand in the quest for the most flatulent public relations statement of the year. It’s always a hotly contested category, but I think we have a clear winner.

Congratulating itself on being named PR Agency of the Year 2013, Professional Public Relations said in a press release: “The award follows a transformational year at PPR. The agency has rolled out an innovative channel agnostic client experience across the company’s seven Australian and New Zealand offices with account teams now providing a mix of owned, earned and bought strategies, services and channels to help brands tell and share their stories.”

You almost have to admire a firm that can display such magnificent contempt for the English language.