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.

 

 

 

A richly deserved honour

I’m sure all readers of this blog will join me in extending hearty congratulations to Professor Mohan Dutta (above) of our own Massey University, who has been announced as the 2023 winner of the Gerald M Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship.

The award is sponsored by the Washington DC-based National Communication Association and named after a former professor of speech communications at Penn State University. It honours scholars responsible for authoring “bodies of published research and creative scholarship in applied communication”.

There could surely be no more richly deserving recipient than Prof Dutta, whose official title is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University.

Followers of this blog, being familiar with Prof Dutta’s winningly pellucid and succinct rhetoric, will agree that he boldly cuts through the dense, obfuscatory jargon that characterises most scholarly discourse and has a set a standard for all other academics to aspire to.

Doubtless the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised, whose cause Prof Dutta tirelessly champions, will rejoice at this tribute and will be there in spirit with him at Saturday’s award ceremony in the exclusive waterfront resort of National Harbor, Maryland. The freedom fighters of Hamas will presumably be delighted too, having recently been applauded by Dutta for their "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance".

The latest award is only the latest of many showered on him. We should all take vicarious pride in the fact that this humble scholar from a New Zealand university with lowly agrarian origins is feted on the global mortarboard circuit – a fact attested to by a recent lecture he delivered at Colorado State University, entitled “Decolonisation as organising radical democracies: Centering health, resisting climate colonialism, securing food systems, and resisting hate”.

It’s not surprising that Massey acknowledges Prof Dutta’s international standing by publicising his many achievements on its website. It is surely entitled to bathe in his reflected glory.

In my misguided past I have written on this website that “award-winning” are the two most meaningless words in the English language. In the light of this latest announcement I now realise that was mean-spirited and churlish, and accordingly apologise for my misjudgement.

Professor Dutta ducks below the parapet

 

It’s now more than three weeks since I challenged Professor Mohan Dutta (above) of Massey University to a debate, and still there has been no response.

In the meantime, he has locked his Twitter account after I urged readers of this blog to check it out. I thought people should see for themselves how incendiary – in fact borderline crazy – some of his tweets were.

Dutta would no doubt say he locked his account to protect himself from racist abuse, but another explanation is that he realised how bad it looked for him. Better to limit his readership to fellow zealots whom he knows won’t challenge him.

Before he ducked for cover beneath the parapet I cut and pasted bits of his Twitter feed as examples of his off-the-wall extremism. They reveal his overtly racist obsession with the evils of whiteness and how white supremacy “erases” minority voices in New Zealand.

He characterises free speech as an American idea that doesn’t fit New Zealand and needs to be “decolonised”. This from a man who (a) exercises his own right to free speech in a highly inflammatory way and (b) assumes the right to decide what’s good for New Zealand despite having arrived here only five minutes ago, metaphorically speaking.

An anonymous post on Wordpress provides a striking insight into Dutta's splenetic, vindictive rage. I can't verify the writer's allegations about Dutta, which should be treated with caution, but his Twitter and Facebook posts speak for themselves. 

For the record, I don’t dispute Dutta’s right to say what he thinks, irrational and offensive though it may be. He’s as entitled to freedom of speech as I am. In fact he has done us all a favour by obligingly exposing to the world the poisonous, polarising rhetoric he spouts from his privileged position as the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey.

My argument is not with Dutta’s right to express himself. But I do object, strenuously, to the fact that the state generously provides him with a taxpayer-funded platform from which to propagate ideas that undermine democracy and promote division; ideas that are fundamentally hostile to the society he has chosen to live in, and in a broader sense openly hostile to the values of Western civilisation that most New Zealanders (including the vast majority of immigrants) hold to.

In fact a crucial question that I would put to Dutta, in the unlikely event that we meet face to face, is this: Why is he here? Why choose to live in New Zealand when he clearly finds this country so vile? It was a downright perverse move unless you accept either or both of two explanations. One is that he came here with the aim of tearing down a civilised, tolerant, liberal democracy painstakingly built up over nearly two centuries. The other is that he was made welcome by a university sector that seems to have infinite room for second-rate imported academics pushing brazen ideological agendas, but which shows zero tolerance for any competing narratives.

Dutta may be a particularly conspicuous and egregious example of this phenomenon, but he’s not alone. The system is infested with people like him.

There is an argument that the best response to Dutta is ridicule, on the basis that his pronouncements are so risible they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. People say he’s deranged and that I’m only encouraging him. To take that approach, however, would be to ignore the damage he’s doing. He needs to be held accountable for his choleric, hateful rhetoric – as do the vice-chancellor of Massey (the Australian Jan Thomas, who famously and dishonestly banned Don Brash as a supposed menace to public safety) and the university council. After all, Dutta is operating with impunity under their imprimatur.

So I continue to wait patiently for the professor's response to my invitation. I also eagerly anticipate Parts Three, Four and Five of his promised five-part hit job on me, which seem to be taking some time to materialise. In the meantime, other people have been digging into Dutta's record – engaging in the type of online archaeology that the extreme neo-Marxist Left, as represented by people like the excitable Secret Squirrel conspiracy theorists at the Disinformation Project, normally specialises in.

Auckland lawyer Juliet Moses, spokeswoman for the New Zealand Jewish Council, has exposed Dutta’s support – along with another far-Left New Zealand academic, Professor Richard Jackson from the comically misnamed National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies – for a British academic with a history of anti-Semitic pronouncements.

Someone else has found evidence that Dutta was previously known by the surname Dutta-Bergman, raising the tantalising possibility that he is himself tainted by the ineradicable stain of whiteness. 

Meanwhile, Ben Espiner of The Platform has weighed in with a muscular and well-reasoned critique that concludes with the line: “It is generally believed that the most ignorant and indefensible of ideas wilt the fastest under the light of public scrutiny”. Public scrutiny is what Dutta, who's normally an incorrigible attention-seeker, now seems suddenly eager to avoid.

An update on the Dutta file

It’s now nearly two weeks since I invited Professor Mohan Dutta (above) of Massey University to have a debate with me to determine which of us was more accurate in his characterisation of the other. (He says I’m an agent of the hateful American Far-Right; I say he’s a bitter, angry, obsessive zealot peddling a toxic ideological line that’s openly hostile to the country he has chosen to live in. I think he may even be unhinged.)

In case Dutta didn’t see the blog post in which I issued this invitation (although he obviously did), I repeated it in an email to him. I have had no response.

While waiting to hear back from him, I had a look at his Twitter account. I saw nothing there to contradict my opinion of him. If anything, quite the contrary.

I urge people to check it out. Here’s a sample tweet from earlier this year in which Dutta applauded something Greens co-leader Marama Davidson had said: “Our research @CAREMasseyNZ consistently demonstrates that whiteness, cisnormative patriarchy and settler colonialism are the drivers of family violence and sexual violence”.

Right there you’ve got several trademark Dutta-isms: the undergraduate, bumper-sticker jargon, the wild accusatory tone and the outlandish, unsubstantiated assertion that family violence is somehow the fault of a white settler patriarchy. (Explainer: the clumsily named CARE (Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation), of which Dutta is director, sits within Massey University and appears to have at least semi-official status. It describes itself as “a global hub for justice-based communication research that uses participatory and culture-centered methodologies to develop community-driven com­munication solutions for building and sustaining human health and wellbeing”.)

At times Dutta is so angry as to be almost incoherent. A recurring theme in his tweets is the iniquity of “whiteness” – this from a man who presents himself, ironically, as a crusader against racism. It appears that to Dutta, anyone who is white is automatically and ineradicably stained with the taint of racism.

One of the points I would like to explore with Dutta, in the unlikely event that my suggested debate happens, is how we define racism. It would be helpful if we could settle on an agreed meaning.

The essence of racism, surely, is the belief that some races are intrinsically superior to others and that discrimination and ill-treatment, even genocide, is therefore okay. That’s what the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the rulers of apartheid-era South Africa believed. But it suits people like Dutta to adopt an infinitely flexible definition that can be stretched as required to fit any circumstance; in other words, to denigrate any opinion he doesn’t like and to smear his opponents as white supremacists.

Another notable feature of Dutta’s splenetic tweets is his obsession with the Hindu nationalist movement called Hindutva. You hadn’t heard of it? No, me neither, until recently. But Dutta is doing his utmost to ensure that we do.

Hindutva may be a political and ideological force in India. It may be true that it’s a malignant one, as Dutta insists. But does Hindutva present a threat to democracy or social cohesion in New Zealand? If it doesn’t, Dutta should pull his head in.

Many immigrants come to New Zealand to escape violent, divided societies where old hatreds run deep. They don’t need them stirred up here.

Sunni and Shi’a Muslims appear to co-exist peacefully in New Zealand. So do Catholics and Protestants who came here from Northern Ireland, and immigrants from the Balkan States – parts of the world long plagued by vicious sectarian divisions. Old enmities should be left behind: dumped in a bin in the airport arrivals lounge, metaphorically speaking, in the same way that incoming passengers are encouraged to jettison plants and foodstuffs that pose a biosecurity threat to the economy.

As a liberal, tolerant, open, capitalist democracy, New Zealand offers an opportunity to break free from historic patterns that lock people into ancient prejudices and predetermine their social and economic status. Thousands of desperate refugees from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia risk their lives trying to get into Western Europe, often with tragic consequences, for much the same reason.

Dutta, however, gives the impression of wanting to replicate in New Zealand the social, cultural and religious tensions that bedevil other countries. For all his sanctimonious and hypocritical talk about wanting to promote social cohesion, creating division is what he does. It’s his ideological stock-in-trade. He views society not as a settled collection of disparate yet compatible groups with common values and aspirations, but as a seething agglomeration of aggrieved minorities whose interests are irreconcilable with those of the supposedly oppressive majority.

According to this world view, these purported power imbalances (which is where the influence of Marxism comes in, although many traditional Marxists are repelled by the woke ideology promoted by people like Dutta) can be resolved only by dismantling existing structures and reconstructing society from the ground up. Dutta is hostile to democracy and even more so to capitalism. It doesn’t concern him that there’s no appetite in New Zealand – outside a noisy extremist minority – for radical transformation of the type he’s agitating for.

After I started writing this, I learned that Dutta had resumed his attack on me. He has posted (again on the Massey University website, thereby implying the university’s official endorsement) Part 3 of what he promises will be a five-part series, all apparently triggered by my post of June 7.

His latest post runs to more than 3700 words. I’m not going to cry “foul”, seeing I started this. But really – 3700 words (with some assistance from his cronies)? And two more articles still to come?

Once again, Dutta abandons any pretence of rational analysis. No longer content to simply characterise me as a voice of the far Right, which in itself justifies my description of him as unhinged, Dutta associates me with violence, racism, death and rape threats, transphobia, misogygny and the banning of books. He sees the world through a lens grotesquely distorted by rage and resentment.

He rails against hate but paradoxically indulges in some of the most hateful rhetoric I’ve seen. We’re left to conclude that there are two types of hate: the virtuous kind, as articulated by Dutta, and the other type that only white people are guilty of.

If his latest attack on me was remotely on target, I would have reason to worry about my reputation, but I get the impression the truth doesn't matter to Dutta. If he’s capable of portraying me as someone who approves of violence and rape threats, he’s capable of saying anything. His characterisation of me is best described as a cartoonishly crude caricature. I urge people to read his article (though be warned – it takes some stamina) and form their own conclusions.

I’ll disregard misquotations and errors of fact in Dutta’s piece and restrict my comment to two points. The first relates to his implication that I’m driven by nostalgia for a vanished New Zealand, which is partially true. I have had the good fortune to spend my life in one of the world’s most civilised (which is not to say flawless) countries. Naturally I value that and will do what I can to protect all that's admirable about that heritage. I think I have a deeper appreciation of what’s worth preserving in this country than someone who arrived yesterday. It's striking that much of the discontent fuelling the culture wars in New Zealand comes from people who, like Dutta, have been here only a short time. I have likened this to being invited into someone's home and immediately demanding they rearrange the furniture.

The other point concerns academic freedom, which Dutta seems to think confers the right to indulge in whatever poisonous ideology suits him (funded by the taxpayer, of course).

In principle I agree with him on academic freedom. The problem in New Zealand, as in other Western democracies, is that academic freedom runs only one way, as we saw when the Listener Seven were vilified by their peers (a cowardly gang-up which Dutta clearly endorsed). As a Curia survey revealed earlier this year, a majority of academics at five New Zealand universities felt unable to express controversial or unpopular opinions. Across all eight universities, only 46 per cent said they felt free to question received wisdom or challenge ideological orthodoxy. At professor level, the ratio was even lower: only 31 per cent. In reality, academic freedom exists in New Zealand only in the sense that press freedom could be said to exist in Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. But Dutta’s safe.

Beyond that, to deal with Dutta’s latest polemic point by point would imply that it’s serious enough to be worth responding to, which it’s not. But for what it’s worth, I repeat my invitation to him to take part in a debate, the venue and time to be determined by mutual agreement. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath.

My invitation to Professor Mohan Dutta

Professor Mohan Dutta has written about me again in a piece published on the Massey University website yesterday:  Opinion: The Far-Right, Misinformation, and Academic Freedom (massey.ac.nz)

Among other things I'm accused of communicative inversions and linked by association with online misogyny and even death threats. I can't say which accusation is more damning because I'm not sure what communicative inversion is.

I'm happy to link to Dutta's article here because I believe in free speech and the right of reply. I could respond point by point but that would be several hours of my life that I'll never get back. 

I do, however, repeat my invitation to Prof Dutta to debate me face to face. Just in case he missed that suggestion in my last post, I have communicated it to him directly via email.

My response to Professor Mohan Dutta

I see I’m now designated as a voice of the Far Right. That description comes from Massey University professor Mohan Dutta, so carries a spurious air of authority.

I supposed I should be alarmed, but I’m not, for two reasons. One is that academia has so recklessly squandered its credibility that we should pay no more heed to the opinion of a professor of “communication” – least of all an imported zealot from the far Left – than to that of the local barber.

The other is that I’m no longer sure what the Far Right is. The term was once reserved for outfits like the Ku Klux Klan and Britain’s National Front, neither of which was active, still less influential, here.

Far Right groups have never secured a political foothold in phlegmatic New Zealand. That remains true despite feverish scaremongering from conspiracy theorists at the Disinformation Project and their media cheerleaders (RNZ’s Susie Ferguson’s dishonest Undercurrent podcast being the latest example). If conspiracy theories are flourishing and paranoia is rampant, then ironically it’s largely due to the efforts of the people who purport to be protecting us from it.

If the same alarmists are to be believed, the term “far Right” now extends to organisations such as Speak Up for Women (which promotes the supposedly radical view that the definition of woman is “adult human female”), the anti-mandate group Voices for Freedom and the farmers’ lobby Groundswell. None of these organisations could be categorised as extremist. Rather, they could be said to have sprung up in response to extremism. They are legitimate pressure groups whose policies and actions should be seen (and would have been, in less hysterical times) as part of the healthy and normal contest of ideas that sustains a mature, liberal democracy.

In the media, the term “far Right” is used equally loosely. Marginally right-of-centre parties such as National are tolerated (although barely) just as long as they humour the media by pusillanimously falling into line with the latest woke diktats. Any genuine conservative, however, risks being demonised as far Right – the more so if they are foolish enough to identify as Christian.

The international media routinely pin the same label on any government whose “populist” policies offend the neo-Marxist Left, the word “populist” now being treated as synonymous with “far Right”. This poses a credibility problem for the media as more and more European voters turn to parties that reject left-wing policies on hot-button issues such as climate change and immigration. Are we to believe that much of Europe has mysteriously succumbed to an extremist right-wing bacillus, or are those voters simply making an informed and rational choice?

But back to Mohan Dutta (whose attack on me, incidentally, is published under the official imprint of Massey University – the same government institution that cancelled Don Brash).

I don’t dispute Dutta’s entitlement to a right of reply after I took a whack at him. Neither do I dispute his right to call me a member of the far Right, even though the term has been rendered virtually meaningless. But I suspect he’ll have more trouble substantiating his characterisation of me than I will my characterisation of him as a neo-Marxist. In fact I invite him to debate me face-to-face to determine which is the more accurate.

I’ll even give him some helpful tips. One is to make sure of his facts. Dutta says I wrote my “hit piece” for Sean Plunket's The Platform. Wrong. That might be where his bitter and disaffected informant (whom I take to be Ben McKay of Australian Associated Press) saw it, but I don’t write for The Platform. The article was written for my blog, as all my pieces are, and republished with permission. I suspect that in Dutta's fevered imagination, Sean Plunket and I are part of the same far-Right conspiracy. In fact The Platform exists only because of the need for a conservative outlet to counter the overwhelming ideological imbalance in the established media.

Dutta goes on to associate me with an “organised” far-Right attack on the “communications and media studies pedagogy” and links to a series of articles which he seems to think prove his point. But nearly all his reference points are from the US and therefore irrelevant. Citing a Washington Post article by a leftist US academic railing against “the US-Infowars-Bannon-Trump-DeSantis-Tucker-Carlson hate machinery” doesn’t get us anywhere. I recognise these names, but that’s all. What little I know about these people, I dislike. (The exception is Trump, about whom I know a lot – in fact more than I want – and whom I detest.)

Elsewhere, Dutta accuses me of “parroting the US-based white supremacist agenda” – this, after saying in his first line that he had never previously heard of me. That being the case, on what basis does Dutta accuse me of pushing a white supremacist agenda? The claim would be defamatory if anyone took it seriously, but the blog post he objects to made no mention of race. In fact I challenge him to find anything I’ve written, in more than five decades as a journalist and columnist, that could remotely be construed as taking a white supremacist line.

No doubt it suits Dutta to resort lazily to overheated American polemics, to frame my post as part of a global far-Right conspiracy and to accuse me of “replicating American far-Right talking points”. Perhaps it’s the only way he can make sense of it in his conspiracy-obsessed world. He seems confused about which country he’s in. But it would be helpful if he could stick to talking about New Zealand, since that’s where we are.

New Zealand is not the US and for the record, I’m not part of an organised anything. I’m a lone blogger in a provincial town and I own all my own opinions – right or wrong, good or bad, fatuous or inspired. I don’t have the backing of a substantial, taxpayer-funded academic institution and the only political organisation I have any association with is the Free Speech Union, which would defend Dutta’s rights as vigorously as it would mine.

Moreover I’m not on social media and wouldn’t have a clue how to access the supposedly toxic rhetoric spouted by the noisy American extremists Dutta refers to. That’s assuming I’m interested in the first place, which I’m not. Other than the FSU, I have no links with anyone. I’m the original Mr Clean.

Oh, and another thing. Dutta objected to my criticism of his impenetrable writing style, then proceeded to prove my point with passages like this: “The white supremacist hegemony of the far-right sees the organising for justice from the margins as threatening to the status quo. Its conspiracy web therefore communicatively inverts materiality, inverting historic processes of racist marginalisation on their head to portray voices advocating for social justice as the elites occupying power.” He goes on to say that I’m “drawing from misinformation-based discursive frames weaved [sic] by the alt Right”.

Comically, he suggests it’s my job as a journalist to translate this obscurantist crap, to which I say: bullshit. It shouldn’t need translating; the onus is on him to express himself clearly. Clarity of language denotes clarity of thinking, and the reverse – which applies in his case – is equally true.

To be fair, Dutta is occasionally unambiguous. There’s no misunderstanding him when he refers to the culture wars being “a far-right mobilisation of white supremacist cultural nationalism … in continuity with the racist colonial infrastructure of Aotearoa”. It was helpful of him to provide this tiny sample of the toxic ideological gruel presumably served up to gullible communication and media studies students at Massey.

And he did touch on another important point: “Accountability to the taxpayer is one of the key resources in the mobilisation of the far-right. Designating themselves as gatekeepers, as representatives and advocates of the voices of the tax payer, far-right individuals and organisations launch their attacks on academic freedom by claiming that the research and teaching on questions of social justice are a waste of taxpayer money.” Note how Dutta invokes academic freedom while conveniently avoiding the even more fundamental principle of accountability for the spending of public money. He would presumably prefer this to be left to the academics, free from critical outside scrutiny. But insistence on accountability to the taxpayer can hardly be dismissed as a fetish of the extreme Right. It’s a fundamental mechanism without which democratic government ceases to function.

Anyway, I encourage all followers of this blog to read Dutta’s article. Some of it may be incomprehensible, but they’ll decipher enough to decide whether it confirms everything I said in my original post.

Three thoughts for today

■ If Michael Wood deliberately sat on his shareholding in Auckland Airport despite knowing it represented a flagrant conflict of interest, he was guilty of ministerial impropriety bordering on corruption.

If, on the other hand, he simply didn’t get around to selling his shares despite being constantly reminded that he should, presumably because he was preoccupied with other things, he was guilty of inexcusable procrastination, rank incompetence and shockingly bad judgment. This should automatically render him unfit for any ministerial portfolio.

So he is either dodgy, hopelessly disorganised, or perhaps both. Either way, the case for Wood’s dismissal is overwhelming. Chris Hipkins is playing for time because he’s running out of cabinet ministers, but Wood’s situation is hopeless. You can hear the Death March playing.

We have been here before. The hazard for Labour governments is that they come to power bursting with zeal and ambition after years of frustration on the opposition benches, then burn out spectacularly when their ability falls woefully short of their aspirations.

It happened in 1975 and it seems to be repeating itself now. A notable exception, as Matthew Hooton reminds us today, was the Clark-Cullen government of 1999-2008, but the Ardern-Hipkins regime has reverted to type. Incompetence and indiscipline are a fatal combination. 

■ Michael Johnston and James Kierstead have written a piece for the NZ Initiative highlighting the precarious future of universities. They suggest a crucial part of the problem is that universities have abrogated their defining purpose – namely, to serve as incubators of ideas and nurturers of free thought and inquiry. This traditional function becomes impossible, they point out, when academics and students are scared to say what they think.

Johnston and Kierstead know what they’re talking about, having both experienced the chilling effects of the all-pervasive cancel culture that prevails in universities.

Their article also refers to the financial crisis that has forced several universities to consider laying off staff. Perhaps a useful starting point for embattled university administrations would be to focus on academics who use their privileged positions to promote polarising identity politics agendas for which they have no mandate.   

This blog yesterday identified one such figure, Massey University’s Professor Mohan Dutta. A trawl through Dutta’s online activism and his involvement in the activist organisation CARE – or to give it its clumsy full name, the Centre for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation – revealed a web of far-Left connections, much of it appearing to operate under Massey’s aegis. (CARE’s 2023 Activist-in-Residence was indigenous rights advocate Tina Ngata, whose on-campus events at Massey last month bore the clear stamp of approval from the university – in striking contrast to vice-chancellor Jan Thomas’s hysterical 2018 ban on Don Brash.)

Dutta is hardly unique in using his academic status to pursue an ideological agenda. If university administrations wanted to save money and simultaneously regain lost credibility, they could strip back to basics by demanding a more rigorous level of accountability from academic staff and giving notice to those who treat their position as a licence to indoctrinate. Those who don’t comply should be shown the door.

That might have the additional benefit of breaking the repressive ideological stranglehold that Johnston and Kierstead allude to and creating an academic environment in which people again feel able to speak freely.

■ I had an exchange of emails yesterday with a fellow retired journalist who lamented the tendency for reporters to embellish their stories with personal opinion, something that was firmly discouraged in our time.

I offered two possible explanations. One was the adoption of bylines – the practice of putting the reporter’s name on the top of the story, often accompanied by their photograph.

Until the 1970s, bylines were used only sparingly, usually to indicate that the reporter was a “name” or had done an exceptional job. Sports writers often got them, as did some political reporters whose knowledge and expertise were acknowledged.

Now bylines are used automatically, even on the most routine news items. The inevitable consequence is that the reporter’s ego is inflated even if he or she has done only a ho-hum job. From there, it doesn’t take a huge leap for the reporter to think his or her opinion must count for something.

Another possible explanation for the intrusion of comment into what should be “straight” news stories, unembroidered by the reporter’s personal views, is that a high proportion of journalists in the 21^st century have university degrees, which was rare a couple of generations ago.

Human nature being what it is, journalists who hold degrees may think themselves wiser than their readers, and therefore empowered to give us the benefit of their insight.

When I began in journalism, there was a prejudice against the hiring of university graduates for exactly that reason; they were suspected of being "above themselves”. It seemed an inverted form of intellectual snobbery, but I now sometimes wonder whether there might have been something in it.

Of course, not having been to university myself, I would say that.

 

NZ: a blank canvas for stokers of the culture wars

Ever heard of Professor Mohan Dutta? No, neither had I until a few days ago, when his name popped up on my computer screen. He occupies the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University’s School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, and what follows is his academic profile:

Based on his work on healthcare among indigenous communities, sex workers, migrant workers, farmers, and communities living in extreme poverty, Prof. Dutta has developed an approach called the culture-centered approach that outlines culturally-based participatory strategies of radical democracy for addressing unequal health policies. Based on academic-activist collaborations, the culture-centered approach uses fieldwork, resistive strategies for performance and dialogue-based reflexive participation to create entry points for listening to the voices of communities at the global margins. At the core of his research agenda is the activist emphasis on provincializing Eurocentric knowledge structures, and de-centering hegemonic knowledge constructions through subaltern participation. He has received over $4 million in funding to work on culture-centered projects of health communication, social change, and health advocacy. Recently, he completed a $1.5 million grant funded by the Agency for HealthCare Research & Quality (AHRQ) to develop a culturally-centered health communication project on heart disease among African American communities in the Lake and Marion counties of Indiana. This community-grounded project interrogating the unhealthy structures that constrain the health and wellbeing of African American neighborhoods in the US became the basis for multiple organic projects rooted in the aspirations in the community for health and wellbeing. At NUS, he received over $2 million in funding to run culture-centered projects of health across Asia, including projects on food insecurity in West Bengal, poverty and health in Singapore, health among migrant workers in low skilled sectors, health of transgender sexworkers, health among Malays, and cardiovascular health and marginalization. At Massey, he looks forward to building the work of CARE in the areas of indigenous health, health and migration, and poverty.

The social impact in Mohan Dutta's work bridges activist interventions and academic knowledge production, delineating the tensions, divergences and convergences when academics, activists, and communities come together in co-creating transformative practices. He is interested in theorizing the nature of productive practices of academic performance situated at the intersections of subaltern politics, activist commitments, and academic research. Professor Dutta explores these tensions in academic-activist-community collaborations through his own experiments with collaboration and solidarity.

In addition to teaching, writing and conducting fieldwork in collaboration with activist groups, Prof. Dutta enjoys spending leisure time with … [I edited this bit to protect his family’s privacy] and an extended family of performers and activists; stimulating conversations with his advisees, usually over meals; organizing opportunities in radical democracy with grassroots groups; and participating in creative production, script writing, and direction for 360 degree campaigns. In his most recent performance work, he has served as the visiting artistic director for Rittwick, a grassroots group in West Bengal, India working on performance for social change. He has also directed the "Singaporeans Left Behind" "Voices of Hunger" and "Respect our Rights" campaigns and documentary films. Prof. Dutta is the winner of the 2016 International Communication Association (ICA) Applied/Public Policy Communication Research Award, and the 2018 Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award. He serves on the Advisory Panel of the World Health Organization (WHO) Cultural Contexts of Health (CCH) group.

What are we to make of all this? The first and most obvious point is that parts of it are written in a dialect that most people would find almost incomprehensible. That is its purpose. Elite groups have always used their own coded jargon to project (and protect) their power, to enhance their aura of exclusivity and to impress the impressionable. The object is not to explain, as most language strives to do, but to obscure, presumably in the hope that no one will detect its phony portentousness. No one does this stuff better than neo-Marxist academics. The university system is awash with this gibberish – a fact that would be comical if we weren’t paying for it.

The second conclusion we can reach on the basis of his profile is that Dutta is adept, like many of his ilk, at tapping into public funds – in this case from the AHRQ, which is part of the US Department of Health, and the National University of Singapore (NUS). The poor working schmucks whose taxes fund these institutions have no knowledge of, and even less control over, the radical agendas they enable. Unfortunately the same is true of New Zealand taxpayers who involuntarily fund activist academics and their tireless promotion of a world view that’s at odds with that of the majority of New Zealanders.

Dutta also appears to be good at bigging up his CV with awards and appointments – obligingly conferred, no doubt, by people who share an interest in pushing the same agendas. Demonstrations of mutual admiration are an essential part of the academic career path.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, we can reasonably deduce that Dutta is yet another import who has embedded himself in the tertiary education system and uses his privileged position to white-ant the society that provides his living. Explicit in his profile is a commitment to radical change; whether New Zealanders want it or approve of it is immaterial.

Am I unfairly picking on Dutta? After all, there are dozens – hundreds? – of other academics like him, all pushing an agenda that’s fundamentally hostile to the capitalist, democratic system that most New Zealanders were brought up with, believe in and support. North Americans in particular have proved adept at burrowing into our academic institutions and stoking the culture wars. I suspect they’re quietly thrilled at having found a blank canvas on which to leave their ideological imprint – a place where lecture theatres are full of gullible, know-nothing students waiting to have their empty minds filled with whatever pernicious tosh their teachers serve up to them. The tragedy is that New Zealand's cultural cringe – the deeply ingrained conviction that people from other countries must know more than we do – allows this to happen. The capture of our academic institutions by activists and disrupters from the extreme Left has gone unchallenged.