Just in case you forgot what Tory Whanau looks like, the Dom Post has some more photos of her

I remarked to a friend this morning that if the Wellington mayoralty is determined by the number of times Tory Whanau’s photo appears on the Dominion Post website, she’s a shoo-in. The other candidates might as well go home.

From the time the paper reported her campaign launch in June with a massive splash of publicity – one that could be described as unprecedented for a candidate virtually no one outside the Green Party had heard of (note the four photos, plus a video) – Whanau has been given the type of exposure her rivals can only dream of.

Today the Dom Post website featured not one but two stories simultaneously about the Green Party-backed candidate, both accompanied by prominent photos. The stories concerned a petty spat with fellow contender Paul Eagle over the placement of billboards, so were of no great consequence, but when I checked at midday one was the lead item on the website. Whanau’s face was the first thing readers saw.

If you accept that facial and name recognition are crucial in local government elections, especially when voters often have little else to go on, Whanau may have a head start even against putative frontrunner Eagle, a former deputy mayor who became Labour MP for Rongotai and now appears to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of that career move.

You can see why the Dom Post loves Whanau. She’s young, Maori, female and Green; the dream woke candidate. Eagle ticks only one of those boxes, and against that, he’s a bloke.

But is the Wellington mayoralty Whanau’s real objective? The above-mentioned friend, who’s a lot more politically savvy than I am, speculates that the true purpose of her tilt at the mayoralty is to build her profile with the aim of securing a high place on the Greens’ list in next year’s general election.

It’s called doing a Chloe, after the Green Party wunderkind who made a well-publicised bid for the Auckland mayoralty in 2016, subsequently got on the Greens’ list at No 7 and was ultimately rewarded with the Auckland Central seat.

In fact if Whanau really is modelling herself on Chloe Swarbrick, I wonder whether she might have her eyes on Wellington Central. She’d have to elbow aside the party’s 2020 candidate, James Shaw, but anything’s possible with the Greens. And it’s worth noting that Wellington Central (aka Woke Central) was where they won their biggest share of the party vote in 2020, with 30 percent – far higher than the 19 percent support achieved in Swarbrick’s constituency.

Whatever Whanau’s strategy, she can only benefit from the apparent undeclared endorsement of Wellington’s daily paper. What the steadily diminishing number of Dom Post readers might think of it is another matter.

 

 

And they wonder why media credibility has nosedived ...

 

Readers may have noted David’s comment yesterday under my post about the Stuff documentary Fire and Fury.

David, a journalist of long experience, remarked on the current media witch-hunt for local body election candidates suspected of holding the “wrong” views on issues such as vaccination. As an example he cited Masterton mayoral candidate Tina Nixon, who was “outed” - along with several others - by the Wairarapa Times-Age for having “links to alternative politics or conspiracy theories”.

The page 1 story (above) was based on unsubstantiated claims by an activist group calling itself Fighting Against Conspiracy Theories Aotearoa (FACT). No one from FACT was identified.

The story was presented in a melodramatic fashion under the headline “Who is pulling the strings?”, complete with a graphic depicting puppet strings.  Most of the candidates named had no chance to respond.

Today on page 3, the Times-Age followed up its story with an apology (below) which acknowledged that it didn’t give the named candidates a proper opportunity to respond to the claims against them. As David noted in his comment yesterday, the shadowy FACT has also apologised to Nixon on its website.

To its credit the Times-Age stated: “Publishing the story without sufficient opportunity to respond falls short of the expectation of responsible journalism from our paper.” I would go further and suggest the decision to run the story at all was questionable, given that it implies the beliefs attributed to the candidates are a threat to society and therefore not ones that can legitimately be held in a liberal democracy.

There’s a second mea culpa on the paper’s editorial page from journalist Mary Argue, who as the recently appointed chief reporter acknowledged responsibility for the way the story was covered.

Good on her, but I don’t think she should bear the sole blame. Argue hasn’t been with the Times-Age long and only a year ago, judging by something she wrote for The Spinoff,  was still a journalism student. No one with her limited experience should be in a position that requires tricky editorial calls.

Meanwhile, other media outlets continue to go after local body candidates who are deemed political harijans. The Dominion Post locks on to an anti-vax GP and Morning Report asks whether the media should be doing more to expose others of her ilk – to which journalism professor Jim Tully, who can be relied on to say exactly what RNZ wants him to say, unsurprisingly agreed.

If people like Fire and Fury narrator Paula Penfold genuinely want to know why so many people no longer trust the media (although somehow I doubt that she does), she could start right there.

 

A few thoughts on Stuff's Fire and Fury documentary

I didn’t intend to watch Stuff’s video documentary Fire and Fury, but after reading Stuff columnist Jenny Nicholls’ gushing review (headlined “Fire and Fury documentary shows journalism at the peak of its powers”, and of course given great prominence on the Stuff website), I felt compelled to.

The one-hour doco, which describes itself as “an investigation into disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand”, got a wholly uncritical tick from its in-house reviewer. But I watched it this morning and came to the conclusion that Fire and Fury (which, incidentally, brazenly pinches its title from a book by American author Michael Woolf about Donald Trump) is part of the very problem the makers purport to deplore.

Let’s start with the positives. Fire and Fury is unquestionably well made. The editing is slick, the photography is first-class (the riot on the last day of the Camp Freedom protest at Parliament has never been more graphically captured) and the music is suitably dark and ominous.

The makers have dug deep, unearthing a wealth of damning video footage and exposing a web of connections between various malignant “influencers” and conspiracy theorists who stand accused of poisoning the public conversation with misinformation and toxic rhetoric.

So it showcases formidable journalistic skills. But to say it’s well made isn’t necessarily, by itself, a ringing commendation. Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi Party’s favourite film-maker, made impressive documentaries too.

As with many propaganda projects (which Fire and Fury is), the producers appear to have started out with a particular premise and set about gathering whatever information and images were necessary to substantiate it. But an equally skilled documentary maker might arguably approach the subject from the reverse direction and come up with something just as persuasive.

Here are some of my misgivings, in no particular order:

■ Fire and Fury paradoxically amplifies messages that the producers tell us are a threat to democracy and national wellbeing. It provides a platform for extremist fringe activists who I suspect will revel in the exposure. If there’s a common characteristic the main players seem to share, it’s that they are egoistical loudmouths and fantasists who are gratified by their notoriety – none more so, I suspect, than Damien De Ment and Kelvyn Alp, founder of the website Counterspin. Fire and Fury gives them more of the oxygen they crave. The documentary will also serve to reinforce their conviction, and that of their followers, that a corrupt mainstream media is deaf to legitimate grievances, has no interest in the truth and is determined to discredit them and suppress their messages. But more on that later.

■ Because the makers set out with a preconceived objective, there’s not even a token attempt at balance, and most notably no attempt to understand what drove the Camp Freedom protesters, many of whom gave the impression of being fairly normal, conservative, middle-class New Zealanders who had never before engaged in protest activity. It’s almost axiomatic in journalism that there are always two sides to a story, yet Fire and Fury makes no attempt to get to the bottom of whatever sense of discontent led an extraordinarily disparate group to converge spontaneously on Wellington from all over the country – an unprecedented phenomenon.

In that respect Fire and Fury is an epic fail because it gets us no closer to comprehending what happened outside Parliament six months ago, possibly because the producers didn’t want to know. Perhaps they convinced themselves that the protesters couldn’t possibly have a valid reason to think the way they do and so the question wasn’t worth asking.  The documentary makers preferred to get the truth, or at least their version of it, from approved voices of the left-wing establishment such as law academic Khylee Quince, Kate Hannah of the Disinformation Project (whose funding isn’t clear from its website, though I suspect we pay for it) and the Australian “misinformation expert” Ed Coper, whose LinkedIn profile indicates he’s well marinated in woke dogma. It goes without saying that none of these people could possibly be suspected of having an ideological agenda of their own – and if they do, we're expected to assume it’s an honourable and righteous one.

Again, this perpetuates the yawning them-and-us gap – no, let’s call it a chasm – and sense of alienation that generated such ill-will toward what was seen during the occupation as an elitist, hostile media. There was no more telling image than that of Trevor Mallard and a press gallery pack looking down on the protesters (that is, looking down both figuratively and literally) from the balcony of Parliament. It was predictably characterised as a Marie Antoinette moment.

■ The reporter and narrator of Fire and Fury, Paula Penfold, doesn't reveal whether she tried to confront any of the figures she identifies as the villains of the piece. She did, however, interrogate a genteel-looking elderly woman who's presented as some sort of public enemy after being caught on camera at the protest telling a media crew to “get out”.  Quite apart from the fact that Penfold chose the softest of targets, challenging the woman to justify herself when she had no obligation to do so (and this in her own home, months after the event) looked perilously close to bullying.  When an experienced TV journalist puts questions to a private citizen unaccustomed to being in the public eye, and has the power to edit the interview in such a way as to emphasise whatever message she wants to convey, there’s never any doubt which side the power is on.

■ Crucially, Fire and Fury doesn’t ask a central question that arises repeatedly: namely, why so many people no longer trust the media. It’s more convenient to leave that particular stone unturned.  Yet distrust of the media was a potent issue at Camp Freedom, as Penfold concedes when she comments: “Since they [the protesters] distrust journalists, they bypass the media entirely.” She goes on to say she and her colleagues have never encountered that level of hostility anywhere in the world. Well, there’s a rather big clue, right there. I deplore threats against anyone lawfully doing their job, but rather than sounding hard done by, Penfold might ask herself how things got to this point.

I have my own ideas about that. I believe the mainstream media in New Zealand have lost sight of what was previously their primary objective, which was to reflect society back to itself and report, as neutrally as possible, on matters of interest and concern to the communities they purported to serve. Instead they have positioned themselves in the front line of the culture wars and put themselves at odds with their diminishing audiences by haranguing them with an ideological agenda largely driven by disaffected minorities. The subjects of Fire and Fury just happen to be the wrong disaffected minorities.

To summarise: While purporting to be concerned about the potential harm done by wacko extremists (and some do have the appearance of being truly wacko), Stuff's big-statement documentary drives another wedge into an already dangerously fractured society. Oh, and by the way: did I mention that it was made with funding from the Public Interest Journalism Fund?

 

 

A few thoughts on the Sharma affair

Overwhelmingly, the opinion of press gallery journalists – including some for whom I retain a degree of respect – seems to be that Gaurav Sharma deserved what he got. Luke Malpass says so; so does Audrey Young.

But I wonder whether the public thinks the same. Political events often look different from a distance than they do from the close proximity of the press gallery, and what journalists think is often wildly at odds with public opinion. As I’ve argued before, they’re ill-equipped to know what the public thinks about anything.

Besides, reporters form their opinions based on information from political sources who have positions to protect, and no matter how conscientiously press gallery hacks try to take a neutral, objective line, their perspective is almost inevitably skewed by the views of whoever’s briefing them.

They also have a natural interest in remaining onside with their sources. All this needs to be taken into account in assessing press gallery opinion, which is often suspiciously homogeneous.

Even accepting the government line that Sharma is a problem child who got himself into trouble with his own staff and apparently refused offers of intervention, some aspects of the controversy remain unsettling.

My own antennae twitched when the story first broke. Not only did the full weight of the Labour Party machine come crashing down on the hapless Sharma – that’s politics, baby – but the media, almost without exception, obligingly parroted the government narrative from the start. The hit job on the Hamilton West MP was not only instantaneous and overwhelming but gave the impression of having media buy-in. Guilty as charged; done and dusted. It looked to me as if reporters were briefed and primed to go.

I couldn’t help but contrast the press pack’s apparent acceptance of the government line with their refusal to cut National any slack over the Uffindell saga. The difference was striking.  

Of course I can no more claim to discern what the public thinks about the Sharma furore than the press gallery, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the public view has shifted over the course of the affair. I’m inclined to agree with the talkback host I heard last night who sensed that the balance of public opinion, which he thought was initially in the government’s favour, had probably moved as the controversy evolved and the perception grew that Sharma may not have been the guilty party – or at least not the sole bearer of blame.  

The secret caucus meeting on Monday night certainly wouldn’t have helped. Gang-ups are never a good look. The irony is that this controversy arose out of bullying claims and ended up showing in plain sight exactly what political bullying looks like.

Even accepting that Sharma broke caucus rules, the manner of his punishment – no, let’s call it humiliation, which is what it is – doesn’t play well to a public concerned with fairness and due process. It’s the ugly face of politics laid bare, and the government can’t escape being damaged. 

As a talkback caller said, whatever happened to Ardern’s kindness shtick? Her earnest, imploring facial expression, so wearyingly familiar to viewers of news bulletins, has never looked more strained – some would say fake – than when she was defending the brutal demolition job on her wayward MP. The empathetic look has worked remarkably well for her, but its magic may be wearing off.

 

 

"Coconut"? I thought New Zealand left that sort of language behind in the 1960s

Simon Wilson reports in the New Zealand Herald that Auckland mayoral frontrunner Efeso Collins, who is of Samoan and Tokelauan descent, declared at a public meeting: “I’m sick of being called a coconut”.

I doubt that I would vote for Collins if I lived in Auckland, seeing he’s endorsed by Labour and the Greens, but it’s shocking and depressing that such crude bigotry survives in New Zealand in 2022. I thought we had put it behind us.

I don’t know much about Collins, but this didn’t seem a deliberate play for public sympathy in the hope that it might win him a few more votes. The way Wilson describes it, he blurted out the words in a spontaneous show of emotion. “People like me have a right to do this,” a tearful Collins said of his run for the mayoralty.

Of course he does. For the past six years he has represented Manukau on Auckland Council. That’s a ward with a population of more than 164,000 people, of whom only 18 percent are Pakeha. More than half are of Pasifika descent, 27 percent are Asian and 16 percent identify as Maori.

Granted, race should never be a deciding factor in an election, but on simple democratic grounds the people of south and west Auckland are entitled to have a candidate who speaks for them rather than someone from the more privileged suburbs that civic leaders typically come from. On the face of it, he has more legitimacy as a candidate than Wayne Brown – an undoubtedly capable man who nonetheless has the disadvantage of looking like an outsider.

But while it’s despicable that people disparage Collins using language that most of us thought belonged in the 1960s, we need to consider the possibility that this is a predictable result when leftist politicians, bureaucrats, academics and media commentators relentlessly promote the politics of division and encourage New Zealanders to see racial groups as being irrevocably in competition with each other. It’s bound to bring out KKK-type instincts in the more rebarbative elements of society.

■ Also in the Herald today, more revelations from the admirable Kate MacNamara about the conflict-of-interest scandal swirling around Nanaia Mahuta. As I wrote in the latest Spectator Australia, Jacinda Ardern’s government appears supremely untroubled by the implications of rampant nepotism. 

The story originally came to light via online platforms and has largely been ignored by most mainstream media, so credit to MacNamara and the Herald for pursuing it. I don’t think I’ve read anything on Stuff about the disclosures,  which reinforces the suspicion that the government has bought immunity from hard questions by the simple expedient of making mainstream news outlets dependent on its $55 million Pravda Project.

For its part, Newshub dealt with the issue by excusing Mahuta’s conduct on the ground that nepotism was unavoidable in the small Maori world – and anyway, National Party governments had indulged in it too. Newshub even quoted “political commentator” Shane Te Pou as saying criticism of Mahuta was “racism and double standards”, conveniently failing to disclose (like RNZ recently) that Te Pou is a former executive member of the Labour party.

■ Speaking of Stuff, a friend who has had a long professional involvement at the highest level in the media emailed me yesterday noting that the Dominion Post that morning carried not a word about the impending protest at Parliament and police plans to deal with it. The Herald, on the other hand, contained a detailed report about the protest and its likely effects on Wellingtonians.

This was nothing new. The Auckland-based paper regularly carries Wellington stories that the Dom Post ignores or misses. Not for the first time, I wondered whether the paper that inherited the honourable legacy of the Evening Post and Dominion has a death wish – or whether it’s so preoccupied with hectoring readers over issues of identity politics that it has completely lost sight of its proper role, which is to inform people about matters of interest and importance to them.

Still, the Dom Post at least manages to entertain us occasionally, even if unintentionally. I pointed out to my acquaintance a headline on the paper’s website yesterday announcing Sparactus actor Ioane “John” King dies, age [sic] 49. I think they meant Spartacus.

The headline is still there now, uncorrected, a day and a half later. I think they’ve given up caring.

 

 

 

Let Arps stand and see what happens

There’s been a lot of squawking and hand-wringing over white supremacist Philip Arps’ bid for election to a Christchurch high school board. But why the fuss?

Yes, Arps seems a loathsome character. A texter to Morning Report used the word despicable, which I thought was a pretty apt description. But in a robust democracy, there are ways of dealing with despicable people.

The best way to signal to Arps that he’s despised is to let him stand for office and see how much support he attracts. My guess is none.

To bar him from running, as a lot of people are urging, would be an attack on free speech. As the great British commentator Bernard Levin wrote, “free speech is for swine and liars as well as upright and honest men”. (You’ll have to excuse the sexism, which I’m sure was unintentional.) 

Poisonous opinions, as Levin pointed out, are less dangerous promulgated than banned. Arps would probably relish the fugitive mystique of being cancelled.

The problem here is that many people on the Left – apparently including those who are huffing and puffing over Arps – don’t trust democracy. They don’t think their fellow citizens can be relied on to make the right decisions. They prefer to put their faith in state decrees that restrict people’s freedoms. In this respect they reveal their essentially elitist, authoritarian leanings.

As an aside, it’s almost comical to hear people accuse Arps of using the school board elections as a ruse to promote his supremacist ideas, then do him the enormous favour of going on TV and radio saying he must be stopped. He couldn’t have wished for more exposure, which is what he craves.  

Let Arps stand, I say, and put his support to the test. Provided the school community exercises its right to vote, I believe he’ll make an even bigger clown of himself than he is already. The votes of right-thinking people – and that means most New Zealanders – are the obvious antidote to extremists.

 

 

The obituary the Dom Post couldn't be stuffed publishing

Alan Burnet (pictured) died on July 18, aged 101. I offered to write an obituary for The Dominion Post but was turned down.

I assumed at the time that the paper preferred to have the job done in-house, which would have been fair enough. But here we are, exactly one month after Burnet’s death, and not a word has been published. I suppose it’s possible something will eventually appear, but it seems unlikely.

Why should this matter? Only because Stuff, the company that publishes the Dominion Post, wouldn’t have existed without Burnet. In fact it’s possible the Dom Post itself wouldn’t have survived.

You’d think that might have justified an acknowledgment on the Dom Post’s Saturday obituaries page, but evidently not.

As I noted in the obituary I ended up writing for BusinessDesk, Burnet was, for two decades, the dominant figure in the New Zealand newspaper business.

He started out in 1964 as general manager of the Wellington Publishing Company, owner of the Dominion – a job for which he was head-hunted by a young Rupert Murdoch, who had recently acquired a controlling stake in the paper – and built it into Independent Newspapers Ltd (INL). In the process, Burnet reshaped an entire industry.

Through a bold and deftly executed series of mergers and acquisitions, INL became by far the biggest player in the New Zealand print media, with a stable of newspaper titles that included the Sunday Star-Times, the Auckland Star, Wellington’s Evening Post, the Dominion, New Zealand Truth, the Christchurch Press and seven provincial dailies from Hamilton to Invercargill. 

Biggest isn’t necessarily best, but it was a profitable and well-run company that valued editorial independence (Burnet refused a demand from prime minister Robert Muldoon that he sack Geoff Baylis, the Dominion’s editor) and gave its journalists the freedom and resources to pursue important stories. It's not overstating things to say it was a golden era of print.

Burnet was managing-director of INL for 10 years and chairman for another 10, retiring in 1993. Murdoch remained in control of the company throughout but was content to leave decisions to Burnet and his right-hand man, former Evening Post editor Mike Robson (who took over from Burnet but died suddenly in 2000).

After Murdoch withdrew from New Zealand in 2003, INL was acquired by the Sydney-based Fairfax group – a wretched fate, as it turned out – and eventually morphed into what is now Stuff, a name originally coined for INL’s website when it was created in 2000.

I wrote in my obituary for Burnet that Stuff, which present proprietor Sinead Boucher bought from its Australian owners in 2020 for the token sum of a dollar, is a pale shadow of the company Burnet left behind. That was a gross understatement. Over a period of nearly 20 years, the company’s bosses unerringly took every wrong turning available to them.

I also wrote that what Burnet thought of the fate of the once formidable newspaper company he had painstakingly built up was not recorded. He was too polite. 

It's possible Stuff ignored his death because he was an old white guy and a capitalist. Being impeccably woke, the company may not want to remind present-day readers of its origins. But newspaper readers were infinitely better served in Burnet's day than they are now.

Stuff’s failure to honour him with an obituary simply confirms what had long been evident – that it’s a company with no respect for (and probably scant knowledge of) its own heritage.

Footnote: I worked for The Dominion from 1969 till 1972 and again between 1986 and 1992, including a period as editor. I also wrote the paper’s history for its centennial in 2007.