Nick Cater, a columnist for The Australian newspaper, has written a biting criticism of New Zealand’s mainstream media in an article commenting on former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd‘s call for a Royal Commission to investigate Australia’s news media for what he (Rudd) alleges is lack of diversity. In the course of the article, Cater compares his country’s media with its counterparts in New Zealand.
As the Cater column is behind a paywall, we quote the following extracts:
The media paradise Rudd craves looks somewhat like New Zealand, where inoffensive newspapers compete for drabness and commentators are all but united in adoration of Jacinda Ardern.
You’ll struggle to read a word of dissent in the four daily newspapers. Mike Hosking and some of his fellow presenters are prepared to break from the pack at Newstalk ZB, but that’s it. Retired ZB host Leighton Smith remains in the fray as a podcaster and columnist but, when it comes to broadcast media, Hosking is Alan Jones, Chris Kenny, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Paul Murray rolled into one.
The only hint of irritation at the Prime Minister’s weekly press conference is that she isn’t running fast enough with her agenda of “transformational change”, the umbrella term for the righting of social injustices, including those yet to be invented.
Ardern’s decision to hold a referendum on the legalisation of cannabis was widely praised as another step on the path to sainthood….
A Prime Minister who tells voters she chose politics because it was a profession that “would make me feel I was making a difference”, and holds an absolute majority in the parliament’s only chamber, is an accident waiting to happen. An independent media should be the first responders in such circumstances, ready to erect barriers in the path of the Prime Minister, should she swerve across the line.
Yet the press pack are not merely on the bus, they are telling her how to drive it.
New Zealand’s small population and splendid isolation are part of the explanation for the enfeeblement of its media. Ardern’s sledgehammer response to the COVID-19 pandemic hastened the decline.
In May, Nine Entertainment let go of the newspapers it inherited from Fairfax, The Dominion Post, The Press and The Sunday Star-Times, for $1 to a company that goes by the name of Stuff. It seems like a bargain given the copy of the Post at the newsstand will set you back $2.90, hardly a vote of confidence in the future of NZ media.
Yet market size is only part of the explanation. It doesn’t explain why, for example, in a country split politically down the middle, 100 per cent of daily newspapers and virtually every TV and radio station stand proudly with Ardern…
Intellectual opposition is all but extinguished in the universities, but still flickers on in alternative media, blogs, websites and YouTube channels, which serve as a faint beacon of dissent.
The last thing a country needs is a prime minister basking in applause who switches on the news and finds herself staring at the mirror.
theaustralian.com.au
This leads me to two conclusions:
First, to acknowledge our gratitude to this website, The BFD, for its willingness to accommodate all shades of opinion. I sincerely hope that everyone who reads this column today will join me in becoming at the very least a Silver Subscriber so as to ensure BFD the financial security it needs to stay in business as the one reliable voice of our people.
Second, maybe we in New Zealand should be thinking of a Royal Commission to examine and report on the loss of journalistic integrity and accurate reportage which used to be the norm in our newspapers and should be in our TV news. Now replaced by a yellow tabloid quest for dollars marked by bias and uninformed opinionising, having long since discarded what was once its justifiably proud status as the Fourth Estate. Sadly it has become merely the mouthpiece of a left-wing government hell-bent on entrapping our country in the one-world socialist governance conspiracy known as United Nations Agenda 2030.
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