‘Jackboot’ Jacinda Ardern is on the run from the media. Yesterday she cancelled her media slot with Mike Hosking using the flimsiest excuse possible:
A statement from the Prime Minister’s office to Newstalk ZB said: “The Prime Minister’s schedule of media appearances has been reviewed and while it hasn’t reduced overall, it has changed.
“The Prime Minister will no longer do a weekly slot specifically on the ZB morning show.
“However she, and all her ministers, will continue to appear on the show as and when issues arise.”
NZ Herald
What a weasel. Labour are systematically cancelling centre-right interviewers: first Peter Williams, now Mike Hosking. They will be moving to close them down next.
Mike Hosking has been brutal in his response:
The Prime Minister has not been on my Newstalk ZB programme this morning, and there is a reason for that.
She is running for the hills.
She no longer wants to be on this programme each week. The somewhat tragic conclusion that is drawn is the questions she gets … are a little bit tough.
…
At the time we got the call, and the line about re-arranging, we obviously asked who was replacing us. We are still waiting for a reply. The reason we’re still waiting is no one is replacing us. They know it, we know it, they are just over being held to account.
Without being too unkind to some of the other players in this market, the reality is the Prime Minister enjoys a more cordial and compliant relationship. The questions are more softball. She favours a more benign pitch, where the delivery can be dispatched to the boundary more readily without the chance of an appeal.
To be honest, I’m pleased. The management here, not quite as much. They argue accountability is important, and they’re right. But what I argue is the Prime Minister is a lightweight at answering tough questions. The number of times she’s fronted on this programme with no knowledge around the questions I’m asking is frightening.
Reports I read, she hadn’t. The time I asked whether they’re replacing the Tauranga City Council, she replied they didn’t do such things. Clearly, not having the slightest clue, in a month or so, they were going to do exactly that.
Those occasions are too many to be comfortable.
And then, your reaction. The two most often-used lines post-interview are “what was the point of that?” And “I don’t know why you bother”.
The reality is, too often it’s just noise. It’s waffle. It’s stalling. It’s filling. It’s obfuscation.
It’s a tricky scenario. She should be up for it. Any Prime Minister should be up for it. As a publicly elected official, you are asked to be held to account. So, it stands to reason you, at least, put yourself up, even if you don’t enjoy it or at times struggle with the complexity or detail of the question line.
It speaks to a lack of backbone that she would want to bail and run. It also speaks to … an increasingly apparent trait – they don’t handle pressure well. Last week was a very good display of that.
They say she’s willing to front on an issue-by-issue basis, so she isn’t gone forever.
As for the weekly bit, I lose no sleep. I’m just a bit disappointed she isn’t a more robust operator, or keener to defend her corner.
After all, it’s our country she’s running.
NZ Herald
Reminds me of a classic Iron Maiden song that is perfect for our cowardly Prime Minister.
Barry Soper is just as brutal:
Think about it, Jacinda Ardern’s the accidental Prime Minister. This rookie leader, plucked from obscurity in the lead-up to the 2017 election, was appointed by Winston Peters simply because she gave him much more than what Bill English was prepared to wear.
But she’s been confirmed by Covid, as the last election would attest to. Without Peters or Covid chances are she’d be leading the Opposition, although even that’s doubtful.
Having worked with the past 10 Prime Ministers, Jacinda Ardern would be the most removed from the media than any of them. This woman who has a Bachelor of Communications doesn’t communicate in the way any of her predecessors have.
She’s the master of soft, flattering interviews and television chat shows, blanching at tough questions. She’s commanded the Covid pulpit to such an extent that the virus has become her security blanket; without it, she’d be forced to face the reality that her Government has been moribund.
The Prime Minister’s press conferences usually begin with a sermon – it took eight minutes for her to get to the fact that she was moving the country down an alert level last Friday. When it comes to question time her forearm stiffens and her hand flicks to those, she’ll take a question from. Some of us are left barking from the side lines.
Ardern doesn’t relate to the messenger, the team of journalists who make up the parliamentary Press Gallery – they don’t know her.
All of her predecessors got to know the parliamentary media by inviting them to their ninth floor Beehive office, at least a couple of times a year. It puts a human face on the public performer.
Ardern has done it once, a few months after becoming the Prime Minister.
Compare Ardern to the last populist Prime Minister, John Key. The National leader liked to be liked and he was because he was self-deprecating, posing for selfies with students on University campuses, falling off stages and mincing along catwalks. He was a serious politician, but his antics demonstrated to his supporters he wasn’t above them.
The closest Ardern’s got to silliness was admitting she did a dance with her daughter when the country had no active cases of Covid last June. That admission flashed around the world as do most things when it comes to Ardern.
She’s a celebrity leader and she’s determined to keep it that way, which is why she’s turned her back on the Mike Hosking Breakfast Show.
The questions were too direct, they got under her thin skin, but, more importantly, she didn’t know the answer to many of them. She was exposed on a weekly basis and it simply all became too much for her.
In doing so she’s turned her back on the highest rating breakfast commercial radio show in the country by far and she has also turned her back on the many listeners who at the last Covid election (her description) switched their vote to her.
Leaders have in the past become exasperated with the media, and at times with good reason, but few, if any, have shied away from the tough questions. The regular Newstalk ZB slot for Prime Ministers has been jealously guarded by them for the past 35 years. This is the only regular slot she’s bowing out on.
The populist David Lange once cancelled his weekly news conferences at Parliament, and as chairman of the Press Gallery at the time, I was charged with persuading him to change his mind.
His complaint: “If I picked my nose, they’d show it on television that night.” The resolution to that one was simple: don’t.
Ardern’s phobia is much more deep seated. She’s treading water.
NewstalkZB
Which is why she is now resorting to “sustained propaganda” to get her message across. The woman is a flake and now we are finding it out.
Heather du Plessis-Allan also puts the stiletto in:
I’m disappointed that the Prime Minister has cancelled the long running Prime ministerial interview slot on NewstalkZB’s breakfast show.
Take out the characters involved. Take out Jacinda Ardern, take out Mike Hosking.
This slot goes back 34 years. Holmes, Lange, Douglas, Moore, Bolger, Shipley, Clarke, Key, English. Those are a lot Prime Ministers prepared to front up and be held accountable. It’s a long line of democratic history Jacinda Ardern has ended.
I know that that it got combative between Hosking and Ardern but that’s how the big boys roll. It’s tough at the top. If you run the country, you should be able to take a few tough questions.
I’ve been told a number of times that the prime minister finds the weekly round of interviews very stressful and she has herself admitted that she takes media criticism very hard.
But it’s actually not Hosking that the PM is no longer speaking to weekly. It’s voters: the biggest single catchment of voters listening to commercial radio in the morning. It’s not the same to switch out NewstalkZB for a music radio station. One is a news radio station – holding a democratic role – and the other is entertainment.
But while I’m disappointed, I’m not surprised. Ardern has shown a tendency to duck from tough interviews. Recently, we’ve seen ample evidence that she’s happy to front the good stuff and make the big announcements, but when there are questions – like whether she started the pile on aimed at the KFC worker – she disappears and sends in her lieutenants. Often, lately it’s Chris Hipkins or Grant Robertson.
She has in the past cancelled media. I recall taking over ZB’s morning show in Wellington. John Key used to appear four times a year and take calls from voters. Ardern cancelled that and appeared once in about 18 months, and refused to talk directly to voters.
In 2018, she cancelled at the last minute her appearances on Newshub Nation and Q+A. But, she still made time to sit down with the New York Times for a soft interview in which the writer Maureen Dowd talked about her ‘fuzzy leopard slippers’.
I believe that the prime minister is making a mistake. Unless this decision is reversed, Newstalk ZB cannot allow her back onto the breakfast show in a weekly slot, even in election year when she might come to see benefit in reaching a larger voter pool.
If that is allowed to happen, it will incentivise future Prime Ministers to act with as much disregard for democratic accountability as and when it suits them.
Being held to account is not something a politician can take or leave. Jacinda Ardern’s preparedness to abandon such a large group of voters is profoundly disappointing.
NewstalkZB
If it wasn’t for her pet media apologists she’d be hammered for her lacklustre achievements. Instead, we get stories about her daughter’s poos, her replies to letters from children, sent months or even a year ago, all designed so her compliant media can use these weapons of mass distraction to deflect from the apparent and building multiple failures of her government.