How much payola has NewstalkZB been gifted from the Labour bribery fund PIJF? Apparently, it wasn’t enough.
But then, that’s the trap of paying bribes: you invariably have to pay more to keep buying silence – or the silence ends.
And some at NewstalkZB are suddenly very vocal about the failures and lies of the Ardern government.
The PM’s post-cabinet chat yesterday was stomach churning in so many ways.
The lies, the disingenuousness of it all, the theatrics and the pretence that they’ve actually been active as a government on crime. Embarrassing. No one’s buying it.
This is quite the turnaround from the toadying mainstream media narrative of the last few years, which has eagerly bought Jacinda Ardern’s lies and spin, hand over fist.
So what’s changed? It seems like even the bought-and-paid-for media have woken up that, while they could run cover for KiwiBuild and child poverty, the wave of shootings and ram-raids are too obvious to lie about. The murder of Janak Patel was the straw that broke the back of at least one mainstream media outlet’s ability to swallow and regurgitate the PM’s lies.
The Government wants to pretend it’s considerate, organized and proactive enough not to wait for a death, in order to act, but that’s simply not true.
The sheer patheticness of the government’s response to out-of-control crime – fog cannons for dairies? Really? – is bad enough. Lying about even that is clearly a stretch too far for even the legacy media.
This new fog canon [sic] measure is too late – they know it, we know it.
Worse yet, the PM tried to deflect all blame from her Government by saying that there’d be a delay on said fog cannons – due to a global shortage. This turns out to be an outright lie.
For once, the media actually did a real fact-check. Heather du Plessis Allan did something that too many NZ journalists have willingly forgotten – she chased down the facts with the most reliable source imaginable, a supplier of fog cannons.
He said to her, “I see the Queen of Spin is at it again..”
He said the facts are, there is no global shortage of fog cannons, the supply issue is due to the Government not placing any orders for them. They’ve dropped the ball, again.
He said they’ve been waiting months for the government to place fog canon [sic] orders and they’ve just been sitting on their hands.
Newstalk even does the unthinkable and reminds their listeners that this isn’t the first time the government’s been caught out doing nothing and then trying to shift blame, linking the fog cannon debacle to the botched vaccine rollout.
They’re also onto Ardern’s robotic parroting of “rejecting the premise” – a phrase she seems to have heard once, somewhere, and thought sounded, like, really, really smart ’n’ stuff.
She “rejected” criticism her Government was soft on crime. She “rejected” that the Government had acted too slowly, she “rejected” the idea that it took Patel’s death for the Government to act.
[Chris Hipkins], the Police Minister, singing from the same song sheet, rejected the fact that we’re currently in a crime ‘crisis’. Same way Health Minister Andrew Little rejects we’re in a health ‘crisis’.
They can “reject” all they like – at the end of the day, the grim reality is right there, for all of New Zealand to see.
And the media are starting to realise, dimly, that their own slip is showing.
We should care; we are being fed a steady diet of BS, from a government that has no idea what the words accountability or responsibility mean.
NewstalkZB
And that’s the truth that even $55 million can’t spin away.