The NZ Herald yesterday, in their WEF-esque editorial project The New New Zealand: Rebuilding Better, have published a poll and rather missed the point of the whole thing. They say the poll reveals what institutions Kiwis trust most. But it also shows what institutions we trust least, and you’ll never guess where the media are placed.
Half of us think our Covid-19 response has pushed us further apart – however our trust in the institutions at the face of the response remains high, an exclusive Herald poll found.
Kiwis ranked doctors, police and scientists as significantly more trustworthy than the government, media or lawyers.
The polling, by Dynata, asked 1000 Kiwis between November 17 and 21 how they regarded seven key institutions on a scale of very trustworthy to very untrustworthy.
NZ Herald
Of course the Covid-19 response pushed us further apart. The whole response was centred on division… us and them. That’s what happens when you segregate, persecute, ostracise and dump on people for having the intestinal fortitude to decide for themselves what medicines they will or won’t take. The key thing about that is the media, instead of speaking truth to power, jumped on board with the whole thing and even promoted the persecution and ostracism. They are still doing it. Little wonder they are trusted less than their government paymasters.
The Herald moans on about social division, but they’ve walked hand in hand with the government, aiding and abetting that division. They never stood for freedom: they stood for tyranny. Trust them? Not bloody likely.
The MSM abrogated their powerful responsibility the moment they went cap in hand like Oliver Twist’s workhouse inmate and took the $55 million in bribes.
Bribes which saw the media cease being critical of those in power and instead saw them become government cheerleaders as the government mandated people into unproven and unsafe medical procedures, cost people their jobs, their careers, their businesses… and then cheered on when those same people protested and the state crushed them with some of the most appalling police brutality we’ve ever seen in New Zealand.
More than three-quarters of respondents (78.4 per cent) said doctors were trustworthy, 69.6 per cent said police were trustworthy and 68.1 per cent considered scientists trustworthy.
On the other end of the spectrum, the poll showed New Zealanders considered media (37.6 per cent), the government (32.9 per cent) and big business (30.1 per cent) the most untrustworthy institutions of those sampled.
Lawyers were considered untrustworthy by 15.5 per cent.
NZ Herald
They way they wrote you’d think lawyers were very untrustworthy. Nice words but the pictures tell a different story.
That’s right, media are the least trusted institution in New Zealand, by a proverbial country mile. Which makes for a hilarious dichotomy when the second-least trusted institution, the government, is creating a modern equivalent of Soviet era Pravda by merging TVNZ and RNZ, on the basis that people no longer trust the media. Willie Jackson can’t see the problem, but I sure can and so can you, without a shadow of a doubt.
Which brings me to an interesting article at Newsroom about the parlous condition of Today FM’s ratings. Today FM famously hired a favourite of Jacinda Ardern, Tova O’Brien, to host their important breakfast show. How has that panned out for them? Not so good it seems.
In the important breakfast segment in Auckland, high-profile Tova O’Brien’s show attracted 16,300 listeners, compared with Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB market leader with 174,400. Duncan Garner’s morning show had 14,200 listeners to Kerre Woodham’s 96,100 (which was, in a rare negative for ZB, down 18,000 between surveys). The Today afternoon slot featuring Mark Richardson and Leah Panapa scored 11,300 to Newstalk’s 115,800 and Lloyd Burr’s drive show had 9200 to Heather du Plessis Allan’s 136,100.
These kinds of listener numbers, and the scale of Newstalk’s dominance are also reflected in the Wellington and Christchurch figures for the two stations.
In the capital, Today has an audience of 6900 to Newstalk’s 59,400. The new station sits in 15th, just behind the local Maori station Atiawa Toa FM and George FM.
In the Wellington breakfast market, O’Brien’s show reached 2800 people in this survey period, to Hosking’s 38,900 in first place. On the measurement for station share in this market, Today is 0.9 to Newstalk’s 27.4.
Newsroom
Those figures are dreadful. Just 16,300 listeners in the Auckland market? People would rather listen to music than Tova O’Brien. I guess that’s what happens when you pin your hopes on a grandstanding media darling of the prime minister. There are no figures for the decidedly stupid Rachel Smalley’s early edition show before O’Brien’s show. Let’s enjoy an example of her stupidity:
As you can see New Zealand’s media is in a horrible position. We have more traffic to our site than listen to Today FM, just quietly. But, even Blind Freddy can see there is a problem with trust in our media landscape. What are they doing about trust, and the consequences that come from being shills to a government, and taking government cash that manifest themselves with falling advertising revenue and audiences?
Well, nothing except echoing Oliver Twist’s plaintive cry for more: more protection, more money from the government and less competition.
Instead of realising that people no longer trust them, they double down and blame mis- and disinformation for their woes. Instead of listening to their audiences, they belittle and demonise them.
Sean Plunket, in his little project The Platform, is discovering this as he fails to throw off habits of a lifetime in cosseted comfortable mainstream radio. He set up his station to be the alternative, but hired people from the old system, including him, and then set about doing exactly the same things as the mainstream does. He positioned himself as an alternative and being “open, tolerant and free”, but in reality he and the station are as closed minded as the rest of the media: intolerant and unreasonable.
Instead of embracing new audiences, who are crying out for someone to represent their thinking, he went after the same audiences that are diminishing in ever decreasing circles from where he came.
Instead of trying to get people on board across the political spectrum who have considerable and growing audiences, he rehabilitated hacks like Michael Laws and himself. Little wonder then that the reality has failed to live up to the hype.
Which is why it is vitally important for you guys to continue to support THIS media. We are being censored by this government, the Ministry of Health and Facebook. We are under surveillance by Police. We are demonised in the media as disinformation super-spreaders. Yet all we ever strive to achieve is to give readers all the facts. We trust you to discover the truth for yourself. We think you are smarter than the average Kiwi and treat you accordingly. We are growing, the mainstream is not.
That’s why I am driven to set up our own NewsDesk and add more and more voices to this platform. We aim to grow our site, our audience and our reach. But we can’t do it without your help. Even small acts of kindness, like sharing articles on Facebook and Twitter help.
Subscriptions, though, are our life blood. I can see a time in the near future where we can dispense with advertising altogether. But that needs more members. That’s why we are promoting a Christmas discount to existing and new members. If you are an existing member, when you upgrade your subscription to a higher level you can enjoy the Christmas discount.
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