OPINION
The media need to start being honest with New Zealand’s voters. As heartbreaking as it must be to find themselves on the losing side of the political divide, they should not be in the business of taking sides. The job of a journalist is to report without fear or favour. The public want objective reporting, not a slanted viewpoint of the media’s own making. That is not to say they are not reporting the facts. It is more how they are reporting them.
A journalist’s job is to dig out the facts but ,in this election, the digging has been pretty much one-sided. The handle of the spade appears to be bent somewhat to the right resulting in more digging in that direction than the left. The media need to realise it is the voters who decide elections, not them. With regard to the 2020 election, they are probably of the opinion they played a major role in the decision-making. They are deluding themselves, being too full of their own importance.
The voters decided for themselves purely based on their (wrong) perception of the government’s handling of the pandemic. If it weren’t for Winston in 2017 and Covid in 2020 Labour would not have been in power at all. Both those results had nothing to do with the media bias at the time. Again in this election, voters are making up their own minds and no amount of media cajoling is going to change the outcome. In fact, in what might be a surprise to them, this election was decided about a year ago.
If the media dropped their bias and decided to do some objective reporting, they would find themselves in step with the voting public. There is ample evidence, if they cared to report it, as to why this government is being thrown out. They are a bunch of incompetent non-achievers. They’ve managed to get nothing done. This is for two reasons – they don’t understand economics and they are drowning in their own outdated ideology. How about shining some light on that?
Another problem is they are being led by an elite handful of people who blame everything on colonialism, but this is 2023 and it is important we all live as one people in the present.
Where is the investigative journalism on the Maori Party’s justice policy? They want a Maori Justice system, abolition of prisons by 2040, to make bail easier, to raise the age of criminality to 16 and amend the Clean Slate Act so rapists and paedophiles can get clean slates. There’s a pertinent question for the journalists here: has the Maori Party designed its justice policy around the fact Maori are committing the bulk of the crime? No doubt that would be deemed racist and can’t be asked.
Why aren’t the journalists talking about the official government advice that of any GST exemption only 30 per cent is passed on? This means, under Labour’s policy, supermarkets will benefit to the tune of $1.54 billion while taxpayers benefit by under two dollars a week. Where is the reporting on the changes Labour want to make to the consent laws? Labour now want the accused to prove the victim said ‘yes’, meaning the accused is guilty until proven innocent. Why aren’t the journalists asking Labour why they’re telling lies about National? There are so many of them that National has set up a website to keep track of them.
There is more to this election than a possible hole in National’s foreign buyer tax proposal. What about the hole in the Treasury’s Budget predictions? Jessica Mutch McKay proved a poor moderator in last week’s Leaders Debate. She kept asking for new ideas but when Luxon started articulating them she cut him off. Someone who has done some good research is Alex Holland. He wrote on Kiwiblog concerning Labour’s race-based policies and came up with close to 130 of them.
So far in this election campaign we have been very poorly served by journalists failing to take an objective look at each party’s policies. As far as the election is concerned, it doesn’t really matter. We all know what the result will be. It’s really just a matter of how much of a hiding the left is going to get. That, however, shouldn’t detract from a journalist doing the hard yards and giving the impression they are proud of the profession they chose to work in.