OPINION
As the election draws ever closer so does the bond between the Labour Party and their media luvvies. The journalists are so unprofessional they don’t even try to hide it. Any little chink they can find in Luxon’s armour and they’re like flies around a rancid leg of lamb. Anything they can do to cause a stink on the right and they’re adding to it like an over-excited bunch of farting bovines. There appears to be a no-holds-barred orchestrated campaign to somehow convince the public that their hero Hipkins is worth voting for. Here’s an example of what honest media coverage would look like:
“Tena koutou katoa – Good evening – It would appear that, along with their friends in the media, Labour leader Chris Hipkins and his party are a lost cause. We’ve tried our best to get the government re-elected but unfortunately, it hasn’t been enough.”
Something along those lines would more accurately sum up the situation. They either can’t see their bias or, more likely, they don’t want to. Either way, journalism suffers and the public is poorly served.
Journalists have this quaint quintessentially stupid idea that in the lead-up to an election (or any other time), they’re the ones who should be listened to and that we should hang onto their every spoken or printed word. That might be the case were they to properly execute the task in front of them. That task is to impart election information in a manner that shows no bias to any of the parties taking part, but their bias always shows.
They try to do it in a subtle way, hoping readers, listeners or viewers won’t notice. This sort of behaviour is a contributing factor to the lack of public trust in journalism in this country. A further contributing factor has been the Public Interest Journalism Fund their friends in government dreamed up using Covid as an excuse. The irony was that the public had NO interest in this fund as most recognised it for the bribe it was.
To get this money every applicant had to show, among other things, a clear and obvious commitment to the Treaty and te reo, probably to satisfy the government bosses in the Maori Caucus. No hurdle for a left-wing media outlet to clear there. Were they able to criticise the Treaty? According to NZ on Air’s Head of Journalism, Raewyn Rasch – and I quote – “Of course you can. But you’d still need to stick with what the main and core criteria of the PIJF are, which is that you maintain the tenets of journalism which are FAIRNESS, BALANCE and ACCURACY.”
Are we to assume then that fairness, balance and accuracy only apply to articles which might give hurty feelings to Maori? Everyone and everything else is fair game. That’s certainly what it looks like if the election campaign is anything to go by. I have yet to see much of the fairness, balance and accuracy Raewyn Rasch talks so mightily about. She is right: they are the basic tenets of journalism. It’s just a pity they aren’t adhered to across the board.
The problem with journalists in this country is they have a ‘holier than thou’ attitude that they are too big to fail. Not being from the real world they probably are unaware that, public radio and television excepted, they are working for a business and no business is too big to fail, particularly if poor performance is involved. In this election campaign, poor performance is there for all to see. There are numerous examples. I should have set up a website to keep track of them as National has done in terms of Labour’s lies. That’s something the media should be tracking also. Fat chance.
A couple of obvious examples of bias spring to mind. First the scrutinising of National’s Foreign Buyers Tax. Nothing wrong in that but where is the scrutinising of Labour’s figures that evidently don’t add up or are we just supposed to take them at face value? Where is the scrutiny directed at Labour’s six years of non-achievement and the millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars wasted? None, because it’s too embarrassing and not aligned with their narrative.
Much to the dismay of the media, according to the polls their overindulgence regarding the Foreign Buyers Tax didn’t work. But what the polls do show, much to their unbridled delight, was that Winston might be needed. So now they’re going hell for leather on that. Because, as the polls show, that will be a COALITION OF CHAOS. This is now their best chance of getting Labour re-elected. Have we seen any interest from the journalists in the three-pronged monster on the other side? Not a dicky bird.
I have come to the conclusion the journalists on the left are, on the whole, a pretty shallow, gormless lot, big fish in a small pond, too big for their own good and with a ‘we know best’ attitude. It pervades left-wing news outlets the world over. In this day and age, those three words FAIRNESS, BALANCE and ACCURACY are meaningless. They’re not interested in them. It’s all about themselves and their support of the left. Sadly, but not surprisingly, they think we are stupid enough to buy into their game.
To confirm my thoughts on the matter I watched The Nation on Saturday morning. It’s a long time since I have watched such a poor standard of current affairs interviewing. Both Rebecca Wright and Simon Sheppard should be hanging their heads in shame. Rebecca, interviewing Winston Peters, spent most of her time talking to him about National and Act, trying to make out that NZ First was racist, and the last question she asked was the height of arrogance and downright rudeness. He called her out for it.
Simon Sheppard interviewed Mark Mitchell. Simon asked the questions but then didn’t want to hear the answers. Why? Because they were not to his liking. In between, Rebecca interviewed Jan Tinetti and Erica Stanford. A far more constructive interview would have been with Erica on her own as Jan is a total waste of space. Interviewing is about drawing information from the guests. It is not a point-scoring exercise for their friends in the Labour Party. The only thing missing were two red rosettes.
There is an old adage these ignorant types may not have heard of: you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Be it news reporting or current affairs interviewing, in the end, all these substandard types are doing is demeaning themselves and their so-called profession. It needs to stop.