OPINION
How thick is the collective New Zealand media industry? Thick as a brick? Think tons of bricks. Yes, they’re that stupid. With mainstream news publishing racing downhill fast, like a runaway jalopy, how stupid would you have to be to step on the accelerator – twice?
You remember the first time: the ‘junk your reputation junket’ when our media friends gorged themselves on government handouts while averting their eyes, pretending we couldn’t see the strings attached, strings that bound them not to report on anything Treaty of Waitangi-wise without a halo in hues of beautiful and irresistible partnership beaming across the nation’s screens.
They tell us they’re still smarting from that self-indulgent exercise; ‘yes, reputationally all PIJF “recipients” suffered with claims of bias, no matter how unfair…’ Diddums. There’s a saying about making beds and lying; our media are doing it without the making the bed bit. Because now they’ve hitched their rundown and clearly cash-strapped strategy wagons to the World Economic Forum, not that they’re telling you that. Ssshhh.
In an initiative named ‘Ads for News’, alongside ‘Back to News’ the WEF is extending its mission to actively drive advertisers away from ‘unvetted’ and toward ‘trusted’ [cough] news sites. Its aim, to be perfectly clear, is not just to demonise but to demonetise sites exactly like this one, to alienate and impoverish them, to scold them from the bully-pulpit known as progressivism.
The initiative is being driven here by an outfit called ‘Group M’, operating out of Auckland. Working with Internews, the ‘Ads for News’ non-profit aims to seduce and corral ad buyers and sellers under one single circus roof, to direct advertisers to ‘inclusion lists’ of sanitised sites and to tut-tut ‘disinformationists’.
What’s disinformation you say? Well; anything not on the WEF agenda, as informed by another compadre: the ‘impartial’ ‘Global Disinformation Index’, about as neutral as Goebbels, whose raison d’être is not just to inform on naughty-news sites, but also to actively shame brands appearing on their Orwellian ‘exclusion list’ of ‘disinfo’ sites:
So why would you get into bed with them? Why would you prostitute yourself, and abandon your editorial independence, to push their agenda? Desperation, Dr Watson. Palpable desperation, coined in loss of reputation, pillowed by promises of future shekels. Such a seedy set of circumstances, but they’re all in – most of them – including “Stuff, NZME, Business Desk, Newshub and 1News” or will be soon as they “will continue to expand”.
The initiative was launched with a panel event with New Zealand journalists; Newshub’s multi-award-winning Investigative Reporter Michael Morrah, NZ Herald Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie, and Nadia Tolich, Managing Director of Stuff Digital, to showcase the importance of strong, local journalism in New Zealand.[…]Back to News is underpinned by Internews’ Ads for News initiative, which was founded in collaboration with the World Economic Forum…”
Want news? Would you like WEF with that? You’re getting it anyway. Just eat it all up, and shut up.