OPINION

Tova O’Brien really is rather stupid. Yesterday she had an opinion piece in niche publication Stuff about how she doesn’t want to imagine New Zealand without Newshub. Well, she won’t need to use her feeble imagination for too much longer because New Zealand will indeed be without Newshub, and the only people whining about it are journalists.

Bless!

Devastating doesn’t begin to do justice to what is happening at Newshub. It is so deeply sad for the people who work there, the people who built the place, the memories of TV3 people who have passed, the audience and for journalism in New Zealand as a whole.

There are a lot of things we often say when we’re lauding journalism, about its value – and values, its purpose, its care, its empathy, its ferocity, its sense of justice, its critical function for democracy and community alike.

A lot of it’s cliche but all of it is also true.

Stuff

I remember when Newshub was demonising the unvaccinated…it was ferocious, but hardly journalism.

The bottom line is this, Newshub went woke, and abandoned its audience, which then abandoned them, resulting in advertisers leaving as the audience dropped.

What many in the media will not admit is that they changed the way viewership was recorded after a precipitous drop. They moved from an actual viewer to counting mythical people who happened to be in the room. It was actually a fraud committed on their advertisers.

But they got rumbled when some large advertisers did not see the normal response from airing their ads. The advertisers then ran ads they knew created sales, and what do you know, all of a sudden those ads no longer worked either. That left the advertisers with the conclusion that the audience claims of the two main TV channels were…ahem…dodgy.

What the New Zealand operators of Newshub failed to grasp is that technology has changed, viewing patterns have changed and their constant activism turned viewers off.

When Newshub became enthusiastic cheerleaders of the Ardern regime, public trust in the media plummeted.

Having been on the receiving end of numerous Newshub hit jobs over the years I am viewing this news with a certain amount of schadenfreude.

Newshub failed because they failed to adapt and, while they were failing to adapt, they sucked up free cash from a bent government and attacked their audience, promoting fringe causes as though they were normal.

Jock Anderson sums it up perfectly:

Newshub is news. And I don’t want to imagine a New Zealand without it.

Stuff

Imagine it, sweetie, it’s happening. Cry harder.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...