OPINION
Paul Holmes once said the main quality for being a journalist was ‘to have lived’. By this he meant that you should have been around the block a couple of times, experienced highs and lows in life and struggled at something and come through the other side in one piece: Holmes himself having spent quite a lot of time in Europe flat broke, drunk and on very thin ice, but learning a lot about life.
The advice Sir Paul offered has been roundly ignored at TV3. Its journalists all seem to be of a specific ‘type’: either white upper middle class whiny rich kids, with the usual virtue signalling and imaginary claims of victimhood, or token dullards employed because they ‘make it look good’.
A consequence has been ‘groupthink’ on a massive scale in recent years; opinions which are not ‘approved’ have swiftly ended careers. Everyone would outdo each other as to who was the most woke and virtuous – lest everyone else refuse to play with them any longer. All very much decadent upper middle class stuff. The other consequence of ‘groupthink’ and having little or no experience of life is a seemingly genuine incomprehension as to why, outside of their bubble (basically outside of the Epsom and Auckland Central electorates), so few agree with them.
Instead of asking pertinent questions of the ‘why do truck drivers in Christchurch and housewives in Napier not believe there are 109 genders?’ variety – as someone like Paul Holmes (and plenty of others back in the day) did – and accepting the answers for what they are, the TV3 kids simply dismissed everyone else as ‘racist’ (what else?) and moved on. The sophisticates chortled at the thought there were still such people in NZ, while unaware it’s actually most people.
When the public turned against the Ardern Government, the rich kids at TV3 did what they could to save her. Scandals were either ignored or, when that was impossible (Kiri Allan), dismissed as a racist attack on New Zealand’s ‘leader’. The sophisticates chortled at how stupid everyone else truly was with their hysteria over a cabinet minister drink driving.
When TV3 journalists (and others) engaged in hit pieces on Judith Collins, or Posie Parker being brutally assaulted, or Israeli women and children being murdered on 7 October, the sophisticates chortled – it was what they all deserved: Doing God’s Work.
John Key could be endlessly roasted for a supposed payment made by Elders when he didn’t even work there, or selling a few shares, or buying some ministerial cars, or drinking a cup of tea, or pulling a ponytail – that was fair game – but TV3 never mentioned one word about certain activities of prime ministerial husbands. The sophisticates chortled at the gullible hicks and rubes who believed these ‘conspiracy theories’ and put it all down to misogyny and (predictably) ‘racism’.
TV3 journalists never had any conscience about ‘outing’ people, doorstepping unsophisticated people to trap them into saying something unwise – for even more chortling by the sophisticates – invading the privacy of people they dislike, cancelling people who didn’t vote Labour or Green and any other punishment the sophisticates felt the ignorant rednecks deserved. They did this all whilst refusing to provide context or balance – and did so with ‘malice aforethought’.
Now they’re all on the scrapheap and expect the rest of us to express sympathy for their plight. I don’t think so, comrades: the Christchurch truck drivers and Napier housewives won, and the sophisticates aren’t chortling any longer. Welcome to the ‘life experience’ Paul Holmes talked about.