Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 13th, 2008 - 75 comments
Categories: Media, national/act government -
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It’s amazing to see how quickly John Key got over his fear of five-headed monsters once it came time to cobble together a government, and more amazing still how quickly the media chose to forgive and forget.
You’ll recall that just two weeks ago the media couldn’t get enough of John’s line that having a government composed of:
“all sorts of different parties” with “competing interests” would not be in the best interests of New Zealand during a period of “difficult economic times to manage”.
But, silly me, they bought that one when it was Helen Clark’s coalition options in question. Now that it’s John Key, it turns out what was irresponsible just two weeks ago was actually “smart” and “inclusive” all along.
They’re a funny bunch, our right-wing media.
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Lew, I am interested to read your perspective on media academics. I will keep it in mind in the future when I’m reading or listening to some of them. At this point I’m having difficulty in matching it with the media academics I know (either quite well or in passing), and who include some of the best in the field in NZ. They are quite diverse in their approaches and interests. I don’t see them as having that big a disconnect between their theoretical perspectives and the ‘real’ world, though there is a difference here between individuals. And those of us interested in audience/reception and media use studies do spend some time focusing on how diverse people use and discuss the media.
Still it’s an interesting proposition/observation and I’ll keep it in mind for the future.
Iprent – something strange seemed to happen when I wrote that problem post, that seemed to be more than just an edit problem. As I recall I hadn’t finished typing when I must have hit some key or the mouse by mistake & the comments posted (I may not have added anti-spam the code words(?)), with the last paragraph incomplete. As you can see it ends mid sentence, and didn’t include the last sentence or two that I wrote. I was using a PC and Firefox. There was an edit link visible, but no timer counting down, and clicking on the edit link produced an error message.
ak, some good points. I too worry about the possible untoward influence of such dominant productions as the Herald. I think it would help if our main news outlets were less commercially oriented, raised the quality of their reporting, encouraged more diversity of perspectives in front page/headline stories, and encouraged more people to critically engage with the media. A big ask I know in our infotainment, consumerist environment. But IMO the problem is not so much that there is bias in the MSM, but that a large number of people consume the stories without being aware of and/or critical of the biases.
Hehehehe. I see Key has met with union leaders about Kiwisaver and will try to consider their concerns. Better add another head to that hydra…and I wonder how ACT feel about that.
I swear, Key is trying to be centrist but he had no idea how much blood is going to fly once all those heads start attacking one another. He has such a desire to please everyone – that sort of attitude is idealistic but will make for a huge mess once people’s expectations are shattered.
Carol: I suppose we probably know or have worked with some of the same people
Yes, it’s a complicated business and a complex and critical group of people, about whom I don’t intend to over-generalise. I certainly don’t mean to bag academia – I’m a part of it, in a way, and on the whole I don’t think the rest of the world listens to them enough – partly due to the ideological gap I talked about.
AK: Well, it’s impossible by definition to nail down all the meaning in a cultural system, because meaning is a function of audience – different things mean different things to different people, if that’s a banal enough way to put it. I agree it’s the vibe – but I question the assumption that The Herald (to take your example) is creating that feeling or reflecting. It’s a feedback loop – you can’t assign all the agency to the media outlet and its Tory-voting primaries, which is what the `media has a right-wing bias’ argument does. A great deal of the media’s function is in agenda-setting – telling people what to think about, rather than explicitly what to think – but by the same token a media outlet generally needs to tell its audience what they want to hear in order to be successful. It’s a devilishly hard bit of business to tease out whether the media’s main role is in reinforcing peoples’ prejudices or in forming them in the first place, and I’m always deeply suspicious of people who claim to have done so (unless I can see their working).
L
When you are right, you are right.
Whilst I could nit-pick one or two points I won’t.
Good call.
Ok, I can’t help it.
I have linked to this post on my blog but I have nit picked those points…
Sometimes the Left are Right: The Right-Wing 5 Headed Monster