Written By: - Date published: 10:27 am, November 1st, 2008 - 56 comments
Categories: election 2008, Media -
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A week out from the election, Granny Herald has still yet to do any proper coverage of the effects on individuals and the economy of National’s four flagship policies: privatising ACC, gutting Kiwisaver, reducing work rights, and weakening the RMA and ETS.
Yet, they can find the space to tell us which politicians would make the best Halloween character or could mentor according to their online polls (always biased towards the type of people who are sitting in front of computers all day [clue: it ain't the working class]).
Here we are, in the middle of the process of choosing the people who will have the most powerful jobs in the country, and the largest newspaper is engaging in inanities that tell us nothing more than the demographics of its online readers.
How my heart yearns for a decent media in this country.
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Scoopit!
That’s like walking in during a middle of a stabbing, demanding to know what’s going on, and then saying “I guess both sides have legitimate grievances” when the murderer tells you that the victim provoked him
Just because people on both sides of the aisle disagree doesn’t mean neither of them have a point. While I find that moaning about the media bias is pretty much a universal hobby, the only way to figure out if it’s substantiated is to see whether any of the very serious allegations stack up.
For instance, reading a dom post makes me see evidence that they’re running the Right’s lines without thinking, (which is probably a relatively acceptable level of bias, but it’d be nice if they’d have criteria to be met before they repeat talking points) but comparing the Dom Post to the Herald makes it pretty clear that the Herald are actively trying to advance a political agenda and aren’t just being insufficiently rigorous screening out bias from their stories.
I honestly find it hard to believe anyone left of Act finds the Herald impartial.
Max:
NZ Herald, Radio Network News and TVNZ have been so noticeably propagandist in this election that there is real cause for concern for our democratic freedoms.
It is no accident that ordinary people are mindlessly calling for “change” without knowing a single thing about National policies. I hear working people discussing the big tax cuts they will get from National and I blame the media for carrying out a terrible deception on the people of NZ.
The truth is no working person earning under $40, 000 will get a single cent in tax cuts from National.
The time to address the issue of media suppression of facts is now, not when its too late.
looks like there is room for a new newspaper
I heard the answer the other day on the wireless
free giveaways at the railway station in the morning
there is still a first mover advantage
and there always will be
and I guess it wouldnt be all that hard to organise a web service that coulod compete if some good minds were put to it
but thats another matter
however the right wing daily press have really pressed the case this year in their open declaration of support and it will be a real test of our democracy to see which side prevails
the imported right wing ideology admixed with kiwiboorishness and venality
or
those who wish to see a fair deal for everybody
who you can trust
I’d like to ask the editors of Stuff why they have seen fit to remove six words from a John Key 2007 H-Fee article. Six words that if appeared in the article today would severely jeopardise John Key’s defence that he had the year of 1987 wrong when going public in August last year on H-Fee and leaving Elders. Six words that give a specific 1987 event which if appearing in the article today would leave the reader in no doubt what year he was talking about, as it is reported that he couldn’t have been involved in H-Fee because he had left Elders three months before the H-Fee and three months this 1987 event took place.
my personal opinion is this
that the press
and television
and radio
have let the nation down this election
not because they supported a candidate or party
that is their right and no one wishes to take that away from them
but because they refused to discuss the issues
and lapsed into mediocre practice
imported style sections
mindless drivel for filler
and that is a cardinal sin in newspapers
mediocrity
and allying yourself with toxic forces
and they will pay the penalty
for refusing to intelligise their product
there is a downside even to their tenure
we demand better and we must have it to survive
Can we have your next post in Haiku form please randal?
contact the cosmic forces send me $25 and you will receive the dvd
old zen koan
Glad to see someone else ( Ms M ) is still concerned about the H- Fee issue. I am concerned too.
Have a good long look at the signatures on the Herald site – see below.
See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz-election-2008/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501799&objectid=10540101
Then ask yourself why the Herald repeatedly failed to name the person who they say signed the cheque.
Because according to Stuff News “the signatures, extraordinarily similar to Mr Key’s, were of another Elders dealer, Maxwell Nichols.”
Since when does JK read MN, and carefully look at John Key’s J and the J on the cheque. They are identical.
In my opinion the NZ Herald is lying to the public and suppressing the facts.
Mrs M: Which words were they? I thought Eugene Bingham’s Column on Sat Herald that I read yesterday was curious in the way it ended. I went back to read it just now and it appears to have been removed from Election 08 pages. ???? Woner why? Still have the column though not via their normal on-line system:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz-election-2008/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501799&objectid=10540463&pnum=0
Ianmac the words I’m referring to refer to the NZ Steel sale in October 1987.
Without their omission Key and the media pushing the befuddled banker spin could not do so as convincingly as they have tried too. I can just imagine the phone call between JK and Mark Textor.
MT: Cosby Textor hello.
JK: Mark! Eek Labour party researchers are investigating H-Fee, buggar befuddling batman but I told the Australian NCA in 1991 that I resigned in June 1988, but I told reporters last year I left in 1987 before the sale of NZ Steel. Help
MT: No matter, we’ll just have that key (pun intended) piece of information removed from any article it appears in and push the line you were confused.
JK: Mark? You sure it will work?
MT: John, you’ve done the befuddled banker exceptionally well up until now, why change what’s not broke.
JK: I love you Crosby Textor. You’re my hero.
Kiwidada I would have preferred the papers to show the whole cheque, not just a small portion.
Just another example of the ‘nanny media’ http://www.frasercarson.com/?p=19
Shame on you MSM.
Mary Hart, Steve Withers: Have a look at http://flatearthnews.net, Nick Davies’ website, set up during the research for his (excellent) book of the same name on what’s wrong with the media (synopsis: the PR/propaganda industry, poor regulation and underresourcing, not ideological bias). He would dearly love to set up a genuinely independent media organisation, and looks to the Centre for Public Integrity – http://www.publicintegrity.org/ – as a model.
I’m a defender of the NZ media, but I believe such a setup in NZ would be of enormous value. The trouble is that when partisans say `we need independent media’, they often mean `we need media which agrees with me’.
L
kiwidada, i agree. The herald is in league with the Australian Federal Police and the NZ Serious Fraud Office to cover up Key’s involvement. I can’t believe though that the Aussie cops didn’t follow Greenspans instructions and shred the smoking gun document. That will be the opening thru which we can prise open the entire conspiracy. It all leads back to Jekyll Island. Trust me.
Haven’t the blogs shown how to supplement mainstream media? The economics of print journalism mean NZ will not see a new mainstream paper. You need to harness the power of the internet – Ian Wishart has the right model (if a limited audience) for NZ, the Huffington Post model would work in NZ – two or three operations across the political spectrum is easily doable – email out an edition every week, pick up stories from the agencies, have guest columnists. Very easy but more importantly cheap. And you’re welcome to have a bias – circulation and advertising demand will dictate whether your bias is relevant.
Good luck on trying to start another newspaper. gomango’s conspiracy theories aside, he is pretty close to the mark when he says the economics of print journalism would work against a new newspaper.
NZ is a tiny market with shrinking demand for broadsheets. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the natural state of affairs is for a single daily newspaper in most towns with only mega cities (think London, New York) able to support more than one. Moreover, newspapers do not survive on editorial content – they live by advertising. Around 80% of a newspaper’s revenue comes from ads. It’s something of a chicken and the egg argument – if you can’t get the ads, you won’t get the revenue – you won’t get the ads without circulation but you won’t have money to print and distribute enough with the ad revenue. If you an figure out how to break into this market with a printed daily, you may have just found the golden goose.
If you think you can launch a broadsheet to even provide a pinprick of annoyance to the Herald, good luck to you. You are better off sticking to the interweb – less need to advertise, always the chance of going viral if you get the formula right, arguably lower overheads. Still, you will need to pay your journos somehow – I don’t think many will want to work only for the satisfaction of providing a counter to the Herald.
DS: Yeah. It takes about 1m people to support a full-scale daily broadsheet paper. We’ve got five, if you include the Waikato Times, and four otherwise. (Note that this isn’t the same as circulation, since only a fraction of that nominal million will buy one). Breaking into an entrenched market is incredibly hard, and it’s dminishingly unlikely anyone will try, given the economies of scale APN and Fairfax are extracting from their editorial, reporting and distribution systems.
One way to circumvent this is for a new outlet to not be run on commercial lines. I’ve argued before for KiwiPaper – Radio NZ National in print. I’m not sure it’d work, but it sounds like a nice idea.
L
IanMac, I read the article you linked to and in the middle of it there is this:
“The TV sting was orchestrated by Labour’s research unit which had armed the reporter with the 100,000 figure, part of a strategy to exploit every opportunity to make Key look dishonest.”
So we can rest assured that at the very least the left have TVNZ leaning their way.
Tim. TVNZ couldn’t just have ignored solid proof that Key had been in voliation of Parliament’s rules. To do that really would be biased.
Tim: I found that article quite interesting.
Firstly, amongst everything else, it didn’t cite a source for that – that the research unit was in involved in the Key’s prevarications over his transrail shares. So that has to be defined as bullshit. As far as I’m aware TVNZ has never said where they got that story from. If someone can find me a link….
Secondly, that was dropped directly into the middle of a story about something else. I read it, and read it again, and finally decided that the paragraph was only there to get “Labour research unit” in the story. Probably because there has been no corroborating evidence to support Key’s persistent bullshit that the ‘Labour research unit’ was involved in the Key/Equitcorp association.
There were a number of other things that made me suspicious of that article. It appeared to be factually distorted and make a awful lot of suppositions without backing them up. I was starting to think that Wishart was writing it by the end.
dismal – irony alert……..
The herald is now up for sale – why don’t yall have a whip around and put a bid in. Live the dream, own your own editorial column.
Hi there, first time comment writer here, but after reading some of the comments here written about the nation’s media I have to add my two cents worth. I am a journalist at a regional daily – owned by fairfax. I can you why many of the daily papers don’t have critical analysis of election issues: We don’t have time and we don’t have the resources. Working to daily deadlines mean often there is little time to do much critical analysis of an issue.
We are overworked, underpayed and mostly under-resourced and in short, our industry is in real trouble. With circulations dropping worldwide for papers, another thing I am noticing is that papers are also more ruthless in getting advertising, which in turn seems to have led to more interference on editorial policies from advertising executives.
You can just see this in the SST where it seems to have more dumbed down fluff pieces than hard hitting journalism. It’s either that or a change in policy by the editor because it wasn’t always like that.
Also, Fairfax and APN (NZ Herald owners) in their ultimate wisdom have both decided to lay off editorial staff in a cost cutting exercise in news rooms across the country. In our paper, most of these people were the wise ‘old heads’ of the newsroom, who have been in the industry for decades and know the job backwards. They say it won’t impact on the quality of our product. Yeah right. I hear it’s the same in other papers too.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t even get me started on newspaper ownership or the state of tv journalism…
cheers.