Like most on the left I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the Herald’s current bias toward National but today’s effort by Audrey Young is a new low altogether.
You see it’s not just that she writes up all of John and Paula’s lines it’s that she provides no balancing comment.
The result is that her story reads like a government statement.
This kind of thing could be excused if the story was a wire piece put together to take the story out as fast as possible but it wasn’t. It was a piece filed for the next day’s paper with plenty of time to quote some reaction.
In fact by 1:37pm yesterday she could have quoted the Green’s co-leader person Metiria Turei saying:
Beneficiaries make meaningful contributions to society. They pay taxes, volunteer in their communities, and support children and other family members. They deserve to be treated with respect, which is sorely lacking from this Government.
By 2:54pm yesterday she could have quoted benefit rights activist Kay Brereton saying:
This government has sat on its hands while tens of thousands of Kiwis lose their jobs and now the minister responsible for this dire situation, Paula Bennett, is blaming the very people she has failed.
At any time she could have picked up the phone and asked Labour’s acting wefare spokesperson, Ruth Dyson, what she thought just like RNZ did or Phil Goff like NZPA has.
But she didn’t. She gave only one half of the story and that was the government’s.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Audrey but if a journalism student handed in this story as an assignment they’d fail.
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