Written By:
Bunji - Date published:
11:43 am, October 25th, 2010 - 10 comments
Categories: labour, newspapers -
Tags: john armstrong, nz herald
There was an excellent piece in the Saturday Herald by John Armstrong. A large 2-page spread, fairly prominent in the paper, and not critical of Labour. Not fulsome praise; just great, unbiased reporting.
Now admittedly I shouldn’t get excited by such things, but the steadily slipping standards of New Zealand’s papers, combined with a media love-in with National at the last election (all singing from the same hymn-sheet: “Time for Change”, without any analysis of change to what…), leaves good quality newspaper journalism a sight to behold.
The New Zealand Herald has always been a conservative paper, but has shown a surprising bent of occasional even-handedness of late. On the whole the editorials are usually still best skipped, even if there is obviously one nameless editorial writer who isn’t indoctrinated; but elsewhere in the paper there have been signs that all is not wedded bliss with National.
It started with National’s Schedule 4 Mining fiasco, that the Herald belatedly “championed” the opposition to. And maybe they got a little taste of independence.
Not championing Banks in the mayoral race may have been just sensible self-interest in not backing a loser, but also the sweeping victory of Brown may have awakened the Herald to the fact that maybe Auckland isn’t as right-wing as they are.
So the Herald has given the Labour conference a very even-handed coverage. And has started a new campaign against a National Policy – this time on drink-driving.
I don’t think we should ever expect the Herald to be anything but conservative, but it is nice to see her sometimes thinking again.
(It’s not become all quality though: don’t get me started on the large article about the unscientific poll of a small non-random sample of their readers allowing them to conclude that the public support the PPTA’s wage/condition claims, but not their strike action – that may or may not be true, but that poll doesn’t allow you to conclude anything)
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.
Crikey, The Herald must have had a religious experience. For some of the editorial staff this must be approaching blasphemy.
Good though, that the left in this instance is getting a fair shot.
It is interesting to see Armstrong noted options for Labour to amalgamate the electricity SOEs and extend the role of Kiwi Bank. I will look forward to seeing that as party policy. The Clark govt made changes to social policy but left the neo-liberal market in charge of economic policy. Breaking that mould under the next Labour govt will be a significant step forward to remaking a new consensus following the 2008 economic crash.