One of the most
striking points to emerge from the free-speech furore has been the failure of
the media to reflect public opinion.
In my column in
the Dominion Post today, I noted that a Newshub poll – not a
scientific opinion sample, but still an indication of what the public was
thinking – showed that 78 percent of New Zealanders thought Lauren Southern and
Stefan Molyneux should be allowed into the country. (This was when their
immigration status was still in doubt.)
It can be inferred
from this that the majority of people believed the Canadians should be allowed
to speak here – and more to the point, that we should be allowed to hear what
they had to say so that we could make up our own minds about whether their views
were harmful or hateful.
But you would
never have guessed this from commentaries in the mainstream media, which were
overwhelmingly hostile to Southern and Molyneux. As I wrote in my column, an
outsider would have formed the impression that New Zealanders were united in
their distaste for the visitors. Those who spoke out in defence of free speech,
such as Don Brash, were generally caricatured by the media commentariat as
pathetic dinosaurs and even as a threat to public safety.
There is a jarring
disjunction here. The American playwright Arthur Miller famously defined a good
newspaper as a nation talking to itself, but something has gone seriously wrong
when the media seem so demonstrably out of touch with what ordinary people are
thinking – and worse, when some in the media treat those they disapprove of
with sneering contempt, lazily labelling them as racists without attempting to
answer their arguments.
There is no rule
that says the media should fall into line with popular opinion (God forbid), but
they do have some obligation to reflect it, especially if they wish to remain
credible.
To be fair, the
picture improved markedly with media coverage of Massey University’s decision
to ban Brash, which resulted in some spirited (if somewhat belated) defences of
free speech. But Massey’s authoritarian edict was such an egregious affront to
democracy that it could hardly be ignored.
And even then,
some in the media couldn’t help parading their bias. Today’s Morning
Report included a travesty of a panel discussion in which the three
participants, egged on by Susie Ferguson, all piled into Brash – like-minded
leftists united in smug, bigoted, intellectually snobbish groupthink.
Radio New Zealand,
as a public broadcaster, has a special duty to observe principles of balance
but it is routinely ignored, and rarely more shamefully than this morning. RNZ
seems to have decided that it need only cater to the demographic group known as
chardonnay socialists, and to hell with everyone else. I feel sorry for the
employees there – there must be some – who take its charter obligations
seriously.
Incidentally,
we’ve heard a lot of semi-hysterical hyperbole in the last few weeks about
something ill-defined called hate speech, but the great irony is that the New
Zealander most subjected to hateful vilification is the very man who’s
constantly accused by the left of fostering it.
Karl
du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of the Dominion-Post. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.
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