Penn Raine: Controlling the narrative

Apparently, the CFOs of Meta and Google have figured that there is better business to be had by allowing their users to freely express opinions on their politicians’ IQs and whether or not a woman can be a woman with a pair of XY chromosomes, otherwise they would have turned up to the meeting with President Macron and one of our ex-PMs – you remember, the one who was kind. Their failure to front at the talking heads lineup for the Christchurch Call to limit on-line ‘extremism’, whatever that means, may suggest to optimists among us that the corporate appetite for woke vanity projects is diminishing. 

 Or not, if you look around at Australia’s political shenanigans where Albo’s crew who seems not to know the meaning of post Voice referendum embarrassment, has doubled down on its efforts to hobble democratic choice.

 

Canberra is currently developing a legislative framework that will determine that state broadcasters will appear first in smart TV searches, will give them ‘prominance’, in what seems to be a belt-and-braces approach in the planned slew of laws to stifle dis and misinformation, aka opinions that they disagree with but cannot produce an intelligent counter argument to. The determination to proceed with the legislation suggests that they can’t accept that the ABC et al are no longer the nation’s fave raves and that the 61% that worked out that the Voice was a scam need to be punished for their differing views.

 

When the winners in our recent election eventually stop bickering about who gets the best Parliamentary offices and the brightest baubles, the most practical kindness they could afford us is to take a scalpel to the metastasising tumour of Wellington’s bureaucracy. 

 

The classic British TV comedy Yes Minister  is often referred to as a jokey reference to shonky government ministries but the point of the humour is that although any particular minister may want to end the fiscal blowouts, the nepotism and working from poolside, Gold Coast culture, and in fact to be religiously determined to do so, the ministry itself will have these behaviours so entrenched – nay beloved- that all its inhabitants have to do is appear compliant while changing nothing.  Ever.

 

So let’s assume that the capital’s ministries will continue wasting our money on ideological regulations that produce nothing and keep our GDP figures down in the lacklustre bottom quartile, but that the sparkly new coalition could so something immediately positive, even if it can’t corral the zombie apocalypse of the bureaucracy. 

 

What could that be? Well, why not junk all proposed laws like those washing about in Canberra around hate speech and mis/disinformation that are still sitting in parliamentary in-trays here. Laws that attempt to control the narrative, shut down platforms with over ten thousand subscribers and bring about prosecutions by a non-elected agency with wide ranging powers to punish or protect – in this last category find politicians and other vulnerable minorities. And, as a corollary, let’s end the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

 

The PIJF, the bribe that currently stifles any balanced journalism, that requires its signatories to embrace every new imaginative iteration of the Treaty, forcefully promotes the Rainbow Tick and wilfully it seems in the current news round encourages sympathy with any allegedly oppressed group. Such as Hamas. 

 

Broadcasters who did their homework might consider how Gaza’s government – apparently ‘freely’ elected back in - oh let me see, 2006 - have used the billions of aid for military purposes, impoverished their citizens, radicalised children not yet in double digits, used its people as human shields and weaponised them to a credulous western media. That Chloe Swarbrick’s mindless chanting of ‘From the river to the sea,’ is an echo of Nazism’s disgusting Final Solution doesn’t seem to have occurred to our MSM who have insipidly reported only that she has refused to apologise, implying that she was standing by some sort of principle and has been unfairly targeted.

 

We still have a subscription to an on-line daily, but it may be only for the fleeting pleasure of unloading some spleen in the (carefully moderated) comment threads and serious conversations have been recently had about cancelling the sub. Used to be that media were fairly boringly neutral, gave you the facts and let you decide on your opinion. Admittedly this meant that the reader needed some level of critical faculty to sift facts and reach a position. This was hard work at times, but good training and this exercise of discernment is now missing because MSM tells us what to think. Easy peasy, no brain cudgelling needed, just sit back and inhale the narrative.

 

This must be why the groups Queers for Palestine are still waving their banners with no sense of the irony of their protest. They stick out as a worrying exemplification of the danger of a little learning, a very little learning that allows them to ignore the fact that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that would not viciously punish their lifestyles. Kathleen Stock, Douglas Murray and other educated gay commentators must cringe at being by virtue of their sexuality swept into this swamp of useful idiots.

 

Our smart TV which doesn’t yet herd us remorselessly towards the state broadcasters is nevertheless currently showing TV3 spruiking itself. The ad itself is not especially offensive unless you object to newscasters telling you how trustworthy they are and how much they really care for communities but somehow over the last 6 years I feel an aversion to seductive spiels such as this. Judging by the blowtorches currently being held to our legacy media I am not the only person who is switching off and tuning in elsewhere. 

 

Our aligned media can cry foul all it likes about alternative platforms and cosy up to government regulators who aim to constrain our views. However, instead of having a big sook because Luxon and co won’t come out to play, they should ask themselves how they have managed to lose our trust so comprehensively and whether it might have something to do with being the mouthpiece of an ideologically addled (ex) government.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.