Cam Slater: No One Cuddles a Corpse Quite like the Media

The media are pretty much all cuddling up to the corpse of Newshub. It is unedifying and and as predictable as it is pathetic. There are some exceptions to that, however, and one is Heather du Plessis-Allan. She says it’s dead: let it go.

We need to let Newshub go. Its closure was a long time coming. It is not worth saving.

I can give you a list of what’s going wrong for media in general and TV news in particular. Everything from viewers’ growing distrust of legacy media through to them simply being too busy to watch an hour-long news bulletin.

But none of that is what really killed Newshub. What killed Newshub is that linear TV is close to dead because we don’t want to watch it any more.

Take a look at the numbers of 18 to 34-year-olds watching. At this age, people are establishing their habits at the start of their working lives, and are the big spenders of the future. Back in 2000, 129,000 of them watched TV. Now, fewer than 46,000 of them do.

The drop is even starker when you factor in that the country’s population increased by 33 per cent.

TV is dead because Netflix and Neon and Apple TV are better. There is more to watch, whenever you want to, not just when they tell you to.

TV is the new video rental shop. The only people still using it regularly are the people who can’t afford Netflix or can’t understand how to set it up.

NZ Herald

The market has changed and linear television is like buggy-whip manufacturers when the automobile became ubiquitous and cheap. Newshub failed to adapt and, instead of doing that, they set about trying to hoodwink advertisers that their audience was bigger than it was in reality. There may well be law suits coming as a result of the jimmying of the stats to dupe advertisers.

There is no point trying to save Newshub’s newsroom. Throwing money at it is only wasting money because the number of viewers will just keep dropping until it closes again. Saving it will only delay the inevitable. It will eventually close, just like the video shop.

The only justification for pumping money into Newshub to save it would be to give it more time to innovate into a product we might actually use in the future. But this product already exists. It’s every news site that carries video online. We have plenty of those already.

The Prime Minister was right. All media need to innovate to survive. Many have. They’ve gone online, prioritised digital over whatever it was they were doing originally, and found a way to make money off it.

But TV news hasn’t. It’s still an hour. It’s still at 6pm. It’s still on linear TV.

NZ Herald

Almost entirely, the media luvvies, who have previously lived in a protected environment, have claimed that the demise of Newshub and other media outlets to come is the fault of everyone else but them.

When they decided to become activists, promoting minority issues, siding with the Ardern Government against their own audience, taking the PIJF bribes in their millions and promoting government lines and as a result marginalising large swathes of NZ society, they made a series of decisions that ultimately and catastrophically destroyed what remained of public trust. No one did that except them. We lost trust, because they couldn’t be trusted. We lost trust because their news didn’t match how we felt about issues. We lost trust because they became mouthpieces for the regime.

When we lost trust we stopped watching. They drove their audience away and then they lied to advertisers. The money dried up…and so did the patience of their owners.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is right, Newshub is dead: let it go. Then we can watch as Stuff stutters and splutters towards a similar fate. Both organisations embraced wokeness and both organisations will be long dead and buried by the end of the year.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. Cam blogs regularly on the BFD - where this article was sourced.