If you love the law or sausages, as the saying goes, best not to look too closely at how they are made. And after watching the orgy of self-pity when Newshub’s closure was announced on February 28, television journalism should definitely be added to the list of those areas where the less we glimpse behind the curtain the better.
The wailing reached fever pitch a week later with news of the proposed cancellation of TVNZ’s Fair Go and Sunday programmes. Days after the announcement, the Herald’s landing page featured no fewer than four journalists’ laments.
Yet in the past months several major employers have laid off more than a hundred staff each. At the beginning of the year, food processor Tomra alone laid off 200 employees. Redundancies at Victoria and Massey universities have meant the loss of some of the nation’s best scholars in social policy and classics — including an authority on the origins of democracy.
Where were the stories about these employees clutching each other and sobbing at the news of their imminent redundancy? Are we meant to believe that losing your job is so much more distressing if you work at TVNZ or Newshub?
In the avalanche of news about television redundancies there were even references to TV3 staff having been in the “trenches together” — and, just in case you were wondering, this wasn’t war correspondents reminiscing about foreign assignments. This was camera operators and entertainment reporters holding onto each other for emotional support after news that their jobs in one of society’s glamour industries would end.
Media managers really shouldn’t have allowed TV journalists’ self-regard to be exposed in such revealing close-ups. Surely the first advice offered by any PR crisis adviser would have been for journalists to maintain a stiff upper lip, keep themselves as dignified and professional as possible and outsource the task of weeping and rending their garments in public to the hoi polloi as they came to terms with the nation’s loss.
Perhaps fearing, however, that the vox pops they rely on to manufacture the appearance of public consensus might elicit only indifference from passersby, senior journalists decided to keep the exercise in-house and rend their own garments instead. And there was nothing more in-house than someone allowing Newshub anchor Mike McRoberts to be interviewed by his former wife, Paula Penfold, for Stuff.
At least Penfold (or her editor) had sufficient self-awareness to ponder — however briefly — whether an in-studio chat with the ex might be an overly self-serving project but quickly decided it was entirely justified. The intro to a story headed: “This is what happened on Newshub’s worst day” read:
“Is it indulgent for the media to write about each other? Maybe — people lose their jobs every day. But the hundreds who’ll likely lose theirs in the Newshub closure have dedicated their careers to telling other people’s stories.”
That is true, but only to a point. Unfortunately, there are many people whose stories the mainstream media simply avoid — no matter how important they are to an open society — because they don’t approve of what they have to say.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan provides a timely example. On the day TVNZ announced its closures, he arrived in New Zealand for a two-week book tour, with public meetings to be held in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Despite his record of having written some of the best and most-popular television comedy in the past 30 years — including Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd — the mainstream media has mostly decided he is persona non grata. That much was made very clear on Newstalk ZB’s site in which the word “hate” appeared twice in a headline drawing attention to the opinions of trans-rights activist Paul Thistoll. It read: “Anti-hate speech activist [says] Irish anti-transgender activist visit ensures hate speech is platformed.”
NZME could have used Linehan’s own description of himself as a “left-wing women’s rights activist” but that was presumably out of the question. After all, NZME has signed up to Rainbow Tick, which keeps its paid-up members on a very short leash when it comes to trans issues.
While in New Zealand, Linehan had his new book — Tough Crowd — to promote. It mainly covers his career in comedy but also his cancellation by trans-rights activists, which saw him lose his marriage and his TV career. His crimes are to insist that sex is binary and that men can’t become women no matter how fervently they might wish to.
The public largely agrees with him — if quietly — but legacy media no longer cares about the opinions of the majority. TV journalists in particular seem to identify like-minded colleagues — their “whanau” as TVNZ’s Maiki Sherman put it — as their target market.
Unfortunately for television journalists loudly lamenting a new Dark Age in which their absence from our TV screens will — at least in their minds — imperil democracy, Linehan’s visit to New Zealand couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Most obviously, their willingness to overlook the Irish comedian’s arrival in the country made an immediate joke of their lofty pretensions to be the guardians of democracy. It might come as a shock to them but free speech is the very lifeblood of a democracy — which means allowing a wide range of views to be aired publicly.
As former judge David Harvey wrote in a recent column: “A commitment to freedom of expression lies not in hearing the things with which one agrees but recognising that freedom of expression extends to those things with which we disagree. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: ‘Freedom for the thought we hate.’”
If television journalists and their producers understood that basic fact about democracy, they would have snapped up the chance to interview Linehan, even if they didn’t personally agree with him on trans issues. In fact, the Free Speech Union, which organised Linehan’s tour, had initially arranged interviews with TVNZ’s Breakfast, Newshub’s AM, and Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan, but all three pulled out at short notice.
The FSU told The Platform: “The only MSM interview cancelled without explanation was Heather du Plessis-Allan. AM was tentatively booked and Breakfast was bumped due to breaking news. We are obviously disappointed we couldn’t get more MSM coverage with Graham but understand the media schedule is often shifting in terms of breaking news.”
The mainstream media’s reluctance to cover important news if it doesn’t align with its “progressive” ideology was made starkly apparent a few days before Linehan landed in Auckland. The leak of the bombshell “WPATH Files” showed that members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — which styles itself as the world’s leading advisory body — are often stumbling around in the dark performing what can only be described as grotesque experiments. That includes operations which result in “bodies that don’t exist in nature” — as the Guardian put it. Among them, the newspaper noted, is “nullification” surgery, where a patient will end up with no genitals at all, “just smooth skin”.
In one video in the leaked files, doctors admit some young teenaged patients can’t fully grasp the effects puberty blockers may have on their fertility. Doctors also acknowledge the possibility that treatment may lead to liver cancer in patients as young as 16.
It’s not a pretty picture. No one will be able to unsee, or justify, the horrors exposed to the world’s gaze. However, thanks to the legacy media’s neglect, most New Zealanders will have little idea of what is happening.
Linehan is in no doubt about the significance of the leaked information. He tweeted last week: “I knew the WPATH Files’ release date would coincide with my visit to NZ and Oz so I’ve been thinking of it as my ‘vindication tour’.”
He was further vindicated when the UK’s National Health Service banned the use of puberty blockers for people under the age of 18 for the treatment of gender dysphoria, except in clinical trials.
This should have been big news here, not least because New Zealand’s rate of prescribing puberty blockers is many times higher than that of Britain. But while the ban has been covered extensively overseas, including by Australia’s major news organisations, New Zealand’s mainstream media has ignored this too.
Linehan’s years-long campaign against trans dogma — with its promotion of puberty blockers for gender-distressed children followed by cross-sex hormones and sometimes mutilating surgery — is now looking prescient as well as principled. Much to the chagrin of his enemies, he will increasingly be seen as a prophet rather than a heretic. As he told Sean Plunket: “I think I’ll be vindicated. It’s just a matter of time.”
Fortunately, he has been given coverage on numerous independent outlets and podcasts — including interviews with journalists Chris Lynch, Simon Anderson, Maree Buscke and Damien Grant. There have been two interviews on The Platform, with the second studio encounter running for a full hour.
Talking to Plunket, Linehan diagnosed the problem besetting mainstream media here and overseas: “People are sick of having someone lie to their faces. When someone is lying to you on television, and you look out the window and see a different reality, then that’s going to produce very unhappy people.”
His recommendation for the mainstream media’s future? “Get rid of these people who have disdain for the views of ordinary and decent people.”
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
Yet in the past months several major employers have laid off more than a hundred staff each. At the beginning of the year, food processor Tomra alone laid off 200 employees. Redundancies at Victoria and Massey universities have meant the loss of some of the nation’s best scholars in social policy and classics — including an authority on the origins of democracy.
Where were the stories about these employees clutching each other and sobbing at the news of their imminent redundancy? Are we meant to believe that losing your job is so much more distressing if you work at TVNZ or Newshub?
In the avalanche of news about television redundancies there were even references to TV3 staff having been in the “trenches together” — and, just in case you were wondering, this wasn’t war correspondents reminiscing about foreign assignments. This was camera operators and entertainment reporters holding onto each other for emotional support after news that their jobs in one of society’s glamour industries would end.
Media managers really shouldn’t have allowed TV journalists’ self-regard to be exposed in such revealing close-ups. Surely the first advice offered by any PR crisis adviser would have been for journalists to maintain a stiff upper lip, keep themselves as dignified and professional as possible and outsource the task of weeping and rending their garments in public to the hoi polloi as they came to terms with the nation’s loss.
Perhaps fearing, however, that the vox pops they rely on to manufacture the appearance of public consensus might elicit only indifference from passersby, senior journalists decided to keep the exercise in-house and rend their own garments instead. And there was nothing more in-house than someone allowing Newshub anchor Mike McRoberts to be interviewed by his former wife, Paula Penfold, for Stuff.
At least Penfold (or her editor) had sufficient self-awareness to ponder — however briefly — whether an in-studio chat with the ex might be an overly self-serving project but quickly decided it was entirely justified. The intro to a story headed: “This is what happened on Newshub’s worst day” read:
“Is it indulgent for the media to write about each other? Maybe — people lose their jobs every day. But the hundreds who’ll likely lose theirs in the Newshub closure have dedicated their careers to telling other people’s stories.”
That is true, but only to a point. Unfortunately, there are many people whose stories the mainstream media simply avoid — no matter how important they are to an open society — because they don’t approve of what they have to say.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan provides a timely example. On the day TVNZ announced its closures, he arrived in New Zealand for a two-week book tour, with public meetings to be held in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Despite his record of having written some of the best and most-popular television comedy in the past 30 years — including Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd — the mainstream media has mostly decided he is persona non grata. That much was made very clear on Newstalk ZB’s site in which the word “hate” appeared twice in a headline drawing attention to the opinions of trans-rights activist Paul Thistoll. It read: “Anti-hate speech activist [says] Irish anti-transgender activist visit ensures hate speech is platformed.”
NZME could have used Linehan’s own description of himself as a “left-wing women’s rights activist” but that was presumably out of the question. After all, NZME has signed up to Rainbow Tick, which keeps its paid-up members on a very short leash when it comes to trans issues.
While in New Zealand, Linehan had his new book — Tough Crowd — to promote. It mainly covers his career in comedy but also his cancellation by trans-rights activists, which saw him lose his marriage and his TV career. His crimes are to insist that sex is binary and that men can’t become women no matter how fervently they might wish to.
The public largely agrees with him — if quietly — but legacy media no longer cares about the opinions of the majority. TV journalists in particular seem to identify like-minded colleagues — their “whanau” as TVNZ’s Maiki Sherman put it — as their target market.
Unfortunately for television journalists loudly lamenting a new Dark Age in which their absence from our TV screens will — at least in their minds — imperil democracy, Linehan’s visit to New Zealand couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Most obviously, their willingness to overlook the Irish comedian’s arrival in the country made an immediate joke of their lofty pretensions to be the guardians of democracy. It might come as a shock to them but free speech is the very lifeblood of a democracy — which means allowing a wide range of views to be aired publicly.
As former judge David Harvey wrote in a recent column: “A commitment to freedom of expression lies not in hearing the things with which one agrees but recognising that freedom of expression extends to those things with which we disagree. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: ‘Freedom for the thought we hate.’”
If television journalists and their producers understood that basic fact about democracy, they would have snapped up the chance to interview Linehan, even if they didn’t personally agree with him on trans issues. In fact, the Free Speech Union, which organised Linehan’s tour, had initially arranged interviews with TVNZ’s Breakfast, Newshub’s AM, and Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan, but all three pulled out at short notice.
The FSU told The Platform: “The only MSM interview cancelled without explanation was Heather du Plessis-Allan. AM was tentatively booked and Breakfast was bumped due to breaking news. We are obviously disappointed we couldn’t get more MSM coverage with Graham but understand the media schedule is often shifting in terms of breaking news.”
The mainstream media’s reluctance to cover important news if it doesn’t align with its “progressive” ideology was made starkly apparent a few days before Linehan landed in Auckland. The leak of the bombshell “WPATH Files” showed that members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — which styles itself as the world’s leading advisory body — are often stumbling around in the dark performing what can only be described as grotesque experiments. That includes operations which result in “bodies that don’t exist in nature” — as the Guardian put it. Among them, the newspaper noted, is “nullification” surgery, where a patient will end up with no genitals at all, “just smooth skin”.
In one video in the leaked files, doctors admit some young teenaged patients can’t fully grasp the effects puberty blockers may have on their fertility. Doctors also acknowledge the possibility that treatment may lead to liver cancer in patients as young as 16.
It’s not a pretty picture. No one will be able to unsee, or justify, the horrors exposed to the world’s gaze. However, thanks to the legacy media’s neglect, most New Zealanders will have little idea of what is happening.
Linehan is in no doubt about the significance of the leaked information. He tweeted last week: “I knew the WPATH Files’ release date would coincide with my visit to NZ and Oz so I’ve been thinking of it as my ‘vindication tour’.”
He was further vindicated when the UK’s National Health Service banned the use of puberty blockers for people under the age of 18 for the treatment of gender dysphoria, except in clinical trials.
This should have been big news here, not least because New Zealand’s rate of prescribing puberty blockers is many times higher than that of Britain. But while the ban has been covered extensively overseas, including by Australia’s major news organisations, New Zealand’s mainstream media has ignored this too.
Linehan’s years-long campaign against trans dogma — with its promotion of puberty blockers for gender-distressed children followed by cross-sex hormones and sometimes mutilating surgery — is now looking prescient as well as principled. Much to the chagrin of his enemies, he will increasingly be seen as a prophet rather than a heretic. As he told Sean Plunket: “I think I’ll be vindicated. It’s just a matter of time.”
Fortunately, he has been given coverage on numerous independent outlets and podcasts — including interviews with journalists Chris Lynch, Simon Anderson, Maree Buscke and Damien Grant. There have been two interviews on The Platform, with the second studio encounter running for a full hour.
Talking to Plunket, Linehan diagnosed the problem besetting mainstream media here and overseas: “People are sick of having someone lie to their faces. When someone is lying to you on television, and you look out the window and see a different reality, then that’s going to produce very unhappy people.”
His recommendation for the mainstream media’s future? “Get rid of these people who have disdain for the views of ordinary and decent people.”
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
4 comments:
HdPA - reason No. 479 to turn off adsquawkZB. Her commentary of late, particularly on sport, has become nothing but vacuous click-bait crap.
Graham, unfortunately you are spot on the money again.
It won't be until we have some 'real balance' in the media , which is all us kiwis want that , until then they will rightfully be despised and not trusted!
I notice Stuff have gone from trying to extract money out of us on every page you click on to now stating something like 'the politicians hate us, which is why kiwis love us.....' donate now. HOW DESPERATE ARE STUFF!
So Graham , I've almost decided to support them. Shock , horror I hear from my fellow normal kiwis. But hear me out. If I donate $1 it must cost them more to process that $1 in bank transaction fees, therefore speeding up their demise. I'm not a nasty person but gloves are off when it comes to the previous govts propaganda arms. Has any one else thought about doing what I've suggested?
Great column! Agree with every word. And the media treatment of 'Posie Parker' described in a recent column by Winston Peters, adds another layer to this toxic cake.
Linehan is not just fighting for women's rights but also even more importantly for vulnerable children not to to be exposed to grotesque surgeries and non reversible drug regimes. These drugs for example cause permanent osteoporosis and a four times increase in heart attacks with a 30 year earlier onset of menopause and even besides the permanent infertility.
You would think as he did that one would be supported in such a noble cause but not so. He was left standing alone. This transgenderism can really only be termed diabolical in its extremely vicious attacks on opponents.
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