I spoke with Radio NZ today - their Morning Report staff - who told me that ACT Leader David Seymour has instructed his Members of Parliament not to give interviews with them. The reason is that he feels they are biased against the party and made it look bad in past interviews. The Main Stream Media, of course, do regard this government as illegitimate and believes that it should choose it, not the people.
It thinks the people are too dumb to understand the problems and needs Big Media to tell them how to think. That's fine - but then why are National, ACT and NZ First not piling into new start-ups & alternative media outlets? This Blog [ Down to Earth Kiwi ] had over 170,000 site sessions in the past year from almost 40,000 unique visitors in 84 different countries. We've become far more influential than our politicians realize. How come? I get mails from a who's-who of NZ who've subscribed, with comments. The journos from the Big Media companies subscribe & often base stories around the blog, but don't tell readers and listeners that it is their source.
Now here's the trick: under the political system NZ used to have, "First Past The Post", a party has to win a seat to get into Parliament. That means a popular Blogger in the UK, which still has this system, may swing a few percentage points of the vote, but it will not win any party a single seat, making them quite ineffective. Not so in NZ. Should you run Blogs that get picked up & sent around social media & bigger outlets, its not so hard to shift a few percentage points of the vote. Under our MMP system, that corresponds directly to shifting seats in Parliament (that are allocated in direct proportion to number of votes). A swing of a couple of percentage points of voters corresponds to shifting 2-3 seats in our 120 seat Parliament. So instead of 60-60, it shifts to 57-63 seats (or up to a 6 seat majority).
Our MPs would do well to figure out the power of small alternative media outlets in NZ. So the question is: why does our PM & Finance Minister go back & back to Main Stream Media outlets that loathe them & seek every opportunity to make them look bad? When I compare notes with other folks in our "industry" who also blog, or run radio stations like The Platform, we're all wondering: why hasn't the new Coalition moved into elevating these outlets with full force? Most of us don't even have a profit motive - we're not even in it for the money - more just influence.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
If the wackos of the Left manage to get in next time around the big question all sensible people will be asking is why did our Coalition government not deal to the State funded media?
But if that happens, sensible people will be a minority so they may actually do quite well....nah, who am I kidding!
The sad thing for me, if recent polls are representative, is that National's lost vote hasn't gone to ACT or NZFirst....it's gone to Labour!!!
Simple answer. Luxon and many others in the coalition are batting for the other side.
It's kinda like, good cop, bad cop.
The government were given a mandate for change. They have a majority in the house.
They must be letting us all down for a reason.
The two big parties are just 2 sides of the same bent coin. The party system is now rotten to the core. Post collapse a radical new design (let’s call it meritocracy) will come into play. But like childbirth, the pain may be excruciating..
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