Graham Adams: Fear and loathing grips the left over NZME shake-up

As a range of commentators on the left of politics pop up to denounce James Grenon’s proposed NZME board takeover, the objections by E tū director Michael Wood seem particularly hypocritical. 

In a press release last week, the head of the journalists’ union complained the Canada-born billionaire had a clear agenda to use NZME for his own interests. “[He] clearly wants to use his financial clout to steer the editorial direction of one of New Zealand’s largest and most important media networks.”

This is, in fact, an assumption on Wood’s part — albeit a reasonable one given Grenon’s previous criticisms of mainstream news media, and the editorial stance of The Centrist, a digital publication he set up in 2023, with himself as the sole director and shareholder.

The Centrist bills itself as offering “under-served perspectives while emphasising reason-based analysis, even if it might be too hot for mainstream media to handle”.

However, Wood’s criticism is a bit rich, you might think, given he was a former senior minister in the Ardern-Hipkins government that shelled out $55 million to a range of media outlets over three years with explicit strings attached.

The Public Interest Journalism Fund made it clear that successful applicants for taxpayer cash had to agree to present the Treaty of Waitangi as a “partnership” — and by implication support co-governance policies — as well as promoting the use of te reo.

That is an extraordinary example of the state “steering the editorial direction” of the majority of the nation’s media by directing taxpayer money their way via an expensive bribe. 

While Grenon and his wealthy colleagues are focused on just one media organisation they already part-own, the Labour government wielded influence over 38 media organisations nationwide that accepted its inducements — including NZME, which was the biggest recipient of PIJF largesse. It also directly funded more than 100 journalists.

The left commentariat, of course, never criticised NZME accepting $6.88 million to follow the government’s approved line on the Treaty.

Although the purpose of the PIJF is rarely identified as such, its Treaty requirements were designed to stifle media criticism of a soft coup by Māori nationalists carried out by the Labour government via policy and legislative changes that introduced co-governance in a vast array of areas, including health, water and resource management, and education.

It was very successful. The mainstream media rarely objected to the fact that giving 17 per cent of the population an equal say to the other 83 per cent was undemocratic. That task was left to independent media — including The Platform — and citizen journalists like lawyer Thomas Cranmer / Philip Crump posting on what was then Twitter. 

The government’s Treaty criteria had to be taken seriously by anyone asking for taxpayer cash, even if their proposal for funding had no direct connection with it. Reports by NZ on Air assessors — discovered via OIA requests — effectively required applicants to bend the knee to the Treaty as a “partnership” no matter what the topic.

Furthermore, in a subsequent publication titled “Te Tiriti Framework for News Media” — commissioned by NZ on Air at a cost of $33,350 (plus GST) — applicants were treated to a long list of more explicit “recommendations” that applicants hoping to snaffle taxpayer cash were encouraged to follow.

* They included the view “Māori have never ceded sovereignty to Britain or any other state.”

* “…our society has a foundation of institutional racism.”

* “For news media, it is not simply a matter of reporting ‘fairly’, but of constructively contributing to Te Tiriti relations and social justice.”

* “Repeated references by the government to the English version [of the Treaty], in which Māori supposedly ceded sovereignty, have created systematic disinformation that protects the government’s assumption of sole parliamentary sovereignty.”

In short, Wood — and his colleague Willie Jackson, who has also spoken out against Grenon’s likely plans — must be hoping the voters that his government so outrageously tried to manipulate using their own taxes are suffering from a serious case of early onset amnesia.

Significantly, Grenon and his wealthy colleagues are not using voters’ cash to underwrite their media ambitions, and are seeking to control just one of New Zealand’s many media organisations. It’s very hard to see how that is a threat to democracy, as some media commentators have claimed.

A dispassionate observer might even conclude that a centre-right publication could provide an essential counter-balance to the relentlessly “progressive left” media — including TVNZ, RNZ, Stuff, the Listener, Newsroom and The Spinoff, among others. Rather than a blow to democracy, it could be more accurately seen as promoting diversity of thought and opinion in a media landscape heavily dominated by left-leaning journalists.

Any such move to nudge the Herald’s editorial direction may not succeed of course.

Dr Merja Myllylahti, who is co-director at the AUT research centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy, reported last week that “(as-yet) unpublished data for the next Trust in News in Aotearoa New Zealand report… shows approximately 28 per cent of NZ Herald readers are on the right… Pushing the paper too far right (or hypothetically too left) could be costly. Moving too right or too left could alienate some readers, leading to a decline in subscriptions.”

However, former Fair Go host Kevin Milne had more remarkable figures. He told Newstalk ZB’s Jack Tame on Saturday that reputable pollsters had found 23 per cent of New Zealanders would have voted for Donald Trump last year if they were US citizens.

If that figure is anywhere near correct, a centre-right publication should find a deep pool of potential subscribers to tap into. Grenon’s move — aided and abetted by Wellington businessman Troy Bowker, who owns perhaps as much as four per cent of NZME’s shares — might well lead to a massive surge in subscriptions.

It’s certainly true that when the Herald opens comments on “progressive” articles it has published, readers are overwhelmingly critical of what is seen — rightly or wrongly — as the paper’s left-ish bias.

Anyone who spends time on social media will realise there is a huge amount of pent-up frustration at the legacy media’s unwillingness generally to grapple with contentious issues such as Labour’s Covid management, the Maori “grievance industry”, climate-change theory and transgender dogma.

The last topic has been a sleeper issue for many New Zealanders — especially after the violent mobbing of women’s rights activist Posie Parker and her supporters in Auckland’s Albert Park two years ago — yet the Herald has long set its face against dealing with the issue in an even-handed way.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise given that NZME’s chair, Barbara Chapman, is a former Patron of the New Zealand Rainbow Excellence Awards and NZME has Rainbow Tick accreditation, which keeps its members on a very short leash when discussing trans ideology.

Although Grenon has said his revamped board will retain the services of one of the current directors, it seems extremely unlikely that person will be Chapman.

Predictably, Martyn Bradbury, who runs the left-wing Daily Blog, has had a meltdown: “Grenon’s seizing of an almost 10 per cent holding in NZME should be deeply concerning and is the latest move by alt-right astro-turfers and wealthy right-wingers feeling emboldened by Trump’s victory and Act’s race baiting to ‘go there’. The last thing our media needs is another foaming billionaire taking over our Fourth Estate.”

Academic Sanjana Hattotuwa — who, alongside director Kate Hannah, was always very reluctant to divulge who funded their now-defunct Disinformation Project — has been reported as saying Grenon’s stake “could impact editorial direction and content priorities”.

“As the former director and shareholder of The Centrist — a publication with clear ideological leanings despite its name — his investment raises questions about potential influence on NZME’s major outlets like the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB.”

The idea that influential news media could be allowed to question climate science, challenge interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, and express scepticism toward transgender dogma appears to be unconscionable to Bradbury and Hattotuwa.

Strangely, no one on the left seemed concerned about the political direction ThreeNews would take when ultra-progressive Stuff took over producing the evening bulletin from Newshub last July. And, for that matter, the media has never made any serious attempt to find out who bankrolls Stuff either.

Wood also had the gall to opine that “the idea a shadowy cabal, backed by extreme wealth, is planning to take over such an important institution [as NZME] in our democratic fabric should be of concern to all New Zealanders”.

Talk of “our democratic fabric” coming from a former politician who was part of a government determined to shred democracy is preposterous and hypocritical. Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Willie Jackson all maintained that “democracy has changed” and the era of “one person, one vote of equal value” had passed. 

Labour’s media spokesperson Willie Jackson warned last week of “billionaires buying up media companies to promote their own warped and distorted views”.

Jackson, who was Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media and firmly backed the PIJF, was keen to see democracy dismantled. He told Jack Tame on Q&A: “Democracy has changed… we’re in a consensus-type democracy now. This is a democracy now where you take into account the needs of people, the diverse needs, the minority needs… It’s not the tyranny of the majority anymore… that’s what co-management and co-governance is about.”

Unfortunately for him, the fact that Labour was tossed out at the 2023 election, plunging to one of its worst results in its history, was due in part to his own party’s ”warped and distorted views” about democracy and co-governance.

Grenon didn’t mince his words in responding to Jackson’s comment:

“I think Willie is a fool for talking about things he knows nothing about.”

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.