Professor Robert MacCulloch: The NZ Herald's Board Should Be Fired.....

The NZ Herald's Board Should Be Fired. Yes, it does have "editorial independence": the editor & staff are free to write biased nonsense.

The NZ Herald's owner, NZME, has expressed "grave concerns" about a potential takeover being mounted by a chap called Jim Grenon. Is the owner concerned that a takeover may end its outrageous bias?

Hilariously, Board Chair Barbara Chapman, who is also a Director of Big Bank Monopoly BNZ, as well sitting on the Board of the NZ Initiative, along with the Chair of Oligopoly Foodstuffs North Island, says she has concerns about the effect of such a takeover on the Herald's "editorial independence" & "integrity". She says, “Radical disruption is not the answer”. Yes, the motto in NZ is still, "steady as she sinks". I've written quite a few Opinion Articles for the NZ Herald over the years but have largely stopped. Why? Editorial Bias. It got so bad that I wrote to the Editor who never bothered replying, even though they have tried to increase their readership by running a bunch of my articles. My letter said:

Dear Alanah,

I understand you are currently the Editor of the Herald after Murray was promoted. I’d like to raise with you a problem that has led me to conclude I should no longer write for the Herald. For example, my most recent submission [attached, called "How our Kingdom of Kindness lost the way"] .. was rejected, whereas the article below arguing the opposite from another University academic who took a "left perspective" was printed around the same time [that article was called "By Doing Politics Differently, Jacinda Ardern Saved Labour"].

It is not a charge I level lightly, but there is no other explanation .. I'm happy to provide more examples making the point if you would like. If you would like to address this problem then I would be most grateful. By the way, I strive to write from a "critic and conscience" non-partisan perspective, giving both left and right a hard time if they are proposing bad policy. However I've found that the Herald is not letting me to do so.

Best wishes Robert"

The Herald's bias got me into trouble, since the Nats started asking me why I hated them so much, writing critiques of them and not Labour. The truth was that the critiques of Labour were rejected. The article referred to in the letter above was sent before Election 2023. It was called, "How our Kingdom of Kindness lost the way" & ended with the line, "The Kiwi story these past years is one of our leaders snatching an extraordinary economic defeat from the jaws of the people’s amazing Covid victory. It reminds us that competency is important, not just kindness". The Herald blocked publication of such articles questioning the failed experiment of Jacindanomics and her "kindness" brand before the election. Sure, it publishes columns by Richard Prebble, but not from folks like me who they shut out. And I don't believe they perceive Richard as the same kind of threat to the status quo "narrative" as the likes of me, who use more strident language than old school, gentlemanly Prebs.

So for the sake of independent thought & integrity & non-partisanship, the Board of the NZ Herald should be cleaned out, and a far more diverse range of journalists & editors hired who do not suffer from "group think" and who don't all write the same kind of way and with similar styles and similar underlying political beliefs. Chapman's line that the Editor presently has "independence" from the Board is meaningless nothingness.

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.