Penn Raine: Do RNZ feel ‘unsafe’ now?

It used to be that RNZ represented the grown ups in the room. Before I switched them off permanently I respected the presenters and their content as dependable sources of fact and analysis, put together by people more mature and astute than I. Just last week though we learn that RNZ are hurt and distressed at their ex-news boss’s ‘scathing’ report.

I’m just going to say it.

Cry-babies.

The hand wringing over Richard Sutherland’s hurty words may not be all performative, of course. Six years of swigging the PIJF and its shots of activist mandates, and shilling for Labour may have embedded a culture that believed it truly was the country’ s cultural commissar.

The Opposition’s propaganda arm has been irksome for years now, showing up as a keenness to tell us what to think about and what to approve of. At best it was the adoption of a superior moral tone too redolent of that despised creature, the classroom goody-good. At worst it was the obsession with diversity and an obvious intention to scorn anything that could be associated with straight white males or the learning of the Enlightenment – just for starters.

There are of course more specific irritants such as RNZ’s refusal to allow any counter argument to the burning planet mantra thatare causing so much distress to our young people. The failure to challenge our Government’s non-acknowledgement of UK’s Cass Report that compellingly casts doubt on the medical and moral wisdom of chemical ‘gender affirming care’ for children. And the determination to never raise the fact of Hamas’s human shield policy in Gaza.

Speculate a moment on the attitude of RNZ employees towards Concert programme staffers, those supporters of Eurocentric wrong-tune and oppressor-types like Beethoven and Bach. Do they shamefully inhabit the outcasts’ corner in the tearoom? Are they frog-marched to de-colonistion seminars? Given the side-eye at the water cooler?

Perhaps there are factions within the 550 plus employees and Sutherland’s comments in his report which exposed a culture of ‘blame-shifting’, ‘low ambition’ and suggested that ‘some people shouldn’t be on air’ reflect the pinch-points of his experience in RNZ.

And if so, might he not be responding to his former colleagues’ fragility with, ‘Cry me a river’?

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.