There was a tweet doing the rounds yesterday that I kept thinking about. It kept bugging me until I gave up trying to resist complaining about the media in New Zealand again and sat to write this. It’s from the anonymous account @Suitandtie9999. and summarises very recent examples of how New Zealand’s media class protects the political Left while pretending to be neutral.
“If the former Vice President of National, Act or NZ First had appeared on RNZ and said it wasn’t safe to talk about experiences within the party — it would be leading the 6pm news for a week!
In just the last 3 days….
In just the last 3 days….
Willie Jackson launched racist attacks at Ryan Bridge: ‘I know you’re trying to write off all the Māori’s right?’ and ‘You’ve been trying to do that for a while now.’
Marama Davidson shared a video of a person who wants to stand for parliament that has the caption ‘I know it will be hard not to punch David Seymour and Winston.’
Martyn Bradbury called for people to spit in politicians’ food: ‘If you are serving a National, ACT and NZF MP food, make sure you spit in that food.’
And Eru Kapa-Kingi has said he can’t share stories about Te Pāti Māori in order to keep himself and whānau safe.
All these incidents involve the political left and the press gallery and media in general have failed to report a single one.”
Read that again. Every single one of those events should have been a news story. They certainly would have been if it were Cam Slater calling for people to spit in the food of Labour/Green/Te Pāti Māori or Shane Jones who shared a video of a prospective candidate saying she would struggle not to punch Chris Hipkins and Chloe Swarbrick in the face. The incidents involve racial discrimination, political intimidation, incitement to violence, and claims of unsafe internal culture. In a functioning democracy with a watchdog media who reported equally as critically about both sides, those would be leading bulletins.
But they weren’t. Because our media class isn’t a watchdog, it’s a lapdog.
We all know that media bias exists, but New Zealand’s press gallery takes it to a new level. They no longer see their bias because they no longer recognise anything outside of it. They are locked into a great pretence of neutrality.
They’ve built entire careers inside an ideological fishbowl. They swim in the same X/Twitter feeds, quote the same activists, attended the same university journalism schools, and reinforce the same worldviews.
The 2020 official Press Gallery photo with Speaker Trevor Mallard.
Every fresh crop of reporters from Auckland, Massey, or Canterbury’s media studies programmes are taught the same catechism: you are not just observers, you are educators. They are told their job is not merely to report, but to uplift, explain, and “contextualise.” The result is that they firmly believe it is their duty to guide the public toward the “correct” conclusions.
And when everyone in the newsroom shares that creed, they don’t even realise they’re doing it. They think they’re simply telling the truth rather than filtering it.
What is most painful about it all is how transparent the failure of journalism is. The double standards are so blatant it’s almost boring at this point.
If an ACT or NZ First staffer said they couldn’t speak out about party “dysfunction” for “safety” reasons, the media would be running rolling coverage, breathless analysis, and deep dives into “toxic culture.” If a National MP had racially attacked a journalist live on air, they’d be forced to resign before close of business. As I said, if a right-wing blogger called for people to spit in Labour MPs’ food, we’d have condemnations from every newsroom in the country. And jokes about punching members of Parliament, ministers of the Crown, would have triggered the formation of an emergency media panel on “the rise of right-wing violence.”
But when the Left does these things, it’s all mysteriously quiet. No wall-to-wall coverage. No think-pieces about “hate speech.” No hysterical press conferences. Just silence. Let’s all pretend it isn’t happening.
This is not oversight. It is editorial intent. It’s the soft bigotry of ideological alignment: they’re our people, so we don’t destroy them.
View from the press gallery in the debating chamber
The truth is, the people shaping New Zealand’s newsrooms are no longer reporters, they’re missionaries. They’ve confused journalism with activism. They genuinely believe their role is to civilise the unenlightened.
They see themselves as moral gatekeepers in a battle against “misinformation” and “populism.” They’re here to correct you, not to inform you. And they will suppress any inconvenient fact that might strengthen what they’ve been told is “the wrong side of history.”
They don’t even realise that this condescension is the very thing driving the public away. They think the problem is us. The peasants. The Facebook mums. The working-class men. The small-town voters who don’t read The Spinoff or worship at the altar of Stuff’s climate desk.
The arrogance is suffocating.
Tracy Watkins, editor of The Post and Sunday Star-Times, wrote a piece a few days ago that perfectly illustrates the problem. In it, she quotes research showing that people dislike the word “journalism” not because they hate the word, but because it now evokes partisanship and elitism. Well, yes. That much is correct. But she interprets this as a branding problem, a matter of “fatigue” around the word “democracy,” and suggests that the public’s mistrust has been cynically stoked by politicians.
But that isn’t it. The problem is not semantic. It’s not a misunderstanding. People distrust the media because they can see with their own eyes that the press no longer plays fair. They see stories buried when they embarrass the Left and inflated when they damage the Right. They notice that questions about Labour, the Greens, or Te Pāti Māori are treated as “distractions,” while any stumble from the Government is treated as scandal. This isn’t “fatigue”; it’s recognition. The public has clocked the bias that editors either can’t see or won’t admit.
When Watkins insists that journalists are “challenging worldviews” and that the backlash is driven by echo chambers, she misses the obvious: the media is the biggest echo chamber of all. The journalists she defends aren’t being punished for telling the truth, they’re being called out for manufacturing it. Until editors like her stop mistaking criticism for ignorance, and stop congratulating themselves for being “watchdogs of democracy” while guarding only one side, trust will keep collapsing. And no amount of wordplay will fix it.
Take this morning’s political coverage on Stuff: “Labour’s secret bold plan and Luxon’s unpopularity: the Left’s 2026 gamble.”
Click to view
It reads like an internal comms memo for Labour HQ. The entire piece is structured around rehabilitating Chris Hipkins and floating the fantasy that Labour is a credible alternative to the “unpopular” government.
There’s breathless speculation about “a bold new plan,” plenty of ink spilled on Luxon’s “problems,” but zero mention of the chaos, disunity, or radicalism on the Left. Not a word about Willie Jackson’s racism, Marama’s sharing of violent rhetoric, or Te Pāti Māori’s implosions. No reflection on why Labour’s support cratered in the first place.
The narrative gets seeded and by 9am every newsfeed in the country is humming the same tune: ‘Luxon unpopular. Labour re-energised. Voters have doubts.’
It’s rhetorical choreography. This is what narrative control looks like. It’s not just what’s printed; it’s what is omitted.
I often am asked why and how this happens? The answer feels like it should be complex, but it is quite simple. Ultimately it is because New Zealand’s media is now one small inbred ecosystem. Reporters at Stuff, NZ Herald, TVNZ, RNZ, and The Spinoff date each other, move between outlets, and retweet one another’s takes. Editors hire former activists and PR staffers from Labour, the Greens, and NGOs. Public-funded journalism grants go overwhelmingly to progressive topics like “climate justice,” “Māori perspectives,” “gender equity,” and so-called “anti-disinformation.” Every “diversity” initiative is ideological, not intellectual. They want different identities, not different ideas.
So the circle tightens. No one challenges the orthodoxy because everyone is invested in maintaining it. When you live in a world where everyone agrees that Luxon is boring, Seymour is dangerous, and Winston is “problematic,” you stop realising those are opinions, not facts.
There are dire consequences for this. When the media chooses sides, it breaks democracy. Without genuine scrutiny, the Left becomes complacent, arrogant, and corrupt. Without fair coverage, the Right becomes paranoid and resentful. And the public stops trusting anyone.
That’s where we are now. A nation where half the country assumes every front page is propaganda and they’re not wrong.
Think about the cost of that. It results in the public tuning out or turning to increasingly fringe sources that have their own credibility issues. This is how republics rot. Slowly, smugly, and under the approving gaze of journalists who think they’re saving the world.
It’s fashionable to talk about “saving journalism.” Insiders usually focus on optimising digital platforms and investing more in video content. But let’s be honest: the version of journalism we have isn’t worth saving.
What we need is media that tells uncomfortable truths without fear or favour. That means independent platforms. It means journalists who aren’t terrified of their editors, Twitter mobs, or their own Instagram friends. It means audiences willing to pay for honesty rather than outrage.
In the meantime, if the media won’t hold both sides to account, then we must.
Every time they bury a story, we must dig it up.
Every time they twist a headline, we must correct it.
Every time they anoint a saviour, we must scrutinise them.
A democracy that can’t see itself clearly is one that’s already half asleep and I fear that in our slumber New Zealand will slide further into a decline we won’t be able to retrieve it from.
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
23 comments:
Agreed Ani. One only has to experience the apathy shown when one tries to illustrate both sides of a story to realise how serious a problem the media has created.
Unfortunately NZs media is corrupt on both side of the political spectrum.
Mike Hoskings nakedly supports the NZ oligopolies, denigrating any suggestion the government should fix market distortions and lack of policing / consequences.
When Prof Robert McCullough exposed the corruption of the banking insurance, supermarket, and electricity price colluders; Sean Plunkett set about blatantly and clumsily attempting to discredit him. Not to worry, the failing platform will disappear soon.
Ryan Bridge's interview of Simon Watts was a breath of fresh air. Bridge made Watts look like the dishonest manipulator he so obviously is.
Bridge's interview of the 'head below water' Brooke Van Velden exposed her obvious incompetence.
When VV tried to blame the terms of reference for the failing covid inquiry, Bridge reminded VV she is responsible for the terms of reference. Bridge also challenged VV's ridiculous assertion the inquiry should not be adversarial or find blame.
IT'S NO WONDER NICOLA WILLIS IS AVOIDING A BRIDGE INTERVIEW.
This isn’t new. Remember the Kim Hill interview with Posey Parker where Parker claimed that billionaires were giving dark funding to the trans lobby, and then Kim Hill had the temerity to ask Parker which billionaires were doing that? Outrageous! Saints be praised, Parker refused to answer that gotcha.
Or the one where an ex-tobacco lobbyist got elected to parliament from a list and then rolls back world-leading tobacco reform. There is no sign of that in the papers this week, people would be outraged that nothing has been done about that!
Well said Ani; a very clear exposition about what has been wrong with NZ journalism for a number of years, about 10 in my estimation and it came about with changes in editors to some extent and the rise of 'wokeness'. I can recall letters of mine critical of maoris being published a decade ago which would not be given space now, with the letters' page now listing restrictions on topics that are forbidden. It is censorship and reflects the heavy bias in items presented as news, but which are actually opinions. Even the Otago Daily Times which used to stand out from the herd has been captured by the 'woke' with Garrick Tremaine silenced. As a pack NZ journalists are a disgrace.
Ani, great piece. The left are in real tatters, under scrutiny where they thrive the most, education, media and politics.
Regarding the media, pretty much everyone knows it's very biased to the left and had any center politician been caught picking his nose or swearing etc the media would be calling for their resignation. It is therefore their highly biased and confused state which can benefit the good parties in the center right as we all pretty much get the real news from accurate sources which are truthful without bias. Also the fatigue of being proven wrong pretty much at every turn for the msm adds to their lack of credibility....well what's left of their credibility.
Ani’s right to say our media missionaries didn’t appear by accident — they were trained for it. The problem starts in the lecture theatre long before it reaches the newsroom.
At Massey, AUT and Canterbury, the “journalism” degrees still nod toward the practical: media law, shorthand, interviewing, the five W’s. But those are the side dishes. The main course is ideology — and the flavour is unmistakably activist. Students are immersed in modules on decolonising journalism, climate justice reporting, critical discourse analysis, and representing marginalised voices. The idea of journalism as neutral observation has been replaced by journalism as moral intervention.
You can trace the drift through the academics themselves. One lecturer’s doctoral thesis argued that New Zealand news should be “re-centred” around Te Tiriti o Waitangi, redefining objectivity as “cultural awareness.” Another built an entire PhD around “environmental communication and climate-induced displacement in the Pacific,” framing journalists as “agents of social change.” A third examined war and migration coverage through “postcolonial lenses” — meaning that every international report becomes a study in Western guilt. collectively they’ve turned journalism schools into finishing academies for social activism.
Talk to anyone supervising newsroom interns and they’ll tell you the same story: most arrive without the faintest idea how to structure a straight court brief or crime lead. Or follow the style book. They can deconstruct a headline through Foucault, but not write one that answers who, what, when, where and why. Their working model of a reporter works for The Spinoff.
This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a culture. When the educators see journalism through the lens of oppression and “decolonisation,” they produce graduates who see every fact as a potential injustice to be corrected. The newsroom then becomes an extension of the seminar room — full of people who think their job is to uplift, contextualise, and guide the public toward the “right” conclusions.
That’s how you end up with a press gallery that treats ideology as integrity and activism as accuracy. The watchdog hasn’t fallen asleep; it’s been reprogrammed.
A great summary. I think the 2020 Press Gallery photo tells the story. The push-back is gaining momentum but the legacy media just keeps digging faster. They don't need any encouragement to ultimately self-destruct as their vitriolic nonsence worsens and their owners' balance sheets print more red ink.
The NZ media has been corrupted by the millions of dollars handed to them by the Ardern government - start with the obligation to deliberately lie to us by taking PIJF funding, by taking the $350M to broadcast the Maori "translations" of the Covid messages, and propping up failing media companies with another $50M during covid.
I am amazed at the number of people that talk about what they say on TVNZ news !
Gullible ? Indoctrinated ?
Did they never learn anything about Goebbels propaganda ?
To anon at 7.29 am. The media were all over the rolling back of tobacco reforms. It wasn't world leading it was just plain daft. If you were born after a certain date you wouldn't be able to buy tobacco. The sort of scenario of a 40 year old sending a 41 year old into a shop to buy cigarettes. It would have created a large black market.
The last 40 years has seen a remarkably successful attack on the NZ public’s psyche. Working quietly behind the scenes, and very effectively in the education arena, the organisers have ensured that the average person’s understanding of the country and indeed the world has been remorselessly twisted and distorted. A key inflection point occurred in 2020 with the catastrophic impact of the Covid scam. At that point we began to see what now is known as mass psychosis, affecting almost the whole population. The reinforcement act of course is ‘climate change’, designed to activate the concept ‘you will own nothing and be happy’. And the most important activists in this national tragedy? Why, the journalists of course.
The phenomena you’re articulating is Critical Media Theory, which is part of Critical Theory.
Critical Theory has nothing to do with Critical Thinking, but everything to do with Western Marxism.
I’d post a link that breaks it down succinctly, but your rules are no links to other sites.
If a link is an integral part of a discussion on the topic at hand, I will let it through.
I wrote about Critical Media Theory here:
https://nominister.wordpress.com/2025/10/02/critical-media-theory-the-ideological-architecture-of-narrative-control/
Yes, unfortunately many academics at NZ universities all about "lenses", which just means cherry picking evidence to support predetermined beliefs. Such intellectual laziness then rewarded by equally average administrators. Those Who Know Better simply don't rank these academics, regardless of their position and status.
Excellent article, Ani. You have described the Far Left bias of our mainstream (so-called) media very well.
TV 1 is basically the opposition broadcaster.
A huge and fundamental problem is the yawning gap between 'us' and 'them'. I am at odds with so many of my former friends and even my family , as I read you - and others like you, but they read something entirely different - there is no middle ground within in which to have any kind of discussion. It is really sad and seriously alienating. When we meet we have to keep to 'the weather' or risk permanent breakdown.
Once the country’s largest newsroom, Stuff now feels like a ghost ship on auto pilot like the good vessel Manawanui.
A glance at its digital content tells the story: Christchurch-heavy coverage, barely a flicker from Wellington or Auckland. That’s not editorial vision—it’s geography. Much of the diminished senior team are apparently based in Canterbury, and with regional sub-editing hubs dismantled, the flow of balanced national coverage has collapsed.
Copy-sharing arrangements between mastheads and Stuff.co.nz have been disrupted by business plans, leaving gaping holes that an “internet trawling” team now fills with reworked wire and social media copy, scraped RNZ pieces, and “syndicated opinion.”
It’s a patch job dressed up as journalism.
The culture that once built careers on accuracy now rewards emotional alignment.
And when the walls start falling in, the fallback is outsourcing. RNZ’s trickle of shared copy now props up Stuff’s daily newsfeed—a quiet admission that the company can no longer sustain national coverage on its own.
Over at the NZ Herald, the story’s the same tune in a different key. Cost rationalisation, staff exits, and consolidation across platforms have blurred once-clear lines of reporting.
The newsroom has thinned to the point where “premium” paywall content is often just recycled analysis, padded with RNZ or AP feeds.
The old Herald was authoritative; the new one is anxious, shapeless, and self-referential.
In both cases, institutional knowledge and experience have been replaced by stylised activism, that has not escaped public scrutiny .
What’s left behind is a weary newsroom culture. News once built on shoe-leather and scepticism now arrives via the empathy filter—scripted outrage for an ever-narrowing audience.
The mainstream media’s crisis is no longer financial—it’s existential.
It has lost any semblance of craft, its connection with ordinary readers, and its sense of purpose.
Where journalism once held power to account, it now seeks to protect ideology it shares with the woke and the ‘progressive’.
Where editors once demanded clarity, they now settle for vibes.
And where newsrooms once served the public, they now serve a selected vision.
The result is what we see every day: an industry that’s dying from lack of meaning.
The RNZ factor
What’s quietly keeping Stuff upright is not innovation or public trust — it’s our tax dollars.
Through a content-sharing arrangement, RNZ now feeds dome publicly funded news into Stuff’s content pipeline. The same stories appear across both platforms.
It’s an extraordinary setup: a private company that gutted its newsroom now leaning on a state broadcaster to fill gaps. The taxpayer bankrolls the journalism, Stuff harvests the clicks.
Even more ironic is that Stuff and the Herald both draw from RNZ’s publicly funded work, meaning two of the country’s largest for-profit outlets are, some would say, living off the same state-subsidised supply line they once claimed to compete with.
It’s welfare journalism in all but name.
You’re great Ani. If you do read these comments, and I hope you do, you might appreciate Bari Weiss’ recent letter to her new employees at CBS. Hopefully she will lead a change in the US for a fairer media and I hope we will too.
For Anonymous 7:29, I’m not sure if Posey Parker would have been listened to even if she had told them, but it is common knowledge today that billionaires like Martine (Martin) Rothblatt and Peter Buffet financially support transgender activism. There are a handful of other billionaires too as well as the still-not-defunct USAID, Open Society and of course, our favourite celebrities. The transgender movement in the west seems to have five billionaires for every one Elon Musk...
To anon @ 5.53
Thanks for your input, I found your views interesting.
Imo stuff have signed their own death warrant with their inability to accurately read the room. On the odd occasion I go there , the experience is shoddy - ads pop up everywhere, other ads pop up trying to tell me that they are honest, trustworthy non biased journos (that's particularly funny and Incredibly disturbing if they actually believe that, but that's the far left for you), more ads pop up wanting money from me. Let me tell you this, hell will freeze over before I give any untrustworthy, biased far left publication a cent.
But it's good to know that they are exhibiting all the hall marks of being in its death throes. Pull the tax payer funding and....good riddance.
Real honest trustworthy non biased journalism is found elsewhere.
Sometimes, Ani , without fear or favour means, for this current lot of nz journos, producing an analysis that meanders through a barren landscape, leaving the reader wondering where the main points have wandered to. Take long time nz herald political journo audrey young today for instance:
Somewhere in the thousands of words Audrey Young devoted to MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi — In the Thick of Māori Party Troubles, there’s meant to be a point. We just can’t find it.
It’s a familiar Herald genre: the “inside the Beehive” profile that promises insight but instead offers a warm bath of context. You can almost see the effort: all that painstaking research, all those well-behaved quotes from Gerry Brownlee and Willie Jackson — yet, when the steam clears, there’s nothing left on the mirror.
What begins as a character sketch of Kapa-Kingi — the ostensibly capable, gently-spoken pragmatist of Te Pāti Māori — slowly unravels into a biography padded with committee minutes and family history.
By the end, the only mystery solved is why readers no longer finish political analysis: because it never actually analyses.
The skeleton of the story is simple enough. Kapa-Kingi was demoted by a leadership clique allergic to dissent. Her approach — working with the institution rather than waging symbolic war on it — was never going to sit comfortably with the Tamihere–Waititi axis that runs Te Pāti Māori like a royal family’s inheritance. .
That’s the point Young dances around but never lands. Instead, she gives us a thousand words of polite biography and soft-focus admiration — the journalistic equivalent of a portrait hung slightly off-centre.
The reader senses tension, ego, and factional paranoia, but the writer won’t connect the dots.
Harold Evans, the great newsroom surgeon, called this sort of writing “a smother of background.” It’s the death of clarity by reverence — the moment analysis becomes a form of avoidance.
The real story here isn’t Kapa-Kingi’s CV or her son’s activism.
It’s the party’s internal contradiction: torn between its performative radicals and those, like her, who think there’s another way to operate. That’s where the real “trouble” lies.
But to write that plainly would require a little risk, a little courage — and perhaps an editor willing to let the facts collide with the vibes.
It's a sign of the decline when even fish and chip shops will not use newspapers in fear of the fact that they may contaminate their food!
“Every time they anoint a saviour, we must scrutinise them.”
True, how true, Ani. Just look at the motley crew of tablecloth brandishing MPs of the greens.
When a convicted thief was moved on, she was replaced by a doddering ex-Wellington city mayor whose ambition was to have more pedestrian crossings on rural Wairarapa roads. Then immigrant abuser Darleen Tana, who suddenly switched pronouns from singular to plural, was replaced by someone who claimed to exist in the plural. Now that it has quit, it’s been replaced by the horrible sight of mamil (middle-aged man in Lycra) with a megaphone — the perfect reinforcement for Julie Ann genter.
And let’s not start on the rest still taking up space in parliament on the taxpayers’ tab. Next year’s elections, Ani, I look forward to a forensic examination of the list MPs the greens put up. It will make for interesting reading.
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