Karl du Fresne: What privilege sounds like in 2025

We hear a lot about privilege these days. We’re told it’s an economic and political weapon that an affluent, selfish, male-dominated white capitalist society uses to keep disadvantaged minority groups in their place.

Wrong. Privilege in New Zealand in 2025 is the phenomenon that enables a small, effete and highly politicised media elite, cushioned by public funding, to capture and monopolise a crucial organ of public opinion and seek to influence the course of public debate.

If you want to know what privilege sounds like, just listen to RNZ. Privilege is an ad-free radio network that panders to your prejudices and stokes your biases; that caters, in effect, to entrenched left-wing bigotry. RNZ and its shrinking audience embody this privilege.

As a publicly funded radio station, RNZ has an obligation to cater to the tastes, interests and opinions of all New Zealanders, not just to a pampered minority caste. RNZ makes no attempt to honour that principle; in fact, hasn’t done so for almost as long as I can remember.

I was amused to read a Stuff interview with RNZ CEO Paul Thompson a while ago in which he suggested RNZ needed to stop trying to be “all things to all people”.

That’s a joke. The truth is that RNZ means nothing to the vast majority of New Zealanders. It serves a steadily diminishing minority audience consisting largely of ageing listeners who hold what are misleadingly labelled as “progressive” political views. It rewards them with content that mirrors and reinforces their smugly virtuous world view.

Thompson has had innumerable opportunities to correct this but hasn’t. On the contrary, he continues to send signals that RNZ will continue down the same blind alley. Key appointments, such as that of Guyon Espiner to take over as host of Midday Report from January, serve as a contemptuous “up yours” to RNZ’s critics and the tens of thousands of listeners who have abandoned it.

RNZ has made itself so irrelevant to the majority of New Zealanders that many no longer realise it even exists. It has achieved this ignominious own-goal through decades of carefully refining its content so as to exclude virtually anyone whose opinions and interests are not consistent with those of its own employees.

Now it’s paying the price as its listeners fall away to the point where even RNZ’s bosses have to concede that the organisation has lost its way – something obvious for a long time to everyone except RNZ itself and its privileged supporters. Even in the midst of the anguished self-analysis prompted by tumbling ratings and a highly critical recent report written by one of its own former key executives, RNZ carefully avoided confronting the damning issue of its all-pervasive editorial bias and the harm this has done to its credibility.

It can hardly be coincidental that RNZ’s audience has declined over the same period that this bias has become steadily more overt and pronounced – something Thompson has seemed either unwilling or powerless to do anything about.

RNZ’s listeners are privileged in more ways than one. They not only enjoy a diet of information and entertainment that can be relied on not to challenge their entrenched perceptions (rather like a broadcast version of Britain’s achingly woke Guardian newspaper), but thanks to the involuntary largesse of the taxpayer they are spared the aural torture of having to listen to commercials. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who listen to RNZ’s main competitor, NewstalkZB.

The fact that NewstalkZB has reversed the former dominance of the state broadcaster and now far out-performs it in the ratings, despite the deterrent effect of intrusive, wall-to-wall advertising, surely says something. But has anyone at Radio New Zealand House noticed?

Somewhere along the line it seems to have escaped the state broadcaster that a publicly funded radio station should try to reflect the interests, opinions and values of society at large. An alien tuning into a show such as Morning Report would never guess that New Zealanders historically have leaned more to the right than to the left. For 29 of the past 50 years they have elected National or National-led governments, including the present one. Does it occur to RNZ presenters and producers that their own values, opinions and preoccupations are way out of line with those of the people they ostensibly serve? Apparently not. They are blinded by their privilege.

Commercial radio is the flipside of the privilege enjoyed by RNZ and its listeners. NewstalkZB’s audience, which now represents the majority of New Zealand radio listeners (that is to say, those whom RNZ appears uninterested in catering for) have to endure a ceaseless barrage of intrusive and mostly inane commercial content. This is the reverse of privilege. These listeners are effectively an underclass, banished to a netherworld where they are condemned to aural torment.

I suspect the bosses of the old Radio New Zealand regarded it as a great relief when the state broadcasting network was broken up in the 1990s and the formerly government-owned commercial stations were flogged off to the private sector. This meant RNZ was freed from the obligation of catering to the hoi-polloi, with all their vulgarian tastes, and could concentrate on pandering to its preferred target market.

In the years since, a pervasive monoculture has evolved at RNZ. This is characteristic of publicly owned broadcasting organisations elsewhere in the world. Those at the top appoint like-thinking people to positions of influence with the result that the monoculture becomes self-perpetuating.

(Here I will insert my standard qualification that there are many employees at RNZ, including journalists, who do a conscientious, honourable job. It’s also true that not all RNZ programmes have a political spin. Nonetheless, a leftist groupthink permeates most of what RNZ does.)

None of this should be taken as suggesting that RNZ should change to reflect a conservative or right-wing agenda, which would simply trade one bias for another and leave us no better off. The only way for RNZ to restore editorial credibility is by reverting to a position of strict editorial balance, fairness and neutrality. This does not preclude taking a hard line with politicians and asking tough questions, but it does require that the approach should be consistent across the entire political spectrum regardless of producers’ and interviewers’ own prejudices.

In the meantime, listeners alienated by RNZ have the option of signing up for membership of a peculiar cult called the Mike Hosking Breakfast. They may not share the host’s fascination with strange things like Formula One racing and American football and they may not like the impression he conveys of never in his life having experienced a moment’s self-doubt. But at least they can get an alternative view of national and world affairs – one not available to them from the state broadcasting organisation that they pay for with the tax on their hard-earned wages.

Actually, quite a few listeners (I’m one of them) don’t want any spin from either the right or the left. They would rather be presented with straight, unfiltered information and left to make up their own minds. But even if some of Hosking’s listeners don’t agree with his conservative slant, they must concede that as the employee of a privately owned media outlet, he’s entitled to say whatever he likes, within legal limits.

That defence is not available to RNZ, which as a taxpayer-owned entity has a responsibility to ensure its coverage of news and current affairs is neutral, fair and balanced – an obligation that RNZ constantly disregards, with the obvious approval of its board and management. This is an abuse of power, pure and simple.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He occasionally blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.com where this article was sourced.