Karl du Fresne: Death Wish 2025

I did something last Sunday that I hadn’t done for probably a year or more. I listened to RNZ’s Mediawatch. 

There was a time when I tuned in to the show every week. But as with so much RNZ content, I grew disenchanted to the point where I simply decided I was better off without it.

For a start, it has never been clear why we were supposed to regard Mediawatch presenter Colin Peacock, who has hosted the show since about 1890 (or so it sometimes seems; actually it was 2007), as an arbiter of journalism standards. He previously worked for the BBC, which would impress the impressionable at RNZ, but as far as I can tell he had precious little on-the-ground experience of journalism in New Zealand. (Then again, his predecessor, Russell Brown, whose background was in student radio and the punk music fanzine Rip It Up, had even less.)

I’ve had a bit to do with Peacock and I have no doubt he’s fundamentally a decent person, but several things about him irritate me: his air of omniscient certitude as he sits in judgment each week, his excruciatingly tedious and self-indulgent interviews about issues of interest to only a tiny handful of media insiders, and his conspicuous tendency to spare his employer the same holier-than-thou scrutiny he brings to bear on other media organisations. But what finally put me off altogether was Peacock’s habit of gratuitously sniping at NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking.

I’m no fan of Hosking and don’t listen to him, but that’s neither here nor there. For Peacock to use his privileged, taxpayer-funded position as a platform for petulant attacks on a rival (and one who shows RNZ up by pulling a much bigger audience than the state broadcaster’s Morning Report) is an abuse of power for which he should have been pulled into line long ago by his boss, Paul Thompson. (It goes without saying that Peacock’s apparent obsession with Hosking is a backhanded compliment to the NewstalkZB host and unlikely to keep him awake at night.)

But that’s all by way of a preamble. Last Sunday’s episode of Mediawatchincluded a telling item on the recent annual conference of the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ), which represents academic teachers of journalism. Included in the proceedings was a panel discussion on “Journalism and the Far Right”, which examined the supposedly baneful influence of conservative media outlets and commentators “in New Zealand and beyond”.

Strangely enough, I don’t recall the nation’s journalism tutors ever voicing similar alarm about the influence of the far left, despite it being all-pervasive in the media for years. This is because they are the far left and regard their ideologically based concept of journalism as the norm – indeed, the only morally correct approach.

The conference session highlighted the extent to which journalistic paradigms have been upended. The model that prevailed for decades – that of balance and neutrality – has been trashed in favour of one that’s blatantly politicised and sees journalism as a moral crusade driven by left-wing fixations such as identity politics, hate speech (so called) and climate change.

Under this new model, objectivity is disdainfully dismissed as “that old shibboleth” (a phrase reportedly used earlier this year in a radio interview by Massey University journalism associate professor James Hollings, one of the conference organisers). Balance and impartiality, principles that characterised the mainstream media for decades, are now dismissed as tools that serve the interests of the right.

Journalists are instead encouraged to choose, on the basis of their own often narrow and rigid world views, which issues should be covered and which should be ignored. Similarly, they are entitled under the new paradigm to decide which groups and individuals should be allowed to contribute to public debate. The rest can be marginalised, demonised or excluded.

We saw this elitist, exclusionary approach to journalism in full, rampant cry during the term of the second Ardern-led government, slyly assisted by the shameful buy-off of the media under the innocuously named Public Interest Journalism Fund.

There are now occasional encouraging signs that that the degradation of traditional journalism values may be abating, at least in some mainstream media outlets. There seems an increasing willingness, albeit a grudging one, to cover stories that were previously untouchable and to give space and airtime to voices and opinions that were formerly deemed beyond the Pale. The instinct for self-preservation may finally be kicking in as audience numbers and newspaper readership continue their precipitous decline and opinion surveys confirm a devastating loss of trust in media organisations.

Unfortunately none of this seems to have registered with the cloistered custodians of journalism training, who display a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. Death Wish 2025 would have been an appropriate alternative name for their recent gathering.

The lineup of participants in the JEANZ discussion tells you all you need to know about the ideological tone of the event. Speakers included another Massey associate professor, Sean Phelan, who first came to this blog’s attention for his impenetrable Marxist gibberish in 2009; Prof Mohan Dutta, also of Massey, who deserves some sort of celebrity status for the unhinged fanaticism of his writing (and who never responded to my invitation to debate with me in 2023); Nicky Hager (say no more); Stuff’s Paula Penfold, perhaps best remembered for her conspiracy-obsessed and deeply flawed 2022 propaganda documentary Fire and Fury; and political reporter Marc Daalder of Newsroom, who can unfailingly be relied on to promote “progressive” ideas and seek to discredit policies and politicians he disapproves of.

Where was the conservative voice on the panel? There was none; not even the fig leaf of a token one. In that respect the discussion accurately mirrored the mainstream media’s abandonment of its commitment to balance. In the warped perspective of the academic left, “conservative” now equates with “far right”. Perhaps someone should point out the inconvenient truth that New Zealanders in 2023 elected a centre-right government, as they have done in the majority of elections during the modern era.

It’s worth noting too that although this was a conference of journalism educators, at least two of the panellists (Phelan and Dutta) are not – and to my knowledge never have been – journalists, while Hager could more accurately be classified as a professional activist, given that he has never pretended to be balanced or impartial.

Not one of the participants conformed even remotely to most New Zealanders’ ideal of journalistic neutrality. Yet these are the people we’ve entrusted with the training of the next generation of journalists – in which case the question must be asked: is the damage now irreversible? Are we living in a post-journalism era?

Of course Mediawatch asked none of these questions, preferring to report the discussion without comment or analysis. Given Peacock’s usual predilection for interposing his own opinion, this could only be interpreted as a sign that he saw nothing to disagree with. No surprises there.

We heard brief audio clips from some of the participants. Phelan, who is Irish, sounded as if he was hyper-ventilating as he squawked about the urgent need to call out what he called the “far-right political project”. Dutta, who is Indian, was quoted as saying that the right-wing media was an ideological project with colonial roots (well, of course he would say that; pernicious colonialism is at the root of everything bad). Daalder, who is American, lamented that aspects of extremist news had made their way into “mainstream pulpits”. Ring the alarm bells!

All this is rich, given that what we’re now seeing in the alternative online media is simply a natural and inevitable backlash against the overwhelming preponderance of the far left. No one should be in the least surprised that media outlets such as the Platform, the Centrist and Reality Check Radio (none of which I follow, incidentally) sprang into life as a reaction against the silencing of conservative voices and the shutting down of legitimate dissent.

It should be pointed out that there was never any need for alternative platforms in the past, since the mainstream media functioned as a “broad church” that made room for all voices. People like the JEANZ educators gleefully danced on the grave of that admirable model and now have the gall to wail about the resulting polarisation and loss of public trust in the media.

On one level, it’s tempting to dismiss the over-excited participants at the JEANZ conference as players in a piece of absurdist theatre, acting out their paranoia far removed from the real world. Regrettably it’s not that simple. Academic courses remain the mandatory gateway to careers in the media, and as long as journalism training is controlled by extreme leftist zealots and charlatans (for charlatans is what some of them are, in my opinion), the media industry has no prospect of ever regaining the respect and trust it commanded in the past.

Media companies cannot escape culpability for this. In the distant past I served on an industry liaison committee that maintained oversight of the journalism course at what is now Massey University and took an active part in the appointment of tutors. If such consultative arrangements still exist, it’s a damning indictment of the industry that it has stood by and done nothing while journalism training was systemically hijacked and corrupted from within by academic white-anters.

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.