Bryce Edwards of the Democracy Project runs an excellent daily news briefing as part of the Democracy Project. The briefing consists of news stories organized by topic and with links. The bias is towards legacy media (a term in intend to use when I am being polite about Mainstream Media. I use the later term when I am being critical) but alternative media features as well. Half of the site is free to all. The other half is for paid subscribers. It is well worth the subscription.
The TVNZ/Maiki Sherman affair has been a lead topic of discussion recently following an article on Ani O’Brien’s Substack. Ms O.Brien recounted an event in which Ms Sherman had played a part. But the article was not so much about Ms Sherman as it was about media hypocrisy and the failure by the media to cover or report on the event. That was the thrust of the article. The way that legal letters were employed to shut down discussion was appalling. As the Free Speech Union said
“A culture that responds to misconduct with legal threats while it can be hidden, and with a quiet exit once it cannot, rewards suppression and punishes disclosure….“A healthy media tells the truth. A healthy society lets people apologise for it.”
Then it was revealed that a complaint had been made about the behaviour of Ms Sherman in the precincts of Parliament and the matter was referred to the Speaker. The result was that Ms Sherman was prohibited from reporting on Parliament for five days – a significant penalty for TVNZ’s political editor.
It was on Friday 8 May 2026 that it was announced that Ms Sherman had left TVNZ. She claimed that she had been under relentless pressure and that it had become too much. But not so much that she lawyered-up in the interim, clearly to negotiate an exit startagey and she was also seen in the company of Ms Linda Clark, a well known media and political go-to lawyer.
On the morning of Saturday 9 May 2026 the lead topic in the Dr. Edwards’ news briefing was about the demise of Maiki Sherman. A number of articles were referenced. In the midst of them was an article by Anne Salmond published in Newsroom entitled “Freedom for whom?”. There was another written by Professor Mohan Dutta entitled “The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor”
In this piece I examine and critique the Salmond and Dutta pieces. There are themes common to both although the line of attack differs. Dutta prefers the ad hominin approach, going for the throat and ignoring the tenents of reason. Salmond is a little more nuanced although she views the Sherman matter as an aspect of a foul right wing conspiracy. Both seem to have completely misunderstood what it was that motivated Ms. O’Brien’s article. Either that or they wilfully chose to ignore it because it did not fit within either their narrative or worldview.
I. The Common Ground
On the surface, Dame Anne Salmond’s Freedom for Whom? (Newsroom, 9 May 2026) and Professor Mohan J. Dutta’s The Substack and the Slur are very different articles. One is a short, sweeping essay about democracy and inequality by a celebrated historian and public intellectual.
The other is a long, densely sourced piece of political journalism about a specific media controversy. Yet they share a framework so consistent that they might almost have been written from the same template.
Both articles argue that what presents itself as freedom is actually power dressed up in the language of liberation.
Both argue that the New Zealand right operates through a coordinated network of funded institutions — think tanks, media organisations, political parties — that pursue elite interests while claiming to speak for ordinary people.
Both use the language of unmasking: the task each author has set themselves is to pull back a curtain and reveal the machinery behind what superficially appears to be organic political discourse.
And both are animated by the conviction that democratic institutions in New Zealand are under deliberate assault from forces that are internationally connected, domestically powerful, and ideologically coherent.
These are not trivial claims, and neither author is a trivial writer. But the way each argues the case reveals as much about the authors’ own intellectual commitments — and vulnerabilities — as it does about their targets.
II. Salmond: The View from the Mountaintop
Salmond’s piece is written in a mode one might call magisterial concern. The prose is clean and authoritative. The sentences come down like verdicts. She identifies the problem — “well funded think tanks and other groups fly the flag of freedom” in service of the wealthy — surveys the evidence in broad strokes, and delivers a moral conclusion. The piece ends with a call for wisdom, democratic participation, and the choosing of capable leaders over “self-satisfied fools, fanatics, or the ruthlessly self-interested.”
It is, in short, a piece written from a considerable height. This is not entirely a criticism. Salmond’s has standing as a public intellectual. Her sweep is often illuminating. The observation that “freedom for whom?” is the unanswered question behind libertarian rhetoric is a legitimate and important one with a deep lineage in political philosophy — from Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty to the more recent work of Philip Pettit on republican freedom.
The Edelman Trust barometer figure she cites (67% of New Zealanders believing government and business serve narrow interests) is a real data point, and the Cyclone Gabrielle/forestry example is concrete and well chosen.
But the loftiness comes at a cost. The argument frequently moves by assertion rather than demonstration. The “links between these groups and right wing political parties” are described as “well attested” without the attestation being provided.
The claim that “ministers seek to destroy unique landscapes and communities for the benefit of overseas corporations” is serious, but the piece offers no specific minister, no specific decision, no legislative detail. The forestry example is the exception — it is the one moment where Salmond descends to particulars — and it is noticeably more persuasive for it.
More critically, the article’s structure is essentially moral rather than analytical. Salmond moves from evidence to verdict with very little causal reasoning in between. Why do well-funded think tanks succeed? What specifically is the mechanism by which they influence policy? Why are political parties that preach localism silent when local rights are overridden? These questions are posed but not answered. And well-funded think tanks are not the sole province of the Right. One only has to look at the Helen Clark Foundation to understand that.
The implicit answer — because they are serving the interests that fund them — is plausible, but it needs to be argued, not assumed.
Is the argument valid despite its grandeur? It fails because it is incomplete. The core thesis — that invocations of freedom often serve concentrated interests rather than dispersed ones — is well established in the political science literature and well supported by the empirical evidence Salmond does cite.
The piece is weakest not when it’s wrong but when its ambition outruns its evidence. A historian of Salmond’s calibre knows that assertions require support, and the piece sometimes reads as though her reputation is doing the argumentative work that her sources should be doing.
This is an argument from authority (or appeal to authority) - a form of reasoning where a claim is deemed true simply because an expert or authority figure says it is.
III. Dutta: The Machine and Its Map
Dutta operates at the opposite end of the register — granular, relentlessly sourced, almost aggressively detailed. Where Salmond surveys the landscape from above, Dutta drills down through layers of institutional biography, network mapping, and close textual reading. The piece is partly journalism, partly academic argument, partly something closer to opposition research, and fully polemic.
The intellectual method here is explicitly that of the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) — a communications theory Dutta has spent two decades developing, which holds that meaning is produced at the intersection of structure, culture, and agency, and that crises are not natural phenomena but produced ones.
This is a useful lens for what he is describing, and it does real work in the piece: the concept of communicative inversion — in which the structurally powerful claim the rhetorical position of the marginal — is genuinely illuminating as a description of how Ani O’Brien’s self-presentation as an outsider contrasts with her institutional affiliations.
The argument about the manufactured-crisis cycle draws on a substantial literature on right-wing populism. The mapping of connections between O’Brien, the Free Speech Union, Jordan Williams, the Taxpayers’ Union, and the Campaign Company is the strongest part of the piece, and it relies on publicly available sources that Dutta identifies specifically.
However, Dutta’s reasoning has its own problems, distinct from Salmond’s.
The chief one is that the piece sometimes conflates the documenting of a network with the demonstration that the network functioned in the way Dutta claims. He is careful to say “the point is not to claim a conspiracy,” and yet the architecture he describes does the conceptual work of a conspiracy: coordinated, precisely calibrated, deliberately designed.
The evidence he presents is consistent with this interpretation, but it is also consistent with a looser story in which ideologically aligned individuals, with overlapping institutional affiliations, acted on shared instincts without coordination.
That looser story would still be worth telling — and would still reflect poorly on the actors involved — but it is a different story, with different implications, and Dutta does not sufficiently distinguish between them.
The piece also sometimes overreaches in its causal claims. The observation that the Coalition Government was simultaneously moving to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority while O’Brien’s campaign was targeting Sherman is offered as though the two events constitute a pattern of intent. But the piece doesn’t establish that they do — it merely juxtaposes them and invites the reader to draw the inference.
This is a technique borrowed from the very apparatus it is criticising.
IV. Post-Modern Critical Theory: Is That What This Is?
The question of whether these pieces reflect a post-modern or critical theory approach is worth addressing directly, because it is often raised as a dismissal rather than as a genuine analytical category.
Both authors are clearly operating within a broadly critical tradition — they are concerned with the distribution of power, the relationship between discourse and interest, and the ways in which dominant narratives naturalise structural inequalities.
Dutta is explicitly so: the Culture-Centered Approach is a developed theoretical framework with roots in critical communication studies, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies. His analysis of communicative inversion, his attention to who gets to occupy “interpretive positions,” and his concern with the “foreclosure of voice” are all recognisably indebted to a Gramscian and Foucauldian tradition in which power operates through discourse as much as through force.
Salmond’s approach is less theoretically explicit, but her framing — elite interests masquerading as universal freedom, democratic legitimacy being hollowed out from within — shares the critical tradition’s suspicion of claims to neutrality or universalism.
The question is not whether the lens is legitimate but whether it is being applied with sufficient intellectual discipline.
The risk inherent in critical frameworks is that the interpretive category comes before the evidence: every phenomenon is read as a manifestation of the power structure the theorist has already identified, and disconfirming evidence is explained away as further evidence of the structure’s cunning.
Dutta is guilty of this: the asymmetry he identifies between how Sherman and Burr were treated is real and worth documenting, but his account of why does not leave much room for any explanation that doesn’t confirm his thesis.
Salmond, rather differently, risks reducing complex political dynamics to a simple story of elites versus the people — a story that has its own tradition of being co-opted by exactly the forces she is criticising.
V. The Problem of Personal Attack
Both pieces use personal attack, and this is worth examining carefully, because the two authors use it differently and with different effects.
Salmond is relatively restrained — she does not name individuals except in passing references to global figures. Her attacks are on types: “narcissistic, bull-at-a-gate leaders,” “self-satisfied fools, fanatics, or the ruthlessly self-interested.” She names one individual indirectly by linking to an excellent article by Jonathan Ayling.
The final line — “Those who chose self-satisfied fools, fanatics, or the ruthlessly self-interested to lead them have only themselves to blame” — is a rhetorical weapon aimed at voters who supported the current government. It is the kind of line that feels satisfying to those already persuaded and alienating to those who are not. As a means of persuasion, it is counterproductive. As a statement of personal moral position, it is at least honest about what it is: a judgment, not an argument.
Dutta’s use of personal attack is more problematic, not because it is more vicious — some of what he documents about O’Brien’s social media conduct is genuinely troubling — but because the personal and the structural are entangled in ways that weaken his analytical argument.
The decision to reproduce, at length, O’Brien’s tweets about “woke shit,” Judith Butler being “utter scum,” and “dehumanising HR jargon” does two things simultaneously. It provides evidence for the claim that O’Brien’s public voice is that of a culture warrior rather than a public-interest journalist.
But it also positions the piece emotionally as an exposure of a specific person, which invites the reader to evaluate the argument by their reaction to O’Brien rather than by the strength of the structural analysis.
There is a genuine tension here. Dutta needs the tweets to make his argument about the gap between the Substack persona and the X persona. But reproducing them at such length, alongside screenshots and the language of exhibits (”Ani O’Brien’s culture war tweet exhibit #1”), shifts the piece’s centre of gravity from structural analysis to personal prosecution.
By making the personal central, Dutta risks giving his critics a way to reframe his piece as an ad hominem attack on a private blogger — precisely the “communicative inversion” he is trying to expose in others.
Neither author seems to recognise the extent to which the personal attack — however justified they may feel it to be — operates as a substitute for completing the argument rather than as a complement to it.
Salmond ends with an implicit attack on voters rather than a call for specific structural change.
Dutta ends with an implicit attack on a named individual’s character rather than a recommendation for how the architecture he has identified might be dismantled or resisted.
In both cases, the emotional conclusion risks making the piece feel more like a declaration of alignment than a contribution to understanding.
VI. Conclusion: Two Pieces, One Problem
Salmond and Dutta are both, in the end, doing what left-liberal intellectuals in many Western democracies are doing in the mid-2020s: trying to make visible a political machinery that is sophisticated enough to present itself as common sense.
Both pieces are also, in their different ways, trapped by the conventions of the genre in which they are writing. The genre requires a villain — individual or systemic — and a hero, usually the author and those who think as they do. It requires moral urgency. It requires, finally, the gesture toward what should be done, even when no concrete programme is available.
These requirements push both writers toward overstatement, toward treating the network-mapping as a completed argument rather than a beginning of one, and toward personal attack as a form of closure when the structural analysis runs out of steam.
The challenge, for anyone who wants these arguments to do political work rather than simply provide comfort to the already convinced, is to make them with more precision, more acknowledged complexity, and — hardest of all — without the satisfying conclusion that those who disagree are simply fools or operatives. That conclusion may sometimes be true. It is rarely persuasive to anyone who hasn’t already arrived at it.
David Harvey is a former District Court Judge and Mastermind champion, as well as an award winning writer who blogs at the substack site A Halflings View - Where this article was sourced
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