David Farrar: How The Press leans

A reader who is a postgraduate student in Christchurch offered to read The Press for four weeks, and analyse what proportion of news articles, opinion columns, letters and cartoons were left, right and neutral. The summary of his findings are:

JC: Our Rights Must Be Protected

Since Covid appeared, democracy seems to be increasingly the domain of the right.

Since the arrival of the Covid pandemic there appears to have been a marked erosion in Western democracies of citizens’ rights. Governments in power at the time, particularly those on the left, appeared to seize it as an opportunity to create an experiment to force ideology upon us to see how much we were prepared to put up with. Leading the pack was our very own Jacinda Ardern, along with her partners in crime Justin Trudeau and other likeminded leaders.

David Farrar: Stupid Government backing Willie’s bill

Paul Goldsmith reports:

The Government is taking immediate action to support New Zealand’s media and content production sectors, while it develops a long-term reform programme, Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith says.

Professor John Raine: It is Time to Resist a New Totalitarianism

On 24th January 2024, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University hosted an interview “The Treason of the Intellectuals” [1] by Peter Robinson of historian Niall Ferguson in the Uncommon Knowledge series. This was a stark reminder that in 1924 in the German Weimar Republic, university academics (with lawyers and doctors) were contributing to the development of extreme antisemitic policy used later by the Nazi regime. The politicisation of German universities such as Heidelberg and Tübingen during this period led eventually to their losing their standing as the world’s very best.

Michael Bassett: Why can't our journalists do their jobs?

As the probability that National and Act will win the election grows stronger every day the left is going berserk. Not content with making new spending promises everywhere he goes, Chris Hipkins has taken to absurd allegations about his opponents’ policies. Even after Christopher Luxon had told us all in the Leaders’ Debate that National supported school lunches, Hipkins whose hearing must be deficient, claimed that they were in danger of being scrapped if National won. Labour looks and sounds desperate, a state that never inspires confidence.