Capitalist: The Customer Is Always Right

One of the criticisms made of Mott the Hoople albums is the mixing that was undertaken after they were recorded. Back then it was a requirement to keep production ‘thin’ for radio and not to overdo things. The radio industry – particularly in America – made that very clear to musicians.

Graham Adams: Mainstream media chiefs and the five stages of grief

The Government giving money for journalism with strings attached is creating big problems for the organisations which accepted it. Some now regret taking the handouts. Graham Adams reports.

Listening to Newsroom’s co-editor Mark Jennings rail against people who accuse the mainstream media of having been bought by the government’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, it was impossible to not think of the Five Stages of Grief.

Fifty years ago, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the now-famous stages of denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance to describe how people cope with illness and dying.

Since then the stages have been used to describe everything from divorce and drug rehab to political upheavals (such as the profound grief experienced by many Democratic Party supporters after Trump won in 2016).

It has also become evident that the stages often don’t follow a linear progression, and people might experience only a few of them, or several at the same time.

NZCPR Weekly: A Dangerous Time for New Zealand

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter we reflect on the danger to New Zealand caused by government funding of the media and we share our interview with Sky News, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Bruce Cotterill outlines why a free and independent press is a critically important foundation to a democracy, and our poll asks whether you trust media that have received funding from the Government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Karl du Fresne: The right to say what you (and others) think

I got a text message from a friend yesterday morning to say she was sitting in a café in Christchurch reading The Star, that city’s free weekly paper. She thought I might be interested to know that there were 26 letters to the editor in response to the paper’s publication (with my permission) of my recent article from The Spectator Australia about the state of New Zealand politics.

Shortly after that text arrived, Barry Clarke from The Star emailed me to say that the letter-writers were overwhelmingly in agreement with me. The letters filled two pages of the paper and Barry said there were others that he couldn’t find room for.

Clive Bibby: News isn't news anymore - at least not the simple reported kind!

Like most political junkies, waiting in anticipation of reading the conclusions in the US Special Counsel's report of his two year investigation into the Trump/Russia collusion issue, l fear that the detail will somehow be lost in translation or by deliberate attempts to distort the findings. Many of those with responsibility to report the truth are already second guessing the outcome and developing strategies to present their own version of the facts.

That isn't journalism in its finest form. It is "sensationalism" bordering on deliberate misrepresentation that has no place on the front pages or in the news bulletins of the major media outlets. Sadly, it is what we have been dished up on a daily basis for the last two years and so perhaps we should expect more of the same.