Ani O'Brien: The sudden discovery of restraint and empathy in journalism

But is social media really the root of the evil of political scandals?

Disclosure: It has been an awful week of being tied to people, actions, and narratives that I have absolutely nothing to do with. I am feeling pretty beat up to be honest.

Media, bloggers, and the social media mob have decided I am somehow “pulling strings” behind the scenes in relation to Jade Paul’s Facebook post. I am not.

Matua Kahurangi: Why do NZ newsrooms celebrate Māori identity in every success story?

But go silent on ethnicity when the story involves crime?

I woke up early this morning, checked the latest RSS feeds on one of my monitors, and as usual around 5am, New Zealand newsrooms were busy rolling out their fresh scheduled headlines. One of them stood out: “Māori mum Nicole Retter’s app PAM tops Tinder, Hinge in New Zealand app lifestyle rankings.”

Karl du Fresne: On objectivity, balance and honesty in journalism

Several weeks ago I listened to a discussion on America’s National Public Radio network about objectivity in journalism. The three participants included Adam Reilly, the politics reporter for the Boston TV station GBH, and Callum Borchers, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
The third guest on the panel, Juliette Kayyem, was not a journalist, but a politically well-connected former Democratic Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts and occasional columnist for the Boston Globe.

Matua Kahurangi: NZ Media is so untrustworthy

David Seymour has to bring his own camera crew

It’s a sad state of affairs when politicians in New Zealand are forced to carry a camera crew just to protect themselves from being misquoted by the very people meant to report the truth. But here we are, watching ACT Leader David Seymour take the smart step of filming all his interactions with the media. And who can blame him? The mainstream media have shown, time and again, that they are incapable of fair or balanced reporting - especially when it involves anyone who challenges their cosy relationship with the political left.

JC: The Truth on Trump minus Media Bias

According to Phil Goff Donald Trump is a dangerous idiot. According to my reckoning Phil Goff is too much of an idiot to even be considered dangerous. According to Thomas Coughlan, Phil Goff’s comments, while in poor form, were one of the most refreshingly accurate descriptors of the president tendered by anyone currently serving in an official post. According to my reckoning that puts Thomas Coughlan in the same league as Phil Goff: the difference being Thomas Coughlan won’t be sacked.

Simon O'Connor: The path to irrelevance

With so much media reporting at odds with public sentiment or clearly one-sided - be it in New Zealand or as we have seen recently in the United States - the direction of travel is not positive.

There are many lessons to take away from the United States’ elections, but one that has immediate relevance to New Zealand is the yawning gap between the views of mainstream media and the public.

Bryce Edwards: NZ Politics Daily - 17 January 2024

Top 12 “NZ Politics Daily” stories today

Below are some of the more interesting and insightful New Zealand politics items from the last 24 hours.

Bryce Edwards: Top Ten “NZ Politics Daily” stories today

Below are some of the more interesting and insightful New Zealand politics items from the weekend and today.

1) The “Ten faces to watch in politics in 2024” according to 1News’ Felix Desmarais are: James Meager, Tākuta Ferris, Chlöe Swarbrick, Todd Stephenson, Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, Casey Costello, Matt Doocey, Judith Collins, Brooke van Velden, and Ayesha Verrall.

Robert McCulloch: NZ's Media got conned by Labour & National's election campaigns & ended up chasing red herrings

It's official - our media fell hook, line and sinker for the shallow & empty election campaigns of Labour & National. Journalists got suckered into arguing with politicians about trivial, pathetic issues like how much of Labour's GST cut on fruit & veges would "pass through" to customers (we're talking amounts of money of the order of $5 a week) or how much of National's making-interest-payments-tax-deductible-from-rental-income would be similarly passed on. Or how much tax would be raised by making foreign purchases of real estate of over $2 million subject to a 15% tax. Who cares? Yet our media went off and charged down the rabbit holes whenever they appeared.

Michael Bassett: Bogus election media coverage

This election campaign has degenerated into a media circus with endless trivial claims and counter claims, many of them driven by the media. As a result, we, the long-suffering voters find ourselves dependent more and more on the integrity of the journalists who are reporting the parties’ policies. Sadly, many aren’t doing the job. We know the Herald’s Simon Wilson of old.

David Lillis: The Media and Co-Governance

A Characteristic Media Piece

New Zealand is on a difficult path - one of advantaging a small minority on the basis of genetics or self-reported ethnicity. As we proceed along this path our media present co-governance as the desirable pathway to our future almost exclusively, and present dissenting opinions very rarely.

 

An article from a former mayor of Kapiti Coast is characteristic of what gets published in online and print media (Gurunathan, K, 2022). The author is undoubtedly a very decent human being who has contributed much to his community and who has the courage of his beliefs and, as a person of color, may well have experienced bias and racism and observed these things imposed on others. He favours re-defining New Zealand as a bicultural nation and evidently is comfortable with the reality that Māori constitute less than 17% of the total population and that very few are full Māori. However, like others, he appears to cast disagreement with co-governance as racism and appears to discount the possibility that dissenters articulate genuinely-held views.

Denis Hall: The "Far" Right - or the "Rabid" Left?

You choose.

Right - as in okay! Is it okay to say ‘right’ now - or will they make that a swear word?

And I’m not going to hold back today.

As you read this - remember - that it wasn’t me who invoked Mussolini or the Fascists - it was the leftist New Zealand and Global News Media that did that - and I’m just responding.

Ask yourself! New Aotearoa’s Media! Are they crazy - or cunning and deceptive like the rats we think they are - jumping into the Government’s pocket to ensure their position of power inside the Government in our coming totalitarian future?

Derek Mackie: Is the tide turning?

Well, well! A leading newspaper, the NZ Herald, has published, in full, David Seymour’s response to the predictable woke furore that erupted all over the mainstream media outlets and on social media after he criticised the issuing of Priority Access Codes for Maori to get the Covid vaccine. 

As he points out, the codes themselves were already widely shared on social media, and yet only he was singled out for the social justice backlash. I wonder if that’s because he is the leader of the only political party in NZ to regularly and consistently take the government to task over its blatant racial preferment. 

His article is a scathing indictment on the government’s separatist policy, described fully in the He Puapua report, to divide NZ by race, creating two classes of citizens - Maori and the vast majority. The first class, in every sense of the word, gets more power, rights, justice, wealth, land, water and, ultimately, a veto over every decision the vast majority tries to make. Everyone else has to bite their tongue and say thank you.