Karl du Fresne: Why the Maiki Sherman-Lloyd Burr incident is a matter of public interest

A good and respected friend – like me, a former newspaper editor – takes the view that the furore over TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman’s alleged verbal abuse of Stuff press gallery journalist Lloyd Burr is not news; that at best, it would warrant a mention in a gossip column.

Fair enough, but I differ. If the high-profile journalists who provide the public with political news and comment are bitchy, entitled, childish, over-stimulated and perhaps inclined to run off at the mouth after a few drinks at the end of a long day, I think we deserve to know. That knowledge is potentially very helpful in judging how much notice we should take of them, or indeed whether we should take any notice of them at all.

John McLean: Pilots of the airwaves

“Pilot of the Airwaves” is a 1979 single by English singer-songwriter Charlie Dore. The song, which reached #13 on the US Billboard Hot 100, was written from the perspective of a woman who listens to a late-night DJ. The song conveys her emotional connection to the DJ and highlights the intimacy and connection that mainstream radio used to provide.

JC: A Man After My Own Heart

Last week I wrote an article on the journalists at Wellington Airport accosting the prime minister following a bad TPU/Curia poll and asking about his intentions about staying in the job. In the Weekend Herald, Bruce Cotterill, a man after my own heart, has written a lengthier and broader article on the state of the six o’clock news. He is, quite rightly, fairly critical of the news provided by the state broadcaster on TV One. He is no more enamoured with the journalists than I am. ThreeNews also failed to impress. His article is well worth a read and few, if any, on this site would disagree with his comments.

Greg Treadwell: 14 community newspapers due to close....

With 14 community newspapers due to close, too many parts of NZ are becoming ‘news deserts’

When media company NZME proposed the closure of 14 community newspapers last week, the so-called “news desert” encroached a little further into the local information landscape.

Kerre Woodham: Where does the media go from here?

First up today, a suite of announcements around the media. Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Broadcasting, thank heavens, has agreed to progress the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. This was a bill initially proposed by Labour and rejected by National. Now, however, the coalition government, minus one of its partners, is progressing with amendments to support our local media companies to earn revenue for the news they produce and in effect, throw them a lifeline, help them survive. Paul Goldsmith says the key change, the reason why they are now supporting the bill, is adopting a ministerial designation framework. This will enable the Minister to decide which digital platforms are captured by the bill, allowing the government to manage unintended consequences.

Greg Treadwell: With the end of Newshub.....

......the slippery slope just got steeper for NZ journalism and democracy

If journalism in Western democracies has been on a roller coaster in recent decades, in Aotearoa New Zealand this week it threatened to come right off the rails.

Today’s shocking announcement by owners Warner Bros Discovery of the closure of Newshub by the end of June will leave only state-owned TVNZ and Whakaata Māori providing public-interest, free-to-air broadcast news.

JC: They Are Playing Foolish Games

The world is in the throes of two major international conflicts. I do not need to name them. I am writing about a third one: it is domestic. It is between the mainstream media and the Government. The fundamental question is this: are the mainstream media going to destroy the government or is the government going to deal to the mainstream media. In terms of how the three leaders have handled the media, so far, I would rate them as 1. Winston Peters 2. David Seymour 3. Christopher Luxon.

Winston does not suffer fools gladly and the news media are fools.

Karl du Fresne: The John Campbell question

Once again, state-owned TVNZ has obligingly provided a platform from which its best-known (and no doubt highest-paid) journalist, John Campbell, can flail the government.

This is extraordinary and unprecedented. The government’s most potent communications medium has been hijacked by one of its employees and co-opted in a highly personal political mission.

Karl du Fresne: A massive gesture of contempt for the voters

It’s said that great minds think alike. Unfortunately the same is true, by definition, of conformist minds.

As an example, take the political news headlines of November 29. They were strikingly similar. Almost without exception, the mainstream media pounced on the new government’s decision to axe Labour’s ambitious (but possibly unworkable) plan to make New Zealand smokefree.

JC: The Media Take Winston’s Bait

From the moment the new government was sworn in, the news media have been floundering, They have been thrashing around, having taken the bait laid for them by none other than their long-standing nemesis, Winston Peters. Winston, playing a part equivalent to the artful dodger (a crafty person behaving in a rather unscrupulous manner), has got them hyperventilating to a marked degree.

Karl du Fresne: What's behind the media’s low-key treatment of the mosque shootings inquest?

Has anyone else been struck by the extraordinarily low-key media coverage of the inquest into the Christchurch mosque massacres?

Day after day, major news outlets have, at best, played down the proceedings. At worst they have ignored the inquest altogether. The coverage has been so conspicuously subdued that I can only conclude it’s deliberate.

Karl du Fresne: Suddenly, the media are unimportant - and it hurts

I sometimes wonder whether political reporters ever pause to think how precious and entitled their behaviour looks to outsiders.
I doubt it. They are too self-absorbed.

Right now, members of the parliamentary press gallery are feeling peevish. After feasting for years on a rich banquet of political news and sensation, they suddenly find themselves on starvation rations. And they’re not taking it well.

Karl du Fresne: I defended the media then; I wouldn't now

In his media column in the New Zealand Herald today, Shayne Currie reports that media organisations are having to think about security arrangements for journalists covering the election campaign. TVNZ went to the extent of hiring security staff for its news team at the National and Labour campaign launches, both of which were disrupted by protesters. Currie quotes TVNZ executive editor Phil O’Sullivan as saying: “Globally we’ve seen an increase in anti-media sentiment. We’re now seeing this in New Zealand too, with an increase in abuse directed towards our reporters while out in the field, and threatening behaviour in online spaces disproportionately impacting our female reporters.”

Karl du Fresne: The Family First advertisement you didn't see

Too hot to handle: the Family First ad that six papers refused to publish.

Last Wednesday, Family First launched a campaign of resistance against the pernicious spread of gender identity ideology. The “What is a Woman?” campaign invites people to sign a petition that defines a woman as an adult human female – a proposition so self-evident that the necessity of affirming it would have been considered laughable only a few years ago.

Karl du Fresne: We have glimpsed the best of New Zealand

What an extraordinary week.

I’m not just talking about the devastation, the tragedy and the heroism, although all that was remarkable enough.

What was also exceptional was the manner in which the country responded. Cyclone Gabrielle gave us a tantalising glimpse of a New Zealand that most of us grew up in and recognised – a country where people set aside real or imagined differences and pulled together in the face of a common crisis.

It has been easy in recent years to wonder whether that country has ceased to exist. Ideological extremism, identity politics and the culture wars, compounded by the social stress and dislocation of Covid, have so dominated politics, the media and the public conversation that it often seemed New Zealand was a country at war with itself.

Denis Hall: Marxism and Communism

I just read an amazing unpublished book - that explained to me in detail how communism and Marxism suppresses people and takes away all freedom - and creates a situation where once they have done that there is nowhere a person can find a public voice to help them fight back.

First remove the voice of freedom - and then remove the freedom.

Then teach the kids that there is no other way.

What the problem is here - is that New Zealanders are still asleep.

Don Brash: Free speech - How free should it really be?

A speech prepared for delivery at Massey University, 5 May 2022

Ladies and gentlemen

This was supposed to be the third speech in a series of speeches at New Zealand universities organised by the Free Speech Union. The second was a speech given last Thursday by well-known journalist and long-term editor of the Dominion newspaper Karl du Fresne, at Victoria University of Wellington. The first was supposed to have been at AUT in Auckland earlier last week.

But in one of life’s great ironies, AUT refused to allow the speech to take place on its campus – I say “ironies” because it was AUT History professor, Paul Moon, who took the initiative a few years ago to promote a strongly-worded statement in favour of free speech, and persuaded a wide range of well-known New Zealanders to put their names to it – New Zealanders as different as Dame Tariana Turia, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Sir Bob Jones and Don Brash.

Another irony is that I have been allowed – or at time of drafting this speech I think I’ve been allowed – to talk about free speech at this Massey campus. As many of you will know, I think I was the first person to be abruptly de-platformed by a New Zealand university when your Vice Chancellor, Jan Thomas, announced with just one day’s notice that I would not be allowed to give a speech which I had been invited to give by the University’s Politics Club. It was to have been about my time as Leader of the National Party, obviously a very dangerous and threatening subject!

Karl du Fresne: Break out those Tui billboards

Well, hello. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer contains possibly the least surprising research findings so far this century. It confirms that New Zealanders are losing, or have already lost, faith in the media.

The barometer, which surveyed 36,000 people in 28 countries, found that governments and the media internationally are fuelling a “cycle of distrust”. Both institutions are seen as divisive, a finding unlikely to come as a revelation to any vaguely sentient human being.

Perhaps most significant is the finding, reported here by Pattrick Smellie of BusinessDesk [paywalled], that 55 per cent of New Zealanders regard the media as a divisive force, against 23 per cent who see it as unifying. The corresponding split globally is 46/35, meaning New Zealanders are far more likely than citizens of other countries to view their media as agents of polarisation.

Chris Lynch: Trust in New Zealand news media nose dives, “No strong case for public funding of commercial news content.”

Trust in news media in New Zealand has fallen “alarmingly” according to a new study from AUT.

From 2020-2022, broadcasters TVNZ, Newshub, RNZ and Newsroom saw the biggest drops – over 10%.

During the same period, the NZ Herald, Newstalk ZB and Stuff also experienced “significant declines in trust.”