Wendy Geus: The Politics of Misogyny and the Media

Or does my conservative voice reduce my view to ‘hate speech’ or a ‘weapon of war’ (to quote Jacinda Ardern)?

Former Covid minister Chris Hipkins’s prolonged public argument with, and humiliation of, pregnant journalist Charlotte Bellis, stranded in Afghanistan, the land of the Taliban, is one of my most ghastly memories of the debacle which was the Covid response.

(Of course ‘trustworthy’ then Covid minister Hipkins had a laundry list of other egregious actions which impaired our Covid response, including his tardy ordering of Covid vaccines – putting us at the back of the queue – and stealing test kits from the private sector and denying it after he failed to order them in time… but I digress.)

Hipkins cornered proves to be a very dangerous animal who reverts to lying, obfuscation and personal attack (note his latest comment to Luxon over Three Waters), as he did also with the two women who went, it turned out, legitimately, to Northland but were labelled by his Government as “prostitutes breaking the law”.

Clive Bibby: Some of you aren't going to like this

It never fails to amaze me how gullible the public are to the mis information coming from the international news media that is uncritically accepted as verifiable fact and repeated verbatim by our own news outlets. While this phenomenon is not new, it has been a developing trend for years , but we, way down here at the bottom of the planet, can't be expected to recognise the validity of every report emanating from the world's trouble spots - we should be able to rely on our local journalists who get paid to do so, disseminating the credible from the bullshit.

I'm not asking to only include stories that have a particular political bias more to my liking - just that there is a bit more balance to the coverage and inclusion of a wide cross section of opinion from those reporters who are working at the coalface of these flash points. They can't all be Trump haters although you have to wonder.

Ron Smith: Scholarship and the 'end of days'

Over all of the last week, the airwaves and print media have been telling us that humanity faces an unprecedented challenge due to the increasing use of fossil-fuels.  The carbon dioxide produced by these carbon-containing materials is progressively accumulating in the atmosphere, where it causes the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’.  The inescapable consequence of this is destructive sea-level rise, an increasing incidence of weather calamities (hurricanes and floods), and particularly a rapid increase in average global temperatures.  

All this from the Secretary General of the United Nations, an internationally-celebrated railway engineer (Dr Pachauri), and numerous experts from home and abroad.  Interestingly, these experts did not include anybody who had any contrary opinion on the thesis as a whole, or on any particular claim.

The crucial question to ask about this most recent spate of claims about imminent climatic disaster is whether it is to be taken as an essentially scientific claim about how things are, or, rather, whether it simply reflects an essentially middle-class liberal unease, about the consequences of human civilisation on the global environment, which has coalesced into a political movement. 

Ron Smith: Fukushima: 'We all die!

The following quotation is taken from Jim Mora’s four o’clock panel discussion on Radio New Zealand, 9 May, this year:  “Fukushima is threatening life on this planet …. Worst case scenario (Jim did ask!) … we all die!”.  The speaker was Peter Elliot, who was described in his panel introduction as an ‘entertainment professional’, but whether he intended his comments as ‘entertainment’, or whether they were recognised as such by Radio New Zealand listeners, may be doubted. 

What also should come up for discussion is the place of this sort of infantile observation on what is claimed to be public-service radio, and the obligation that broadcasters, like Jim Mora, have to ensure some standards, with regard to the quality of the information put out and, of course, some balance, in the public debate on important and contentious issues.