There is a well-worn pattern to Winnie on the warpath

I fully expect New Zealand First leader Winston Peters to gaslight more journalists and make more chilling threats against news organisations over the coming months. He acts like he is gearing up early for a general election.

His fractious exchange with Corin Dann – who he labelled an “arrogant wokester loser” via social media –  on Morning Report last Wednesday was far from novel. It was classic piece of political gamesmanship that drew on a very, very long tradition of shooting the messenger. Nor was Peters’ veiled threat against RNZ’s finances particularly novel.

As far back as the eighteenth century journalists were being targeted. Edmund Burke is reputed to have given us the title the Fourth Estate but is also (less reliably) credited with the following: “Political journalists defy the laws of nature: They are both scum and dregs.” American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said he would prefer newspapers without government to government without newspapers. However, he also compared journalists to carrion crow feeding off “the agonies of their victims, as wolves do on the blood of lambs”.

Patrick Day, in The Making of the New Zealand Press, stated that initially journalism in this country was held in higher regard than in Britain – in spite of the fact that the press here was based on English traditions. A century later, however, things had changed. Keith Holyoake used off-camera intimidation to try to cow interviewers but it was one of his successors who began the unhappy tradition of denigrating (on-air) reporters who ask awkward questions. It became a set piece for that extraordinarily complex character, Robert Muldoon.

Muldoon’s 1976 altercation with television reporter Simon Walker on Tonight looks like the template that Peters all-too-regularly uses to derail awkward interviewers. The interview involved presenting the then Prime Minister with a series of awkward facts that called into question his recent “The Russians Are Coming” warning on Soviet ship movements (which followed the Dancing Cossacks commercial that helped to get him elected in 1975). Muldoon questioned the right to put the questions and lambasted the “smart alec interviewer”. You can view that interview here. It has a familiar ring that belies the fact it is almost fifty years old. Continue reading “There is a well-worn pattern to Winnie on the warpath” →

Legion of wake-up calls embedded in news trust report

I shudder at the sheer horror of it all!

There we were: Stuck in a remote part of East Cape with no cellphone coverage, no satellite tv feed, and a radio that did no more an emit an angry hiss.

We were victims of news deprivation – a cruel form of externally imposed news avoidance.

I know that some people would relish the thought of finding themselves in a news blackout but, like people suddenly deprived of their daily tonnage of caffeine, we get withdrawal symptoms if we are deprived of the news media’s daily version of reality.

The fact you are reading this commentary confirms that we did survive the ordeal. Our travels took us further down the East Coast of the North Island and normal services were resumed. Now we are back home.

Our personal news desert meant I did not see or hear coverage of JMaD’s 2025 Trust in News report until I was reintroduced to my computer (any attempt to take it on holiday would have had unfortunate consequences).

I was pleased to see a slight drop in the number who sometimes avoid the news – down from 75 per cent to 73 per cent. I now know what they are missing. Continue reading “Legion of wake-up calls embedded in news trust report” →

Slow death of the newspaper editorial

Newspaper editorials are disappearing, crushed under an avalanche of opinion from the well-informed, the ill-informed, the misinformed, and the malicious.

It is a slow death, with the institutional voice of the newspaper being heard less often and with less authority.

It is not solely a New Zealand problem. Last year in the United States, the Virginia Press Association scrapped its editorial award after receiving only one entry in 2023. That was the year America’s major newspaper chains such as Gannett began cutting back on editorials.

In New Zealand, most of our regional newspapers only run an editorials a couple of days a week at best and, often as not, the same editorial is shared by all newspapers in each group. Stuff’s metropolitan titles The Post and The Press and the Waikato Times follow the same pattern as the group’s regional tiles. Only the New Zealand Herald and Otago Daily Times continue to carry a daily editorial.

For reasons that frankly elude me, the Weekend Herald (the week’s largest circulation paper) has decided that its editorial column should almost always be devoted to sporting issues. There is nothing that warrants their elevation to the leader column. They belong on the sports pages. And they stand in stark contrast to the Sunday Star Times’ wide-ranging and well-argued editorials, which are accorded a prominent position on page 3 and are signed by the editor Tracy Watkins.

Perhaps there is an inevitability about the slow death of editorials or leader columns. Continue reading “Slow death of the newspaper editorial” →