ADDRESS TO REMUERA ROTARY 6 NOVEMBER 2017
I covered my first New Zealand general election half a century ago. Continue reading “Political lessons in a small country”
Poor cousin who came to stay
The well-established Mirror and the depression-era launch of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly
A frisson of fear must have passed through the owners of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in the first week of December 1932. Continue reading “Poor cousin who came to stay”
Communicating truth in a post-truth world
An address to the Australasian Catholic Press Association annual conference in Auckland 24 August 2017
President Donald Trump may be blamed for many things but you can’t hold him responsible for creating the post-truth environment. It existed, in one form or another, even before Julius Caesar justified the annexation of Gaul by bad-mouthing the neighbouring Germanic tribes. Perhaps it existed even before Pericles, to borrow from the Tony Blair songbook, sexed-up the need for the Peloponnesian Wars.
Continue reading “Communicating truth in a post-truth world”
Fake News and the 2017 General Election
This commentary appeared in the New Zealand Herald on 1 June 2017
The question is not whether New Zealand will be confronted by fake news in September’s general election but what form it will take.
The recent track record of falsehood is too seductive for it to be ignored here. Brexit, the U.S. and French presidential elections (and no doubt the forthcoming German federal election campaign that coincides with our own) shows fake news has a ready audience among those who would like it to be true. Continue reading “Fake News and the 2017 General Election”