No, they’re not; Katie. People are not “a little bit sitting on the fence there” in your 1News poll of support, or opposition to, public service job cuts and, no, it’s not a “slim majority” supporting reducing the number of public servants, it’s a very clear majority.
In a remarkably skewed piece, even by abysmal 1News ‘standards’, the Verian (formerly Kantar) poll results which would normally be conflated as in an agree/strongly-agree bloc were instead cleaved into separate sections to make it appear as though the public, or at least the poll respondents, somehow concur with Katie’s wishful thinking of considerable opposition to the moves. Do the maths, Katie: 13% expressed no opinion either way; of those who did share their views 60% supported cutting public sector jobs, just 40% disagreed. In football 60–40 would be a clear result; only in the strange minds of NZ media would that be called a close-run thing.
But who could blame her when media bosses so readily encourage opinions expressed as content? Katie, in the same bulletin, promised “huge” turnout at nationwide protests as workers “in their thousands” would march in united opposition to evil government cuts on May 1st or “May Day” as designated by the International Socialist Congress in 1904. And dutifully they did: the thousands turning out in literal dozens, threatening, as numbers peaked, to overwhelm one corner of the tiny scrap of green on Wellington’s Lambton Quay known as Midland Park and spill onto the surrounding footpath.
To prove her point of massive solidarity in universal socialist causes, Bradford’s team accosted a young lady of particularly arresting looks who “happened to be wandering past” the protest:
The lovely interviewee proffered: “It’s unfortunate, really.” I’m not sure if the lady was referring to the underwhelming job-losses protest or the 1News reporting of it. It’s a close-run thing.
