Hey ho — another round of NZ on Air funding, another orgy of indulging the government’s bought-and-paid-for media.
Of course, that’s not how the government are so blatant as to put it. Instead, they dress it up with fluffy piffle about “diversity”.
Audience-focused content that meets the needs of tamariki and rangatahi, rural women and regional New Zealand is among a range of projects successful in the third round of Public Interest Journalism (PIJ) funding.
Also successful in this round are returning investigative journalism and current affairs series that continue to inform and engage the public about important issues.
Meaning, a reliable string of updates about Jacinda Ardern’s wedding, every time the government is caught out and desperately needs a distraction. Plus, of course, the usual avalanche of lying guff about climate change and “Aotearoa”-this-or-that. If it’s “how climate change in Aotearoa is affecting the needs of tamariki and rangatahi, oh and something about ‘whanau’”, the media practically collapse into a pile of sodden panties (and that’s just Paddy Gower).
NZ On Air earmarked $9m for this funding round, the third drawn from the $55m Public Interest Journalism Fund announced in February 2021. Demand was high from a broad spectrum of media organisations, with 82 initial applications collectively seeking $29,135,469.
“Broad spectrum” is, it goes without saying, a big, fat lie. Unless “broad spectrum” means, “spanning left to the far-left”. As The BFD previously reported, the government underwriting of a failing media class is exclusively targeted to left-leaning media. Once again, the usual suspects are being lavishly rewarded — at the taxpayer’s expense — for their slavish devotion to the Ardern government.
As the above graph shows, the latest round of funding has only cemented its blatant bias to the left. All of the money is still going to organisations further biased left than The BFD is right. All that has changed is the addition of some new players and the incremental increase in the money greasing the pockets of the left-media.
(Caveat: As previously, the data is limited by MBNZ’s coverage and the Byzantine difficulty of tracking all of the PJIF funding.)
Reading the lists of funding announcements, the same names keep coming up…
Allied Press, Newshub, RNZ, Kawhai Media, NZME and Stuff […] Stuff and NZME […] The Spinoff and Newsroom […] Stuff […] NZME
NZ on Air
This isn’t “public interest journalism funding”, it’s a feudal lordship showering its loyal vassals with gifts and sinecures.
The BFD, meanwhile, hasn’t asked for or received a single government cent — thanks to our subscribers, who know honest journalism and are willing to choose to pay for it.
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