Long, long ago, I warned that, should the New Zealand media scrub the glamour and fairy-dust out of their eyes, it could quickly get very ugly for their former Fairy Princess.
Jacinda Ardern has so far enjoyed a dream run from the NZ media. Despite her nearly-vacant slate of policy success, Ardern only had to trot out a baby photo or wedding announcement to send the media back to sleep. The media briefly stirred in late 2019, but were lulled back into complacency by the fortuitous (for Ardern) outbreak of the Wuhan pandemic – not to mention a $55m bribe media lifeline.
But as New Zealand’s latest virus outbreak-and-lockdown drags on, the media are getting restless again.
“Jacinda Ardern had already sealed her position as a great leader early in her premiership of New Zealand,” Fortune gushed of the NZ PM. “Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and Ardern targeted not just suppression of the virus, but its complete elimination.”
What a difference three months makes. With an outbreak now in the hundreds, her bid for “complete elimination” of Covid-19 looking naive amid strict lockdowns and glacial vaccination rates of just over 20 per cent that make even Australia’s rollout seem record-breaking, the Ardern media halo is slipping.
Even the Wellington-based NZ press gallery, seen by some to have given Ardern a saloon passage through her four years as PM, has turned on her.
Last week’s coverage of Ardern would rank as some of the toughest she has had as PM.
Of course, “tough” for Ardern is something akin to being gently flogged with a soggy chip-wrapper. The NZ media at their worst so far look more like the Canberra press gallery on a quiet day.
As a member of the NZ gallery tells Diary:
“From a media point of view, the worm has started to turn. She has been coming across as stage-managed. She hasn’t been as polished, hasn’t been as good as in the past, and there’s been more political grandstanding.”
“More”? Political grandstanding and stage-managed is all Ardern has ever offered New Zealand. The media have merely been happy to turn a blind eye for three years.
But, for once, they’re beginning to look like they might actually start doing their job.
This time, the NZ media is not letting Ardern off the hook. On the weekend, stuff.co.nz’s well-regarded political editor Luke Malpass, (the former Sydney-based editorial writer for the AFR) accused the NZ PM of trying to fool the NZ public by presenting a “concocted headline number” to inflate the appearance of action on vaccines.
Ardern’s cheap sleight-of-hand has been to try and pass off being “either booked or had at least one vaccination” as “vaccinated”, to fudge the vaccine numbers. Normally, the NZ media would simply applaud this sort of obvious trickery: for once, they’re beginning to point it out.
On a similar theme, prominent NZ Herald business columnist Fran O’Sullivan told Ardern there needed to be “less podium performance and more facts”, accusing her of “massaging the messaging”.
O’Sullivan skewered “Ardern‘s irritating habit of failing to ‘just get to the point, Prime Minister’”.
Really? Is O’Sullivan trying to pretend that that’s something new? Why hasn’t she held Ardern to account for her incomprehensible waffle over the past three years?
Even New Zealand’s traditionally left-leaning national radio broadcaster, RNZ, brought back Ardern’s past words to haunt her: “In April, Ardern told parliament New Zealand‘s delivery schedule was slower than other countries’ as its people were ‘not dying while they wait’,” RNZ noted in a piece that described NZ’s vaccine rollout as “staggeringly slow”.
Leaving aside the understatement of the year that RNZ is “left-leaning”, it looks as if the whispering in the press gallery is only getting darker and more ominous for Ardern.
NZ journalists tell Diary Ardern will need to “stomp on” the current outbreak fast – or the media critiques will intensify.
The Australian
BFD readers will no doubt take that possibility with a Siberian grain of salt.
Far more likely that Ardern will just trot out Clarke or Neve (oh, wait, she’s just done both) and it will be all sunshine and smiles from the media again. If all else fails, there’s always the wedding.
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