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Hobson’s Pledge Trust
The New Zealand’s mainstream media’s practice of reporting only one side of stories concerning equality and unity between Maori and everyone else has been traced to guidelines issued by Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi.
In January, Cabinet agreed to draw down $55 million over the next three years from the broadcasting fund to be administered by NZ On Air “to support the production of public interest journalism including Maori and Iwi journalism”.
The document, titled Public Interest Journalism Fund: General Guidelines, that was released in April, said that this fund came about, firstly, because “the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19, particularly through social media channels”.
Reason No 2 was a supposed “need for the fund to reflect a Te Tiriti o Waitangi Partnership with Maori media”.
Media commentator Karl Du Fresne, who has worked in New Zealand journalism for 40 years, including a stint as editor of the Dominion Post, summed up the fund.
“Nowhere in the guidelines is there any explicit commitment to the publication of a range of competing views on vital issues – for example, race relations and the Treaty,” Du Fresne wrote.
“In fact, the guidelines pretty much rule it out, since recipients of public money won’t be able to acknowledge the existence of Treaty sceptics, still less give them space or air time, if they’re required to promote the principles of a Treaty “partnership”, the very existence of which the sceptics challenge,” he wrote. See Journalism or indoctrination?
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