Is It Any Wonder No-One Trusts Them?

Who listens to the radio? That’s what I’d like to know

The Sports

Who, indeed, would listen to a single word the legacy media babble? If you knew someone who’d consistently lied to you for years, and who kept lying to your face even when you both knew that they’d been caught out in their lies… you’d probably never bother talking to them again. You certainly wouldn’t believe a word they told you.

This is the state of the legacy media today. For all that they babble about “harmful misinformation”, they’ve become the biggest, most shameless liars this side of politicians.

Politicians whom they equally shamelessly pander to with partisan zeal. And is it any wonder, when those very politicians are lining the legacy media’s pockets with tens of millions of taxpayer dollars? The political class are paying the pipers — and the pipers are obliging with a hooting, cacophonic chorus of lies and distraction.

When parliament resumed this week, the government should have been braced for a shellacking. The evidence is growing that a catastrophic tragedy is unfolding in storm-affected parts of New Zealand. Rumours, founded or otherwise, of a massive death toll being kept hidden from the public gaze. Worse, that while the government fiddles, Mad Max style gang rule is plundering cut-off communities.

Maybe these are all just rumours, maybe they aren’t: but the legacy media aren’t even bothering to find out, let alone hold anyone to account. Any government presiding over such a disaster should be being held to account by a media worth its name. Instead, the media swung into operation with a political hit-job clearly designed to take the heat off the government.

Newshub was back to its default setting of political scalp-hunting, contriving to whip up a storm out of an injudicious comment from a relatively minor player whose chief failings appear to be that she’s honest and politically not very astute. It was a reminder of all I despise about television journalism […]

Maureen Pugh’s statement of scepticism about climate change was seized on not because she’s an important figure in the party (far from it; although she’s National’s junior whip, she has retained her seat in Parliament by the skin of her teeth), but because her gaffe presented an opportunity to portray National as at odds with itself over a cause that the media push with totalitarian fervour.

And, just coincidentally I’m sure, ensure that the news cycle is dominated by anything other than much-needed questions over the government’s handling of the Gabrielle disaster. It could only have been a coincidence rather than a coordinated media-political con-job that James Shaw just happened to conspicuously be carrying some IPCC holy text or other.

More importantly, it predictably pulled the limp strings of the gutless Chris Luxon in exactly the direction the media so plainly desired.

Predictably, Pugh’s colleagues from Christopher Luxon down scuttled for cover. I didn’t hear any of them defend her right to express a dissenting view. A sensible response would have been that National is a broad-church party, open to a variety of ideas and able to cope with minority opinions. But no: deviation from the party line is not permitted and will be punished – in this case, by Luxon giving Pugh some books and ordering her to read them. Does he not realise he risks losing more votes than he wins by throwing her under the bus? It serves only to gratify the witch-hunters in the media and enhance their sense of power.

Karl du Fresne

More importantly, it ensured that potentially devastating questions for the government went unanswered. Given clear warnings for months that last year’s Tongan volcano would bring flooding rains this summer, what had they done to prepare? Did environmental policy around forestry slash exacerbate the disaster? Is the true death toll being kept from the NZ public? Why hasn’t the army been sent in to deal with reported looting and criminal anarchy?

That would have been the much-vaunted “speaking truth to power”.

None of that is being asked. Instead, the media have chosen, yet again, to speak lies for power. In a classic distraction gambit, the media has launched a vicious hatchet job on a minor opposition MP whose only crime was to utter heretical views.

And journalists wonder why they get abused by the public. They wonder why they get vitriolic emails. They wonder why their already parlous trust levels are plummeting down the s-bend.

Just stop lying for the worst people in the world.