Kal du Fresne, no friend of National or Judith Collins, writes about one of the worst members of the Media Party and their particular style of gotcha politics on National:
First up, a disclaimer. I am not, and never have been, a National Party supporter. While there have been rare occasions in the past 50 years when I’ve voted National, they are outnumbered by the times I’ve supported Labour. National won’t be getting my party vote next week, though I may yet decide to support the party’s Wairarapa candidate. (For the record, I voted for Labour’s Kieran McAnulty last time.)
It’s important that I get that declaration out of the way, because otherwise what I’m about to write will be dismissed by Labour camp followers as sour grapes from a disgruntled Tory. (That’s bound to happen anyway, but I need to spell out my position regardless.)
Now, to the point of this post. In recent weeks I’ve watched with mounting disbelief as the network formerly known as TV3 has conducted what appears to be a sustained offensive against the National Party.
Initially I gave Newshub and its political reporters the benefit of the doubt, thinking perhaps the run of events was against National and over time the playing field would be levelled. But that hasn’t happened, leaving me convinced that Newshub is functioning as Labour’s unofficial propaganda arm.
I shouldn’t be completely surprised, because it’s happened before (I wrote about it here). But nine years on, the bias is even more explicit and infinitely more mischievous.
Newshub has become increasingly shrill as they attempt to sway the election for Jacinda Artdern. They have become the CNN of New Zealand. Their behaviour has become so bad that it is actually embarrassing.
No one who believes in the importance of fair and impartial news media can accept this is right. Fair, accurate and impartial journalism is never more important than during an election campaign. Some of us can remember when in every newspaper newsroom, someone was assigned to tot up the daily column inches given to each of the major parties to ensure no one was given an unfair advantage. But Newshub doesn’t appear to care about maintaining even a pretence of neutrality.
You could choose virtually any night at random to illustrate this, but let’s examine Tuesday night’s bulletin. It started with political reporter Jenna Lynch – eager-beaver apprentice to chief stirrer Tova O’Brien – asserting that National was in crisis mode following leaks to Newshub by MPs reportedly unhappy with Judith Collins’ leadership.
Taken in isolation this would be unexceptionable, but context is everything – and this story meshed neatly with an ongoing Newshub narrative portraying National as a party in disarray – a “death spiral”, in O’Brien’s words – and not fit to govern. A write-off, in other words, and not worth wasting a vote on.
And those National MPs are traitors, ankle-tapping a campaign just as it was gathering momentum. On Tuesday night National plus Act had enough to form a government on internal polling. By Friday National was back to being in line with Colmar Brunton. That fall can be and should be blamed on those mingy, back-stabbing traitors inside National, who would rather lose than see Judith Collins win. Without their misery guts whinging Newshub would have had nothing to go on.
“The cracks are getting wider and the wisecracks nastier,” opined Lynch – except that the wisecracks she was referring to appeared to relate not to the election campaign or Collins, but to totally unrelated grudges dating from the National leadership takeover by Todd Muller five months ago.
There was also a sneering reference to “fawning MPs” clustering around Collins on the campaign trail. But fawning MPs are a staple on the political circuit, and certainly not confined to National. Why should Collins be singled out for derision when it’s long been a bizarre convention that when party leaders appear on camera, they must be surrounded by sycophantic MPs and ministers furiously nodding in agreement at whatever the boss is saying? Because it fits the Newshub narrative, that’s why.
Lynch went on to make the unsubstantiated claim that Collins was “on the ropes”, then linked this supposed crisis to a bitchy Twitter exchange (is there any other kind?) between Muller’s former PR adviser Matthew Hooton and deposed deputy leader Paula Bennett. But the Twitter sniping appeared to have nothing to do with Collins; it was about the circumstances in which the ill-fated Muller took control back in May.
It apparently didn’t matter that there was no connection, because it served the purpose of providing a pretext to cross to Winston Peters, who wisecracked that it explained why Collins had been shown praying (which, in turn, served as a cue for Lynch to remind us that Collins was accused of politicising her faith); and then to Ardern on the campaign trail, so that we could observe for ourselves the stark contrast between the National leader – white-anted by disloyal caucus members, according to Lynch, and looking defensive in the face of Lynch’s insistent questioning – and a relaxed and smiling prime minister untroubled by caucus disloyalty or awkward questions from hectoring reporters, surrounded by adoring fans, posing for selfies, accepting gifts from awe-struck children (“Oh, is that for me?”) and patting dogs.
Jacinda Ardern only does fawning crowds of children. You won’t see her any where near where real voters are.
Next we crossed to political editor O’Brien, who pronounced the party was in turmoil (hadn’t we just spent three minutes hearing Lynch say much the same thing?) and that the writing would be on the wall for Collins if National lost the election (as it is for most major party leaders who lose elections, but hey, here’s a radical suggestion: why don’t we just wait and see?).
We then segued into an unrelated item about politicians criticising the media, the main purpose of which seemed to be for Newshub’s political journalists to pat themselves on the back for irritating people like Peters, David Seymour and Gerry Brownlee, as if getting up the noses of politicians is how the efficacy of journalism should be measured.
Since it was stripped of any explanatory context, the item would have made no sense to anyone other than the most obsessive political junkie. In most cases it wasn’t clear what the politicians were talking about, or to whom. This was not about imparting useful information to the public, which is supposedly the purpose of journalism. The purpose seemed to be to satisfy some other agenda known only to those involved.
The item included a brief clip of Brownlee, who in July was the target of repeated Newshub attacks accusing him of indulging in conspiracy theories over the government’s response to Covid-19, delivering an extraordinary rant to someone off-camera in which he said: “Your [presumably meaning Newshub’s] people give me the shits. You’re bloody lazy as buggery.”
Again, there was no explanation of what this was about. It doesn’t matter, apparently, that the audience is left out of the loop; it’s all about point-scoring. But the item did serve as the cue for yet another cross, this time to Greens co-leader James Shaw, who was presented as the voice of moderation and reason. Politicians on the campaign trail get tired, intoned Shaw solemnly, “but that’s no excuse for rudeness”. The take-home message: there are wise and civilised politicians like Shaw, and then there are feral bullies like Brownlee.
Gerry was dead right. There would be many readers who find Newshub “journalists” give them the screaming dab-dabs.
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism as I understand it. It’s a continuation of a long-standing trend whereby journalists see themselves not as mere observers and reporters of the political process, but as active players and agitators.
Duncan Garner pioneered this style of journalism at TV3 when he was political editor and each of his successors – first Paddy Gower, now O’Brien – has taken the approach a step further. O’Brien is the worst, constantly setting out to generate conflict and controversy by catching politicians out, goading them, tripping them up and asking loaded questions that she hopes will generate headlines for the six o’clock bulletin.[…]
I detest this style of journalism. It attempts to place journalists at the centre of the action rather than on the periphery, where they belong. They abuse their power by seeking to influence events rather than simply reporting them in a fair and balanced way and allowing the public to make up their own minds. They are every bit as guilty of abuse of power as the most despised press baron.
And while some journalists insist on seeing themselves as morally superior to politicians, it can be argued that the reverse is true. As devious and self-serving as some politicians may be, they can still claim the moral high ground because ultimately they are accountable to someone: namely, the voters, to whom they must answer every three years. No journalists have to submit to that judgment.
I’ll finish this post by repeating what I said at the start. I’m not a National supporter and it won’t concern me in the slightest if National loses the election. In fact I’d go further and say they’ve done nothing to justify winning it.
It’s no help to National that there’s a whiff of desperation in the way Collins is conducting her campaign, as evidenced by the cheesy shots of her praying, presumably in a late play for support from the Christian right. But it’s hardly surprising that she’s looking desperate when she has journalists like O’Brien and Lynch enthusiastically charting every stumble and writing her off before the voters – the only people whose opinions ultimately count for anything – have had their say. Collins isn’t competing with just the Labour Party; she also has to reckon with journalists who are clearly willing her to fail.
That’s why I call them the Media Party. They want to play politics but none of them has the stones to actually stand for election. The sole exception being Kris Faafoi, who is a better politician than he was a journalist.
Judith Collins was given a hospital pass by the dead shits in National’s caucus, but then on the cusp of winning the real stupid members of the caucus decide that they are bigger than the party.
If National misses out next Saturday then members and caucus can look back and wonder what might have been if the caucus had acted earlier on Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett’s appalling leadership, and what might have been had the wet wing of the caucus had some guts and didn’t bolt at the first sign of pressure, and what might have been had Denise Lee and her idiot friend Mark Mitchell not thought that they were bigger than the party.
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