Despite their best efforts, missionaries to this beautiful group of islands didn’t manage to convince locals they encountered to end several of their more unpleasant cultural practices for many, many years. One of those was the widespread tangihanga (or mourning) custom among women to slash their face and breast with sharp objects, usually sea shells, until drawing blood from their wounds, upon the arrival of news of lost loved ones and relatives.
It seems, on the news of Newshub’s demise that the practice is still alive and kicking, as article after article, and opinion after opinion, bewail the ‘loss to democracy’ from its inevitable shut-down and encourage us to join in their pantomime-style mourning choruses.
I don’t buy it.
Instead of listening to the message, they’re selling that which customers are no longer buying. We see ‘blame’ attributed, particularly to the contemporary euphemism for colonisers (i.e. ‘right-wing’) abandoning the security of curated ‘news’ for the conspiracy theorist frontier of alternative news sources filled with rabbit-holes and fake news.
A wise news outlet would say: listen to your audience. The dunce says: nay, they must listen to us (until they stop listening).
Recently there was more breast-slashing in the form of Dr Greg Treadwell, who works for AUT and is part of the team which produces the annual ‘Trust in Media’ report, and who, following the very good news of 2023’s report of lower-than-ever public trust in MSM, disclosed that “Early reports from this work in 2024 show that decline is accelerating.” Surprise, surprise, before bemoaning the usual tropes: “allegations from right-wing pundits and politicians that media had been bought”, along with superb conceit: “Poor media literacy, active conspiracy theorists and decades of under-funding journalism have likely all contributed to the increasing rejection of mainstream news media.”
Forget the old custom of slashing oneself in the grief of loss: these revelations have me laughing my head off, and believe me, that’s far more dangerous. I struggled to snuggle back into my rabbit hole, such was my mirth.
