This week has been a bit of a wild ride and I have an unexpected follow up on a column from two weeks ago, A Turn for the Better. You will have read about the sudden death of Newshub by now with the organisation slated to close its doors in June. I wasn't expecting the complaints from media execs about "an extinction level event" to happen that quickly. The writing had been on the wall for a while with a declining TV audience now down to under half a million and dropping fast. Under 35s make up less than 10% of the TV audience. They've had every opportunity to adapt and they have not done so.
Is there a serious difference between the content Newshub and TVNZ have been putting out? The entire legacy media complex walks in virtual lockstep, only the occasional journalist making a breakout. The complaints that Winston Peters makes that the Fourth Estate needs to be "impartial, politically neutral, fair and objective" to be respected aren't exactly right either.
The media is and will always be biased. Every journalist, every columnist, and every commentator has their own biases and political preferences. Yes, they can all be fair and objective, but it is the lie of impartiality that has caused so many problems. What needs to change is an honesty and openness about these biases—and you'll find that honesty from the alternative and new media like The BFD and RCR.
There isn't space in the media landscape for half-a-dozen legacy media outlets that all have the same biases they tried so desperately to hide. If they were simply honest about their left-wing credentials and if they simply stopped trying to oppose the formation of a counterbalanced right-wing media then we wouldn't be in this mess.
This week legacy media also turned their guns on me, and my show The Dialogue on RCR, asking the Prime Minister if he would block his MPs from appearing on Reality Check Radio because I interviewed Martin Sellner. Far left activists called for the MPs to boycott our station and hoped that the left wing legacy media would apply pressure for them—and that's exactly what happened.
Thankfully Prime Minister Chris Luxon didn't give them the answer they were expecting in a post-cabinet press conference on Monday:
Luxon said he wanted them to be “available to as many media outlets” as possible. “You do not want to see group-think emerge. It’s actually very important that [interviews] happen,” he said.
The lobby group behind this line of questioning calls themselves FACT (Fight Against Conspiracy Theories), but like most communist agitation groups the name is the opposite of what they really do—spread lies. Indeed they could offer no complaint about anything Martin said in the interview other than his support for a burqa ban (which is law in many European countries) and his support for remigration which would provide positive incentives for illegal immigrants and other migrants to return to their home countries, which policies are also being trialled by some European governments.
They had to resort to "guilt by association" for events outside of his control.
In response to these underhanded tactics by the legacy media, some other MPs also responded. David Seymour said:
“I always intend to raise the standard of debate and am happy to challenge interviewers,” he said. “I talk to a wide variety of media outlets, even niche ones like Stuff. Having a range of voices in the media can only be a good thing.” He went on to accuse Fact of being a “left-wing lobby group”.
This week multiple MPs did interviews on RCR as usual, notably Mark Cameron from ACT and Shane Jones from NZ First.
The legacy media hoped this week would result in the cancellation of Reality Check Radio, instead we are stronger than ever, and one of their own Newshub is gone. Now more than ever it's important for the legacy media not to silence voices, but rather continue the dialogue.
The issue in New Zealand isn't partisanship, which is good and healthy, but just the total domination of the left over the big media institutions. Break that and we can have the Fourth Estate back. This week was one more step closer to the death of the legacy media gatekeepers.