Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Another kick in the crotch for the people of Christchurch, first the dropping of the Canterbury Clothing Company brand
Given that Canterbury clothing is no longer based in Christchurch that complaint doesn't seem particularly valid. Canterbury abandoned Chch first?
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Well, if this turns out to be no more than “someone told me something” I’m not sure it says anything about Shearer’s character. But, boy, it says a metric fuckton about his political judgement.
Indeed. His source is a video taken inside the GCSB. If he doesn't have a copy of the video in his hands or has made damn sure that the person who is providing it has secured a copy where the GCSB/police can't get to it, he's a damn fool going on TV without anything to back him up. The opposition and the media are starting to hit the PM with body blows on this Dotcom/GCSB issue, and he's just taken a big swing and fallen over on his face.
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I don’t have anything against soft-news stories per se, but they do seem to act as a gateway drug to anti-journalism: advertorials (the lavish news coverage of the KFC double-down burger was probably the nadir of this in NZ journalism) and faux-controversies (‘was New Zealand originally settled by a race of Nodic immortals? John Ansell says Yes!’).
Aye. My concern isn't the barrier between 'hard news' which is backed up by data, and 'soft news' which is interviews with individuals who have a personal story to tell. The latter can often be fantastic television, and those stories can highlight the broader reality and make it much more real.
I dislike (to take Campbell Live) John Campbell bouncing around behind a recently released David Bain like he's Justin Bieber, and I loved the story that aired on decile schools and lunchboxes. I suspect you can ask the hard questions and shed light into dark places just as much in a 'soft' news story talking to an individual as you can looking at the latest data or report. Plenty of hard news can happen that way.
Also, the entire thing would be vastly improved if the live cross was reserved for a story when there's actually something going on in front of the camera beside the reporter at the time the news airs.
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Munky Kramp, Lea Maalfrid… good luck find them anywhere else (I have other Demarnia Lloyd songs, but not from that band).
I posted about Munky Kramp on here four years ago and Peter Gorman emailed me with a link to his web site which had five Munky Kramp mp3s. The page is no longer available on his site (http://variantmedia.co.nz/) but I have the mp3 files still if anyone wants them: schoolboy song, making hay, eyes that cry, chrome rover and baby baby.
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Am I the only one who's been given godlike powers to close threads and make posts sticky? Russell?
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Which, by extension, would make it logical for the Chair of the Intelligence & Security Committee to be the Leader of the Opposition. They thus have zero to fear from incurring the wrath of the PM by asking awkward questions.
Well you could say that about all select committees, I'm not sure it applies more to this one.
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I would mind considerably less if one of them wasn’t statutorily required to be the person whose agencies are meant to be kept in check by this Committee. And did I mention that he’s also the Chair? The fox guarding the hen house is a rather apt metaphor.
Well yes. Though there's a lot more closed ranks element to our political parties than the US for instance, so less likely that a chair is going to stand up and say "man the minister [who is also the PM and holds my political future in his hand] screwed this up bad" than in some other countries.
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So we’ve got a Committee that is one-fifth the Minister in charge of the portfolio, one-fifth the Leader of the Opposition, two-fifths the Minister’s hand-picked nominees (currently Dunne and Banks), and the remaining fifth a nominee of the Leader of the Opposition (currently Norman). I count three fifths of the Committee as being part of the House majority, and thus not terribly inclined to vote in ways that might displease the governing party. It’s legislatively composed to have no independence from the ministerial or operational leader.
I don't mind the majority of the committee being from the house majority. Indeed, I'm quite impressed that Key and Goff/Shearer have looked outside their own parties to have cross-party membership.
But Banks? Can't even take oversight of his own campaign for mayor, let alone oversight of a secret government agency.
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Unless you are Alan Jones of course…
Or Michael Richards.
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Interesting - the plot thickens. Wonder what the source is inside Gen-I.