Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
National Ministers are used to spouting unchallenged talking points to fawning presenters in soft interviews. Joyce thought he was doing a routine he said/she said until Espiner pretty much ambushed him by keeping Parker in the studio.
Since refusing to debate anything with anyone in a serious forum has been the hallmark of this governments six year in power, I reckon Joyce will be seething at Espiner.
-
Part of the reason people are so outraged about this is most New Zealanders don’t have a clue just how awful our corporate media (TV, radio and newsprint) actually is now. When I travel, it is embarassing to re-discover just how bad our news and currents affairs are now.
The biggest problem with the Herald is the disconnect between the general assumption it is still “Granny” Herald (like the Times used to be called “The Thunderer”), paper of record and broadsheet purveyor of reliable if conservative news and comment and the reality – that what passes as one of two daily “papers of record” is a cross between the Daily Mail and the Sun. New Zealanders, who don’t have a Guardian or an Independent or (heaven forbid) a Telegraph to compare it with assume the Herald still carries some sort of serious journalistic gravitas and integrity, when the reality is Rebekah Brookes would probably use a steelo pad to try and scrub herself clean if she had to shake hands with Tim Murphy.
I heard on NatRad the other week the online Guardian Australia is doing well, and they may eventually come to NZ. It cant happen soon enough, IMHO.
-
I would be inclined to go with a slander action against Key and the Herald, simply because I think that in an advanced democracy a major daily paper of record working hand in glove with the PM simply can't be allowed to get away with concocting complete fabrications that smear the chief opposition party just 90 days out from a general election.
-
This is a very dumb idea.
I am not sure if Labour has much choice, or much to lose. They have no choice because this orchestrated farrago of lies and innuendo from the Herald and the National Party cannot be allowed to simply die and leave a bad impression. Not three months out from an election. At least taking legal action – if only until after the election – will get the message out to the electorate that the Herald concocted a smear. And given the collusion between National and the Herald on this, Labour has little to lose by declaring to the general public that it considers the Herald to be a hostile witness.
-
This government hates public radio and has frozen its budget forever. It’s hatchet man CEO Paul Thompson says the future is online and (on thin evidence) declares broadcast radio dying.
The end game is obvious. Sell off the frequencies, and all of RNZ will become an internet only shell. It’ll be the converged digital revolution, just not the way anyone expected.
-
” they face precisely no legal or reputational sanction for publishing.
This is, of course, the same morally bankrupt media culture that in this far flung iteration decided that Cameron Slater is blogger of the year.
See, people love that stuff. My flatmate can’t get enough of it on live leak, and he is by no means alone – in fact, I would say he is in the majority. The sheer number of people who spend their lives alternating between the gruesome, unedited highlights of death live leak style and similar online sites and the (to me) incomprehensibly popular CI channel seems to me to adequately explain the enduring influence of people like Garth McVicar.
it is a form of pornography, and since no one can do much about that I can’t see how we can stop people flocking online to watch the latest hideous ISIS video execution.
Ratings, dear boy, ratings.
-
Brazil play like crap but cheat like champs. But none of that will matter anyway because the refs have all been told by FIFA that Brazil are going to win the tournament.
But then saying FIFA has fixed the tournament to ensure a hometown win is half believed by everyone already.
-
For what exactly? Are you really implying that the only way of achieving a stable nation-state is through achieving racial/cultural purity?
All the empirical evidence of the last 200 years - in Europe at least - points to that. So the answer to your question is yes, that is what I am saying.
-
There is a dirty secret in Europe - the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe that occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of WW2 worked. Everyone was in on it. Here are the Ukrainians slaughtering the Poles in 1943-44, for example.
Where strongman communist rule meant it didn't occur in 1945 in the ex-Yugoslavia the slaughter and the cleansing was merely put off for fifty years. With the break up of the USSR it was inevitable that the interlaced ethnic groups would fall into the sort of violence that characterised pre-WW2 Europe and ex-Yugoslavia.
The (unpalatable) solution is a mass transfer of populations to newly defined borders by agreement, rather than by massacre.
-
Ultimately, I think this budget is fine, and National really is doing a reasonable job of managing the finances.
This opines the authentic self-satisfied liberal middle class.
Nothing for the poor. Not a cent for the bottom.
Still, I guess we got gay marriage.
Francis Fukuyama was right. The neo-libs won.