Posts by Tom Semmens
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Speaker: The Public Broadcasting Imperative, in reply to Megan Wegan,
That is true, but the White Sea canal wasn't built only by the guilty.
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The way to contain the contagion that is now TVNZ is to wait for the TVNZ Christmas party and then nuke the site from orbit.
It is the only way to be sure.
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Arguing about the the makeup of the panel’s guests isn’t the half of it. The panel frequently has Mora inviting on and interviewing hard-right commentators, to whom Mora then proceeds to lob gentle tennis ball questions.
Mora’s loaded guest list and questioning technique was perfectly illustrated by his patsy interview with Jordan Williams. For example, Mora asked Williams about his “vote for change” front-group and Williams was allowed to say his organisation is “…a membership-driven, grassroots campaign…” without challenge. Mora simply let William’s statement sit as fact for his audience. This is despite the astroturfing nature of William’s/Shirtcliffe organisation being well documented and remarked on in the media – as for example here and here and here – and any two minute Google search would have revealed that. Any journalist worth his or her salt should surely have at least raised this question, and asked about Peter Shirtcliffe’s involvement with the vote for change organisation as well. Failing to do so raises serious questions about Mora’s partiality, since he is a smart and well informed guy and he must have known Williams was basically lying. The other option is Jim Mora is simply an incompetent journalist not fit to run his afternoon show.
This isn’t an isolated example of Mora’s style of right wing loaded “journalism”, just the most recent to hand. He does it all the time. having Brian Edwards and Michelle Boag on your panel may maintain a veneer of “balance”, but the truth is Mora seems to carefully screen his subject matter experts to present an often very right wing view against which his “left wing” panel member is frequently reduced to playing the role of token opponent to a hegemonistic conservative world view.
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“…I do believe that if Labour had a dashing leader who attracted young women at the races, you would see an equivalent story…”
Stuart Nash and Jacinda Ardern as the red dreamboat team for 2014, perhaps? Has our political journalism really come to that? Actually, that is a rhetorical question. When I saw the the subject for this episode of Media7 I laughed, because it seems to me completely pointless to have an episode examining the actions of a corpse.
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What’s amazing to me is that supporters of any political party have always alleged that the Herald is conspiring against them and in bed with their enemies.
Have you even bothered reading the Herald in, oh, the last 48 hours? Apart from the two stories above – Goff is rubbish because Key says so and Key mobbed by giddy crowd, let’s look at Audrey Young’s Herald headline yesterday – “Anti-poverty plan gives working parents benefit to jobless” – is simple partisan hackery and drips of sarcasm. Her story comes with loaded editorialising as the “vitriolic” used to attack Robyn Malcolm in it’s language – I quote: “The… …plan highlights the difference between Labour’s bid to make life easier for sole parents and National’s cracking the whip to get them into work…”
You work out the message from that, you are the newsroom has-been “expert” here. Oh, did I use quotation marks there? Did I editorialise there? Did that change the perception of the meaning of the words I wrote, do you think?
This Key business is now becoming scary, because it shows no sign of waning (if anything, it is becoming more cult like everyday) and because the media are the prime cheerleaders of the celebrity cult that has been built around John Key in a way that you would expect from cowed journalists in a tinpot South American dictatorship – which perhaps we are increasingly resembling in every other way anyway.
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But Hawke had been in politics - or at least the trade union movement - for years, and was immensely popular before he entered parliament. In other words, he had a track record and a history.
John Key parachuted in from nowhere complete with a lovely made for TV fairy tale back story. And the media welcomed him like a messiah, an attitude that hasn't really changed.
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I find the Panel broadly leftwing,
That's right, because David Farrar asking Jordan Williams questions is the very dark heart of radio socialism.
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Hard News: Presentation and Reality, in reply to raoulduke,
The media bias in the Herald against Labour – or the Greens or anyone who isn’t part of the “we love John Key” Glee Club really – is amazing.Claire Trevett and Audrey Young helpfully include quotation marks around their report on the story, just so the reader is sure to know it is a load of rubbish just from the headline.
And the body of the story contains all you need to know – “Prime Minister John Key yesterday dismissed them earlier yesterday as “rubbish”.
Well, if John says so then clearly Phil Goff is wrong.
Of course, Tracy Watkins over at Stuff/Dom-post isn’t much better, incredibly stumping up the cash and getting an expert to carefully trawl through Goff’s claims fact-checking, presumably so they could triumphantly damn Goff should an error be uncovered. Oh, if only the same standards of truth were to be applied to John Key's utterances!
I have never seen anything like the current cult of Key in any modern democracy anywhere.
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And anyway, do we really hold The Panel to any serious standard of discussion or debate?
That depends. If you think out of touch and conservative middle aged whites discussing issues with carefully picked right wing commentators demands serious consideration, then the answer would be yes.
If, on the other hand hand, you dismiss the entire panel as a little more than a reflection of Jim Mora’s ability to channel Kiwiblog, then no.
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Jesus, I have heard that Jordan Williams and he's the most glib snake oil salesman I have ever heard. He is the sort of guy who would have you counting all your fingers after shaking hands with him.
The Shirtcliffe funded anti-MMP campaign was intellectually dishonest and relied on the most base sort of negative attack advertisments to try and stop MMP being introduced. Why would anyone assume that nasty old geriatric leopard has changed any of his spots at all?