Hard News: Now It's On
223 Responses
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Clark as the victim of media bias here?
I don't think so Craig. The Herald has gone into campaign mode earlier than in 2005 due to the Electorial Finance Act which, I think anyone might agree, their has been some inaccurate reporting of in the paper. But Labour won 2005. The Herald may have the majority view more with them this time. Or not.
But what is clear is that the Herald's coverage cannot be taken as a neutral, near objective angle. And I think that's obvious to anyone paying attention.
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But what is clear is that the Herald's coverage cannot be taken as a neutral, near objective angle. And I think that's obvious to anyone paying attention.
Oh, balls. I'm sorry to have to keep repeating this but reading something you find disobliging is not signs of "media bias". Do I think the problem with that Google Bomb story that the Herald on Sunday has a anti-Key, anti-National bias? Well, perhaps but it's one of those existential unknowable unknowns Donald Rumsfeld used to be so fond of. More evidence that outsourcing your fact-checking to Uranus, and filling the newsroom with (cheap) twelve year olds, is a bad idea? Definitely.
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I thought Helen's comment about John Key enjoying himself in Otara like any other tourist would was the line of the day yesterday, and Ms. Rees won Laour a small skirmish in the overall battle.
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Craig, the Herald's been a right-wing -- at times radical right -- newspaper for over 130 years. It used to be edited by this guy, the closest New Zealand's ever come to an Oswald Moseley figure. During the '30s, it took a consistently hostile editorial line the First Labour Government. It castigated Michael Joseph Savage for criticizing Chamberlain's position on Czechoslovakia, for instance.
Denying that newspapers in New Zealand are biased, one way or the other, by the political beliefs and financial interests of their editors and owners is just silly. Disseminating those beliefs and furthering those interests is what newspapers do. It's one of the primary establishing functions of newspapers -- look at the history of the Dominion, for instance. Politicians realize this. Back in the day, it was not unheard of for a prospective candidate to buy the electorate's local newspaper for campaign purposes.
What's changed in New Zealand recently is that practically all of the traditionally Left newspapers that used to counter the influence of the conservative rags have disappeared. And that, I suspect, has played a not insignificant role in fostering the current 'mood' in the country, especially among older voters.
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The journo clearly didn't do as good a job as you of connecting the dots, Craig. Or Rees lied to him. Either way, her behaviour is not on.
However, the Herald has displayed a bias over the last couple of years which is readily apparent to many of us (not just because we don't agree with the content), so you're wasting your breath trying to say it goes both ways. It doesn't.
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Giovanni, I wonder how long you've been in nz?
Eleven years next month.
And whether you find it unsettled, tenuous - like a young tree with shallow roots, compared to Italy? Do you think the quality of collective memory in Italy,being such an historic, much layered, long-settled place, is quite different to here - where amongst pakeha, anyway, there's only a few generations' worth of memory?
That's an easy question that I'll attempt to answer in 8,000 words or less.
Okay, Italy has been peopled for a while longer, but how much of that heritage is actually lived memory passed on from person to person? The art to make wine and olive oil or dry-stone walls, sure. And certain institutions, notably religion. But Gothic architecture, Renaissance painting, Roman sexuality? We know about these things, and to a certain extent we might feel like they belong to our collective memory, but really they are an object of study, not unlike
paleontology. I think the bulk of actually lived, collective memory has a much shorter timespan, and the NZ indigenous cultures, Maori and Pakeha (if you excuse the simplification) have plenty of past to draw upon. It is and unsettled past, and that's a healthy thing, but no more than the Italian collective memory, which is far more fractured.I think NZ has a tremendous advantage, though: its oldest indigenous culture is cherished as a national living treasure. If you take an Italian culture that was around when NZ was colonised by the Europeans - that of Rural lombardy, say - there is simply no way to preserve it, not as lived memory. I'm a big fan of Giovanni Guareschi, who tried to do that in his Don Camillo books, but he was a reactionary (as opposed to a conservative or a traditionalist in a
positive sense): he wanted modernity to simply go away. In NZ, on the other hand - and I don't feel at all off-topic saying this - you can be a (cultural) nationalist and a progressive, a radical activist and somebody who looks to the past for inspiration and guidance.I'll gladly leave it to John Key to make this election all about the future. (Git.)
I read your blog about memory & technology - tis fascinating stuff. Are you conscious of fictionalising your memories of Italy - even though technology enables you to keep in touch?
As an emigrant you are naturally more aware of these things, but we fictionalise the countries that we live in, too. Again, the direct experience of national life is partial; my knowledge of what it's like to live in Auckland or Timaru, or to be a cleaner, or an investment banker, or a parent on the DPB, is mediated. Isn't that why we obsess about the power of the media to shape public perceptions and determine public opinion? Although here too NZ is lucky I think, in that there are far fewer worlds apart, ways of life that are completely unknown by those on the outside - the result of living in a relatively egalitarian and yes, perhaps a touch monocultural society.
But: I could go on about this stuff, and on and on and on until somebody would have to come to my house and punch me to make me stop.
Sue Kedgley: standing between me and voting for the Greens.
Sue Bradford: standing between me and Sue Kedgley and not voting for the Greens.
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Metiria Turei - standing between.. oh I give up. Impressive performer anyway, and seems to be coming from a different angle than her older Green colleagues. Less hectoring, perhaps.
Nice blog, Giovanni.
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All those old National Film Unit movies from the mid 1930's on didn't just happen by chance. The first Labour government gave up trying to get its message out via a N.Z. print media that thought Franco was to soft on the lefties. So instead they went over their head and used the new medium of radio (Colin Scrimgeour anyone?) and set up a pro-government film unit for good measure.
Battling the entrenched business interests who own the media is not a new phenomena for the left in N.Z.
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Battling the entrenched business interests who own the media is not a new phenomena for the left in N.Z.
Oh God... this is almost as much fun as reading the usual suspects on the right claim that Charlie Gibson's hardly penetrating interview with Sarah Palin was a vicious attack you come to expect from the "liberal media". And we've got the best part of two months to go...
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However, the Herald has displayed a bias over the last couple of years which is readily apparent to many of us (not just because we don't agree with the content), so you're wasting your breath trying to say it goes both ways. It doesn't.
*sigh* I'm not even going to rise to that bait, Sacha -- but you do have a point. No use trying to rationally debate anything with someone whose mind is made up and set in superglue-infused concrete.
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Or when the evidence is against you, old bean. :)
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Bradford & Kedgley - two people who ought to be kept locked up in a jail on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity if the Greens want to be in the next parliament.
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Or when the evidence is against you, old bean. :)
Um, what "evidence" is that, Sacha? Oh, I've seen something I don't like in the Herald, therefore they're biased. It's tiresome coming from the right wingnuts -- who are equally confused about the difference between assertion and argument -- and I don't see why you get a pass.
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BTW, Sasha, I fully expect the New Zealand Herald to remind me repeatedly over the campaign why I've no intention of renewing the sub when it runs out in the middle of November. But as I said about Duncan Garner on another thread, you've got to give him credit for being a superficial fuckwit on a thoroughly non-partisan basis. Everyone gets their share of his special brand of stupid.
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Sue Bradford: standing between me and Sue Kedgley and not voting for the Greens.
Heh, almost for me. I have a lot of respect for Sue Bradford and all she's managed to accomplish, but Kedgley represents the rabidly anti-science aspect of some environmentalism that struck me very poorly during the big GE debate and that the Greens have never quite redeemed themselves on for me, and likely won't anytime soon
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Craig, when the Harold offers equal opportunity handjobs like the fulsome one it gave Johnny boy, we can have a conversation. I'm not going to waste my time for now, either.
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Sue Kegdley is the sort of person who everyone rolls their eyes at behind her back, for me - and by the look of it at lot of other people - she is the classic kill-joy, a lactose intolerant with a gluten allergy food obsessive that you'd never invite over for dinner because all she will eat is a piece of certified fair trade organic tofu from the Republic of the Coromandel. And she would lecture you over your lamb chop.
Bradford is a different kettle of fish, but just as annoying. A doctrinaire middle class "socialist" who lectures rather than persuades. I used to have some time for her, but then I personally saw her in action with some genuine working class people and she was, to put it frankly, a patronising fuckwit.
The thing about the Greens is for all their leftish pretensions, they are not a working class party. They are a religious party, just like Brian Tamaki would want, only with a belief system more palatable to middle class liberals.
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I would strongly disagree that the Greens are a 'religious' party - unless you are sloppily using 'religous' to mean 'believer' - and of course the Greens are a believer party - Earth first. (Tamaki and his deranged cohorts - ok, that's a bit strong - gullible & easily-led-by-self-interested-and-self-promoting-religious-nutter cohorts, are a religious party.)
I'm on the Southern Maori roll: I come from (and, oh, how I do mean this!) a Labour party family, and I've twice strategically voted for the Greens on the party vote. But I think their Maori policies are seriously shonky-
Steven Crawford, how I do like MMP too!
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Craig, when the Harold offers equal opportunity handjobs like the fulsome one it gave Johnny boy, we can have a conversation. I'm not going to waste my time for now, either.
And Helen Clark's never had her face all over a puff piece in her career. Give me a bloody break. And while it might be disappointing that John Key doesn't beat his wife, abuse his children, defraud little old ladies of their savings and turned out to be the son of Nazi... Well, were you expecting them to just make it up?
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Alas, voting Green is something I might do with gritted teeth to ensure that the environment gets due attention in the next parliament, considering that National thinks that any problem can be erased with the most cursory greenwash (because of course climate change is a hoax, or benign or... hell, the next generation's problem) and Labour... thinks the same with slightly more earnest spin.
Certainly SK reminds me of the Greens' worst aspects: their doctrinaire Luddism and sanctimony in particular. "Inside every revolutionary there is a policeman", I think Flaubert wrote and that attitude seems to permeate the party as a whole. Unfortunately I do not want to eat cold organic lentils in the dark. I WANT my GE lentils in my nuclear power lit apartment if that's the least worst way to avoid climate change thank you.
The problem with the Greens for me is their absolute intellectual rigidity, their failure to acknowledge that the choices are between the worst worst and the least worst, not Heaven and Hell.
On an aside or a digression, characterising them as "religious" is right or wrong depending on what you mean by religion - religions of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition are of what I'd call an apocalyptic/transcendentalist mold and are prone to "revelation" and bullying fundamentalism whereas religions in most cultures, and as far as we can tell from the archaeology of vanished cultures, are more of the animist mold, using ritual as a relatively pragmatic means of establishing a kind of narrative integrity between oneself, society and the world. It is the latter kind that could be seen as proto-scientific in the pragmatic epistemology, whereas the former is a structure for totalitarianism. Oh dear, I'm slipping into academic mode... blah blah, subvert the dominant paradigm by deconstructive intertsubjectivity, or as Deleuze writes... ah, excuse me while I take my pill.
Right then, where was I?
And Helen Clark's never had her face all over a puff piece in her career. Give me a bloody break. And while it might be disappointing that John Key doesn't beat his wife,
(Twirls hair and blows bubble) Like, what-ever!!
There's argument, there's discussion and there's point scoring. Craig, It think you're brilliant and witty, but sometimes you can be a political Trekkie and I like neither Kirk nor Picard (Adama on the other hand...).
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Hah, godwinned already. Too easy. :)
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Craig, when the Harold offers equal opportunity handjobs like the fulsome one it gave Johnny boy, we can have a conversation. I'm not going to waste my time for now, either.
Meh. I never read the full thing, so can't comment if it was a handjob or not. But equal opportunity?
Helen Clark has been our Prime Minister for 9 years now. Before that leader of the opposition, before that Minister in the 4th Labour Government. I think we have a fair idea of who she is and what she stands for.
John Key on the other hand has come from pretty much no where in political terms. Giving that he's looking fairly likely to be our next PM, it's not unreasonable to be asking who he is. I'd have to hope that the media would take a role in providing that information for us.
The media should be balanced, that doesn't necessarily mean equal opportunity.
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Kyle, don't take my word for it - although there was a whole thread somewhere back there. Anyway, you may recall that Russell summarised the article as "Why John Key is so freaking amazing". I'm talking about tone, slant and other such things.
Actually I'm off to watch telly. Less depressing. :)
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That's an easy question that I'll attempt to answer in 8,000 words or less.
Thank you for that, Giovanni. I was born here, but my grandparents weren't, so there's not much depth to my family history here. I'm quite conscious of not feeling solidly grounded here - which probably has alot to do with why I'm studying history, esp. nz history. And why i wonder if it feels different to spring from an old culture (and now be transplanted).
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Mikaere Curtis wrote :
Denise Roche is the Greens candidate for Auckland Central. She's also on the Auckland City Council, representing the Hauraki Gulf ward.
We're running a Party Vote campaign. We stand in electorates because that's the most effective way of engaging with voters during an election campaign, not because we think we can win the electorate.
Gareth Ward wrote :
Thanks Mikaere. I'm looking to get a little more "engaged" in my decision for local representation this year - sounds like the Greens won't be of any use to me in that task.
On the contrary! I am keen to try to convince half of the Labour voters in Auckland Central to vote for the Green Party candidate instead of Tizard. It makes no difference to Labour in terms of seats, but if the Greens get an electorate seat they don't have to worry about the 5% threshold. (Although I wish Labour would not stand a candidate in some seat (eg Mt Albert) and ask people to vote for the Green Candidate in order to assure that the Greens are in the next parliament).
In terms of local representation, the way I figure it, the Labour and National candidates are highly likely to get in anyway from the list, so getting a candidate for another party in as well, has got to improve Auckland's representation.
Besides, a candidate that only got in because of the electorate vote, is going to be much more responsive to the electorate than one who would've got in on the list anyway.
Looking at the last election's results (eg Auckland Central) gives you an idea whether there is a possible third choice in your electorate.
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