Mediawatch's weekly catch-up with Lately. This week Colin Peacock talks to Karyn Hay about the PM upsetting Newstalk ZB by giving a longstanding Monday slot a swerve and further fallout from NZME's Michael Bassett ban. Also - alarming accounts of the capital's mean street after dark.
Photo: photo/ RNZ Mediawatch
Who needs who the most?
The Prime Minister refusing to go on Newstalk ZB every Monday. A big deal?
PM Ardern says it’s not because she’ll still be available - and so will senior ministers - just as much as they ever were. We’ll see.
Hosking’s ZB colleagues certainly made a big deal of it.
Political editor Barry Soper launched a weirdly-worded broadside on the ZB website which says she’s distanced herself from journalists. He says John Key was more approachable, had the journos round more often, and was even better at selfies.
Drive show host Heather du Plessis Allan made the point that this was bringing an end to a long tradition:
"This slot goes back 34 years. Holmes, Lange, Palmer, Moore, Bolger, Shipley, Clarke, Key, English. Those are a lot Prime Ministers prepared to front up and be held accountable. It’s a long line of democratic history Jacinda Ardern has ended. But it’s actually not Hosking that the PM is no longer speaking to weekly. It’s voters: the biggest single catchment of voters listening to commercial radio in the morning."
Ardern has clearly calculated she doesn’t need to reach that audience via Mike Hosking any more every week.
Hosking himself said on air he can take or leave it because the interviews weren't very enlightening - which is weird because he also claimed he found her out time and time again and that he was the only one - or one of few - to ask her tough questions. (Wouldn't that alone would make them well-worth the airtime?)
But Hosking also said “management weren’t happy" that this decision had been communicated to ZB a month ago. So why didn't we hear about it before the first no-show this week?
On Morning Report’s regular weekly Tuesday interview, Susie Ferguson asked Ardern if she had singled ZB and Hosking out. She denied it - saying she wanted to talk to a wider range of media at different times. (Again - let's see)
But no other media in her regular Monday/Tuesday round has been cut, so few commentators believe the rejig wasn't - at least in part - designed to finish the Monday interview with Mike Hosking.
Apparently most other outlets give the PM’s office a heads-up about the likely topics for the weekly interview - Newstalk ZB did not.
Hosking said he was disappointed Ardern isn't "robust enough to fight her corner." But in his show, she often found herself fighting from his corner.
Every morning Hosking airs strong scripted editorial comment and often he made clear his own low opinion of this government and its leadership.
So when she fronted up, it was not always to answer pressing questions of the day but to defend herself against opinions Mike Hosking had already aired.
When the jnterviews were over, he would often editorialise again afterward - making further claims she was unable to respond to.
It’s not like that on other outlets. ZB might now be reflecting on why Ardern considered she had little to lose by cutting them out.
Hosking and other ZB hosts have already said it could hurt Labour come election time when they will want to be on air getting messages out.
But that poses problems for ZB. They will look willfully unbalanced if they shut the Labour out in response as an act of utu.
Further fallout from NZME Bassett ban
The Michael Bassett article in the Northern Advocate on Tuesday. Photo: PHOTO / RNZ Mediawatch
Last week NZME said a column by Dr Michael Bassett that had appeared in the Northland Age paper and on the New Zealand Herald’s website was “unacceptable.”
The Northland Age's article - headlined ‘Racism on a grand scale’ and printed under the banner “New Zealand as we know it” - bemoaned what he called a “bizarre craze” of embracing Māori culture.
“It has failed our standards and should not have been published,” NZME’s chief editor Shayne Currie said.
Historian Scott Hamilton published a rebuttal and fact-check here: All the things Michael Bassett got wrong in his noxious article:
““It is hard to believe that the author of the text printed by the Northland Age was once a history professor. Bassett’s intellectual decline proves once again that bigotry is injurious to scholarship.”
This week some further details about how it was published and withdrawn came out from Dr Bassett himself on a blog he shares with Rodney Hide and Don Drash.
It turns out the same piece had already been published - with a more mild headline ‘New Zealand’s Modern Cultural Cringe’ a month earlier.
Dr Bassett said the editor of the Northland Age - Peter Jackson - asked him if he could publish the article - and Bassett said he didn’t know it would appear on the Herald’s website as well.
He said a complaint was made by an offended reader who saw it online and he claimed Shayne Currie took just minutes to tell his fellow editors Murray Kirkness and Northern Advocate editor Rachel Ward to “review this urgently” and the column was off the Herald’s website within an hour and replaced by an apology to readers was in its place.
Later that day he said he was informed that “NZME won’t be publishing any more of your columns.”
Remarkably swift - and it shows that it was the association with the Herald masthead that made the difference.
“We are immediately reviewing our processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” Shayne Currie said at the time
This probably means local editors of NZME’s local papers will have less freedom to publish contributions on contentious topics.
Dr Bassett’s piece was pretty clearly an opinion, and as such NZME could publish contrary opinions in the interests of balance (which it did).
So it is surprising that NZME acted so decisively to distance itself from the decision to publish.
Bassett’s own response was interesting:
“In one sense the whole business has been a storm in a teacup. Fortunately, there are plenty of other ways for people to access my articles and those of my colleagues, Don Brash and Rodney Hide.”
But he took a swipe at “the alacrity with which (the editors) swung into gear at the threat of a complaint to the Press Council and battened down their hatches.”
Pundit and Free Speech Coalition member Chris Trotter was more upset about Dr Bassett losing a mainstream media outlet.
“Have Granny’s readers really become “wokesters”? Of course they haven’ Is (Shayne Currie) so certain that there will never again be mainstream outlets to which they can turn for a more faithful reflection of New Zealanders’ opinions, that he feels entirely safe in censoring them?,” he asked.
And then he says there will be a reaction:
“The free market, no less than Mother Nature herself, abhors a vacuum. Wheels are already in motion to set up New Zealand’s very own equivalent of the Fox News Network. Backers described as having “very deep pockets” are determined to set up a right-wing media alternative as “fair and balanced” as RNZ, Stuff, MediaWorks and, now, the NZ Herald.”
Alarming accounts of Wellington after dark
Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
Herald journalist in Wellington Katie Harris published an eye-opening piece last weekend Why I no longer feel safe walking at night.
“I've lived in the capital for more than a year, and during that time I've been followed, harassed, catcalled, touched by strangers and accosted too many times to count.”
“In the year that's passed I find myself increasingly reluctant to leave the house once the sun goes down. Even just a short trip to the dairy can be frightening when you're having to weave your way past people defecating in the streets or a slow-moving brawl.
Maybe it is just me, maybe it is just poor luck, or maybe we have a major problem.”
The next day, she tweeted this:
“Today a man snuck into my apartment building and pretended to be a maintenance worker to steal a woman on my floor’s keys and wallet - it seems not even where we call home is safe.”
Other journalists responded. Dileepa Fonseka former Council reporter for the DomPost tweeted:
“Frightening this happened to you. There’s something 1970s New York about how rapidly the capital is disintegrating.”
It paints a worrying picture - but it was almost entirely anecdotal. Just one person's experience.
Why the situation this bad all over town? If so why?
Katie herself has published stories about this in the past. For example she recently reported seizures of GHB and GBL - used in drink spiking and often sexual assaults - has nearly tripled in the year since 2019.”
Today she backed up her personal piece with more data.
"Police data shows sexual assaults in Wellington have increased by nearly 50 per cent in the past five years - “acts intended to cause injury” have grown by 35 per cent over the same period."
It's also an example of how the Herald is making a real push with Wellington stories. Wellington reporter Georgina Campbell reporting on the Council’s woes in details.
Herald website users in Wellington can foreground the local content on the homepage and there will be more stories like this as thee Herald up its drive to be a more national digital outlet.
