Will a new RNZ board stop the rot?

The Treasury has publicly advertised vacancies on the RNZ board for a new chair and two “governors” (I presume that means directors). The appointees will replace current chair Jim Mather and board members Jane Wrightson and Irene Gardiner, all of whom were installed during the term of the Ardern government. All three are well-connected Wellington insiders who were never going to upset the status quo by insisting RNZ fulfil its obligation to cater to a wider audience than the privileged “progressive” class – I use the inverted commas deliberately – from which the state broadcaster draws its core support. The question now is whether the government will appoint people willing and able to do the job the current board clearly had no interest in tackling.

The advertisement for candidates is notable for its use of the word “trust”. It mentions that RNZ “plays a vital role in fostering a strong national identity through trusted journalism, current affairs, and cultural programming”. Later, it says applicants should have an understanding of “media and public sector dynamics, public trust, and audience engagement”.

Trust has emerged as a crucial issue for media credibility. Judging by the wording of the ad, it seems to be assumed that RNZ enjoys wide public trust, but that’s not necessarily the case. While RNZ can claim to be the “most trusted” New Zealand news source, according to a 2025 survey conducted by the Auckland University of Technology, it’s merely the best of a bad lot. RNZ was given an average score of six out of 10, zero being not at all trustworthy and 10 being beyond reproach. So barely a pass mark.

RNZ itself published a piece by the authors of the AUT report noting that New Zealanders’ overall trust in the news had declined “precipitously” – from 58 per cent to 32 per cent over the past five years. Mather, who has chaired the RNZ board since 2018 (in other words, a period coinciding with that decline), acknowledged in RNZ’s annual report that trust in the media had been shaken globally and said it was incumbent on public media, in particular, to address this.

The AUT survey also revealed that despite generous taxpayer funding and the great marketing advantage of not being encumbered by crass, intrusive advertising, RNZ trails well behind its private-sector competitors in the news business. Last year it was the sixth most popular news source in New Zealand, lagging behind Stuff, TVNZ, the New Zealand Herald and even Facebook and YouTube. That indicates there’s a lot of ground to gain. Trust could (and should) be a vital factor in winning back all those New Zealanders who have turned sour on the media.

So what is RNZ doing to rebuild public confidence? Er, not a lot. It signalled last month, when it announced the appointment of John Campbell as co-host of its flagship news and current affairs programme Morning Report, that it was wilfully blind to mounting public concerns about political bias in the media and the tendency in recent years to blur the lines between news and opinion, of which Campbell is a master practitioner. RNZ either didn’t grasp or chose to ignore (either is inexcusable, but it was far more likely the latter) the reality that Campbell is a polarising figure who has done nothing to disguise his political leanings, and in particular his dislike for the government that his fellow New Zealanders chose to elect in 2023. 

Coming immediately before the start of an election year, when the quality and fairness of political journalism will be under intense scrutiny, his appointment should be seen as an act of provocation and defiance - not so much against the government (since journalists in a liberal democracy owe governments no loyalty), but more importantly against the many thousands of New Zealanders who, like me, were once RNZ devotees but gave up listening because they felt they could no longer rely on it to be fair, balanced and impartial. To that I might add … and also against the millions of New Zealanders whose taxes pay for RNZ but who never listen to it, and indeed may not even realise it exists, because for decades it has ignored them, preferring to position itself as a bastion of cultural privilege. (I will here insert my usual qualification to the effect that there are people at RNZ, including some journalists, whom I respect, and who I believe do their jobs conscientiously and professionally. This article is not about them.)

The New Year brought fresh evidence of RNZ’s disregard for basic principles of editorial balance and impartiality. A story broadcast on January 3 noted that there had been a 37 percent increase in the number of abortions – up from 12,948 to 17,785 – since the few remaining legal impediments were lifted in 2020.

This was presented as a benign, indeed positive, trend. The sole source quoted in RNZ’s story was Dr Simon Snook, whom the lobby group Voice for Life identifies as the man who set up the 0800 Dial-an-Abortion service and has spent years lobbying for an increase in the number of abortion facilities around the country.

Snook’s own company, Magma Healthcare, provides medical abortions through a service funded by Health New Zealand (i.e. the taxpayer). It’s hardly surprising, then, that he put the best possible spin on the surge in abortion numbers, saying it reflected "improved access to care" rather than an increase in demand.

Referring to the tendency for women to obtain medical (i.e. drug-induced) abortions rather than invasive surgical ones, Snook was reported as saying: “I think what we are seeing now is people who previously would have wanted an abortion and couldn’t get one for their own reasons are now getting it. We are getting the abortion numbers correct for the country’s need.”

To quote a celebrated line from Mandy Rice Davies of Profumo scandal fame, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” Of course Snook is going to spruik an increase in the number of abortions as a good thing. No doubt he would argue that he’s approaching the issue from a position of sympathy for women, but there’s no getting around the fact that it's good for his business. That doesn’t rule him out as a legitimate source, but his credibility needs to be judged in terms of his vested interest in the lucrative abortion business.

A competent, fair-minded reporter would have recognised this and sought to balance the story with comment from someone with a different perspective on the abortion trend. Failing that, someone further up the editorial chain should have insisted on it.

After all, it’s not hard: Voice for Life, the country’s main anti-abortion lobby group, has been around for decades. It has a website with an email address for media inquiries. And it’s not as if VFL is some lunatic fringe group: it tells me it has 30 branches, more than 8000 newsletter subscribers and more than 14,000 followers on social media. (I’m not a member, although my views on abortion are reasonably well known.)

Here’s the thing. Setting aside personal views, abortion remains a highly contentious and divisive issue in New Zealand. Responsible editorial decision-makers would recognise that and realise that any story on the subject calls for balance. RNZ failed that elementary test. Small wonder that VFL described the RNZ story as “a shocking example of woefully biased pro-abortion propaganda, where one of the very people who should be held accountable by the media for the massive increase in abortions is effectively allowed to wave away the harm he has actively contributed to by claiming this increase in harm is a good thing”.

Of course VFL’s statement didn’t get published. Journalists now routinely ignore people whose opinions they disagree with. This became especially noticeable during the term of the Ardern government, when lobby groups dissenting from ideological orthodoxy valiantly kept pushing out media statements knowing they were doomed to languish unseen.

There’s a striking contrast here with previous generations of reporters who went out of their way to seek and report opinions and statements that they often heartily disagreed with. That the current generation doesn’t bother – in fact is often taught by journalism tutors that there’s no need for impartiality and balance – is a prime reason why trust in journalism has collapsed.

It needs to be stated repeatedly that RNZ, as a publicly funded news organisation, has a special obligation to be neutral and balanced; to publish stories that reflect the diversity of public opinion rather than those that conveniently correspond with its journalists’ own views. Mather's statement seemed to tacitly acknowledge that public media operate to different criteria from their private competitors.  Companies such as Stuff and NZME (publisher of the Herald) can make their own rules, as long as they’re willing to risk consequences such as loss of trust and declining readership. RNZ (and TVNZ, but let’s not go there) has no such latitude.

Will the new appointees to the RNZ board recognise all this and do something about it, or will they meekly accept advice from RNZ functionaries that editorial practices are an operational matter, therefore none of their concern, and sit uselessly and impotently on their hands? We shall see.

(Footnote: The original version of this article has been slightly tweaked to insert a new point and clarify an earlier one.)

RNZ's boss gives New Zealand the fingers

A few thoughts on the announcement that John Campbell will take over next year as co-host of RNZ’s Morning Report:

■ RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson had a choice. He could make a polarising appointment or a non-polarising one. He chose the former. In doing so, he gave the fingers to the large (and I suspect growing) number of New Zealanders who neither like Campbell nor trust him as an impartial journalist and commentator. Disregarding RNZ’s obligation to serve all New Zealanders, Thompson made an appointment that he must know will alienate people and almost certainly lead to a further loss of faith in RNZ. He didn't have to do it; there were alternatives.

■ Thompson is either tone-deaf or indifferent to public opinion. An alternative explanation is that he is a weak manager who has yielded to internal pressure to appoint someone the RNZ establishment will be comfortable with. Certainly Campbell will be seen as a compatible ideological fit with other leftist RNZ broadcasters. (I don’t know what Thompson’s personal political views are or whether he even has any, but they may have played no part in his decision.)

■ It’s not just Campbell’s politics that are polarising; it’s also his style as a broadcaster, which alternates between gushingly ingratiating and finger-waggingly pompous and condescending. He professes to be a man of the people and to speak for ordinary New Zealanders, but he’s not and he doesn’t. He proved that when he spectacularly spat the dummy in 2023 because his fellow New Zealanders elected a centre-right government.

■ According to Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column in the New Zealand Herald, RNZ says it’s confident that Campbell is committed to impartial journalism and “like all employees of RNZ, will be held to that high standard through our comprehensive editorial policy”. At best, this is meaningless PR flannel; at worst, it’s plain dishonest. If Campbell has demonstrated anything in recent years, it’s that he’s incapable of impartial journalism. He doesn’t even believe in impartial journalism.

■ Currie also reports that Campbell’s appointment was the subject of “robust discussion” by the RNZ board, but that the directors ultimately deferred to Thompson’s right as CEO to make the call. It’s not hard to surmise which board members are likely to have supported the appointment and which of them resisted it. Those in the former category are likely to be gone once their current terms expire, but by then the damage will have been done to RNZ’s already tarnished reputation.

Death Wish 2025

I did something last Sunday that I hadn’t done for probably a year or more. I listened to RNZ’s Mediawatch.

There was a time when I tuned in to the show every week. But as with so much RNZ content, I grew disenchanted to the point where I simply decided I was better off without it.

For a start, it has never been clear why we were supposed to regard Mediawatch presenter Colin Peacock, who has hosted the show since about 1890 (or so it sometimes seems; actually it was 2007), as an arbiter of journalism standards. He previously worked for the BBC, which would impress the impressionable at RNZ, but as far as I can tell he had precious little on-the-ground experience of journalism in New Zealand. (Then again, his predecessor, Russell Brown, whose background was in student radio and the punk music fanzine Rip It Up, had even less.)

I’ve had a bit to do with Peacock and I have no doubt he’s fundamentally a decent person, but several things about him irritate me: his air of omniscient certitude as he sits in judgment each week, his excruciatingly tedious and self-indulgent interviews about issues of interest to only a tiny handful of media insiders, and his conspicuous tendency to spare his employer the same holier-than-thou scrutiny he brings to bear on other media organisations. But what finally put me off altogether was Peacock’s habit of gratuitously sniping at NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking.

I’m no fan of Hosking and don’t listen to him, but that’s neither here nor there. For Peacock to use his privileged, taxpayer-funded position as a platform for petulant attacks on a rival (and one who shows RNZ up by pulling a much bigger audience than the state broadcaster’s Morning Report) is an abuse of power for which he should have been pulled into line long ago by his boss, Paul Thompson. (It goes without saying that Peacock’s apparent obsession with Hosking is a backhanded compliment to the NewstalkZB host and unlikely to keep him awake at night.)

But that’s all by way of a preamble. Last Sunday’s episode of Mediawatch included a telling item on the recent annual conference of the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ), which represents academic teachers of journalism. Included in the proceedings was a panel discussion on “Journalism and the Far Right”, which examined the supposedly baneful influence of conservative media outlets and commentators “in New Zealand and beyond”.

Strangely enough, I don’t recall the nation’s journalism tutors ever voicing similar alarm about the influence of the far left, despite it being all-pervasive in the media for years. This is because they are the far left and regard their ideologically based concept of journalism as the norm – indeed, the only morally correct approach.

The conference session highlighted the extent to which journalistic paradigms have been upended. The model that prevailed for decades – that of balance and neutrality – has been trashed in favour of one that’s blatantly politicised and sees journalism as a moral crusade driven by left-wing fixations such as identity politics, hate speech (so called) and climate change.

Under this new model, objectivity is disdainfully dismissed as “that old shibboleth” (a phrase reportedly used earlier this year in a radio interview by Massey University journalism associate professor James Hollings, one of the conference organisers). Balance and impartiality, principles that characterised the mainstream media for decades, are now dismissed as tools that serve the interests of the right.

Journalists are instead encouraged to choose, on the basis of their own often narrow and rigid world views, which issues should be covered and which should be ignored. Similarly, they are entitled under the new paradigm to decide which groups and individuals should be allowed to contribute to public debate. The rest can be marginalised, demonised or excluded.

We saw this elitist, exclusionary approach to journalism in full, rampant cry during the term of the second Ardern-led government, slyly assisted by the shameful buy-off of the media under the innocuously named Public Interest Journalism Fund.

There are now occasional encouraging signs that the degradation of traditional journalism values may be abating, at least in some mainstream media outlets. There seems an increasing willingness, albeit a grudging one, to cover stories that were previously untouchable and to give space and airtime to voices and opinions that were formerly deemed beyond the Pale. The instinct for self-preservation may finally be kicking in as audience numbers and newspaper readership continue their precipitous decline and opinion surveys confirm a devastating loss of trust in media organisations.

Unfortunately none of this seems to have registered with the cloistered custodians of journalism training, who display a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. Death Wish 2025 would have been an appropriate alternative name for their recent gathering.

The lineup of participants in the JEANZ discussion tells you all you need to know about the ideological tone of the event. Speakers included another Massey associate professor, Sean Phelan, who first came to this blog’s attention for his impenetrable Marxist gibberish in 2009; Prof Mohan Dutta, also of Massey, who deserves some sort of celebrity status for the unhinged fanaticism of his writing (and who never responded to my invitation to debate with me in 2023); Nicky Hager (say no more); Stuff’s Paula Penfold, perhaps best remembered for her conspiracy-obsessed and deeply flawed 2022 propaganda documentary Fire and Fury; and political reporter Marc Daalder of Newsroom, who can unfailingly be relied on to promote “progressive” ideas and seek to discredit policies and politicians he disapproves of.

Where was the conservative voice on the panel? There was none; not even the fig leaf of a token one. In that respect the discussion accurately mirrored the mainstream media’s abandonment of its commitment to balance. In the warped perspective of the academic left, “conservative” now equates with “far right”. Perhaps someone should point out the inconvenient truth that New Zealanders in 2023 elected a centre-right government, as they have done in the majority of elections during the modern era.

It’s worth noting too that although this was a conference of journalism educators, at least two of the panellists (Phelan and Dutta) are not – and to my knowledge never have been – journalists, while Hager could more accurately be classified as a professional activist, given that he has never pretended to be balanced or impartial.

Not one of the participants conformed even remotely to most New Zealanders’ ideal of journalistic neutrality. Yet these are the people we’ve entrusted with the training of the next generation of journalists – in which case the question must be asked: is the damage now irreversible? Are we living in a post-journalism era?

Of course Mediawatch asked none of these questions, preferring to report the discussion without comment or analysis. Given Peacock’s usual predilection for interposing his own opinion, this could only be interpreted as a sign that he saw nothing to disagree with. No surprises there.

We heard brief audio clips from some of the participants. Phelan, who is Irish, sounded as if he was hyper-ventilating as he squawked about the urgent need to call out what he called the “far-right political project”. Dutta, who is Indian, was quoted as saying that the right-wing media was an ideological project with colonial roots (well, of course he would say that; pernicious colonialism is at the root of everything bad). Daalder, who is American, lamented that aspects of extremist news had made their way into “mainstream pulpits”. Ring the alarm bells!

All this is rich, given that what we’re now seeing in the alternative online media is simply a natural and inevitable backlash against the overwhelming preponderance of the far left. No one should be in the least surprised that media outlets such as the Platform, the Centrist and Reality Check Radio (none of which I follow, incidentally) sprang into life as a reaction against the silencing of conservative voices and the shutting down of legitimate dissent.

It should be pointed out that there was never any need for alternative platforms in the past, since the mainstream media functioned as a “broad church” that made room for all voices. People like the JEANZ educators gleefully danced on the grave of that admirable model and now have the gall to wail about the resulting polarisation and loss of public trust in the media.

On one level, it’s tempting to dismiss the over-excited participants at the JEANZ conference as players in a piece of absurdist theatre, acting out their paranoia far removed from the real world. Regrettably it’s not that simple. Academic courses remain the mandatory gateway to careers in the media, and as long as journalism training is controlled by extreme leftist zealots and charlatans (for charlatans is what some of them are, in my opinion), the media industry has no prospect of ever regaining the respect and trust it commanded in the past.

Media companies cannot escape culpability for this. In the distant past I served on an industry liaison committee that maintained oversight of the journalism course at what is now Massey University and took an active part in the appointment of tutors. If such consultative arrangements still exist, it’s a damning indictment of the industry that it has stood by and done nothing while journalism training was systemically hijacked and corrupted from within by academic white-anters.

 

 

 

What privilege looks like in 2025

Two weeks ago, in a blog post headlined What privilege sounds like in 2025, I made the case that the broadcasting organisation formerly known as Radio New Zealand is the embodiment of privilege. 

I argued that the dwindling number of New Zealanders who listen to the state radio station are in fact doubly privileged. Not only are they able to hear taxpayer-funded content that’s carefully curated so as not to offend their sensibilities or challenge their cosy assumptions, but they are spared the indignity of being bombarded with crass, intrusive advertising. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who choose to tune into commercial radio (which, in this context, essentially means NewstalkZB).

I also noted that despite this disincentive, NewstalkZB’s audience keeps growing at the expense of RNZ. You’d think someone at the top of RNZ might have noticed this and started asking the obvious question – namely, why are listeners abandoning us? But even if they’re asking that question, the evidence suggests that they can’t bring themselves to answer it honestly.

As if to prove this, when my old colleague (and former broadcasting journalist) Barrie Saunders linked to my blog post on Facebook, RNZ board member Jane Wrightson sneeringly responded: “Oh good grief!” In doing so, she obligingly illustrated the problem.

I suspect that Wrightson, who has had a glittering career at the heart of the Wellington public service, inhabits an insular world that is largely deaf to critical outside scrutiny. They can’t see anything wrong, therefore there’s no problem. Wrightson apparently doesn’t pause to wonder why people like me no longer listen to RNZ.

For decades my radio was permanently tuned to the state broadcaster. I habitually listened to it at home and in the car. I should be RNZ’s target audience.

I miss some RNZ programmes and would gladly become a loyal listener again, because it still does some things well. I miss Jim Mora and I still sneakily listen to Phil O’Brien when no one’s around. But for me the entire organisation is fatally contaminated by the naked, systemic bias inherent in critical areas of its programming – most notably in its choice of presenters and in the way it deals with touchy political and ideological issues such as race, climate change and gender.

RNZ’s partisanship in favour of what are smugly and misleadingly labelled “progressive” values is evident not just in the issues it chooses to cover and how it deals with them, but just as critically in the issues it prefers to ignore and the people it refuses to engage with.

The parallels with the beleaguered BBC, currently grappling with the reverberations from a damning report exposing embedded biases on issues such as Gaza, crime and immigration, are obvious.

As a board member, Wrightson should be asking why RNZ has lost so many listeners like me (and you can be sure there are countless others. Not only do the audience figures bear that out, but I meet them all the time). But she prefers to dismiss criticism with an airy wave of the hand. “How tedious”, she seemed to be saying. It was what you might call a Marie Antoinette response.

But RNZ is hardly the only media organisation whose editorial priorities scream of privilege. If you want to know what privilege looks like in 2025, just read Stuff.

The Post’s Saturday magazine Your Weekend, in particular, wallows in privilege. I have no doubt that its editor and staff sincerely see themselves as champions of the marginalised. But this sits awkwardly with their choice of content, which invariably reflects the interests and preoccupations of a narrow demographic group consisting largely of affluent, young, educated, left-leaning, middle-class Pakeha women.

This highlights a besetting fault that pervades much of the New Zealand media. Editorial agendas are too often determined by journalists writing for and about people like themselves; people with the same interests, priorities, values and tastes. This is not a formula for success, since it ignores the rather substantial part of the community that doesn’t fit that profile.

Every time I look at Your Weekend (which I do quite often, because there are few things more satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed), I’m struck by the incongruity of editorial content that vacillates between earnestly woke on one hand and breathtakingly puerile, trite and self-indulgent on the other. YW appears unable to decide whether it’s a progressive socio-political pamphlet or an adolescent fanzine, slavishly pandering to elitist, designer-label consumerism.

A flick through a couple of recent editions reveals a preoccupation with actors, writers and artists (oh, and a burlesque queen last weekend and the weekend before that, a social media “influencer” and a food forager). In other words, a snapshot of an effete metropolitan café society that enjoys a lifestyle shared by a privileged few.

Nowhere is that privilege better encapsulated than in the sections devoted to subjects such as fashion, makeup and wine. Here you might see a pair of women’s shorts that costs $550, shoes priced at $595 and a handbag with a tag of $430. In the wine column I rarely see anything priced at less than $30, and often much more. I wonder, how many Your Weekend readers can afford the prohibitively expensive stuff the magazine promotes?

I accept that YW is targeted at a particular demographic group, but I would argue that it doesn’t even reflect the broad interests of that target market; merely a carefully selected subset of it.

A similar self-centred blindness to real-world interests and concerns seems to permeate the entire Stuff universe. Last Saturday’s Post, for example, included a wordy review of an esoteric Te Papa exhibition, a half-page by the same writer devoted to the woke podcaster Toby Manhire, another half-page about an obscure Australian musician (ah yes, obscure, but a close associate of Nick Cave, darling of the rock music cognoscenti - say no more), and an interview with the director of a Wellington food festival in which she listed all her favourite places in the city – mostly trendy bars and cafes, but with a sauna venue and a dance-fitness studio thrown in.

That last-mentioned item was a quintessential reflection of Wellington as it’s experienced by a well-paid, hedonistic, apartment-dwelling elite. I wait in vain for one of these regular “My Wellington” pieces to feature a checkout operator or a bus driver. Perhaps the Post assumes such people couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say.

This type of non-journalism set a new bar earlier this year with a series of Post articles called “The Yummy Mummy”, in which a Stuff journalist who’s also a first-time mother visited various Wellington cafes with her baby to assess their suitability for “Mums and their pint-sized partners”. This was peak self-indulgence, speaking to a tiny minority of readers who share the Stuff editors’ strange ideas about what’s relevant, important and interesting.

As someone who recalls when the Post’s precursor papers, the Evening Post and the Dominion, were stuffed full of actual news stories – stories about court proceedings, council meetings, car accidents, crime, parliamentary debates, business and the economy, cats up trees – I naturally couldn’t help thinking how many such stories could have been accommodated in the hectares of space lavished on these overwritten and often pointless articles.

Of course it’s true that newsrooms have been hollowed out and that papers no longer have the resources to cover the stories they used to. Nonetheless we can draw our own conclusions from the fact Stuff chooses to squander its limited editorial resources pandering to a segment of the market that doesn’t reflect New Zealand society at large.

There’s a word for this: privilege.

Booze, smoke, psychopaths and sexual harassment: when journalism was fun

I was invited to talk to the Greytown Lions Club last night about my life in the media. At the end, someone said he thought my speech deserved a wider audience and asked if I was going to publish it. I didn’t intend to but then thought: it’s a piece of social history, so why not? So here it is.

I entered journalism straight from school. That was the way things were done back then. Not now; you need a tertiary qualification, and preferably a university degree.

Why did I become a journalist? Probably because my mother had suggested it might be a good career for me because I was reasonably good at English, and I didn’t want to go to university. My burning passion was really music, but you couldn’t build a career on music. I had to satisfy myself with playing in bands on the side, which I did for several years.

I received my introduction to journalism in the reading room of the Evening Post in Willis St, Wellington. The reading room was where every word that went into the paper – everything, including all the classified ads and racing results – was checked before publication so that any errors could be picked up and corrected.

Reading rooms are gone now – history. Reporters are expected to correct their own mistakes. But don’t ask me how they’re expected to correct their errors if they don’t realise they made them in the first place.

My job title was copy holder – the lowest of the low. I worked alongside a more senior person called a proof reader. It was mind-numbingly tedious, menial work for which I was paid $21 a week – $23 if I was rostered to work a few hours extra on Saturday afternoons for the Sports Post, which came out late on Saturday and contained all the latest sports results.

I think the Evening Post management reasoned that if you could survive a year in the reading room, you could survive anything. But it was a good introduction to newspapers because it gave me an opportunity to observe how everything worked. It was also a fascinating place in human terms because of the weird and wonderful variety of people who worked there. The Evening Post reading room was a magnificent collection of cranks, oddballs and eccentrics – some likeable, others not so much.

Over in Mercer St, at the Dominion, where I worked later, the reading room also had a culture all its own, but a very different one. At the Dom, the readers tended to be long-haired dopeheads, dropouts, student radicals and anarchists.

Looking back now, I realise that the newspaper industry of that era had a wonderful tolerance of non-conformists. In the 1960s and 70s newsrooms were populated by a wondrous assortment of drunks, philanderers, egotists, neurotics, bohemians and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Many of them had the saving grace that they were articulate, well-read, well-informed and easy to like.

People gravitated to newspapers from all sorts of backgrounds and with all manner of personal idiosyncrasies. Newsrooms were smoke-stained and noisy from the clatter of typewriters and the barking of impatient chief reporters and subeditors. Today’s newsrooms seem bland and homogeneous by comparison, full of earnest people – mostly youngish middle-class university graduates – silently tapping away at keyboards. I bet we had far more fun.

University degrees were virtually unheard of in journalism. Most of the people I worked with came from working-class backgrounds and like me, got into journalism straight from school. But all that changed after the first journalism school was set up at Wellington Polytechnic in 1967. By the 1980s it had become virtually impossible to become a journalist without first completing an academic course.

That was a retrograde step. Journalism went from being something you learned on the job to something you were taught in a classroom. It also changed in the sense that it became more heavily based on theory rather than practice. It became subject to academic capture and we saw the intrusion of an ideological approach that encouraged budding journalists to think their primary purpose was to challenge the institutions of power rather than simply to provide people with important and useful information. 

Along the way, what the late Warwick Roger liked to call the Mongrel Factor – the dogged, hard-headed, competitive and slightly feral spirit that motivated some of the best reporters – fell out of favour. I’d have to scratch my head very hard these days to think of any reporters who qualify for the honourable term “mongrel”.

My first reporting job at the Evening Post, after I had escaped the reading room, involved covering the Wellington Magistrates Court. On a busy morning at the No. 1 Court there would be as many as six junior Evening Post reporters sitting at the press bench under the supervision of a more experienced hand named Fran Kitching, better known now as Dame Fran Wilde.

We covered every case that came up, taking it in turns to write our stories in long hand on copy paper. Every so often a messenger would turn up and take a bundle of stories back to the office. It sometimes took days or even weeks before some of those stories were published because unless they were particularly important or newsworthy, they would be set in type and kept until there was a convenient space in the paper for them.

We covered all cases apart from very minor traffic offences. That was a much fairer arrangement than we have now, when reporters are so thin on the ground that they have to cherry pick which court stories to cover. Reporting of the courts appears to have become quite random, with only major cases such as murder trials being guaranteed coverage.

From the point of view of defendants, it’s a lottery. Some criminals may go through the courts unnoticed by the media while others have their names splashed in the papers. You see this in the Wairarapa Times-Age, where weeks pass without a single court case being reported even though the local district court has been sitting. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, someone will be named and shamed on the front page. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for the criminals, but it’s not fair that some are publicly exposed while others escape scrutiny.

There’s also an important public interest element here. The reporting of criminal cases serves two purposes. One is that it serves the public good by alerting communities to the bad people in their midst. The other is that the fear of having their name in the paper can serve as a deterrent to criminals, especially in smaller communities where everyone knows everyone. But newsrooms have been so hollowed out that most of the time the court press bench is empty. New Zealand is hardly unique in this regard. The British journalist Nick Davies memorably wrote a few years ago that you were more likely to see a zebra in an English court than a reporter.

The Evening Post when I started there in 1968 was cosy, comfortable and complacent. It felt a bit like a government department but it was highly profitable, thanks largely to the enormous volume of advertising in its pages. I pick up Stuff papers today and see page after page without a single ad, and I wonder how the hell the company makes a profit. More often than not the most prominent ads are “house ads” promoting Stuff’s own publications, and therefore not generating any revenue.

The Evening Post, which was owned by the Blundell family, was also very conservative – so much so that it was one of the last papers in New Zealand to put news on the front page. Prior to that, page one had consisted entirely of classified ads. I think it was the Wahine disaster that finally persuaded the Post to put news on page one, but even then it struck an awkward compromise by putting news on the top half and ads on the bottom – a bizarre and possibly unique arrangement that persisted for quite some time.

Having said that, the Post was extraordinarily thorough in its saturation coverage of Greater Wellington affairs. You couldn’t fart or sneeze in Wellington without it being reported in the pages of the Post.

In 1969 I was poached to write a twice-weekly column for the Evening Post’s morning rival, the Dominion. When I say that, I don’t mean that all I did was write a column. No newspaper, least of all the lean and hungry Dom, could afford to pay a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old just to write a column, so I simultaneously worked as a general reporter.

The Dom had a very different workplace culture from that of the Post. It was edgy, stimulating and slightly anarchic. My friend the late Barrie Watts, who was then the Dom’s features editor, described the paper as being staffed by anti-social misfits and amusing psychopaths fuelled by prodigious quantities of alcohol. It was only a slight exaggeration. 

I was startled on arriving at the Dom to find I had to provide my own typewriter. The company supplied only two typewriters and they were both chained to desks, which surely tells you something about the place.

In my first week there, a notoriously irascible subeditor named Black Jack McKinnon bellowed for all the newsroom to hear: “If Mr du Freznee [I suspect he mispronounced it deliberately] hasn’t learned how to spell ‘accommodation’ by this time tomorrow, I’ll stand on him on this desk and kick his fucking arse.” Needless to say I never misspelled accommodation again.

That too tells you something about newspaper culture in those days. If you got something wrong, you could expect to be pulled up very sharply. Workplace bullying codes wouldn’t permit that sort of bracing humiliation now.

Sexual harassment too was taken as a given. I recently had a coffee with a former Evening Post reporter, a woman now quite prominent in public life (not Fran Wilde), who recalled her boss saying to her not long after she started: “There are breast men and there are leg men. I’m a leg man and I’d appreciate it if you wore a skirt rather than pants.” You can imagine how far you’d get with that sort of line today.

Newspapers can be high-pressure workplaces. You’re creating a brand-new product pretty much from scratch every day and you’re working to tight deadlines. Information has to be gathered, stories written, edited and proofread and pages laid out within very tight time frames. Tempers can get strained and volcanic rages were commonplace. Usually they were relatively harmless – phones being yanked out of their sockets, typewriters hurled on the floor, that sort of thing – but occasionally it turned a bit uglier.

I remember late one night when a Dominion reporter named Ron Malcolm, a pugnacious Scotsman and former British Army paratrooper, was at his desk writing a report of that evening’s Wellington City Council meeting. Chris Smith, the deputy chief subeditor, holding space open for Ron’s story with one eye anxiously on the clock, loudly suggested Ron pull his finger out. Ron responded by inviting Chris out to the lift foyer for a chat, then without a word decked him. Rising groggily to his feet, Chris said “That was a dumb thing to do, Ron”, whereupon Ron knocked him down again – then walked out, never to work at the Dominion again. He did, however, later turn up as a tutor on the Wellington Polytechnic journalism course.

I relate this story not because I approve of Ron’s behaviour – far from it – but as an illustration of the rumbustious journalism culture of that era.

Drinking was central to that culture. There was always a substantial core of Evening Post journalists who hit the pub every afternoon – or in the Dom’s case, at night in a short lull before the final rush to get the paper out and just before the pubs closed. Some of my workmates were high-functioning alcoholics. Every city had its own journalists’ pub – so much so that the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper always carried advertisements advising what pub to visit if you were from out of town and wanted to find local newspaper people. In Wellington it was the Britannia in Willis Street, which was conveniently located almost next to the Evening Post and just a short walk from the Dominion. Journalists from both papers drank at the "Brit" but rarely mingled – partly because they kept different hours, but also due to the fact that the two papers were competitors with quite different workplace cultures and a certain degree of mutual animosity.

That animosity persisted after both papers came under the ownership of the same company in the late 1970s, and even when the two titles were merged to become the Dominion Post in 2002.

I’m ashamed to admit that for much of my time as a news reporter at the Dom, I was clueless. Even when I was appointed as the paper’s industrial reporter, which involved covering the paralysing union disputes that in those days were on the front page virtually every day, I was often pathetically ignorant of what I was writing about and relied on sheer blind instinct. It didn’t help that most of the union officials I dealt with were deeply suspicious of the Tory press. But I was fortunate in being able to establish good relationships with a few key people such as Jim Knox of the Federation of Labour and Pincher Martin of the Seamen’s Union.

In 1972 I moved to Melbourne and got a job with the Melbourne Herald. That was, as they say these days, a whole different level. The Herald was an afternoon paper with a circulation of half a million – more than ten times that of the Dominion. It shared a fortress-like building on Flinders St with its morning stablemate, the Sun News-Pictorial – circulation 650,000. It was a golden era of newspapers. The Herald printed eight editions a day, the first coming out about 11am and the final at 5 o’clock. The final edition often looked entirely different from the first because the paper was constantly being remade through the day as fresh stories broke.

I would have a story on the front page of the first edition and watch with mounting dismay as it gradually receded further and further inside the paper as the day progressed and more important news broke. Sometimes my story might disappear entirely.

You could go for weeks without getting anything published at all, which was unheard of on a New Zealand paper. I remember one of my colleagues shouting the public bar at the Duke of Wellington Hotel, where the Herald journos drank, because he’d had a story published after a drought of three months.

Most Herald reporters routinely got bylines – in other words, had their names published on their stories – but strangely, it happened to me only once. My byline was on a front-page story in the first edition but mysteriously disappeared in later editions, although the story remained in place. The vanishing byline was no mystery to a colleague of mine named Sam Leone, because a similar thing had happened to him. Sam explained to me that we both had foreign-looking names and the Herald apparently preferred to showcase reporters with familiar-sounding Anglo-Saxon names – an astonishing attitude in a city with a big migrant population.

Despite that, I loved my time at the Herald. It was like a giant living organism. The newsroom had a fleet of black Holdens and the police reporters - there were six of them with their own room at police headquarters - were driven around by their own dedicated chauffeur in a big black Chev Impala. The company even had its own resident doctor.

The Herald and the Sun merged many years ago, becoming the Herald-Sun. It’s still the biggest-selling paper in Australia but it’s a pale shadow of its illustrious precursors.  My wife and I walked past the Herald building on a recent visit to Melbourne and there’s very little trace remaining of its glory days. A great institution, brought down by disruptive technology that choked off the flow of advertising revenue and led to ruinous and self-destructive internet rivalry.

My next gig was with the National Business Review back in Wellington. The interesting thing about NBR is that it was a weekly paper launched by former Victoria University students whose previous journalism experience, such as it was, was with the student newspaper Salient. With one exception (the managing editor, Reg Birchfield) they had no background in the newspaper industry, but they saw a gap in the market and their audacious gamble paid off.  Somehow, more than 50 years later, NBR has survived despite all the turbulence in the newspaper industry, although it’s now under different ownership and published online only.

By 1976 I was back at the Evening Post, editing the TV page and writing daily television reviews. Somehow I ended up on the panel of a Friday night TV show called The Media, which was memorably spoofed as The Tedia on David McPhail's satirical show A Week Of It. The one story I’ll relate about The Media, and it’s at my own expense, concerns the show that we made in the week that Fawlty Towers made its debut in New Zealand. As the TV critic on the show, it fell to me to review John Cleese’s brilliant new comedy and I gave it the thumbs down. Worse still, I compared it unfavourably with an American comedy series that had also made its debut that week. Suffice it to say that Fawlty Towers still enjoys a worldwide cult-following while the Tony Randall Show –the one I glowingly reviewed on national TV that night in 1976 – sank without trace. So much for my judgment.

I then spent four years writing for the Listener. Again, it was then in its glory days, with a circulation approaching 400,000 – by far the largest magazine circulation, per head of population, in the world. But I wouldn’t delude myself that this was entirely due to the quality of the content. In fact the Listener at that time was state-owned and benefited from having sole rights to publish the full week’s TV and radio programmes, which guaranteed a massive readership. The Listener did, however, have a great team of writers, including such names as Tom Scott, Helen Paske, Phil Gifford, Denis Welch, Karen Jackman, David Young, Gordon Campbell and Pamela Stirling.

The magazine was ridiculously profitable and there was little pressure to produce. We had the luxury of almost unlimited time in which to write our stories, though some of us took more advantage of it than others. The late Stephen Stratford, a subeditor on the magazine, once wrote that “months passed – indeed, entire seasons – between stories by Vernon Wright [one of my fellow writers] and Karl du Fresne”. I have to admit it was basically true, though I did produce stories for the Listener that I’m quite proud of. 

After that, my career took a radical lurch. I went to the Nelson Evening Mail as news editor and never enjoyed a job more. I relished being back in an environment where I was subjected to the discipline of tight daily deadlines. It was a great team and a happy workplace. We worked hard, but we were out of the office by early to mid-afternoon. By then I had three kids with one more to come and the civilised working hours were an opportunity to establish some sort of regular family life. But then I ruined it all by being awarded a journalism fellowship to the UK for three months and as a result of that, being invited to rejoin the Dominion as its news editor – which I ill-advisedly did.

From there I progressed to the editorship of the Dominion in 1989. All I’ll say about that is that I stand before you as the embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that you rise to your level of incompetence. I never quite understood what this meant until it happened to me. Basically the Peter Principle means that you ascend through an organisational hierarchy because you’re good at what you do, until you reach a point where you realise you’ve gone one step too far. I’m not going to say I was a failure as a daily newspaper editor; merely that I didn’t enjoy the job, didn’t feel temperamentally cut out for it and therefore wasn't convinced I was suited to the role. I had gone from an editorial function that suited me to a managerial one that didn’t. So I quit after two years, much to the astonishment of many of my newspaper colleagues and fellow editors. Some regarded rising to the editorship of a metropolitan daily paper as a career pinnacle. Why would you turn your back on it? But I didn’t see it that way and I never wasted a millisecond wondering whether I’d done the wrong thing by resigning. For me it was a liberating act.

My last 10 years as a full-time newspaper journalist were spent as an assistant editor back in familiar territory at the Evening Post, mostly writing editorials, feature articles and columns under the editorship of my friend Sue Carty, whose own career was subsequently cut short by multiple sclerosis (which now, thankfully, seems to be in remission). When I accepted a voluntary redundancy deal in 2002 I was able to reflect that I’d come a long way in the 34 years since I’d started in the Post’s reading room. By my calculation it was about 30 metres.

In the past 20-odd years I’ve had an active freelance career. I found myself working for the Listener again under the editorship of my old colleague Pamela Stirling, though this time I wrote as a freelance contributor rather than an employee. I’ve been a columnist and a blogger and I’ve written books on subjects as diverse as wine, music and freedom of the press. I’ve had a lot of fun, and earned useful pocket money, compiling daily quizzes that were published throughout the country. I’ve enjoyed being my own boss and I’ve managed to make a relatively comfortable living at a time when journalism has been in a very fragile state.

I could easily detain you for the rest of the night talking about the wretched state of journalism in 2025 and why it’s sunk so low, but that would be too much of a downer. Some of my earlier remarks might give you a clue as to where I think we started going wrong, but that’s possibly a subject for another time. Thank you for listening patiently.

What privilege sounds like in 2025

We hear a lot about privilege these days. We’re told it’s an economic and political weapon that an affluent, selfish, male-dominated white capitalist society uses to keep disadvantaged minority groups in their place.

Wrong. Privilege in New Zealand in 2025 is the phenomenon that enables a small, effete and highly politicised media elite, cushioned by public funding, to capture and monopolise a crucial organ of public opinion and seek to influence the course of public debate.

If you want to know what privilege sounds like, just listen to RNZ. Privilege is an ad-free radio network that panders to your prejudices and stokes your biases; that caters, in effect, to entrenched left-wing bigotry. RNZ and its shrinking audience embody this privilege.

As a publicly funded radio station, RNZ has an obligation to cater to the tastes, interests and opinions of all New Zealanders, not just to a pampered minority caste. RNZ makes no attempt to honour that principle; in fact, hasn’t done so for almost as long as I can remember.

I was amused to read a Stuff interview with RNZ CEO Paul Thompson a while ago in which he suggested RNZ needed to stop trying to be “all things to all people”.

That’s a joke. The truth is that RNZ means nothing to the vast majority of New Zealanders. It serves a steadily diminishing minority audience consisting largely of ageing listeners who hold what are misleadingly labelled as “progressive” political views. It rewards them with content that mirrors and reinforces their smugly virtuous world view.

Thompson has had innumerable opportunities to correct this but hasn’t. On the contrary, he continues to send signals that RNZ will continue down the same blind alley. Key appointments, such as that of Guyon Espiner to take over as host of Midday Report from January, serve as a contemptuous “up yours” to RNZ’s critics and the tens of thousands of listeners who have abandoned it.

RNZ has made itself so irrelevant to the majority of New Zealanders that many no longer realise it even exists. It has achieved this ignominious own-goal through decades of carefully refining its content so as to exclude virtually anyone whose opinions and interests are not consistent with those of its own employees.

Now it’s paying the price as its listeners fall away to the point where even RNZ’s bosses have to concede that the organisation has lost its way – something obvious for a long time to everyone except RNZ itself and its privileged supporters. Even in the midst of the anguished self-analysis prompted by tumbling ratings and a highly critical recent report written by one of its own former key executives, RNZ carefully avoided confronting the damning issue of its all-pervasive editorial bias and the harm this has done to its credibility.

It can hardly be coincidental that RNZ’s audience has declined over the same period that this bias has become steadily more overt and pronounced – something Thompson has seemed either unwilling or powerless to do anything about.

RNZ’s listeners are privileged in more ways than one. They not only enjoy a diet of information and entertainment that can be relied on not to challenge their entrenched perceptions (rather like a broadcast version of Britain’s achingly woke Guardian newspaper), but thanks to the involuntary largesse of the taxpayer they are spared the aural torture of having to listen to commercials. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who listen to RNZ’s main competitor, NewstalkZB.

The fact that NewstalkZB has reversed the former dominance of the state broadcaster and now far out-performs it in the ratings, despite the deterrent effect of intrusive, wall-to-wall advertising, surely says something. But has anyone at Radio New Zealand House noticed?

Somewhere along the line it seems to have escaped the state broadcaster that a publicly funded radio station should try to reflect the interests, opinions and values of society at large. An alien tuning into a show such as Morning Report would never guess that New Zealanders historically have leaned more to the right than to the left. For 29 of the past 50 years they have elected National or National-led governments, including the present one. Does it occur to RNZ presenters and producers that their own values, opinions and preoccupations are way out of line with those of the people they ostensibly serve? Apparently not. They are blinded by their privilege.

Commercial radio is the flipside of the privilege enjoyed by RNZ and its listeners. NewstalkZB’s audience, which now represents the majority of New Zealand radio listeners (that is to say, those whom RNZ appears uninterested in catering for) have to endure a ceaseless barrage of intrusive and mostly inane commercial content. This is the reverse of privilege. These listeners are effectively an underclass, banished to a netherworld where they are condemned to aural torment.

I suspect the bosses of the old Radio New Zealand regarded it as a great relief when the state broadcasting network was broken up in the 1990s and the formerly government-owned commercial stations were flogged off to the private sector. This meant RNZ was freed from the obligation of catering to the hoi-polloi, with all their vulgarian tastes, and could concentrate on pandering to its preferred target market.

In the years since, a pervasive monoculture has evolved at RNZ. This is characteristic of publicly owned broadcasting organisations elsewhere in the world. Those at the top appoint like-thinking people to positions of influence with the result that the monoculture becomes self-perpetuating.

(Here I will insert my standard qualification that there are many employees at RNZ, including journalists, who do a conscientious, honourable job. It’s also true that not all RNZ programmes have a political spin. Nonetheless, a leftist groupthink permeates most of what RNZ does.)

None of this should be taken as suggesting that RNZ should change to reflect a conservative or right-wing agenda, which would simply trade one bias for another and leave us no better off. The only way for RNZ to restore editorial credibility is by reverting to a position of strict editorial balance, fairness and neutrality. This does not preclude taking a hard line with politicians and asking tough questions, but it does require that the approach should be consistent across the entire political spectrum regardless of producers’ and interviewers’ own prejudices.

In the meantime, listeners alienated by RNZ have the option of signing up for membership of a peculiar cult called the Mike Hosking Breakfast. They may not share the host’s fascination with strange things like Formula One racing and American football and they may not like the impression he conveys of never in his life having experienced a moment’s self-doubt. But at least they can get an alternative view of national and world affairs – one not available to them from the state broadcasting organisation that they pay for with the tax on their hard-earned wages.

Actually, quite a few listeners (I’m one of them) don’t want any spin from either the right or the left. They would rather be presented with straight, unfiltered information and left to make up their own minds. But even if some of Hosking’s listeners don’t agree with his conservative slant, they must concede that as the employee of a privately owned media outlet, he’s entitled to say whatever he likes, within legal limits.

That defence is not available to RNZ, which as a taxpayer-owned entity has a responsibility to ensure its coverage of news and current affairs is neutral, fair and balanced – an obligation that RNZ constantly disregards, with the obvious approval of its board and management. This is an abuse of power, pure and simple.

 

A gross failure of editorial judgment

There’s a story in the New Zealand Herald this morning about the death of former King Cobras gang leader Ulaiasi “Rocky” Pulete. Carrying the byline of Herald crime reporter Jared Savage, it’s written in the reverential tones normally reserved for an esteemed community leader, business person or sporting figure. Pulete is described as “a giant of the criminal underworld” and “highly regarded across the wider criminal fraternity”.

This is a former bank robber who graduated to the booming methamphetamine trade and orchestrated major drug deals from his prison cell. We’re told that during his long spells in jail, “Pulete carefully cultivated trusting relationships with other inmates and was considered one of the most well-connected criminals in the country”. The admiring tone of the story is reinforced by a photo of a grinning Savage posing with Pulete in 2021.

According to the story, Pulete had stayed out of trouble since his last release from prison in 2017 and been left permanently disabled by an accident in 2018. Savage appears not to consider the possibility that these two facts might be related.

Savage writes sympathetically about Pulete’s “ordeal” following his injury and his subsequent battles with ACC. The story goes on to say that while Pulete had left his criminal lifestyle behind, he was visited often by friends “with chequered pasts” – there’s a cosy euphemism for you – and members of rival gangs. “Despite no longer taking an active role in organised crime, police and criminal sources said Pulete remained trusted in the underworld and knowledgeable about the environment”. I half-expected to see him described as “a gentle giant”, which is a familiar cliché in this type of story.

Perhaps Savage thought he was telling us a redemption tale about a career criminal turning his life around, but that’s not the impression the story conveys. There’s not a word of acknowledgment, still less of remorse or regret, for the lives destroyed by the pernicious drug trade from which Pulete profited in his active criminal years. I think both Savage and his editors were guilty of a gross failure of editorial judgment for running a story that presented him as someone worthy of our respect.