Balance in the NZ Herald and has something gone terribly wrong at the Herald on Sunday?

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So the ‘balance’ in the NZ Herald this year for the election will be…

Guest columnists will include the acerbic Cactus Kate from the radical right, former Labour candidate Josie Pagani and broadcaster Mark Sainsbury.

Right, so that would be Cactus Kate, the women who openly states with contempt that beneficiaries should be paid not to “breed” (her words) and bemoans the inability to sterilise them outright alongside Fox News Democrat Josie Pagani who can’t stand beneficiaries either.

Sweet Christ that’s balance.

In other news the Herald on Sunday decided to end their ‘column Idol’ to find a replacement for Matt McCarten as the balance to Rodney Hide by appointing…..no one.

That’s right, there won’t be a permanent replacement for Matt’s left wing column in the Herald because now they are in election season apparently and the last thing one would want in election season is an actual left wing perspective expressed. I’m told the Herald will make their mind up after the election, but that wasn’t the initial terms entered into by all those guest columnists the Herald on Sunday asked to submit columns under. Myself included.

This decision to not replace Matt follows the Herald on Sunday’s remarkable lapse of journalistic judgment with their claims of a $100 000 bottle of wine that never existed, their $15 000 book that has never been proven and a $150 000 donation to Labour that never existed while insinuating that whole time that Cunliffe was somehow involved in a cover yup of those fictional things.

How the Herald On Sunday allowed an allegation as extreme as that to go to print based on nothing more than  third hand account of a signed statement that’s not legally worth anything and that the NZ Herald Editorial team didn’t seem to understand the difference between an affidavit and a signed statement is staggering enough.

This however is a screaming disgrace…

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There seem to be some real question marks over the editorial direction of the Herald to be making some fundamental blunders like this. Their level of self mutilation is making the Labour Party Caucus look positively disciplined.

As for the so called ‘balance’ of Josie Pagani and  Cactus Kate, so what the NZ Herald is really saying is that they will have right wing opinion and really right wing opinion as their spectrum of balance.

Welcome to 30 years of neoliberalism.

 

17 COMMENTS

  1. I gave up on the herald ages ago.
    It would be good if there was a print alternative to read…but alas no. At least with the Internet and social media, I can do my own research on topics. I feel I cannot trust the media, both press and television these days. Sad.

      • me too

        I haven’t had television for about 10 years either

        I never buy print newspapers

        when Granny Herald retreats behind a paywall I’ll stop reading it

        too little balance alongside too little or zero investigative journalism, paste and copy bollocks without even spell check

        the number of grammatical and spelling errors in their articles is astounding

  2. The Herald should also apologise for running this pro Israel puff piece on one individual Israeli soldier because he had “Kiwi” links.

    What about a “human interest” story on the thousands of Palestinians dead, maimed and de-housed that only have links to–oh thats right–the Human Race.

  3. Not only is the Herald blatantly BIASED, the edtor is INCOMPETENT. The editorial decisions are now a SICK JOKE. That hate campaign aginst Cunliffe, re the so-alled $100k bottle of wine was so INCOMPETENT as to be unbelievable, and then they had the sheer CHEEK to publish that ridiculous editorial, where they BRAYED loudly and proudly that they were not going to back down on that one! What a pack of effing incompetent nincompoops!!!!

  4. I’m boycotting the Herald now, based on the disgusting bias in their front page article today (ignoring them using the wrong photo altogether). The article paints the NZ born IDF soldier who died killing civilians in Gaza as some kind of hero, and quotes extensively from people saying how lovely he was, and how they loved his patriotism (for Israel). I’ll get my news elsewhere, from sources that aren’t blatantly being apologists for genocide.

    • @KJ – hear hear. Wholeheartedly with you all the way on this one. Well said.

      Time for people to wake up and shake off the US propaganda and see Israel for what it really is – the scourge of the Middle East.

  5. Have a look at the editorial in the Listener this week too – another PR organ for the rabid right

    • @ Julz: “Have a look at the editorial in the Listener this week too – another PR organ for the rabid right”

      Not surprised. After having been a lifelong reader of the Listener, I gave up on it some years ago, for that reason among others. I do miss the books section, but that’s all.

      I heard on radio today discussion of the Herald’s cock-up. There’s no excuse for a major daily employing numbnuts of this sort; but really, the Herald is such awful toilet paper, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I rarely read it, but it seems to be worse each time I do.

      You poor sods up there: we here grumble about the DomPost (the 2-minute silence, I’ve heard it described), but the Herald’s worse.

      • Dom Post is awful, just awful. The Herald maybe worse, but awful is awful, I don’t think there’s making a distinction between very poor and very very poor. It would be a similar amount of work to fix both of them.

        Having chatted to some polticial campaigners back in the 80s I wonder if it has as much to do with who is in regular contact with these people as anything else.

        Politicians should have a relationship with newspapers, their reporters and their editors, keeping them informed of goings on, and in some ways keeping them honest.

  6. That’s the end of our HOS subscription then. Won’t be paying to read the bigoted opinions of Cactus Kate, another nasty hater like Slater.

    • @ Banjo: “…the bigoted opinions of Cactus Kate…”

      Hasn’t she got a day job? I’d advise her to get back to it.

  7. I can’t wait for them to go behind the paywall, that way there’s no danger I’ll accidently end up on their site.

  8. I hope that Cameron Slater is appointed editor of the Herald in the near future, because when he became editor of the Truth, this paper went down the gurgler less than a year later. We can only hope!

  9. Dear NZ Herald,
    Publishing stuff you find on facebook is not news. We can look at facebook ourselves. Printing a story about a man called Michael Boulgaris who wants to sell a 15 million dollar home in sought after Coatesville, with walk in wardrobes and feature lighting in popular school zones is not a Business article either. We read the ad you ran a short time before that about the same place.
    Yours Sincerely,
    People Who Are Not Completely Stupid.

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