One of the impacts of the consolidation of media into Newshub and NZME is that these media platforms now become insular in terms of the voices they promote.
If you look at the Paul Henry Show panel, it’s mainly other people who work at Newshub. The same goes for NZME. Here, Chris Shultz desperately attempts to breath life into an old venture they’ve launched with NZ on Air money ). The interview is with Jeremy Welles (part of the NZME family) and his Mike Hosking puppet show. Shultz pretends it’s new..
The Hauraki host has unveiled a new-look puppet for his WatchMe show Like Mike, a parody that features Wells impersonating the Newstalk ZB and Seven Sharp host with a series of Hosking-style witticisms and cliches.
…truth is the thing has been around for months, but maybe the venture isn’t rating very well so needs some extra promotion.
What we end up with is platforms far less diverse and far more status quo. This is one of the ironies of mainstream media now rushing to be online. Anyone with a basic education left mainstream media years ago because of the braindead content they provide, leaving only the poor and those too frightened to use new technology to source their own content. Trying to get down, funky and rebellious seems ludicrous because no one looks to the stale old NZ Herald for that.
Public Broadcasting has an ethos and philosophy to it, giving large foreign owned corporates public money to provide low level wit seems like a sad joke.
I don’t know anyone dull enough to watch The Civilian. He’s funny when he writes, but goodness that last interview with Bob Jones was painful wasn’t it?
Mainstream media have polluted the public discourse in their traditional transmission points  and now they are trying to do the same online.
You want alternative voices in the sports media but now the cross pollination has the same voices in most of the venues.
Having said that there’s something lovely about someone in the stable shitting on one of the other horses – Wells crapping on Hosking.
The sop story this morning is to make it all palsy-wally in the stable, and the Wells’ pieces all funsy and just having a good laugh. Put some sugar in kill the tartness.
With Hosking crapping on the whole country it’s not sugar that’s needed.
It has to be this way because the entire narrative developed by corporations and promoted by them over many decades (in some cases centuries) throughout most of the world is destructive bollocks.
It is only by keeping the general public uninformed/misinformed and consuming crap that fat salaries can be paid to executives and dividends can be paid to shareholders
Since the government is a deeply in bed with corporations (basically acting as their agents), it follows that everything will get worse (be made worse) until the system implodes.
In the meantime, anyone with a brain that still functions normally ( i.e. can think for themselves) can only disengage from the insanity and look upon the victims in bemusement and horror.
The saddest aspect, of course, is that the corporations who are now running the show are in the process of rendering the Earth -once bountiful with all kinds of diverse biological life and having massive cultural diversity – into a toxic, mono-cultural mess, and ultimately into a dead* planet.
*bacteria, jelly fish, and insects etc. will probably persist after corporations have rendered the Earth uninhabitable for most vertebrate species (including humans).
There is a place for mainstream news waterhole that a wide swathe of the public trusts to be objective and provide the most salient news of the day in a concise format. It’s something that a healthy society needs but unfortunately, as you point out, the present waterhole has been polluted to the point where it is undrinkable any more.
The only solution is a advert free well funded independent public television station, (and Radio New Zealand to remove the creeping National Party cronyism in its midst).
It would be good if you could ever watch the like Mike segment, have tried 5 times and after a minute of spinning circles I gave up – and I am on UFB. Am not someone with a short attention span but the feeling that their system is sending out via dial up speeds means that I am not going back for a look.
I remember some years ago when many farmers committed suicide but the saddest thing of all is, one of those farmers was one of our neighbours and he always helped locals out and vice versa. Now, in 2016, its like a repeat situation but I hope the end result won’t be another period of farmer suicides.
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