TDB 2019 Media Awards

By
Martyn Bradbury
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8
1361
It was another year of mediocrity ruling and the banal winning in media.
The continued commercial pressure caused by the financialization of media ownership saw Stuff-NZME threaten all sorts of crimes against journalism if they didn’t get their monopoly merger.
RNZ-TVNZ were set for a shotgun wedding and Mediaworks threatened to sell their TV station before Christmas.
The Herald went behind a paywall (thank you Jesus), the 7pm current affairs offering of Seven Sharp and The Project proved how far we have fallen intellectually, Newsroom continued to impress and John Campbell reshaped breakfast TV into a must watch.
As the masses source their information from Facebook manipulations and lies, here is the best and worst of the NZ media industry 2019.

Best Journalists 2019

Barbara Dreaver: Her coverage of the appalling measles outbreak in Samoa and the Ice crisis ravaging the Pacific marked her out once again as one of our best journalists.
Henry Cooke: This years must read weekly NZ journalist.
Thomas Coughlan: The other must read weekly NZ journalist.
Mihingarangi Forbes: Her laser like focus on the appalling horror of Oranga Tamariki was one of the journalistic highlights of 2019.
Jack Tame: The best TV journalist in NZ, asks devastatingly well researched questions, knocked over Paul Goldsmith in a knock out interview that has to be seen to be believed.

Biggest media arsehole 2019

Mike Hosking: When he wasn’t picking fights with Greta Thunberg, when he wasn’t falsely accusing Jacinda of knowing about and covering up a sex assault,  Mike was showing all the empathy of a chainsaw on meth by attacking beneficiaries.
The smugness to spit on people poorer than you when you are a multi-millionaire broadcaster just seems so ugly. Privilege never managed to sound so fascist. He makes cancer look misunderstood.

Biggest arsehole on Twitter 2019

Hamish Price: Jesus Hamish – can you take a holiday from being a vicious nasty spiteful prick for just an afternoon? What’s most disappointing is that in the cerebral sewers Hamish swims in, he thinks this is cutting edge wit. If this is the level of discussion National MP’s and their social media enablers want to take the debate they should be mocked mercilessly.

We love our Chinese Overlords long time 2019 Award for Journalism 

The NZ Herald:  If we had a functioning news media – the fact that the NZ Herald, our largest daily newspaper, had been unconsciously complicit in aiding the spread of Chinese propaganda should be leading every news bulletin, especially when you consider China attempting to hack us, Chinese business interests caught trying to buy two MPs for National’s party list and of course an actual Chinese Spy inside the National Party caucus.

When the NZ Herald found out that they had unwittingly become a puppet for Cameron Slater when Dirty Politics was published, the Herald promised they would change.

When the NZ Herald found out that Rachel Glucina had falsely pretended to be a media consultant and not a reporter when she tricked the waitress John Key had been touching into giving them an exclusive, the Herald promised they would change.

Here we are now finding out that once again the NZ Herald has been used to promote hidden interests and the Herald promises to change.

Lots of promises, very little change.

Biggest Media beat up 2019

Tamihere Seig Heil: The sanctimonious wailing by mainstream media over Tamihere’s taken out of context comment would be hilarious if it wasn’t eclipsing the NZDF covering up an actual war crime – the woke shallowness of our media is extraordinary.Just before the last set of questions, I asked the following questions…
UNCLE PHIL: – You were very self congratulatory last year when you told everyone that you shut down crypto-fascists Molyneux and Southern – but as Mayor do you really have the power to censor voices you don’t like? 
UNCLE JOHN: – If John Banks was Mayor and he didn’t want a  council venue used for a Gay Rights Activist to speak at, should the Mayor have that power and what will you do if these alt-right crypto-fascists  try to come back here?
…Phil justified his censorship, John argued the Mayor shouldn’t have that power. Phil carried over his defence of censorship in his last question (the question the media are showing you) and in response, Tamihere quipped “Sieg Heil to that!” which was in reference to Phil’s previous defence of censorship.
The way the media are attempting to frame it was Tamihere just announced he was actually a Nazi and was invoking hate against mixed race grandchildren.
If Tamihere was secretly a white supremacist Nazi, he’s done a bloody good job of disguising it as a Māori. Chris Trotter has written the best review of this entire fiasco here.

 

The Phillip Matthews self censorship Journalism award for our Woke Overlords

There should be a special place in hell for Journalists who actively argue against free speech and this year, the NZ Herald’s bewildering decision to censor Rachel Stewart’s column on the cancelation of a feminist conference at Massey was surely the must gutless cowardice we’ve seen this year. Mainstream media are increasingly terrified of woke social media lynch mobs and this self censorship is intellectually bankrupt.

Worst Journalism 2019

The Spinoff – Jacinda covering up a sexual assault story:

The Spinoff published a damning one sided expose hit job alleging serious sexual assault, this led to feminist journalists and right wing Pundits to declare that not only must Jacinda have known about this sexual assault, but that she actively covered it up as well.

It was a vicious character assassination against Jacinda based on nothing more than woke mantra and rumour.

A real good old fashioned witch trial.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

When this erupted in the media, huge pressure went on Labour to cauterise this wound and Nigel Haworth lost his job and a review immediately called. To confuse matters, Simon Mitchell, Lawyer and Labour Party uber insider swore that the claimant had never sent the documents she claimed she did.

Well, the review is in an it is DAMNING of the claimant who made the accusation of sexual assault…

Sexual assault allegations against ex-Labour staffer ‘not established’

The inquiry into the allegations of sexual assault made by one Labour member against another has cast major doubts over the accuracy of the chief complainant’s story.

Labour released the report – conducted by independent lawyer Maria Dew QC – this afternoon.

It found “insufficient evidence” to back up the most serious allegations and ruled critical elements of the complainant’s version of events were incorrect.

It also said the complainant had since admitted providing “misleading information” to the investigation.

The complainant had given media a screenshot of an email and an attached document which she said she had sent to the Labour Party outlining her complaints of sexual assault.

Ms Dew concluded, on the balance of probabilities, that document was not attached.

The report also rejected the complainant’s claim that she had outlined her complaint in person to Labour’s investigation panel, saying that was “improbable” when assessed against the weight of other witness evidence.

…well, well, well. She gave the inquiry ‘misleading information’ and she was in fact in an 8 month relationship with this person she claimed sexually assaulted her, details that were NEVER part of the Spinoff hit job…

Over the next year, Sarah immersed herself in the party as a volunteer, quickly gaining more recognition and responsibility. It was during this period that she first came into contact with the alleged perpetrator, who is several years her senior, and started to have correspondence and regular meetings with him. He was already established in a leadership position at Young Labour, and his star continued to rise in the party proper. 

It was soon clear his interest in her was not purely political or professional, she said. On a party trip in 2017, after a night of drinking, he spent time “coming up behind me, hugging me, grabbing me”, she wrote in an April 2018 email to Maria Berryman, the lawyer leading the review. He also sent Sarah screenshots of explicit private messages exchanged with another party member, seen by The Spinoff, in which the pair fantasised about having sex with her. “I would feel manly if she was on her knees,” he wrote. 

Early in 2018 he invited her to a private meeting at his home to prepare for an upcoming regional conference. “He said it was really important that I came,” she said. “He made it feel like it was a part of my duties.” She arrived around six o’clock, and sat in the lounge to watch television with the rest of the household. After the others went to bed, the pair were left alone and moved to work on party documents on a computer in the adjoining office. 

It was then that Sarah felt the mood start to shift. 

…at no point whatsoever do Spinoff note she had been in a relationship with this guy for 8 months!!! That knowledges changes the entire dynamics of what she has told the Spinoff.

So this Spinoff hit job destroyed the young staffer, destroyed the President, defamed Simon Mitchell and allowed the insinuation that Jacinda covered it all up, all in the name of middle class woke feminism and hashtag activism?

That’s the journalism everyone is racing to support with donation is it? Puritanical character assassinations from virtue signalling evangelicals?

How charming.

When I went after John Key and the ponytail pulling scandal, I made sure I could back up everything written including how the Herald sent in a fake PR advisor to gain an exclusive to make Key look good, The Spinoff must be forced to ask if they had any journalistic standards at all in their hit job.

If you want to donate to a media that challenges the mainstream narrative without imploding the progressive movement with unsubstantiated hit jobs, you can support The Daily Blog here. 

Simon Mitchell should be suing The Spinoff for every cent Duncan Grieve has managed to get out of NZ on Air.

Biggest blacklisted story of 2019

I appreciate I’ve pissed most of the media off in NZ, but even I was surprised that so many of them point blank refused to cover my case against the NZ Police attempting to gain secret trails using secret evidence.

Best NZ TV Award 2019 – The golden shoulders of Atlas 

Madeleine Sami for the Great Kiwi Bake Off – Jesus, that girl just carries the entire show doesn’t she? What is the other one doing?

Worst TV Award 2019 – Who the fuck was paying attention?

To be honest I didn’t have much hope for the show when I saw the adverts.

Maybe it’s the orange suit pants of the host (she’s off the Edge Radio station isn’t she?), maybe it’s the bland comedic commercial radio talents of the guy (he’s off ZM isn’t he?) or maybe it’s Urzila Carlson’s South African accent which has all the charm of feral possums on meth making love on top of a tin roof with an orchestra of finger nails on blackboards, I couldn’t pin point where my depressed foresight originated, but the combination of all three on the show seemed to be even more soul destroying than I had initially considered possible.

The hack pre-produced jokes fell flat, the laughter was fake and the entertainment value non-existent.

Look, I get that as someone with an education over 16 with basic reading skills, I am not the target audience for this slop, but TVNZ managed to fill a room with a cheering audience who all looked like they had drunk their body weight in Red Bull, so maybe lowest common denominator lite entertainment is the glorious new future of public television?

All I know is that I ended up feeling more stupid than when I started, so the same experience when you listen to ZM and The Edge both at once.

Best TV Show ending:

Veep: After everything, each one of these gloriously awful characters got their just desserts. One of the most abusive and funny TV shows ever.
Silicon Valley: It started off so hopeful and in the end saw technology as the enemy. Sad and underwhelming but ended up saying more about how we view Silicon Valley now than when Facebook started.
Game of Thrones: Hated by many female fans who felt the Mother of Dragons would never have turned into a tyrant. Loved by many male fans who saw that coming a mile away.

The Tom Sainsbury Mediocrity Award for undeserved attention 2019

Have I slagged off Herald Columnist and Troll’s Troll David Cormack at all in this awards season?
No?
Ok, he wins this award.

If I can remind him annually that he should regret ever threatening me on Twitter, then it is a win.

Fuck him.

2019 Woke Middle Class Sadfishing Mummy Blogger rage feminist site of the year

The Spinoff: Its exciting mix of Sensible Sentencing Trust level victim rights lynchings and write ups of reality TV alongside the Editors constant attempt to shape the public broadcasting narrative into one that directly funds him has made The Spinoff the must miss source of information for the year.
Can’t we get a Paywall up on this thing? Please Baby Jesus, build a Paywall. I want an Action Station petition calling for NZ on Air to fund a Paywall.
The Spinoff could be a hipster blog, but none of the males working there seem to be able to produce enough testosterone to grow facial hair.
Look, I really, really, really want to care about your middle class challenges like attachment parenting of Brock and Bruschetta and finding a Yoga Kindergarten with the right POC diversity, or your need for vegan friendly sex toys or your views on militant free bleeding to overthrow the colonial patriarchy, but on reflection, I just don’t think I give a fuck.

Best Journalism 2019 

Oranga Tamariki Uplift story and Lake Alice horror: The lies with which Oranga Tamariki attempted to use to hide the terrible manipulations they conducted to steal a new born Māori baby out of the arms of a mother shocked the entire nation in a way that disgusted us all. That the state had secretly granted itself such enormous powers using NOTHING MORE than Big Data to determine who the state could steal babies from and who it couldn’t were so outrageous it turned Maoridom against the practice. We would never have been the wiser if Newsroom Melanie Reid blew the lid off this dirty secret and that the Prime minister and the Minister in charge still have not seen the video shows how damaging a piece of journalism this really was.
Likewise the Mike Wesley-Smith’s coverage of the abomination of Lake Alice brings tears to the eyes as the enormity of State abuse came home to us all. Both cases are journalism at its finest. We were humbly served as citizens by such trailblazing journalists.

Best Broadcaster 2019 

Hilary Barry and John Campbell: She makes the hot mess that is Seven Sharp watchable and he has reshaped morning Breakfast TV on TVNZ as something that you must watch every day. Hilary is our collective Aunty, John is our collective Uncle. John is so funny, so sincere and refuses to put up with shit unlike any other male broadcaster in the game, where as Hilary is a genuine role model for every middle aged woman in the nation.
With these two leading Broadcasting in NZ, there really is hope.

Best Māori Current Affairs 2019

Moana Maniapoto – Te Ao with Moana
It’s by far the most intelligent thing on TV. Moana is a broadcasting queen and if you want a true idea of what the fuck is actually going on in NZ from a  flax roots perspective, Te Ao is the best source of information in the entire country. Watch it, watch it, watch it.

Worst News Website 2019

Stuff – God I hate their interactive crap, it’s as if I’m a bored teenager who needs to be tricked into reading by all the disneyland attachments to make the text ‘fun’. Fuck off! Trying to guess which story is really part of their video ‘play’ section is always a challenge because they refuse to warn you that it isn’t an actual story and some bullshit video. The titles are the trick here, ‘Best most stunning’ blah blah blah or ‘Surprise shock at’, they are all clickbait bullshit.
Why is NZME trying to buy this?

Build that wall, build that wall, build that wall NZ Herald Journalism Award 2019

Here are some ideas on what I won’t mind missing Behind the Wall
  • Mike Hosking, Kate Hawkesby, Heather du Plessis-Allan and Barry Soper. The real housewives & husbands of Parnell ZB Troll farm that the Herald has become (thanks to their content sharing arrangement with ZB) means that week after week the Government is showered with biased hot takes that makes Tova O’Brien look like a seasoned and wise Jedi master of current affairs. Please put these yapping lapdogs of the establishment behind your paywall, hell I’d pay to have them behind a paywall – is that possible?
  • Lizzie Marvelly’s 10 millionth column on how shit men are was celebrated last year and while we all need to know how shit men are, and yes we are shit, God we are shit, we really need to be killed because we are shit – I just feel like I’ve gotten the gist of whatever she’s written without reading it now. Like, I kinda felt I hit that stage at the 5 millionth mark, but that’s just the heteronormative patriarchy in me speaking. Lizzie is an important voice saying the same thing forever and her amazing content should be behind a paywall. As men, we should be forced to pay to hear how shit we are, you know, as part of our ongoing obligations to narrow the gender pay gap.
  • Fran O’Sullivan – seeing as Fran is a good friend of China, shouldn’t she be behind a paywall? Like in a panda enclosure?
  • Any news story whose sources are people on twitter.
  • Any news story about a fight on twitter.
  • Any news story about someone taking offence on twitter.
  • Any news story about twitter.
  • Any news story using Facebook as a source.
  • All of the ‘Lifestyle’ section.
  • Mummy bloggers. Please sweet baby Jesus, bloody mummy bloggers.
  • Anything reprinted from the Spinoff
  • Property speculation content masquerading as a service.
  • Anything that is a ‘joint content project’ between Big Dairy and Big Oil.
  • Anything written by Duncan Garner.
  • Climate denial editorials.
  • John Roughan, we’ve heard quite enough from John Key’s biographer thanks. You couldn’t pay me to read his stuff.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. I read, watch and listen to a lot of media. Know one’s enemy and all that.
    The only media that deserves an award is a blog-site called The Daily Blog.
    I vote The Daily Blog. # 1.
    The rest of you can fuck off along with your flouncy pouters, your short arsed, sparkly, cave-dweller nut-cuppers to the riche and powerful, your humped backed, bowlegged arse kissers, the wheedling minions, the greedy graspers, your snivelling liars, sycophants and lets not forget your high-end, jet set, cold-blooded, lizard people who’ll cling to the decaying carcass of any sickly little celebrity-fly.
    Off you go. Report on this ( See raised middle finger.)

  2. At least, they have not yet found a way to paywall laughter! Today, my face hurts – I’ve got muscles there that I’d forgotten existed. (What a great way to look towards the next decade or so.)

    Cheers! 🙂 🙂 🙂

  3. In defence of Duncan Garner. Garner supported Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill and wrote why he did so.

    He, me, Helen Clark and bad John Key are the only persons I know to have publicly supported what Sue Bradford was doing. All the violent family in which I grew up were and are anti Bradford.

  4. Biggest blacklisted story of 2019 is one of the worst aspects covered in this post.

    Bomber great work on putting this together and it is a reminder of how fortunate we are in the work that the T.D.B does in putting the other side of the story in black white and no fake content too make the story just that little bit more delicious.
    Just the truth that we used too expect too get from our fourth estate and with no HIDDEN agendas.
    For the record i did email a number of our esteemed media outlets too ask why no coverage of the outcome of your police case which involved illegal harassment over a long period of time.
    Not one reply not even a acknowledgement that i had taken the time too get in touch.
    This is the best piece of advice you can give……

    If you want to donate to a media that challenges the mainstream narrative without imploding the progressive movement with unsubstantiated hit jobs, you can support The Daily Blog here.

    BINGO.

  5. Unfortunately for you Martyn, the Herald’s paywall was implemented by underpaid chimps, so all its glorious opinionators are still discoverable with a little workaround/ CSS jiggery pokery

  7. There should be an award for the whoever among the media are most in lock-step with the Nat’s Dirty Political Tricks.

    Here are two main Nasty Political Tricks they played:
    1. When the Coalition released their 2019 Budget, complete with certain Social Welfare Reform measures, the Nats pre-empted any in-depth discussion of it by their own early release. The media then allowed questions about a possible government site hacking to overshadow discussion of the budget itself. This meant that down the track it is easier for Nats to claim, “They’ve done nothing”.

    2. Secondly the Nats found someone who had been in an eight month relationship with a Labour staffer and who then made certain complaints about him. Paula, empowered by some in the media, used this to begin whipping up a frenzied series of attacks on Jacinda. Again, the political timing was a factor. The attacks took place at a time when our PM was being held in considerable esteem by others around the world. For example, while she was speaking at the United Nations Bryce Edwards was effectively smearing her on the Guardian, with suggestions that she was “embroiled in a sex scandal”.

    • Kheala – ‘For example, while she was speaking at the United Nations Bryce Edwards was effectively smearing her on the Guardian, with suggestions that she was “embroiled in a sex scandal”.’

      I think this is indefensible from a so-called academic. But OU staff are said to be subject to odd constrictions restrictions now.

      Even if readers are later made aware of the truth of an issue, the negative effect of the initial accusation often still lingers, and as a political scientist Edwards would, or should, know this.

      He’s not the only NZ commentator publishing distortions in off-shore media – the pay is quite good, and if they can malign the govt, then it’s a double whammy for them.

      Bennett’s sex attacks on PM Ardern could back fire – one doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to figure out
      why she’s so interested in it, but the interplay with media shows how successful the marriage between PM Key’s office and Whale Oil was, and that yes, it’s business as usual with their lazy dirty progeny.

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