We are a pretty emotionally stunted people.
We are passionate about cow udders, Rugby and denying alcoholism, but not really a renaissance people when it comes to emotional range or depth.
That’s why the closure of Newshub has been a mix of kiwi awkwardness and stunned shock.
The enormity of what we have just lost culturally and journalistically simply hasn’t dawned on us yet.
Losing Newshub is one of the worst days in NZ broadcasting history.
We are simply too stupid a people to appreciate what we have allowed to simply slip beneath the waters.
It felt at times like watching a Dr Who reunion with all the different manifestations of Breakfast shows and 6pm News programmes.
NZ Herald did a very respectful review over the last 3 decades.
Paul Henry, Oliver Driver, Campbell Live, Paddy, Hillary, Melissa Chan-Green, Mark Richards, Mike McRoberts, Duncan, Lloyd and Ryan, they’ve all led our national agenda and the loss will be enormous.
My personal favourite was the original Nightline with Belinda Todd. It was a legitimately anarchic and wonderful time in TV that was magical and subversive.
In terms of democratic infrastructure, Newshub closing is like two lanes falling off the Harbour Bridge.
We have allowed one of the main guard dogs of our democracy to be euthanised and we will all suffer you morons!
The way we have allowed capitalist mythology to shrug this all away as the free market at work simply highlights how totally brainwashed we have become by free market mythology.
The Social Contract of the fourth estate has been sold off in favour of a consumer media network. The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free, we have a journalism crisis, the social cost of that is…
- Citizens less informed about politics
- Citizens less civically engaged
- Citizens less likely to vote
- higher levels of corruption
- increased polarisation
…and that’s the way the Right Wing wants it!
There are of course winners and losers.
WINNERS:
Capitalism Mythology – It really says something about us as a culture when Capitalist Mythology takes over as the only value. Newshub falling over has been sold as the ‘Free Market Working’, that Fourth Estate Journalism has been relegated to a mere product rather than an essential institutional necessity for a functional democracy. We have been cheated by this mindset because it ignores the reality that capitalist media is in a forever crisis with
Atlas Network + Taxpayers’s Union – Less scrutiny allows their agenda to be promoted.
ACT Party +NZF + National – They want less accountability and want less attention on their terrible anti-worker, anti-Treaty, anti-environment, anti-Renter, anti-Māori, anti-beneficiary agenda.
Anti Vaxx lunatics – Less actual information allowed Qanon to spread.
Social Media Hate Algorithms & Political Polarisation – The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another. Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
Soft American Cultural Dominance –
TVNZ’s mediocrity – They have always been reactionary to Newshub, they always were a slow follower to the innovation TV3 brought and all TVNZ had to do was sit on its hands, produce mediocrity and wait for the free market to kill off TV3.
LOSERS:
Democracy – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, we are all in far more in danger of abuse of power than any of you comprehend.
Renters – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, renters rights will go backwards under a Government of Landlords.
Beneficiaries – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, beneficiaries will be brutalised.
Workers – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, the Government will be able to erode worker rights.
Climate change – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, the polluters gerrymandering law to stop their interests from being curtained will allow more catastrophic climate change.
Migrant worker exploitation – With less Fourth Estate Journalism, migrant worker exploitation will explode.
CONCLUSIONS:
Now what do I know?
I’ve only produced the best weekly political podcast (that isn’t funded by NZ on Air), pointed out Today FM was going to go under 6 months before anyone else and that Newshub was on the chopping block.
So what do I know, but my suspicion is that the Newshub replacement on Stuff will end up costing Stuff more and damaging them.
The question will be who goes under first, Stuff or The Spinoff.
Watch how TVNZ joins the Paywall movement, we are doomed to a Democracy Project future where public institutions erect Paywalls so that the masses are left to the misinformation and disinformation of Social Media.
People will turn to filters of the News rather than. the actual News itself.
Our opinions will be built upon the opinions of opinions of opinions.
Newshub closing is like the burning of the Library at Alexandria, if you mean by library a Pau shell covered shed with a book about Lyn from Tawa in it and if by Alexandria you mean the Waikato.
We will be a lesser culture, we will be a lesser democracy and we will be a lesser society for the closing of Newshub and all it would have taken to keep it alive was $30million and when you consider the Government just borrowed $14billion for Tax cuts, the only winners here are those who don’t want more scrutiny and accountability.
Moving forward, we are a more shallow people.
This is what we is now, this is what we have become.
I would like Stuff, the Spin-off, and Newsroom to go next.
Journalists betrayed their purpose when they decided the news should be shaped by their values and worldview.
I’m sorry the media doesn’t call for LGBT’s to be strung up from lamposts.
If you did that, then what would actually happen is that the news media would shift to becoming more dependent on outside sources-PR and think tanks. In otherwords, propagandists. So yes, I agree with you that Journalists betrayed their purpose, but getting rid of the media isn’t an improvement. Society has to push for funding it, and imo socializing it. (Journo’s should run the media themselves, not advertisors, state, private equity, or corporations).
Spot on Ada.
Very depressing reading, and sadly very true. What is possibly even worse is that nobody in the opposition appears to be promoting any kind of vision for a reformed media landscape. Do they even care?
Steve King If Prime Minister Luxon ( inept fool) says he doesn’t care whether or not his government’s policies work, it doesn’t give the opposition very much to challenge. Some offshore outlets address New Zealand news, and they do so more vigorously than our own, and nobody here watches television now anyway. The dumb programming could be deliberate to turn people off.
Spot on Gentle Annie, Luxon does not care at all.
Prime Minister Luxon the most caring of people.
No.
Another potential winner: The taxpayer, because it will swing some viewers on to TV1 thus bolstering their revenue and avoiding the need to prop them up with our hard-earned dollars.
Martyn – No taxpayer money to go to Newshub…it is a private firm.
Every now and then a garden needs a bit of weeding. Newshub is in the green bin. Garden looks a lot better.
You didn’t murder it, I didn’t murder it, we didn’t murder it, so who did? Who’s fucking with our MSM and for why? I have a sinking feeling that the murderers are not of these shores mate. Since our four main banks are australian owned and God only knows who owns them in turn, although I have read that it’s Wall Street bankers, then one must ask ” Is this a bloodless coup? ”
The only thing we have of value is the land we stand on. Hmmmmm…..? I wonder…..
The Guardian.
‘Potentially historic’ heatwave threatens more than 130 million across US
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/06/us-weather-heatwave
… and it’s just going to keep on giving. There will be brief scuffles here and there and then living between the 30ths will be impossible. You wait and see.
The fourth estate has lost its way and needs to return to its original high role of independent advocacy.
Newshub was a US corporate production and deeply compromised by accepting money to promote the political ideology of the government of the day.
We lost all trust in Newshub and stopped supporting the product.
Polls evidence the falling credibility in which the NZ MSM is currently held.
I just want the facts and I can develop my own views of things. Have the internet for that now. Don’t need a celebrity journalist telling me what to think.
Or what they feel!
Whatever did happen to Belinda Todd? A whole generation of boys my age growing up thought she was so hot and funny and it was a crying shame when they went all serious and got rid of that News Night format.
There was a time when I religiously bought a newspaper. There was a time when I religiously watched One News. There was a time when I religiously watched Fair Go, Sunday and other topical programmes.
Today, however, the “news” on TV and in newspapers is out of date, and well spun. Because I’m from an era when critical thinking was taught and expected, my distrust of TVNZ, TV3, Press, ODT, NZ Herald, etc has grown exponentially with each passing year.
Like a good 50/60% of my generation, and probably 80/90% of the subsequent generations, we’ve ditched television news and newspapers. Why? Because it’s crap. Because you can get unspun news from your phone.
Critical thinking is still required, but there’s less bullshit to shovel.
So do I regret for an instant the loss of TV3? Nah – not for a heartbeat. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve all passed their use by date. While some of the journalists tried hard, their treatment of the Labour governments of NZ and elsewhere brought the karma onto them. Now they get a small taste of what the working class has put up with over the last four decades.
After they’ve done a suitable period of penance, and have worked out where and how to get a proper sympathetic message across on a format that is unfiltered, I might, just might, read them again. But let them beware; I’ll be judging them against hard earned experience. If they don’t measure up – bye.
Perfect Richard. You nailed it.
“The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free,” Bang on!
“The question will be who goes under first, Stuff or The Spinoff.” Hmmm, let’s take a punt: now that uber-woke Spinoff no longer has the financial protection of Jacinda’s govt, my money is on Spinoff. But then I never win bets, so maybe it’s Stuff? What’s the TAB paying for both going?
Legacy media has been collapsing under the right of its own hubris and insider trading as foils for the ruling class class point of view for too long. This would be a day to weep, if they promised anything important to offer.
Their idea of great reporting is letting the government and the establishment beat up its own citizens because they don’t want a mediocre-to-dangerous cash grab gene therapy injection for a statistically-inflated lab-release they couldn’t even isolate as genuinely new.
They’re clueless on Ukraine, silent( and complicit for generations) on Palestine. They have nothing to offer on any meaningful front for real progress to help any of those “loser” or 90% of kiwis.
There iwll be short term pain, but far better in the long term as people learn to listen to each other and talk sincerely rather than be programmed by some random crew of truth DJs.
Shame.
Read and watch and listen to everything and make up your own mind. Less input means poorer output.
Amen.
It seems the most opinionated people are the same that only trust “their sources” which is generally the ones that follow their same political bent. When the evil “MSM” media disagrees with them they just hunt out more and more extreme conspiracy sites and cherry pick what they read (and usually post here).
Read it all, listen to it all, try to understand the point of view of who is saying it. God forbid you may actually learn something outside your own echo chamber.
Admission in a Georgian.University
My Prediction. Fox News was in NZ under Sky News Australia before the stuff announcement. I reckon they backed out of an offer for News-hub once they heard Stuff was going in. Stuff and there 6pm bulletin will eventually collapse and the Murdoch’s will sweep in and pick up whats left paying penny’s on the dollar. The thought of a Fox News NZ is both hilarious and terrifying.
Quite a clever analysis, but strictly a worst case scenario. The only thing you didn’t factor in was the numbers game (ratings war) and the generational gap on news sources. Murdoch is in trouble all over the place, and Fox News is dying a slow death in America, now only watched by MAGA zombies. All his other outlets are hemorrhaging capital and he’s still cunt-struck by his new trophy wife. His clueless sons are out of their depth. Meaning entry into the NZ media scene really isn’t on his horizon, let alone a possibility. Nah, the info wars in NZ will be on phones and vlogs/blogs. Here, there might be scope for intelligent journalism – if they get their act together.
We are blessed to have Mike Hosking and the rest of the ZB crew.
Gosh poor old Rupert will be shaking in his boots at your forecast RC.
The media are subject to evolution like everything else.
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