MEDIAWATCH: 10 Years of woke middle class social engineering at The Spinoff

‘The goal was just to stay alive’: The Spinoff turns 10

Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff, speaks to Newsable about the website’s milestone birthday and the state of NZ media today.

Jesus wept? It’s been a decade already?

The Spinoff is without a doubt the best example of woke identity politics in Aotearoa New Zealand and are the worst cultural journalism mutation since:

• The Platform
• Cameron Slater starting the Whaleoil Blog
• Appointing Professor Joanne Kidman to the Academy of Extremism

Originally a script writing site for brand content and reality TV shows needing online support, they would hold up their top 10 ice cream brands Kiwis love lists with all the pride of an only child showing you their terrible terrible art.

There was endless chatty pap about tedious nothings in obvious attempts at seeding water-cooler chats, or 50 best kiwi biscuits that Kiwis love in a Kiwi summer, or another gossip chat column listing the top 5 things in some bullshit reality show most people never gave a fuck about, in short, The Spinoff was white girl middle class capitalism culture (with a Gay friend) before Taylor Swift personified it.

Imagine The Edge with less advertising and blander.

Then came wokeness, the Summer of Cancel Culture and creamy, creamy, creamy NZ on Air money and overnight The Spinoff went from bullshit content writing for brands trying to reach those tricky online consumers into full blown fourth wave feminist, non-binary culture warriors for vegan mommy bloggers.

It became a little bit of Woke Wanker Wellington here in Auckland, and gosh darn didn’t we love it.

After the injection of over $6.1million+ from NZ on Air, The Spinoff became a social engineering Government propaganda platform for middle class millennials that masqueraded as ‘journalism’.

 

These are some of the actual titles for their feminist blog, ‘On The Rag’, I honestly didn’t make any of these up:

• Alex gets a Brazilian wax for the first time | On the Rag: Body Hair
• Sex toys, one night stands and pre-colonial horniness | On the Rag: Sex positivity (full episode)
• Gender identity, Brazilian waxing and Amazon river dolphins | On the Rag: Body Hair (full episode)
• Where is it OK to get your boobs out? | On the Rag: Boobs | The Spinoff
• Does weed make you horny? All our big questions, answered | On the Rag: Weed | The Spinoff

This woke cavalcade of poorly viewed taxpayer funded content created with all the same intellectual rigour of your average suburban Wellington mommy blogger, produced an editorial team who are in a daily struggle session to prove who hates heteronormative penis’s the most.

$6million+ taxpayer dollars so white people can feel guilty and virtue signal their therapy learnings just seems so Wellington Public Service, am I right?

The Spinoffs crimes against journalism are remarkable and should be celebrated in the best Spinoff tradition of a ‘TOP 5 CULTURE CRIMES AGAINST JOURNALISM’ list, so let’s do it.

‘The Spinoff’s TOP 5 CULTURE CRIMES AGAINST JOURNALISM’

5 – Spinoff TV

NZ on Air shat gold bullion straight down The Spinoffs throat for Spinoff TV and right from the start it hemorrhaged so much in ratings that it was immediately moved to the Graveyard slot and died…

Spinoff TV loses nearly 90 per cent of audience after ‘graveyard’ slot shift

…NZ on Air responded to this enormous failure by giving The Spinoff millions more.

 

4 – Steinlarger Advert complaint

The Spinoff were very cross with the Steinlarger TV advert because white people are made to look like the heroes and grrrrrrrr identity, diversity etc etc etc.

B-U-T

If we are finished with the identity politics remix isn’t there a far more serious problem with this Steinlager TV advert romanticising the nuclear free protests?

L-I-K-E…the fact that Steinlager is owned by Lion, Lion owned by Kirin, Kirin is owned by Mitsubishi and Mitsubishi owns Uranium mines all around the planet?

Steinlager is doing nuclear free protest TV adverts all the while their Corporate master owns some of the largest Uranium Mines on earth!

Isn’t that a tad more hypocritical and far more damning than the identity politics lens that the Woke are locked into?

3 – LOTR not woke enough

Why we shouldn’t glorify Lord of the Rings

…For the taxpayer funded Spinoff the issue is that there aren’t enough trans Elves and Maori hobbits to bring diversity to the Lord of the Rings!

Note, it’s not how Peter Jackson and John Key gerrymandered the funding and passed law to help a corporation screw over NZ workers, oh no, you get the honest feeling that if LOTR had a love scene between lesbian Orcs and Trans dwarves it would be getting a standing ovation at The Spinoff!

Actual real world workers getting fucked over by a large corporation is the issue with the LOTR legacy, it’s not the lack of bisexual mothers transitioning as leads.

When you see everything through the identity politics lens, class always goes missing.

 

2 – Posie Parker Coverage

The Spinoff attempted to portray the Rosie Parker fiasco as totally peaceful and a moment of Trans Joy.

Most Kiwis sitting at home however watched an angry mob attack and chase off stage a woman as the very antithesis of free speech.

It probably helped cost us the election.

 

1 – The Labour Party Staffer Rape Allegation 

If there’s one glorious moment of Spinoff journalism, it’s their Labour Party Staffer Rape Allegation story, and what a moment of journalism it was.

It was the Summer of Cancel Culture and The Spinoff wanted what Alison Mau was desperately attempting to find, a NZ version of Harvey Weinstein to hunt and burn!

The Spinoff started by publishing a harrowing story of a Labour volunteer who was sexually assaulted by a Labour Party Staffer. The story was written in a manner that suggested the two barely knew each other.

That turned out to be an enormous lie.

They had been in a relationship for 8 months.

That The Spinoff purposely deceived the nation because knowledge of an ongoing relationship only leads people to rape myths might be fine for a woke publication, didn’t go down so well in the real world.

Andrea Vance raged that she was deceived, the guy accused of the Rape allegation had his life destroyed and The Spinoff blamed everyone else for being mean about their ‘journalism’, which quickly sank once the deception on their behalf was outed.

Crazy times.

Crazy, crazy hateful times.

Now I know I sound derisive towards The Spinoff and all they stand for, but that’s not completely true because I do celebrate the gifts The Spinoff have brought us; The Tiso Counter, The Emily Writes syndrome, The Duncan Grieves job interview pretending to be journalism scam and the NZ on Air funding political barometer.

The Tiso Counter: Very similar to the Geiger counter, it measures radioactive wokeness. 1 Tiso will make you sick, 5 Tiso’s will kill everything except vegans.

The Emily Writes syndrome: That moment when you like a social media post without realising it’s a radioactively woke person and you quickly unlike the post within 30 seconds.

The Duncan Grieve job interview pretending to be journalism scam: It’s an incredible way of interviewing media heavyweights pretending to care what they say when you are really pitching to them how your company can solve all their media challenges. It has all the nuance of a prince from Nigeria asking you for your bank account and PIN number to put in $3million in Treasury Bonds of which which you will be paid 1 million and a herd of goats.

NZ on Air funding political barometer: You can immediately see what political power holds Parliament simply by checking how much NZ on Air has given The Spinoff in any year. If the amount is more than $1.5m a year, the Greens have over 8%, if it’s less than that, National are in power.

See!

The Spinoff has brought us so many wanky gifts that no one wants!

They are a posh dinner party in a posh suburb where you are caught between Toby Manhire and Alison Mau arguing over who hate white cis males most.

What we need is media that actually identifies class and economic justice above the low hanging fruit of alienating woke identity politics.

The Spinoff’s 10 year legacy to date has been a middle class joke pretending to be a working class punchline.

 

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