Letter presented to TVNZ on Saturday 3 May 2025
Alastair Carruthers
Board Chair
Television New Zealand
Victoria Street
Auckland CBD
Kia ora Mr Carruthers,
Request for independent review of TVNZ’s reporting on Palestine/Israel
Over the past 18 months of industrial scale killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military in Gaza we have been regularly appalled at the blatantly-biased reporting on the Middle East by Television New Zealand.
TVNZ’s reporting has been relentlessly and virulently pro-Israel. TVNZ has centred Israeli narratives, Israeli explanations, Israeli justifications and Israeli propaganda points on a daily basis while Palestinian viewpoints are all but absent. When they are presented they are given rudimentary coverage at best. More often than not Palestinians are presented as the incoherent victims of Israeli brutality rather than as an occupied people fighting for liberation in a situation described by the International Court of Justice as a “plausible genocide”.
This pattern of systemic bias and unbalanced reporting is not revealed by TVNZ’s complaints system which focuses on individual stories rather than ingrained patterns of pro-Israel bias. Every complaint we have made to TVNZ has, with one minor exception, been rejected by your corporation with the typical refrain that it’s not possible to cover every aspect of an issue in a single story but that over time the balance is made up.
Our issue is that the bias continues throughout TVNZ’s reporting on a story-by-story, day-by-day basis – the balance is never achieved. The reporting goes ahead just the way the pro-Israel lobby is happy with.
We have lost count of the number of times TVNZ has reported on Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem when they should be described as Occupied Gaza, Occupied West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem. This is the designation of these territories under international law and New Zealand government policy so why is it so hard for TVNZ to get these simple basic facts correct.
Similarly the Israeli military should be described as an Israeli occupation force in relation to the occupied Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance groups should be described as just that – as “resistance groups” or “armed resistance groups” rather than using Israeli terminology of “terrorists” or militants. “Terrorists should be reserved for groups labelled as such by the United Nations. No Palestinian resistance groups have these designations at the UN.
When the presenter on TVNZ’s premium current affairs show is able to repeatedly mislead viewers with an outdated Hamas charter, almost 20 years out of date in fact, as a way to condemn the organisation then the pro-Israel lobby is having its racist, Islamophobic, propaganda work done for it by TVNZ.
The damage to human rights, justice and freedom in the Middel East by western media such as TVNZ is incalculable.
It is prolonging Israel’s illegal occupation, its apartheid policies, its ethnic cleansing and theft of Palestinian land. TVNZ is part of the problem – a key part of the problem – and we are asking the board of TVNZ to conduct an independent investigation into its pro-Israeli bias.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Ngā mihi.
John Minto
Co-National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
Please let us all know when and what the weasel-word reply is.
” Please let us all know when and what the weasel-word reply is ”
Oh I can answer that one.
There won’t be a reply.
To reply would mean acknowledgement that they read the letter.
And we can’t have that !
The worm is turning, I couldnt help notice that on TVNZ last night Simon Dallow turned back to face the camera after a story on Gaza with a look of disgust on his face, its fleeting but its there. I actually commented to my son,now theres a meme in the making there. Perception is everything.
Why are the prisoners taken by the Palestinians called hostages, and the hostages taken by the Israelis prisoners? The actions of the IDF itself a misnomer, are vile and unforgivable.
Power+man: IDF is combatting a vile and unforgiving group – Hamas. The ball is in Hamas court…
oh bullshit you one eyed drop kick! All a halfwit like you has to do is compare footage of the release of Israeli hostages( most of whom are members of the IDF)and observe their physical condition with the terrified tortured malnourished Palestinian souls released by Israel . There are times NAthan when the camera says it all. Israel is a violent brutal Fascist state that has repeatedly broken International law and allowed the world to see the vile hatred it is built on and spews out at the rest of the world everyday. Israel is a bully a liar a thief and full of shit!!!
In his first mass before the tens of thousands of the faithful gathered on St. Peters Square, Pope Leo XIV called for an immediate lasting ceasefire in Gaza and the “release of all the prisoners”. Pope Leo used the Israeli’s word for their captives. ie ‘prisoners’, and not the Israeli’s word for Hamas’ captives ie ‘hostages’.
Needless to say, Pope Leo’s words were greeted with a massive cheer and spontaneous applause.
“It sounds different”
We can’t help it, if it sounds different, because we are racists. All of us.
Al Jazeera English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfy6g05yVRg
15.8M subscribers
10,670 views
May 14, 2025
Transcript:
Stefanie Dekker @0:00 minutes:
“We’ve witnessed more than 18 months of genocide in Gaza…….”
Nizar Farsakhr @14:04 minutes:
“It is extremely difficult to reconcile with a world that has centered, let’s say the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, and those pictures of emaciated children in concentration camps in black and white. And then when you see that live in Gaza there isn’t that outrage….”
Stefanie Dekker @15:17 minutes:
“I think you made a a very important point there, about the value of life.
52,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since. October 2023.
Translate that to 52,000 Americans killed you know, or 52,000 Italians killed, um it sounds different.”
Of course it sounds different, because we are racists. All of us.
Western media has made us that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfy6g05yVRg