Corporate Mainstream NZ Media suddenly realise NZers are being lied to but don’t see their own role in that

Breaking news comrades – the Corporate Mainstream NZ Media have suddenly realised that NZers are being lied to – but of course don’t see their own role in that.

This stunning new revelation comes to us from ‘Noted‘ the new media project by corporate mainstream media to get their corporate views on social media without telling anti-mainstream media social media from realising it’s from them….

Kept in the dark and fed endless bullshit, it’s difficult for even engaged citizens to make sense of much in New Zealand’s public and political life. 

What struck me most about the release of video footage of the Pike River mine drift was not whether a re-entry should be attempted (which is far too technical a question for me to assess), but how ready people were to believe there had been a cover-up by the government or the police, or both.

Former Act MP Heather Roy worried about exactly that on The Nation in a panel discussion: “Before I was thinking it would be the wrong thing to go into the mine but the new evidence in the video footage that came out this week shows, actually, can we trust the police… can we trust the government? And that’s not a good thing when we’re starting to ask those questions as a society.”

TV3’s political editor, Patrick Gower, agreed, saying there had been a week of “misinformation” by the government over Pike River.

Roy is a little late to the party in starting to question the government’s willingness to bend the truth to its own ends, if not downright lying when it suits its purposes. Some commentators have been appalled by this for years.

John Key, of course, set the tone for eight years as his government’s King of Spin, and that tendency doesn’t seem to be abating in his absence. We are routinely told our economy is an outperformer among OECD nations and we’re the envy of the world, that there is no crisis in Auckland housing, and that many of our young are too drug-addled to work — despite extensive data contradicting each of these claims.

I love how it’s a discussion on the panel off the fucking Nation that has brought light to Graham Adams world.

Wait, it gets better…

The same week the Pike River video footage emerged, Michael Reddell, a relentlessly reasonable and unexcitable critic of New Zealand’s immigration policy, posted an exasperated piece on his blog Croaking Cassandra titled: “A Government that Simply Makes Things Up”.

He wrote: “Perhaps all governments these days eventually do it, but one of the things that I’ve come to dislike most about our current government is the way they and their acolytes simply make stuff up. I could, I suppose, understand them not actually doing anything much. After all, they didn’t promise to do anything much. But the endless spin, and stuff that is just made up, sickens me.”

What gave his complaint extra bite was his moral objection as a committed Christian: “Apart from anything else, I try to bring up my kids heeding the biblical injunction to honour those in authority over us. I don’t read that as suggesting people won’t disagree with those who hold office, but there is something quite sick about the political process –  and perhaps about a society that tolerates this stuff –  when so often one reads comments from senior ministers or the Prime Minister to which one can only explain to kids interested in such things that ‘they are just making it up’. We should expect much better than that.”

…quoting a hard core Christian for moral guidance, how charming.

The hilarious bit about Graham Adams sudden realisation that the National Government are lying through their teeth is that Noted is fuelled for its content from Metro, North and South and the bloody Listener for fucks sake – each of those publications have been living inside John key’s arsehole for the full length of his term. They have sucked up to and worshipped Key and are part of the very same middle class hegemony that has sided with National from the start, so watching them fumble around blindly trying to understand why NZ is where it is now is as painful as it is disingenuous.

In the same week that the mainstream corporate media were trying to get their head around Pike River, they spent the week trying to claim Labour were in disarray while National were caught out lying in 4 seperate cases.

What about the corporate mainstream media’s role in empowering Cameron Slater during the heights of Dirty Politics? The countless smears these fuckers perpetrated on the people of NZ, oh no, dear old Graham Adams doesn’t go back that far.

What about when the largest newspaper in NZ had Key’s mate Rachel Glucina pretend to be a media adviser to the young waitress who was touched repeatedly at work by the Prime Minister?

That doesn’t get a mention by Adams.

The corporate mainstream media can’t understand why educated NZers hate them or why they walked away years ago to the internet for better sources of information to hold the powerful to account. Listening to the way Rod Oram was treated by Fairfax and the way those arrogant pricks had the audacity to hold him up as their evidence of being balanced while they were quality gagging him is the final nail in corporate media’s coffin.

 

The sooner these corporate mainstream media liars and manipulators are forced to shut up shop, the sooner citizen journalism can start to rebuild the industry.