Herald front page highlights why we need a 5th estate
The crap news the holiday grad students are pumping out at the NZ Herald has become even more banal this week.
Last week it was North Korea nuking Auckland, TV3 bums and a poorly researched story about ‘racism’. Look at the Herald front page today, a Facebook story about breastfeeding, an Instagram story about someone imitating Max Key and someone who posted on Facebook that they were ‘fat shamed’.
It’s not that mothers breastfeeding in public or having people say mean things while passing in cars aren’t important issues, but these grad student holiday journalists are just trawling social media for stories rather than actually investigating anything. It’s a sham, it’s not journalism.
The sooner this crap is put behind a pay wall the better.
The fourth estate has obligations to hold the powerful to account, lazy journalism that jumps on social media for news doesn’t do that.
If the fourth estate won’t do the job of holding the powerful to account, the 5th estate must.
Isn’t it time progressives went beyond twitter feuds & actually started using social media to challenge the mainstream narrative?
Isn’t it time that Scoop actually does ‘take back the news’ rather than just being a tired old press release aggregate website?
Isn’t it time Union Coms and Green Party Coms did more than alienate on social media?
Isn’t it time to go beyond social media keyboard activism and actually engage in the debate?
Isn’t it time empty echo chamber political party aligned blogs stopped talking over the working class voters they are trying to win over and aknowledge the irony in calling for unity when they can’t practise it themselves?
Isn’t it time the corrupt mainstream media who enabled dirty politics and have become subservient to the Government are shown the door?
Isn’t it time we had an alternative to Story on TV3 and Seven Sharp at 7pm?
We can either wait for those things to happen, or we can just do it ourselves.
More details to come soon.
Carrot vs. Stick. I’ve said before that you are unlikely to pull people in while denigrating them as stupid sleepy hobbits. The challenge will be in finding a middle ground (or bastion) that increasingly engages people. This also shouldn’t rely on some fiscal or environmental disaster as I fear that might be too late.
Best of luck with the new project; it’ll be good to see what you come up with.
Young people will like their elders being called stupid sleepy hobbits because that’s what they see.
When The Daily Blog expands can I suggest it gets some regional stringers to do updates. Maybe one region a day with a rundown on what is going on there. This should not just be the major cities but smaller regions as well with about 14 in all so each region gets a profile once every too weeks.