Key’s ties, Verity ‘slut’ shamed? and The Spinoff’s never ending budget – Not News Awards of the Week
News is supposed to inform citizens so that they know who they should vote for once every 3 years, you want light weight fluff entertainment, tune into Bravo or E, emulating them should not be on the agenda.
Last weeks ‘this is not news’ Awards are…
Bronze medal for ‘this is not news’ Award – The Spinoff spends money for fun?
Is Lightbox just shitting blocks of gold directly into Duncan Greives mouth? The money they seem to have to spend on meaningless crap is phenomenal. Last week, The Spinoff bravely declared what everyone already knew – Phil Goff is going to win the Auckland Mayoralty by a country mile. Why anyone would spend money on a political poll as self evident as the Auckland Mayoralty election is a good question because Phil is going to win through a mix of apathy, crap candidates and more apathy.
Phil Goff winning the Auckland Mayoralty is not news and commission polls suggests you have too much money, like those awful adverts for mobile phone games.
Silver medal for ‘this is not news’ Award – Verity ‘slut’ shamed?
Slut shaming is a terrible way of belittling a person for their sexual choices, it’s not good and accosting women on the street to yell it at them is even worse, but how Verity Johnson managed to turn being yelled at on Krd into a discussion about prostitutes seemed tenuous at best.
Verity works on a show hosted by a right wing manic, and most people hate the show because of that. While the woman yelling ‘slut’ at Verity clearly hadn’t managed to articulate that perspective, it seems a fairly long bow to draw by Verity that this was an example of people not liking prostitutes?!?
Maybe the woman yelling at you on Krd actually just didn’t like you or the show you work for?
Gold Medal for ‘this is not news’ Award – NZ Herald & their ‘tie’ story
Last week, the NZ Herald decided that the most important story to focus on wasn’t new spy powers using fear of Muslims, it wasn’t water being polluted and poisoning thousands, it wasn’t even that Kiwisaver are investing in cluster bombs, tobacco and nukes – oh no. It wasn’t that our child poverty has now reached the Guardian or that people are now offering to rent out driveways to sleep in – This week the NZ Herald decided an important political story was how many ties John Key has.
You heard that correctly – The Herald breathlessly reported that the Prime Minister thinks he has somewhere between 200 and 500 ties. On the day he was asked he said he was wearing a paisley-patterned pink tie and that he’d be wearing a blue polka dot tie on the next day.
It’s journalism like this that means we can’t get nice things like a properly functioning fourth estate that holds the powerful to account.
Ties, ladies and gentlemen – that’s the big story of the week in the Herald – John Key’s bloody ties.
Yes Martyn
It is now seen as vital that our opposition parties (on behalf of half of the voter’s who voted for them) now place the legal claim in the court to take back our half of the public owned media, so we can send a balanced view of public affairs that affect us all, so all of us as voting for opposition parties finally have a voice now!
So opposition Parties get going now please do it
Take back half of RNZ/TVNZ NOW!!
‘News is supposed to inform citizens so that they know who they should vote for once every 3 years’
That may have been the case before national and global corporations took over but it is certainly not the case now.
Now ‘news’ is geared to distracting, entertaining, dumbing-down, informing citizens what the next phony threat is (whilst ignoring all the actual threats), and persuading them to buy stuff they don’t need (and which will probably do them considerable harm).
Every moment spent listening to/watching/reading/ propagandised so-called ‘news’ is a moment of one’s life completely wasted.
Hah, I could find many more “not newsworthy” medal examples to add to the list, but will not bother, as it is a very sad state of affairs, our shallow, light, very fluffy “info” providing MSM.
The government must love it, how it is all going according to plan.
You know, sometimes I wake up, read the news, and then want to wander off into the bush and spend the rest of my days living in a treehouse.
So JK owns between 2 and 5 hundred ties. It’s reassuring to know that he can pin the numbers down so accurately. That must be why the nation’s finances are so healthy across the entire social demographic! 😉