MEDIAWATCH: New Year Honours – Barbara Dreaver is the journalism we need now
Here are the Pacific recipients of the New Year Honours list for 2024
Award-winning journalist Barbara Dreaver said finding out that her name was included in the New Year Honour’s list was surreal.
Dreaver has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to investigative journalism and Pacific communities.
She has been a champion of Pacific stories and voices for more than 30 years.
“It’s not just the telling of our stories, it’s also getting a result and we do this job to make a difference,” she said.
“And if you can do an investigative journalism story that will change people’s lives and that’s got to be a good thing, and that’s something I feel hugely privilleged to have been able to do.”
Dreaver said her parents have been such an inspiration and helped her over the years, always cheering her on from the sidelines.
Bab’s is a god damned national cultural treasure!
Her body of work every single year marks her journalism and her ability to pull NZs attention towards the current affairs of the Pacific as the benchmark for Fourth Estate values in this country.
The range of issues Barbara Dreaver covers from natural disasters to geopolitical machinations to domestic internal dynamics, her spectrum and skill as a Journalist is true dedication to the craft.
She is such a humble person and her stories are always focused on the ignored voices.
We need her quality of journalism more than ever before.
I’d call on her to replace Jessica Mutch as TVNZs Political Editor, but she is so needed covering the Pacific, (especially when you consider how many geopolitical ticking time bombs are likely to go off in the pacific in 2024), we desperately need her where she is.
Standing ovation for Babs!
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Three cheers for Barbara, a very well deserved honour. Yes, always humble and polite, but also a very genuine voice for those who the powerful would wish us to ignore.
Todays media is in a sorry state. It is in fact a shadow of its former self.
Gone are the days of true investigative journalism like what happened in The Unfortunate Experiment.
In its place is now a bunch of almost sycophantic Wannabi politicians whose political biased seems to have been bought for.
I am not alluding that the media was bought out by Labour but more likely from a previous political government that successfully eliminated ALL those more intelligent and questioning journalists from such media sources as to what I now call the tabloid NZ herald rag.
The rich who hold control over the media have torn down and discarded those true journalists who looked out the window and figured it was raining rather than be told by another that it was raining.
There is one former politician and leader from the past whose just hated John Campbell because Campbell asked him intelligent and well thought out questions. Hence probably the demise of Campbell Live between 2008 and 2016.
What has now piqued my attention is the ‘sudden’ promotion of the one I call Jessica Mulch-Macaw(aka the Parrot of National) to a part of the ANZ Bank. The very same bank John Key is on the board of.
And so back about 2022 Mulch-Macaw stated on TVNZ(again another piece of the NZ National Party Propaganda Brigade) that Luxon ‘should be more in the public eye’.
Looking at the Bosom Buddie relationship between Luxon and Key prior to Luxon becoming an MP and eventually, probably at the behest of National’s Top Boss(John Key) Luxon becoming leader it now comes across as so suspect that Mulch-Macaw ‘suddenly’ gets a job in the ANZ Bank in some role that was probably ‘created for her’ as a thanks for her ‘actions’ between 2021 through to 2023.
The media holds the foul stench of National within itself. I don’t think anyone will ever want to take the media all that seriously. Not whilst National controls the media contrary to Winston’s silly little allegations.
I would suggest Winston looks at his ‘side kicks’ in a more deeper way and not trust any of them. Because it’s likely once Winston has over-stepped the invisible line that National and ACT have marked in the ground he will find himself in Hades.
Everything good you can say about Barbara Dreaver would be applicable. If we weren’t running gummint and our political discourses at a low level, we would have had every opportunity to form well advised relationships, fully briefed on our mutual interests as a useful Pacific Island from her and other Pacific journalists’, reportage.