MEDIAWATCH: RNZ went woke then went broke
The problem with appealing to identity politics and promoting journalism using the identity lens is that you ultimately end up with the majority being alienated while constant attacks from the remaining woke audience for not being woke enough is pure temple politics that endlessly divides.
Woke backlash at editorial lines outside the latest conclave dogma proclamations are fierce and brutal.
RNZ are held hostage by their woke online reactionary audience.
This has seen a steep decline in audience…
RNZ’s latest radio ratings do not make for particularly happy reading for the state broadcaster. Its total radio audience is at its lowest number in more than three and a half years.
While RNZ’s ratings are reported separately from the commercial stations, the public entity has gone from essentially number one in the overall New Zealand market in 2020 to number five today, based on total cumulative audience.
At the start of 2020, RNZ had a healthy overall national audience of 654,306. If those RNZ numbers were to be compared alongside the commercial market, RNZ would be a clear number one, followed by three music stations (The Breeze, More FM and The Edge), with ZB in fifth spot, with 536,499 listeners.
Fast forward three and a half years and positions have been reversed. Using the same comparison, ZB now claims the top spot with 677,643 listeners and RNZ has 532,351. The same three music stations sit between them.
RNZ’s change of fortune is reflected in the performance of its flagship Morning Reportbreakfast show.
At the start of 2020, Morning Report enjoyed an audience of just over half a million listeners. That has fallen by more than 120,000 in three years to sit today at 380,152.
Newstalk ZB breakfast host Mike Hosking was a distant second to Morning Reportthree years ago – he was more than 100,000 listeners behind back then. But today he is almost 100,000 ahead.
“We do want and expect Morning Report to grow again in the next 12 months,” Thompson told Media Insider.
…they should have allowed the youth radio idea to grow rather than kill it!
RNZ is pretty woke and for the middle class, that’s great, to everyone else it’s tedious and smug.
The Panel (which used to be one of the highest rated shows in NZ) is now just 3 shades of the same middle class woke opinion agreeing with each other.
The latest dishonesty from RNZ attempting to win a bullshit journalism award with their new middle class docudrama using all the same wailing voices from the Disinformation Project and Spin-off and the numerous anonymous Twitter wokies all refusing to acknowledge their own role in whipping up this cacophony of hate.
Let’s not forget the Wellington woke called for the military to be sent into the Parliament Lawn Protests because everyone was a ‘Nazi’.
Feelings are the only currency now in our age of subjective rage and this election will be fought by the Hateful Right against the Unforgiving Woke to try and woo voters over.
The Hateful Right will vomit up racist rhetoric while the Unforgiving Woke will banish everyone who disagrees with their dogma.
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Radio Who?
100% Martyn, especially your comment about The Panel.
Listening to RNZ is like eating cold, grey porridge, so I have to suffer the endless, mind-numbing ads in 1ZB in order to get to the gems.
The Panel in its current state is a circlur wankfest.
“Ooh I so support this”
“Well I support it more than you”
“Well I supported this long before either of you two so that makes me so much more superior than you or anyone else”
I gave up listening to it for the sake of my transistor radio and the window it would have been eventually thrown through.
I would consider a lifetime ban from RNZ a badge of honour. Well done Martyn.
Yes and yes. So not surprising. Deleted the app some time ago and no longer listen to RNZ. Its crap! It badly needs to be freed from its political masters!
My great hope with better funding was a better resourced objective newsroom, advancing on where they were under the budget strangulation of National. In fact, one of the reasons I voted Labour in 2017. Instead what we got was unlistenable pidgin Te Reo everything by correspondence. Yes, Wellington love that box ticking shit, the rest of us… not so much.
But having recently learnt through other sources including TDB that Willie Jackson has been highly instrumental in linking broadcasting funding to all things Maori, and the ugly but buried Kiri Allan episode at RNZ I cannot help but think their predictable decline is linked directly to their Minister or his vast influence!
RNZ – poster child of what not to do to stay in journalism.
The thicko woke RNZ management should be the first to be sacked for their appalling strategy, as they cancelled their main audience demographic in favour of the new woke as well as removing their old, journos, and their target demographic don’t actually listen to radio or read anymore. Wokie audiences tweet and do blogs, self promote to get funding in the same woke spaces and cancel so are in competition with RNZ.
Couldn’t agree more Martyn, it’s the radio equivalent of the Women’s Wankly….a good story…a entertainment story…a sports story…a cat or dog story….a business story…a propaganda story (USA/Russia/China), all fluff & puff stories that effectively tell you nothing…a bit like talking to a PR person or a politician…after they walk away everybody says what the fuck was he talking about!
The other morning Ingrid Hipkiss cut somebody off when talking about poverty because it was butting up to the business update, that shows you what is important to their overlords.
The absolute fiasco (pearl clutching) about the so-called journo fitting his version of events really took the cake, we are feed uncritical propaganda on a daily basis with no checks & balances.
FWE Womens W…kly. Supreme award.
It’s no coincidence that you and Plunket and a handful of others that are likewise cancelled are the only bastions of questioning probing old school journalism/comment that refuses to take government money or tow the company line.
We are only one step away from our legacy media organizations being indistinguishable from state run media in Russia or China.
Kiwis are finally realizing this with viewer and listening surveys for RNZ and TVNZ showing numbers plummeting.
Imagine turning up for an RNZ interview as a straight white male. You would be looked at in disgust and ushered out fast whilst anything you touched was being quickly bleached.
Where went my earlier comment? I hope it didn’t disappear because I criticized Martyn’s Panel performances – unable to think on his feet and given to coming out with prewritten bombast.
And the last couple of weeks, I’ve been enjoying the Panel with Wallace.
I think there is a lot of great radio on “The National Programme”, but the Covid, Ukraine, Russia lockstep has been pathetic. RNZ seems to be a bumboy for the BBC etc.
Ny George I think he’s got it!
Feelings are the only currency now in our age of subjective rage and this election will be fought by the Hateful Right against the Unforgiving Woke to try and woo voters over.