6pm news on Three to continue after Newshub closure as Warner Bros. Discovery and Stuff strike deal

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and New Zealand media company Stuff have signed a deal which will see Stuff produce a 6pm news bulletin for Three.

However, the agreement does not mean a reversal of last week’s confirmation of WBD’s plan to close its inhouse news gathering operation, Newshub, with the loss of nearly 200 jobs.

The deal means WBD is outsourcing production of its 6pm bulletin to Stuff, which already runs the country’s largest news website, and publishes several daily and weekly newspapers including The Waikato Times, The Press and The Post.

This announcement is as empty as a step parents hug and twice as disappointing.

I mean, yay, 30 jobs have been saved out of 300 job losses and Samantha Hayes gets to continue paying the mortgage and once again Sinead Boucher and Stuff Journalism have saved NZ from a fate worse than ZB but this is a band aid solution that may end up choking Stuff and sinking them so less cheering and way more panic thanks.

This is the lifeboat announcement on the Titanic, not a new dawn for journalism.

The single worst thing this whole Newshub dying event has allowed is to birth Duncan Greive’s from the Spinoff as a’ media commentator’.

Stop encouraging him!

How can someone who got $6million from NZ on Air have anything left to add other than ‘ha ha suckers’?

Remember how The Spinoff framed the Posie Parker fiasco?

We need less Spinoff, not more of it thanks.

There are of course political winners and losers from the murder of Newshub.

 

WINNERS:

Sinead Boucher and Stuff Journalism:

Once again Sinead has gone above and beyond for NZ Journalism with this bold move. We owe her an enormous debt of gratitude that one of our largest news outlets is run by someone as sincere as she is and we all wish her luck with this new venture.

 

New Digital Ratings:

The legacy media’s bullshit ratings systems are now dead and the only game in town is clickbait. All new media is competing now with pornhub and 5 second dances on TikTok.

 

Geopolitical American Cultural Hegemony: 

Warner Bros don’t give a shit about NZ journalism.

They bought TV3 because China and America are in the middle of a Cold War and as a player in the pacific, America wants to drench NZ in soft power American culture.

Warner Bros care about ramming America’s got talent, America’s The Batchelor, America’s MAFS, America, America, America down our throats.

While Warner Bros don’t care about NZ journalism, they do care about the revenue it brings in and more importantly they care about burning all their good will to be able to continue drenching us in American Cultural Hegemony, so this pissy little lifeboat to pretend they care is the perfect outcome for them.

 

Lite weight NZ ‘entertainment’:

Because TV3 is just an expression of geopolitical cultural power, all the bullshit local franchise holders of American culture get a reprieve so welcome back The Masked Singer and the blah blah blah crap The Spinoff gets paid to review and love.

 

You-Go-Girl-Feminism Journalism:  

Alison Mau may have left the building, but her ghost remains to hunt down and kill all men. Despite being Māori, Mike McRoberts has a heteronormative penis and those are certainly not the flavour of the week at Stuff which is Identity Politics Central.

Samantha will be picked as the host so her and Tova can have an online reunion.

Hashtag BossGirl, Hashtag You-Go-Girl-Feminism.

 

Foxtel + Australian Sky: 

Through out all of this NewsHub meltdown, Rupert Murdoch has had his Nazgul quietly meeting and waiting. They are watching from the sidelines to see if the Broadcasting costs choke Stuff as well as Warner Bros and will sweep in when the industry is weaker.

 

National/ACT/NZ First:

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, this new hard right, racist, climate denying, beneficiary bashing Government will be able to get away with far more damage.

 

Trans national mining interests:

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, Trans National Mining Interests will get to rape and pillage our environment thanks to fast track powers Shane Jones gave himself.

 

Real Estate Pimps:

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, the Real Estate Pimps will continue to get tax breaks at the cost of education and health care.

 

The Billionaire Class:

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, the Billionaire class will continue to get tax cuts at the cost of hungry children.

 

Corporate Farmers: 

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, Corporate Farmers will get away with stealing more water, polluting more water and creating more climate changing emissions with less scrutiny.

 

Atlas Network:

With fewer journalists asking hard questions, far right think tank, The Atlas Network will get away with less scrutiny.

 

E Tu Union:

Have stood for journalists and reminded everyone why being a member of a union is so important!

 

TVNZ Board:

Have managed to get away with doing sweet fuck all. The most hopeless pathetic TVNZ Board ever created, they have simply sat on their hands, allowed News to be gutted and have leveraged their legacy position to whether the storm while Newshub sank.

Every single board member should be sacked by the next Government!

 

Social Media hate Algorithms: 

For all the blaming of the media, we are ignoring the biggest factor in this – YOU!

Yes – YOU.

YOU who are swamped with social media preening your vanity, your next comment, your likes, your need for affirmation, the self involved echo chamber YOU create has far more impact on how you see the media!

Yes the media went a bit woke, yes the media has always been racist and classist – but the biggest change has been YOU!

Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated.

A cacophony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening.

Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.

Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.

Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.

Most people are on social media and most people have a woke activist or Qanon antivaxxer fanatic in their social media feed screaming their feverish truths. While these activists certainly think they are speaking truth to power by endlessly calling people out for breaches of woke mantra or fake news anti Trump lies, to everyone else they are simply toxic.

Sartre said ‘Hell is other people’.

I say ‘Hell is other people’s social media feed’.

People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.

Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!

The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.

Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and meth combined.

Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty – it’s not so much the personal virtue signal, (we are all dicks at times), it’s the weaponization by algorithms that make it so dangerous and damaging.

The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.

Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the middle classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.

On the other side, feral Incel antivaxx racists are in full death threat mode on anything that makes them feel insecure, which apparently is everything.

The biggest reason so many have lost trust in the media is because many have been led down rabbit holes and believed the hate algorithms they’ve been fed!

When Winston lies that the entire media were bribed, it allows conspiracy to become the new editorial line.

We have changed more than the media have!

 

LOSERS:

Legacy Media Bullshit Ratings systems: 

No one will ever believe a Radio/TV/Newspaper salesperson telling you that 300 000 people saw, heard or read your advert anymore. They want to see the online data. The lies the legacy media used to sell inflated ratings numbers are dead and watching them now struggle to pretend that wasn’t the problem is glorious.

 

Newshub Staff:

300 sacked, maybe as few as 30 jobs saved.

Sure, it’s a lifeboat, but it’s a lifeboat on the Titanic.

 

Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee:

Why bother having a Minister of Broadcasting if all she does is fiddle while the industry burns?

Melissa Lee is a hopeless Broadcasting Minister!

She makes Chris Faafoi look brilliant and competent, and that’s almost impossible!

Her shrug and claim that this is the market working misunderstands the enormity of what is happening here!

Her argument that no one watches TV misunderstands that all of Newshub’s journalism features online and influences well beyond the TV screen in the Lounge Room!

No wonder she has been gaged and stuffed into the corner.

What a joke.

 

NZ Democracy: 

Ultimately it is our quality of democracy that suffers with fewer journalists asking the Government and their wealthy interests the hard questions.

 

CONCLUSION:

The biggest reason NZ has lost trust in media is because we as a people are no longer being rational nor objective about the way we interact with the world, we are totally subjective and base everything now on our ‘feelings’.

Right now in New Zealand, you can win an argument with nothing more than ‘feelings’.

If you ‘feel’ the argument more than the other, then you win.

Crazy no?

Because objective truth, logic and rational debate are all heteronormative white cis male privileges, ‘FEELINGS’ are all that matter now and once the middle class woke activists triggered that new threshold for truth, the feral anti vaxxers and Incels and redneck racists and Groundswell astroturf protests have done exactly the same!

This is the new politics of the neoliberal subjective!

We have chosen to feed our emotions and feelings rather than engage our rational objective minds.

We are all burning the library while complaining the library doesn’t have the books we like.

 

 

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