RNZ’s existential crisis, Peacock and the Sutherland report

It says a great deal about the culture at Radio New Zealand that the independent report into RNZ by its former news chief, Richard Sutherland, was being kept out of the news. RNZ was forced to release the report last week after an Official Information Act by media. And “release” seems to have meant release to the media not to the public. The NZ Herald doesn’t seem keen to make it available either from what I’ve seen from their Media Insider coverage that has quoted from it (so I haven’t read it). Does that seem normal to you?

RNZ is seeking to suppress a report that the CEO, Paul Thompson, had commissioned. I can assert suppression because try finding it on the RNZ website. No return. The RNZ articles on this – both Media Watch by Colin Peacock – have no link to it. The first of (14/08/2025) does not mention that the Sutherland report was being released at all and the second was yesterday (17/08/2025) which goes into length about it, which itself quotes from it and in which he has linked to other things, but does not link to the report. Peacock reports:

“I asked him to be frank and robust, and that is what has been delivered,” Thompson said when RNZ released it this week after Official Information Act requests.

Yes, but Mr Peacock, your beat is called “media” and “watch” so the most obvious aspect of this is to ask why it had to be OIA’ed (because the OIA’s were from the media – right!?) and why isn’t it online at RNZ because, Mr Peacock, you aren’t linking to it. Mr Peacock: you keep quoting from it, but you won’t provide us with the source material.

Mr Peacock has revealed enough in his column to be ashamed about regards RNZ’s short-comings in the report, but to suppress the whole thing, the whole by-the-sounds-of-it gloriously brutal dissection of the beast performed by an insider is against the entire concept of watching the media. It is a mockery. The same column he wonders about the collapse of credibility of the news media! His columns – on RNZ this week at least – read like AI marketing press releases aiming to minimise or absolve the organisation. He clearly is having trouble managing the conflicts of interest.

So RNZ is so humiliated that the CEO who commissioned the report doesn’t want us to read it, they don’t want to own it. It cost thirty grand – they should really own it. The media watching person won’t let us see it. Is that normal? Peacock says:

Mediawatch asked to speak to Sutherland about his blunt review of his former employer. He deferred to Thompson who also declined.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much original Watergate footage on Youtube, but looking at the images accompanying the articles I see a steely-eyed, frog-lipped, hard-man in Sutherland in head shots and a dishevelled Thompson without a tie like he’s still working from home appearing at a select committee hearing, I see cover-ups and suppressed documents. Characters. I am reminded of the Watergate hearings and that in this episode Sutherland as henchman to CEO Paul Thompson is playing Mark Felt to Thompson’s J Edgar Hoover – and leaking everything.

Was Sutherland under the (mis)apprehension that Thompson could redact the whole report in its entirety from the OIA so that it would remain confidential? If only Mr Peacock wasn’t on the RNZ payroll maybe he would be able to do more than assist the big blameless boss to wipe a metaphorical 18 1/2 minutes off the tape.

All the tales out of school from the old manager describing in $30k just how useless everyone is. God, how liberating! Everyone already knows why it’s shit: it’s based in Wellington where the culture is complacency. The remedy being move the main show at least out of Wellington. Is that the executive summary? Did I get it right? If only the Sutherland report was on the RNZ website – or anywhere – I could link to it, but as of 17/08/2025 it isn’t and I can’t.

And just to make sure we are being fair: as Felt was a hero for leaking, so Felt had feet of clay and was guilty of “black bag” crimes and was just as bad as Hoover as it later transpired – so it was that both Sutherland and Thompson (as Editor-in-Chief) presided over a regime of bias favouring pro-US and pro-Israel talking points that resulted in the only journalist at RNZ attempting to uphold editorial neutrality in news items being sacked for it (Mitch Hall – who writes occasionally for The Daily Blog). That dismissal was ideological, political chicanery emphasising the irrevocable position that RNZ is – despite all the pretending about their charter and their independence – a government department that carries out the “deep state” agenda reflexively, intuitively.

RNZ doesn’t need a formal memorandum from someone with a .govt email to enforce censorship – that is routine. It must side with the NZ state by default. Kathryn Ryan, for example, can interview an Israeli ex-IDF running around Syria with the white helmets and never challenge their supposed independence or ask what connections they have with Israel. A painfully credulous interview (a few years ago before the overthrow of Asad) that destroyed both her and RNZ’s credibility in my mind – if only anyone else cared enough about their credibility to even notice. Sutherland presided over all this pro-Western propaganda with Thompson so let us not be under any allusions about Deep Thorndon.

Watergate undermined confidence in the highest office and the government system and increased confidence in or solidified the importance of the media – Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post’s publisher in particular. The Sutherland report is damning of the government radio system, and the treatment of the report by that same damned government radio system undermines not only confidence in it but confidence in the media in general by virtue of the government radio system being part of the media – so it is worse than Watergate in that sense.

Am I imagining this or was there a fuss in connection with the idea of a report? I recall, vaguely: what was the point of a review when the decision has already been made to appoint a “Chief Audio Officer” regardless? Lucky Sutherland agreed to the appointment – and says they must control news – very convenient to agree with the CEO like that, a… prerequisite perhaps.

As for Sutherland’s myriad observations (as gleaned from the quotes) of substandard performance it seems it is not sheeted back to the CEO somehow but is generally an institutional failing – that is the gist. Not Thompson’s leadership (or lack) then? Lord, no. That guy giving me $30k, no, it’s definitely not his fault, I can tell you that right now, I can immediately think of thirty thousand reasons to pre-exonerate that guy in the introductory paragraph. He’s only been CEO since *checks notes* 2013, that’s only *maths* 12 years. You can’t turn around what the crew of screw-ups believe is the Titanic in merely 12 years. A dozen years – falling ratings since a peak in 2021 when people were literally a captive audience in lock-down – but it isn’t a leadership issue, it’s a staff issue.

Sure, the staff. Are the Wellingtonians mediocre because they are complacent, or are they complacent because they are mediocre? It’s a chicken and egg sort of thing, isn’t it. I used to think they were lazy and arrogant, but their ethos reflects the more subdued, less dramatic attributes of complacency and mediocrity. After all they haven’t enough personality to be arrogant. It’s more walk-shorts than power-suits – the shadow of Gliding On. The certainty of lifetime employment pervades.

Or at least they still sound that way on-air – assured – but not nearly articulate enough and professional enough in execution if I read between the lines of the report I can’t link to (to which I would agree, it is amateurish at times). However, Sutherland’s soundings of staff attitudes showed an existential doom, convinced that radio as a medium was in terminal decline.  Television definitely is without question in decline, but my understanding was radio is holding its own, so this revelation was very interesting and I don’t think he’s wrong in attributing the cause of the symptoms as being essentially a lack of morale. Once again – is the CEO responsible for this or what!?

Sutherland’s solution to the terminal problem is shake the staff sternly and tell them it’s OK. All this recalls Hitler in the bunker pleading with Speer that the war was not lost and that if Speer could at least hope that the war was not lost that he could continue as Reichminister. Speer had to play along with this nonsense to keep his job until the unavoidable defeat and that is what the RNZ staff will do too instead of being fired, just hang in there even though they don’t believe in the mission anymore.

And what is the mission? The constraint is the RNZ Charter (last time I looked) says RNZ must cater to its audience, ie. the legacy audience, and so they are stuck with that aging demographic without mandate to take it younger. Sutherland recommends aiming at a 50+ audience (instead of the current aim of a 100+ audience). Others have suggested the median audience member being younger still.

And Concert FM chugs straight through the tempest, carriages of gravy slopping as the train crosses the junction without even checking any papers. Everyone forgets it even exists – half the network and not even a single mention. Incredible.

Some Pakeha institutions are untouchable and RNZ Concert is one of them. I’ve heard otherwise staunch libertarians and free market types defy all logic and reason when it comes to defending their supposed apogee of Western culture – an exception gladly conceded without cause. A state radio network designed so guys with jags have something to listen to as they drive to and from the golf club. As if Concert doesn’t have its failings: hostility to non-classical music, few live events and then there’s playing von Karajan. Playing music conducted by someone whose greatest hits include the Horst Wessel song and who was so pro-Nazi they joined the Nazi party twice does nothing to dispel the notion that Concert’s median audience member is Dr Hannibal Lector.