Top 5 dumbest crap NZ media said about Local Elections wrap up
The results are in, so it’s time to look at the dumbest crap our mainstream media have said about the Local Elections:
Top 5 dumbest crap NZ media said about Local Elections wrap up
5: Duh – online voting – duh Award
Every time there’s a bloody election, some clown in the mainstream media writes some ill-informed opinion piece asking if online voting can turn around the decline in participation. Only the most drunk and lobotomised journalist would attempt to argue for online voting in the post-Snowden era. We know that 5 Eyes has the ability to hack any system and the bloody second you move voting online, the entire credibility of the electoral process would forever be tainted. The only way to ensure educated voters never vote again, would be to make the election online because participating in a voting system open to hacking would be immoral and educated people would boycott an electoral system that open to being rigged. Shut up about online voting already!
4: Low vote turn out Award for idiocy
The most audacious crap spouted about the election is by current affairs hosts complaining about the low voter turn out. So how many public interest stories about local government did Story do? Sweet FA is what they did. The media can’t blame voters for the low vote turn out when all that media is serving up is clickbait bullshit. The mainstream media last week spent more time on a rugby player having sex in a toilet than the fact SERCO scammed us and an MP was kidnapped in International waters! To bitch about the very low intelligence environment that these media personalities themselves are helping to create is like being forced to buy fire insurance from an arsonist. You help make the problem Heather, you don’t solve it.
3: Incredibly late to the table Award
How late to the party were RNZ, TVNZ, TV3 and the NZ Herald over Chloe Swarbrick? Wallace Chapman and Waatea 5th Estate supported her from the beginning, but the other mainstream media ignored her until the very last minute. The NZ Herald even penned a ‘what’s next for Chloe’ piece after leaving her out of their first candidate analysis. The others just cut her out of their panel debates altogether. How can local democracy flourish if the media actively ignore candidates of real change?
2: Shut up you sanctimonious clowns Award
After ripping the Auckland Council to pieces for daring to challenge the property interests that prop the NZ Herald up, the Herald comes out and thanks the candidates for standing! The audacity! A newspaper that spends no real time focusing on solutions for Auckland, that actually left Chloe Swarbrick out of their coverage and has waged war on the Unitary Plan wants to give everyone a pat on the back and a ‘no hard feelings’ pep talk? It’s like Fox News congratulating Hillary Clinton.
1: No one knows anything trumpet of unaware self stupidity Award
The dumbest thing said in the wake of the elections has to go to Stuff.co.nz. Stacey Kirk complains that she doesn’t know anything about the candidates. She’s a political journalist FFS. She complains she knows nothing and neither does anyone else, so you know, why bother eh? In terms of self sabotage this would be hilarious if it didn’t highlight the woeful ignorance at the heart of our political media elite. The bloody media in this country don’t bother covering local politics because they are far too busy on All Black Sex in Toilet romps. To complain about the very ignorance your own ‘news’ service are helping breed is so eye rolling I’m staring into the top part of my skull.
The media’s ignorance is our ignorance and their chase for clickbait bullshit clouds our ability to have a functioning democracy.
Our watchdogs have become free market clickbait lapdogs.
Chloe Swarbrick is a rising star. Her honest is a joy to behold. She is one to watch out for in coming years. If there are more like her, from her generation, we can seal the end of neo-liberalism foir good.
The PM thought he would take the moral high ground in the Aaron Smith case:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11723446
Key said:”That’s why I think Aaron will feel pretty disappointed in himself. “And I think the [NZRU], coming off the back of a few other pretty poor PR issues in recent times, will want to send a strong message to the All Blacks that they have a high level of expectation of their behaviour.
“And Aaron clearly didn’t meet it.”
Key agreed that Smith needed to be held to account for his actions, but the punishment needed to be in proportion with his actions.
Hypocrite
What a hypocrite is Key?
Key let the office of the PM down when he fondled a waitress’s hair repeatedly after she asked him not to. “I think John will feel pretty disappointed in himself. “And I think the [kiwi public], will want to send a strong message to the National Party that they have a high level of expectation of their behaviour.
“And John clearly didn’t meet it.”
We agreed that Key needed to be held to account for his actions, but the punishment needed to be in proportion with his actions.
Try saying that on JK’s page. Oh, whoops, you can only compliment him there or you’re off. Try saying it on the Yahoo page?? I did, and no one there seem to think calling Key a confirmed female hair abuser is kosher… er.. correct.
he should stick to politics he aint even goods at that but keep his nose out of this sort of stuff
There’s not much I can think of to add to the above.
The face of media in New Zealand is rapidly changing. Live streaming is going to create real problems for television news in the long term. It has only just hit New Zealand but it will quickly become the norm. Those who want to remain ignorant will choose news sources that reflect that but that is a whole other problem than just what television news presents. We may need to recognise the overall standard of thinking in the New Zealand population is now disturbingly low. Partly this has been created by 40 years of new right Monetarist policies. But for those who want to know more and be more informed it is now going to be available for them. This will benefit progressives and undermine conservatives.
“We may need to recognise the overall standard of thinking in the New Zealand population is now disturbingly low. Partly this has been created by 40 years of new right Monetarist policies. But for those who want to know more and be more informed it is now going to be available for them. This will benefit progressives and undermine conservatives.”
The problem is, while people like us know how and where to get alternative information, those “disturbingly low” informed people will not give a toss and stay ignorant, so having online streaming and so may not change and improve anything, as it may simply not be used by most.
The individualisation, the diversification through technological change, that is part of the problem. When there were only two to three TV channels in the country that most watched, they all got more or less the same exposure, and that offered a level playing field, as long as the news and so were somewhat balanced.
With the privatisation, the closure of most public broadcasting, and the marginalisation of broadcasting and other more informative media, giving way to entertainment and infotainment, we are seeing the law of the jungle take over, and that means more monkeys just fooling around, while not capable of informed thinking and long term decision making.
‘The media’s ignorance is our ignorance and their chase for clickbait bullshit clouds our ability to have a functioning democracy’
By the way, don’t forget that ‘Ignorance is Strength’, and present financial-economic-political arrangements are totally dependent on maintaining the ignorance of the masses.
http://literarydevices.net/ignorance-is-strength/
‘Meaning
It simply means that if people remain ignorant of the facts, they would not be able to raise questions against governments; therefore, it would help the concerned government in making a country “stronger.” The main agenda of the Party was to promote “double thinking” which describes an act of accepting two equally contradictory ideas simultaneously as correct in a distinct social context. In other words, it tells that the ignorance of the masses is translated into government’s strength.’
As a person intensely interested in electoral voting systems, and how well they serve the people, I ask some questions and give some observations.
What does the low turnout rate for local body elections actually mean?
In a country where we are able to vote without fear or intimidation why don’t we do it?,
Some people say it because we are not “engaged”, although they seem unsure just what this term means.
Myself I think it is a number of factors. First, there are often not a lot of good quality candidates for mayoralties and councils around the country. Too often the candidates are white middle aged land developers, business owners, financial consultants and country squires. They are representative of only a small number of the population – they see everything in terms of running a business. They might be good at what they do but are they necessarily the best qualified to make decisions of behalf of people from different cultures who work ordinary jobs? Most of the candidates say the same things: lower rates increases, improve community consultation, etc. but never give specifics on how they will achieve that.
Second the voting processes are poor. Too many elections are FPP who, as I have said before, tend to favour candidates with big budgets and big organisations behind them. FPP is a poor choice when you have several candidates that you like in various ways because it usually ends up in making unwanted compromises on the ballot paper.
Also I am highly critical of postal voting. Postal voting might be OK for School Boards of Trustees but it should not be used for government elections, either local or national. Postal voting is flawed because it uses outdated address information and there is anecdotal evidence that a good many voting papers never reach their correct person. When you do a secret ballot at a polling booth you are at least doing it yourself in a controlled situation free from outside pressure. Nobody can say in what means each postal vote has been done, or even if it has been done by the correct person. In my house I received 4 voting papers belonging to former tenants, two of which I know no longer live in New Zealand. What was to stop me from opening them all and voting illegally for my choice? Only my conscience, if I had done so the chances of detection would have been practically nil. I don’t think mine is a unique situation either.
Postal voting exists primarily because it saves money – it is cheap. Like most cheap things it is also essentially nasty. It also relies on the honesty of NZ Post to deliver them. I don’t like to criticize NZ Post workers but I have worked at NZ Post in the past and I know what kind of things can happen to mail sometimes.
I do not support on-line voting. Our democracy is too precious to be entrusted to a system that is too vulnerable to manipulation and hacking.
Of course the low turnout might just be good old sleepy hobbit syndrome. People don’t care about local body government matters until they get their next rates bill and complain it is too high. They all complain about how their money is wasted on consultants, councillors are paid too much, council buildings are always the first to be renovated, the footpaths are crap and the rubbish bags are too expensive. However when the next council election comes around they happily vote for the incumbents who have been there since the turn of the century and have not changed anything.
Local government indifference leads to unrepresentative councils run by business elites where others are shut out. Take the recent New Plymouth result where no Maori candidates won a set on council and even the new mayor admits that the faces around the council table will not be a good respresentation of the city’s people.
So how do we get people to give a stuff about local body affairs?
No easy answers, but perhaps we could start by stopping the talk about local body POLITICS and use another term. When you mention the word politics a lot of people switch off immediately because the word conjures up images of self-interested middle aged suits getting paid to sit around tables planning their next multi-million dollar stadium (at your expense) and telling each other how great life is; all the while everyone else works hard just to get by and pay for their house and food.
Not all councils and councillors are like that, of course, but perhaps if we talk about local body servants or management committees (or something similar) there may be a change of attitude.
Above all, we need people to be interested in their own towns, cities, etc. In this era of globalisation it isn’t easy but its a challenge that needs to be taken up to get people interested enough to get out and vote for their leaders.
‘monkeys just fooling around, while not capable of informed thinking and long term decision making’
Sounds like the mob of idiots just voted onto my local council (many returned for the nth time) by the uninformed fools who do most of the voting.
‘monkeys just fooling around, while not capable of informed thinking and long term decision making’
Also describes the senior council officers who prepare the so-called reports.
The good news is the system is so corrupt, so inefficient and so ineffective is has to collapse soon. The bad news is it will be like a scene from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie shortly after.
“Political commentator Chris Trotter had compared Swarbrick to a young Helen Clark who was equally poised and confident “…indeed.
I do hope, for those who admire Chloe, that he is making an entirely superficial, middle aged guy type comparison.
Politically, the idea that Chloe is a ‘Helen Clark’ in waiting might put a wee dent into the perception that Chloe is making a stand against neo liberalism and third way agendas. Though in Chloe’s defence I can’t see that she herself has made any notable, Left wing claims.
I very much look forward to finding out which political parties see her as a potential recruit, and whether she takes them up or not.
If she plans a political career, and she certainly has the smarts and energy to enter the fray, now is not the time for coyness.