The debate over criteria, processes, and timelines for merging or consolidating New Zealand local councils into larger unified authorities, including which councils should amalgamate, how decisions are made, and the balance between central government direction and local input.
How the framings classify across 12 articles. Each framing is labelled by a small AI stance classifier; see the methodology page for details.
Up to 12 framings across outlets and orientations — each a short phrase the extractor generated to characterise the piece's editorial angle (not a quote). Filter by lean to see how each bloc is spinning the story; click through to read the original.
immediate action needed to save local democracy
Merging councils in ‘urgent and focused conversations’ to salvage local democracyurgent and top-down pressure on local governments
Amalgamation, Press Release Policy and the Populist Threat (Live From Booktown)Lobby groups, unions, think tanks and industry bodies whose own releases or whose people’s media appearances touched this topic over the last 12 months. Owned = their own press releases; earned = their people quoted across radio, press & commentary. A card carried in both — with the release coming first — is the agenda-setting signal. Co-occurrence isn’t proof a group drove the coverage.
driven by financial pressure and efficiency goals
Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.
How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.
How the news corpus has covered this same topic over the last 12 weeks. 40 articles from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT, 1News, Newsroom and The Spinoff. Click through to the press view for the full panel.
Verbatim segments from politicians speaking on podcasts and radio shows about this topic. Sourced via the voice-reference library — each speaker has been confirmed manually from their voice clip. Click play to stream the original audio from the publisher, pre-seeked to the moment the quote starts.
What a great story. Hey, Jim, look, I'm gonna run myself out of time here. You you you're an old hand. Not only it's uh in the in the media, …
Social-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →
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