Media Accountability

Morning. Welcome today, the new classroom money and what it buys. If you're having trouble getting to a specialist from your GP's referral, I can tell you why. We've got good news on tourism. Good news for Touch Football. Michael Kelly, House of Cards fame, Jack Ryan fame. He's with us after eight Catherine Field in France. End of Brady does the United Kingdom for us. Welcome to Tuesday morning, seven past six. Help me out here. So the media are under fire, right? The media are in crisis, apparently. Mikey Sherman got railroaded out of a job because she's a Māori woman. The media are under attack from the government. David Seymour went too far attacking Radio New Zealand. If you read a lot, you will have seen Lord knows how much verbiage written about the poor old media and its never ending troubles in the past week or so. My question is this for you this morning. Do you care? Or is this belt way? I argue beltway. Stuff. Radio New Zealand in particular. Went to town. Newsroom bleated. The spin-off wrote pieces. The NBR rattled off a good woe is me column. No one is more gripped by the media than the media, but I just can't work out whether this is actually a thing or just a pity party. Conflation is at play, as it always is. The TBNZ political editor lost her job. Seymour had a crack at Radio New Zealand. The PM cancelled an interview. Somebody else complained about political coverage. So there's a popourie of material with which to become angsty. So let's whip through a few individual examples, shall we? One. Mikey Sherman, is she looking for work because she's a Māori woman? No. She is looking for work because, as a political editor of the state television channel, you need to be beyond reproach. And she wasn't. Two, did David Seymour go too far on Radio New Zealand? No. A minister can't direct. He didn't direct. He offered an appraisal. A scathing one, but nevertheless an appraisal. The media's too sensitive to criticism. Three, the general angst around politics and media. This is not new. When I work for Morning Report, Sharon Crosby used to call me into her office every second day to deal with the barrage of political complaint. Worse than election year, of course, everyone's on the fritz. That's life. I'm currently dealing with the famous five and they are whining complaint about me naming them. This is day-to-day business. Four. More importantly, like all things, there is nuance and complexity, ebb and flow. But overall, the media's getting a hammering because the media overall has no one to blame but themselves. It's global, of course, but locally. COVID and the Adurn loving changed the dynamic forever. I was there, I saw it, I felt the change. It was the big reveal that under pressure, the media does have an agenda. It's not neutral, and they could no longer hide it. That was the moment that the curtain got pulled. And the genie has not and cannot be put back in the bottle. I don't think the wider world cares about this. We are too busy. But just in case you do, we are here broadly, uh, because an industry let itself down and doesn't like the fallout.