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Words & Pictures - A Writer's Life
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NZ journalism's slide into misinformation

2/2/2022

 
So, a young New Zealand woman goes to Afghanistan in the middle of a global pandemic affecting eight billion people, gets pregnant, and then gets shirty when New Zealand’s border rules (which had been in place for nearly two years) make it hard for her to get back into the country when she decides she is ready to come. She makes a fuss very publicly, while millions of other people around the world are quietly coping with the separations, difficulties, and pain created by the pandemic. She slams the government. And then slams them again when they advise us that they’ve offered her flights (but they didn’t suit her) and offered her consular assistance (which she didn’t take it up). How dare they talk about her publicly, she protests!
Wow, the self-entitlement of brainless people is astounding. And no sign of any sense of self-responsibility. The idea of self-responsibility is one that is much espoused by right-leaning folk - but only when it refers to other people, not themselves.
Around the same time this arrogant display of self-interest was made much of on New Zealand’s television news (it must have been a slow news day), another story popped up to slam the government. A more-than-middle-aged rich farming couple (one of them wearing an enormous string of pearls) faced the camera to bang on about how they can’t get people to drive their harvesters because of our border controls and how it will lead to food shortages. Oh pe-lease.
First (I’m ticking these off on my fingers) all right-wing business people worth their salt believe in self-responsibility. I feel certain that they would’ve worked out a couple of years ago that labour might be short during a pandemic and thought up inventive ways to entice people to train up and work for them. They could pay them good wages, for example, and provide free accommodation. They could even have capitalised on the government’s free training schemes for people who want to learn to drive heavy machinery, by shoulder tapping recruits.
Second, this well-padded (in more than one way) couple is clearly concerned about their bottom line which (see point one) they could have done something about anyway.
But to blame the government? What utter rubbish.
What really interests me is the way these stories were told on national TV as if they were fact. There was no attempt to take an even-handed look at the stories. Rita Skeeter would say “is all as it seems”? Another step on the slippery slope of New Zealand journalism’s slide into misinformation – the sort that all dictatorships and fascist regimes love. We have so much to look forward to.


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