Corporate media runs Aotearoa New Zealand

There's a lot of news stories that need to be reviewed but perhaps none more so than the languishing state of our media.

This week Henry Cooke announced on "X" that he had been made Political Editor at The Post. It comes days after Sinead Boucher appointed former ACT and National lobbyist Matthew Hooton to Editor-in-Chief at Wellington's Stuff masthead brand.

Newsroom's co-editor Tim Murphy responded to Hooton's appointment this week with:

Truly remarkable appointment - of a non-journalist - to edit the capital's newspaper and quality website, and best Sunday newspaper. Shades of US media appointments from the right of politics. And .. the Jim Grenon Herald loses its star columnist. 

Yes Hooton had been one of NZME's best selling columns. And so he brings that nous to The Post. 

But the fact that New Zealand's dominant and most penetrative media outlets, NZME and Stuff (both corporate, both privately owned) are now led by outwardly right wing figures is extraordinary.

 (As readers of Mountain Tui will know, James Jim Grenon now leads private ownership in NZME. Grenon's history of alt news is well documented. And Steve Joyce, a National Party ex-Minister who remains employed by National in various government roles, chairs the NZME Board. Finally, Luxon's ex-Chief Press Secretary was hand picked to lead NZME's new editorial board)

Last year or perhaps it was the year before now, how time flies,  I pointed out that Sinead Boucher was unmasked by RNZ as part of a right wing lobby group "Vision for Wellington". There is no secret that her papers overtly and covertly attacked Tory Whanau during her tenure as Wellington Mayor, and Stuff frequently led with headlines from Taxpayers Union figures.

Stuff also paved the way for National announcements e.g. on the very day that Nicola Willis announced the cancellation of Work-From-Home (WFH) for the public service, Stuff's Annemarie Quill 'coincidentally' paved the way by in the morning with front page articles suggesting WFH was "killing" Wellington!

Also no secret that Jenna Lynch, the partner of recently departed ACT Chief of Staff and a remaining party loyalist, has run a series of, in my view, very misleading headlines and articles at Stuff.

Take her depiction of Green Party Tamatha Paul. Lynch managed to drum up quite the flurry and beat up by suggesting Paul wanted police defunded when she said no such thing. After I wrote about that "mix up", and released the full video, Stuff somehow decided to do the same.

I admire Lynch's grit but not her editorial approach. And while I have been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in the past, I'm not sure she's illiciting a great deal of confidence anymore.

This year, besides being the sole journalist who repeated defamatory and unverified assumptions by his ex-wife, to Chris Hipkins on a live feed, Lynch also tried to create the Labour #Toastergate scandal.

She confronted a clearly bewildered Hipkins in Parliament, suggesting a years long departed contractor on an old Labour campaign was a "troll" for running clearly parody videos of the government. And desperately tried to link it to the party.

First, God knows we could all do with some parody under this lot. There are times when the only way I can consume American political news is via "comedians" like John Oliver or Jon Stewart. Parody is not "trolling" in any case.

Second, supporters and ex-employees are allowed to create content without it being whipped up as some type of scandal - but not for want of trying on Lynch's part.

It's not overlooked here that Lynch has intentionally ignored the close affiliation of Taxpayers Union as government partners, and it being an on the record organisation that helps ACT run election campaigns with what some would consider genuine trolling tactics.

And most recently, yet again, Stuff's Jenna Lynch and Glenn McConnell led with a misleading front page headline: "New Labour policy shocks minister: Party wants to cancel primary school testing"  

But once you take a look at what Andersen really said, you can hear the nuance and realities do not match up to what Stuff presents.

And a pattern clearly emerges.

 

As the Aotearoa Educators Collective writes, National's "Smart" Tool "has seen a huge amount of taxpayers money going to an overseas company just so the Minister can achieve an ideologically driven goal of national testing."

In addition, they point out:

"Both the (Stuff) reporter and the Education Minister (Erica Stanford) are trying to conflate national testing with reporting to parents, when this is not the case. We have had decades of reporting to parents twice a year with or without National Standards/Testing." 

 I also went to look at Brie Elliot, an online education commentator, who stated that Stuff obviously had an agenda, and corrected Lynch and McConnell's article, based on the video and Anderson's actual comments:

"Ginny did not say children should not be assessed.

She did not say parents should not receive reports.

She did not say schools should stop tracking progress.

She was talking about not mandating SMART.

That is a very different thing.

SMART is ONE assessment platform.

It is not “primary school testing” itself.

Teachers already assess children. Schools already report to parents. Parents already receive information about how their children are progressing. Have you heard of teacher parent conferences?"

 

TLDR: A swathe of education commentators and the video itself clearly shows Stuff's subtle misrepresentations, and every writer knows that context is key.

 

Looked at within a swathe of incidents, and it starts to look like a pattern by Stuff, and certainly Lynch.

Back to Hooton and Cooke.

Congratulations to both. 

No doubt Hooton's appointment will win him many business and political supporters. As Wayne Wright Junior, original funder of Sean Plunket's The Platform & Best Start Empire heir stated so clearly, the receptivity and friendship from politicians rose for him as The Platform gained popularity.

Make no mistake, I liked Hooton when watching him speak so frankly and clearly about Hobsons Pledge, and Luxon over the last year or two. 

But I also distinctly remember that soon after he went on air with Duncan Garner to jointly disparage Luxon as unintelligent and essentially dumb, he pivoted soon after in a NZ Herald article, suggesting Luxon "deserved to be PM" if he could close the India trade deal. (Spoiler: Luxon did, by giving India everything they wanted, where other countries had resisted. My article about the India FTA here)

I remember noting that the right wing commentators all piped down at the same time and wondered why one trade deal would rectify all of Luxon's significant shortcomings. 

And in that way, combined with Hooton's penchant for cheering on key Donald Trump and Atlas Network idol Javier Milei, leads me to feel Hooton is more than a flexible character.

In any case, he's done well to navigate this opportunity.

And Cooke, who I have seen Bernard Hickey speak warmly of, takes the chair after returning from London. I suspect Cooke felt that he took a backward step in his career to go there, and must feel elated to finally win the chair, but in the same breath, I feel that the establishment has taken him over. Lamenting people "stealing his articles" when posting past the paywall, and encouraging subscriptions as if it's a personal victory, well don't say we are not owned by our KPIs as humans. That's the way corporates run and those who submit, can succumb.

Perhaps the last word here though goes to Finance Minister Nicola Willis, who in an account recorded by  Murphy, congratulated Hooton on his success in this manner:

Nicola Willis doing a Matthew Hooton to Hooton on the occasion of his conversion into (The Post and Sunday Star-Times’) editor-in-chief, telling Heather du Plessis Allan on ZB: “I always wish everyone the success they deserve” 

And so say all of us.