Although he points out that this war has actually been going on for some time:

Having adopted a nauseatingly sycophantic approach to the former government, consistently ignoring issues that showed it in a bad light and subjecting it to only the gentlest scrutiny while mercilessly savaging the opposition…

A sort of Cold War then, from at least 2017 – although in my opinion going back much, much further, “One hundred days that lifted our spirits” being a NZ Herald headline that I particularly remember from late 1999 with Helen Clark’s new government. But now the war has gone hot:

The level of hostility toward the Luxon-led government is striking. All pretence of balance and neutrality has been abandoned.

The message is clear. The mainstream media are sulking because they think the voters elected the wrong government. They are angry and indignant that despite all their efforts, New Zealand swung right on October 14.

In his first book, The Public Eye (1971), journalist Brian Edwards, said exactly that about the TV current affairs show Gallery, which was running in prime time on our only TV network, NZBC, and for which Edwards would eventually gravitate to being the prime interviewer. The three-time loser Labour Party of the day (and soon to be a four-time loser) were so hopeless that Edwards and company felt they had to be the Opposition, since nobody else seemed to be willing or able to hold the National government’s feet to the fire.

Of course this also meant challenging all the other aspects of New Zealand’s grim, small-c conservative culture that had delivered unto National so many years of power, a culture that Edwards noted with a barb from the book:

The truth about the NZBC is that it is less afraid of the Prime Minister than of ‘Mother Of Ten’.

Gallery and its successors would Speak Truth To Power and the status quo. The decade of the 60’s, all those drugs, all that long hair, Free Love, anti-war protests and protests about many thing, plus an end to the dominance of the nasty old White racists who’d beaten the Nazis just so they could come home and oppress Maori, was part and parcel of what Gallery and Edwards were fighting for. Muldoon was a setback but 1984 dawned as a hopeful, sweeping, generational change where the Boomers would be in charge.

Perhaps they should have read Orwell’s book, whose sales naturally increased that year and whose dystopian warnings appeared as horrific reality to Labour lovers in the form of Roger Douglas. Still, they always had the anti-nuke wins and a kick in the balls of the hated Uncle Sam.

Edwards was the prototype for John Campbell and almost every other TV journalist to come, but, as is always the case with such Lefty revolutions, there can be only one direction. Having helped to destroy that old NZ culture and National’s almost permanent hold on power there can be no going back; that would be “reactionary”, and reactionaries must be treated harshly:

They are wilfully tone-deaf to the public mood because they think they know better. It means nothing to them that the voters had had enough of Labour’s ideological excesses. At best, the high priests of the media (or should I say high priestesses, since the worst offenders are female) are indifferent to democracy; at worst, they resent it because it gives power to the hoi-polloi – the deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s word.

I’m glad he spotted that similarity, which appears to exist across the entire Western world, especially as The Deplorables have risen up, first with Brexit and Trump in 2016 in Britain and the USA respectively, and now in Argentina, Holland and Denmark.

Here in NZ the MSM as Opposition may well work where Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori fail:

The sheer aggression is likely to rattle Luxon and his National ministers, none of whom have previously shown much spine in standing up for themselves against media hit-jobs. They will need to harden up fast.

I worry about that too. Seymour and Peters have had to deal with this for years but I honestly wonder whether any National MP understands that they are hated by the MSM? More likely it’ll be a schmuck response of puzzlement, like this one:

There was virtually no-one in the National caucus when I was there who demonstrated the level of partisanship against our Labour opponents as you do about the Democrats. Frankly it makes no sense to me.

Vast forces in the West are slowly grinding up against each other and I think a culmination point lies not too far ahead. I think the Left and the MSM sense this and are thus fighting harder and nastier than ever before when they see even the slightest hint of being forced backward. I’d like to think that it means their self-destruction but given the emotional calling to collective help buried within both the human soul and the Left I doubt it will happen to them. They’ll always be with us.

The MSM not so much. Because I don’t directly read, watch or listen to them, especially the NZ versions, I can’t tell if their influence is waning or not. In terms of actual numbers for TV and Radio ratings, plus subscriber and readership numbers, as well as revenue, profits and employees, the massive and ongoing decline over the last twenty years leads me to think that they are going to self-destruct.

One can only hope that 6-9 years of National-led governments will make that go faster – although that’s assuming they’re not willing to bail them out and also end things like TVNZ, RNZ and the execrable sugar daddy of NZ On Air, which won’t happen with CEO-type greasing of them and attitudes within National like this:

“I know some commenters here view TV1 as simply the propaganda arm of Labour, but I am not one of them.”

Idiot.

See also:

Die Cathedral, Die