A comment by Nick Roberts in the previous post, The MSM and The Perfect Dictatorship, caused me to respond, but as I wrote I figured it was more suited to be a post.

That image is from the cover of the first book published by New Zealand broadcaster, Brian Edwards. It’s his 1971 autobiography, The Public Eye, and I read it a few years after my Dad bought it. By then his interviewing days were long gone and I never saw them. I would know him only as the host of the consumer defence show, Fair Go and although that had his tough investigative approach it was aimed at shonky tradesmen and retail companies rather than politicians and leaders of public institutions like the SIS and the Police, with whom he had clashed in ways shocking to Kiwis on the late 1960’s.

One of those was with the tough Auckland cop Gideon Tait, with whom my Dad had trained in 1937. Dad had been outraged by that interview, where Edwards used the now standard MSM tactic of implying that Tait was a racist in dealing with Maori gangs and such (there’s an entire chapter devoted to it). But Dad, as usual, wanted to know more about Edwards so bought the book and, despite that incident, was impressed (Dad also bought Tim Shadbolt’s Bullshit and Jellybeans, which I also enjoyed reading as history.)

In the book Edwards explained that most NZ journalists then were conservative – but only in the simple sense of pushing back against radical change, in which they were a perfect reflection of their society. Two of his thoughts from the book have stuck with me:

  • He and a few others on the current affairs show Gallery, felt that the Labour Opposition were so useless in the mid-late 1960’s that he and others at the NZBC “saw themselves as the real Opposition”.
  • That the head of the NZBC was less afraid of the Prime Minister than “Mother Of Ten” in the complaints letters.

Edwards and others of his Boomer generation therefore saw their reporting shaded by their Left-wing beliefs only to the extent that they pushed back against a conservative society. When you’ve got a state-owned healthcare system plus massive state ownership of the “commanding heights of the economy”, it was pretty hard to be more left-radical without going full communist. So Edwards and company were not radical advocates! In keeping with that he would later go on to be the primary media trainer for Helen Clark in her rise to power through the 1990’s and 2000’s.

As a result of this book and one or two other biographies of reporters like David Frost, plus observing them on TV in the 1980’s, I accepted this portrayal, even as the old conservative guard of reporter aged out of the scene, plus cartoonists like Minhinnick and Garrick Tremain.

So when I saw the likes of John Campbell rising up I just shrugged my shoulders: the MSM had become more Left-wing but with Edward’s attitudes in place that shouldn’t be an issue. Fairness and balance would remain.

But that’s not how it turned out, and John Campbell is the prime example. He and those who have gleefully followed him in the 21st century are Left-Wing advocates across any issue you care to name and use their MSM platforms as outright propaganda bases for those beliefs – and that seemingly applies to all the producers and support staff who work there.

So you could perhaps think of Edwards vs Holyoake or up against Muldoon when you saw Campbell vs Clark in the infamous Corngate interview of 2002, but what you were seeing was Campbell fully taking the side of the Green Party and Nicky Hagar’s “investigation” of GM seeds in attacking Clark. No surprise that Clark subsequently referred to him as “the little creep”, but Edwards too attacked Campbell for what he felt was an unacceptable approach, and it was clear that he wasn’t just performing as an attack dog for Clark.

More recently, the retired reporter Karl du Fresne made similar comments with The John Campbell question and The case for objectivity in journalism, all the while knowing that it’s probably a Sisyphean task (Howling At The Moon).

The same thing has been observed across the West, especially with TV and radio, perhaps the only exception being Britain’s famed “Fleet Street”, where the various newspapers continue to be unrepentantly partisan and even ideological, but with that distributed evenly. Australia is possibly another exception, in that reporters there seem to have always fearlessly enjoyed savaging every politician. But even then, events like the Great Chinese Lung Rot Pandemic brought a degree of Group Think to all of them.

Sadly I can’t see this changing back. A non-news example are the late-night, light entertainment TV shows in the USA, where the likes of Colbert and Kimmel get nightly audiences just 10% of those once gathered by Johnny Carson, or even his successor Jay Leno in the 2000’s, plus David Letterman. But the key point is that as their audiences have shrunk they’ve given up trying to be balanced: they have Lefty audiences and in order to keep them they’ll throw at them as much Democrat Party talking points and Lefty red meat as possible – cast “jokes” and “humour”. But they’re dying anyway:

As much as it pains me to say it, not only is Kimmel’s crystal ball sadly spot-on — but late-night TV should call it quits. None of it is any good anymore.

And that’s not a “back in my day!,” old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud, “these crazy kids,” criticism, either. Exactly zero young people are watching NBC and CBS at 11:30 p.m. Late night is now squarely aimed at 50-and-up MSNBC viewers

The news, whether on TV and radio or in print or online, has gone the same way, and for much the same reasons.