Posts by simon g
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
thoughts and prayers
An early favourite, I think.
Have we had Backstop yet?
(Also, I vote against people's names being included, unless they've been turned into words, like Jacindamania).
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National's response: "“This is mickey-mouse policy made on the hoof."
If they can't find good policies, could they at least find a good dictionary? Next they will be telling us there's an elephant in the room, a dog's breakfast with the cat among the pigeons.
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Leak
Featured in the media all year, but especially in the second half. Not a new word of course, but for sheer prominence, must be a contender.
Tape
Nominated in the sub-category of "Misused/Outdated Word of the Year". Various recordings have been in the news, none of which are on tape, but we baby-boomers like to cling to our ancient vocabulary, and we run the media, so there.
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And here we go again ...
On Stuff today, another "woe is us" story about landlords' pain and suffering. The source? A thing calling itself "Stop the War on Tenancies", which pretends to be an organisation representing property investors, but is in fact nothing more than one guy with a blog who usually goes on about Treaty issues and assorted talkback fodder, somewhere to the right of ACT.
Of course he is entitled to his rants, and if Stuff want to publish them as opinion pieces that's fine. But it's not fine to present this as "news", and by now surely media outfits should have developed a certain caution before publishing any old propaganda that lands in the inbox. At the very least, professional journalists should be asking about the source, and then disclosing it to their readers. It takes a matter of seconds to find out online that this is not what it seems - so why don't they bother?
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Thanks Russell & co, a good read.
I suspect any affection for a 2019 date is more to do with the fact that a cannabis question on the ballot would dominate the general election campaign.
I think that's the wrong way round. The election swamps all other issues in the media - in fact, sometimes the "horse race" commentary even swamps the election issues themselves. An election day referendum gets less coverage than one held during a term (the referendum on MMP in 2011 was a case in point, far more important than the flag, but far fewer column inches).
On the other hand, turnout on election day is much higher. And I'd guess that the opposition to reform will focus on scaring a conservative base, and getting them to lick their envelopes in a smallish postal ballot. Whereas in a general election the less engaged majority, whose attitude is more pro-reform but not "to the barricades", will outweigh the antis.
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Some premature pessimism here. Stick around for Texas, California, etc.
Projecting results while people still vote in the same state is a minefield.
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For telly-watchers, ABC is on TVNZ Duke. They seem to have every talking head on their staff, and then some.
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Disappointing news of the day ...
"National's Justice Spokesman Mark Mitchell has cancelled plans to embark on a fact-finding mission to the Czech Republic to get to the bottom of the Karel Sroubek saga." (NZ Herald).
I feel the government missed a trick there. Should have paid for Mitchell's ticket. Plus a couple more for a TV crew to accompany him.
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Nikki Kaye's response was reasonable opposition politics: welcome the government's move, while promising to hold to account. But Woodhouse's very different take was more typical of National's attitude lately: lash out at anything and everything, for no good reason, and on the evidence so far, for no good result.
It's not my job to give advice to a party I don't for, but here it is anyway: remember what Labour got wrong after they lost in 2008 and then don't do it. The sense of deja-vu is striking: the opposition underestimating the political skills of the PM, getting excited about scalps that nobody remembers, listening to the online echo chamber, chasing a series of disconnected headlines, not grasping that the A team has gone (Clark, Cullen, Simpson vs Key, English, Joyce) and the B team over-rate themselves, etc.
They really are remarkably inept.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to izogi,
“She’ll no doubt want to root me tomorrow. I’ll have to take one for the team to get the details out of her.”
Jordan Williams, talking about a source. A human being.
How long are the NZ media going to continue being complicit in this? Every time they give us "news" from the "Taxpayers' Union", and pretend that Williams is a legitimate, disinterested contributor on a "panel", they enable and encourage his vile behaviour.
This fails any basic test of ethics. Editors and broadcasters know that. They can read.