Posts by llew40
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The framing of the six o'clock news and the daily papers drives the understanding of almost everything for everyone in this country.
Sorry - dont buy that. Seen the circulation figures for the Herald in South Auckland? Seen the declining figures on TV News?. For the news interested, one of the transformational aspects of the internet age has been access to different news and different perspectives on the news. For the uninterested, the off switch has never been more readily employed than today.
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Mainstream journalism in NZ is a shambles. Really, it’s desperately poor and often pathetic. It’s a fucking joke and the rest of the world is seeing that as well as having an arsehole PM who can’t speak properly and likes to taunt those who oppose him with pre-school level insults we have shit television reporters, deluded and often deranged political columnists in our newspapers and gutless, craven radio presenters.
Sorry but that attitude, right there, even if feels good to get off your chest, doesn't strike me as one that is likely to lead to electability anytime soon. If we get locked into a 'blame the media' narrative I don't think it leads anywhere constructive. The media is us. And even then, their influence on the electorate is over-stated. Look at how even a rabidly partison media outlet such as Fox News in the US is unable to influence voters beyond the already converted. Believe it or not, a lot of people ignore the media, and make up their minds as to who to vote on other things.
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My read of the election results here is that like it or not the electorate have rejected the Labour parties leftward shift.
I don't think so. Public polling tends to reveal a majority acceptance of much of Labour's policy. Labour/we-the-left definitely need more data-driven campaigning. But I reckon it's much more about how it's framed than the content being unpalatable.
Plus: Labour (again, sigh) seem to be divided internally. That's electoral poison.You may be right Rob, but I fear that for the Labour party, framing this comprehensive defeat as "our policies are right, we just need to do a better job of selling them" may not lead to a materially different outcome. Totally agree that having a better handle on polling data is a good start. Certainly worked for Obama.
Chatting to a friend last night about an interesting exercise that a well-known Auckland private school did with some 14 year old students in the lead up to the election. In terms of party-brand, the students mock-voted a majority for National (presumably reflecting their parents political leanings). When they stripped out the party brand names and asked the students to vote for policies in a blind taste session, the students majority voted for Internet Mana.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Blairism will destroy that party, and I mean that literally.
Jose Pagani's vision of a grand coalition with National must be the only reason she continues to drag out the rancid carcass of Blair's legacy
Blair is/was all kind of odious things and failed/corrupted promise incarnate, but he was also very electable. And after the misery of a generation of Thatcherism (and Majorism) electability counted more than anything at the time. My read of the election results here is that like it or not the electorate have rejected the Labour parties leftward shift. One can argue that this is only because the message wasnt delivered with enough clarity or the messenger was a bit shit. Or one could argue that the people didnt like the message. So does Labour double-down or look for a centrist leader?
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Some excellent comments made by the NBR journalist Nathan Smith on a current online article there (its paid content so haven't linked to it).
In one of the comments subsequent to the article itself, he makes the point that the big discussions about privacy in the future will likely be about personal information freely volunteered to corporations. Already the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon know a heck of a lot of things about a lot of people.
With the last 10 years or so onwards of our personal digital information all being stored online in various organisational repositories, with the value of that data growing by the day, and with the implications of that personal data being misused by increasingly sophisticated hackers and criminal interests becoming more significant as the digital generation moves into more positions of power and influence, one could well argue that the privacy implications of this may one day be a much bigger challenge than that posed by government interests.
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There are assumptions that any NZ data that may have been witnessed by Snowden must have been collected in NZ (or on its way in or out). However, as I understand it, data that travels internationally becomes subject to the legislation of the land through which it travels or where it is hosted (or at least the delivery and hosting mechanisms of that data does). In the same way that international travellers are subjected to the relevant travel security legislation etc of different countries. And plenty of NZ data travels internationally. So it seems to me if that is the case - vested and political interests and spin aside - entirely plausible that most if not all of the parties involved in this may be telling the truth.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Fair comment - please allow me to downgrade my 'terrible' to 'unfortunate'.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Why? Because people miss out on some free booze and a backslapping opportunity?
Assume you just mean this set of awards, or do you mean the concept of awards in general?
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Well, putting myself into the shoes of Canon, as a corporate sponsor I think they were quite right in their initial insistence on sticking to the separation of sponsor from judge - after all, who would want to be a part of an awards process where sponsors had an influence on the judging?
The way the situation is evolving though puts them in a more difficult situation. Ahead of any possible criminal charges or proven misrepresentation of an award entry (which must surely be very close to being the case), do they form a view that sponsors should take a moral position on award participants?, if so, who and why?.
Almost certainly there will have been discussions about the representation of the award entry, and I assume that they will have been discussing a stronger line on distancing themselves from it. I imagine they will also be thinking about whether or not next years sponsorship is worth it - which would be a terrible industry outcome.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Am a wee bit surprised that Herald didnt go bigger. They are no friend of Slater.
Agree with much of the sentiment being expressed here. Anyone who doesnt believe that political leaking goes on across the spectrum is being wilfully naive.
But some of the claims being made in this book do appear to be a step or three well beyond your bog-standard 'leaking' in all its sordid glory. And therefore worthy of greater scrutiny, not only in these specific instances but as to whether or not these practices are now a common part of the arsenal of political warfare.
Sadly, I am - in the absence of any proof otherwise - sceptical that this is uncommon.