Category: mediawatch

How NZ media launders right-wing extremism

I continue to despair at the state of local media, a longstanding concern as the venerable mediawatch category on this blog shows. As the information environment has eroded into its present miserable state, the failure of the media to rise to the occasion grows ever more inexcusable. Today delivered a particularly egregious example of how unthinking journalists can cheerfully serve the needs of some of the worst people in the world. These bad actors know exactly how to take advantage of our media, and yet in 2026, well into the era of Trump 2, with fascism on the rise and right-wing authoritarianism stronger than it has been since the Second World War, somehow our fourth estate remains completely vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.

At issue is this story in Stuff, one of Aotearoa’s primary news sources: MP defends knitting in Parliament: ‘I find it calming and makes it easier to concentrate’

Lloyd Burr has turned in a light-hearted story about MP Deborah Russell, who can sometimes be observed knitting while at her seat in Parliament.

Russell’s act of knitting prompted some feedback into Stuff’s inbox. One of them said “I’m outraged at the footage of a Labour MP knitting in Question Time. These people!!! Knitting!!!!”

Is it really such an outrageous thing to do during Question Time?

Burr then reported the Speaker of the House’s confirmation that knitting is explicitly allowed in the House, and has been for decades, finishing the para with a light touch: he jokingly added that “it may lead to too much uneven tension in the knit”.

Deborah Russell is quoted saying she finds it helps her concentrate, and we get extra context: lots of MPs are texting or doing social media or games on their phones; a number of other MPs from all sides of politics have knitted while in the House, including several current MPs. The piece ends with a classic human-interest light touch finale: “The funny thing is, I’m actually not that much of a good knitter,” she laughs.

What a charming story! A few grumpy phone calls have been comprehensively dismissed with the addition of good-humoured context!

Except.

Stuff also put on the page [EDITED TO CLARIFY: on their home page, devoid of context] an interactive poll, complete with the cutesy use of a knitting needle in place of the usual pointer. And that has generated tens of thousands of votes, which show the takeaway from the story is not as benign as the cute tone suggests. In spite of long-standing rules, cross-party precedent, testimonial of benefit, and the fact the entire story presents this as fine and dandy, 20,000 people (as I type) still think it’s not OK. Hundreds of comments on the story also include plenty of aggrieved voices who find this completely unacceptable.

Despite the cheerful tone of Burr’s article, and the jaunty energy of the knitting needle pointer, the material effect of this story is to introduce thousands and thousands of people to a fresh justification for furious anger towards (left-wing) politicians.

Lloyd Burr and Stuff just circulated hate propaganda.

This is not a surprise. It was, in fact, completely obvious, so obvious a simpleminded blogger like me could call it. And that’s exactly what happened. I encountered the story on Bluesky, where Hayley/writagal (an excellent follow BTW) shared it expressing entirely appropriate frustration.

I’m going to feature my reply in full because I called it exactly right, and I say this not to show how clever I am (hahahanope) but the opposite: that it was completely obvious to anyone who is paying attention to how any of this shit works now.

This story looks to me like it has come out of one of the outrage mines. Some RW trollmonger on X or in a toxic FB group has seized on it and drummed it up into an issue, and now Stuff is obediently repeating it as "people are concerned". Exactly what the troll accounts wanted, well done Stuff

I expected it was some chud on X who had noticed Deborah knitting and decided to make a thing of it. A couple hours later I braved the feotid waters of X, plugging “knitting parliament nz” into the search function. This incredible investigative skill was rewarded with the culprit: some chud on X who had noticed Deborah knitting and decided to make a thing of it.

But wait, there’s more. By using the advanced investigative technique of “scrolling down slightly” I found even more shocking evidence: this wasn’t even the first time! Back in July the same poster had made almost exactly the same post!

These posts had generated lots of engagement on renowned hate site X dot com, but the first one hadn’t made it out of the troll ecosystem. This time, however, someone had actually sent an email to the Stuff website, and that was all it took. Suddenly it was A Story.

Regardless of Burr’s and Stuff Editorial’s intentions, covering this story at all was handing a win to the right-wing haters. Of course it does! The whole story is about something that looks like a distraction! That’s why there was a need for a specific rule allowing it! That’s why the same subject has been covered in the media in the past! The most salient point of the story is that the negative first reaction is wrong!

This point was completely lost.

As soon as you put an image or video (which Stuff also posted under a separate header!!) of something that, at first glance, looks like a politician failing in their duties… then you’re inviting hate. Especially if they’re on the left. ESPECIALLY if they’re a woman.

The tone of the story, the exonerating facts, all of the words Lloyd Burr put in that story are so much dust in the wind compared to the communicative force of raising it as an issue at all, with images and a reader poll to boot. And this was completely obviously the case right from the start.

So far, so bad. Turning this grumpy email into a story was phenomenally ill-judged, and the story itself was wrapped and presented in a way that would only deliver terrible consequences.

But instead of stopping there, I’m going to use my completely self-taught journalistic skills to take my background investigation to a higher level, with the extremely advanced technique of “clicking on their profile picture”.

Gross.

Just to decode for anyone blessed enough not to know: “Socialists & Globalists” here is a reference to Jews, and relates to grotesque conspiratorial thinking about left-wing ideas that is frequently used to justify all kinds of hatred and atrocities. Gab is a social media site utterly dominated by extreme right ideologies. This guy is a fascist troll hiding his identity, with thousands and thousands of followers, enthusiastically connected to global comms channels that promote hatred and conspiracy.

This is the guy who is looking to make Deborah Russell the target of political and media approprobrium.

Lloyd Burr has done exactly what this fascist prick wanted. Stuff Editorial has done exactly what he wanted.

There was no need to cover this at all. Covering this story was losing. A pathetic self-inflicted failure of journalistic standards, once again, and at the expense of a woman in politics, once again.

And how much media coverage of the extensive community of hatemongers who spread their conspiracy and stoke outrage and try to undermine democracy? None.

Not good enough.

It’s all gone bad hasn’t it

The internet has never been so broken.

Where are the good conversations at? That was the core currency of the internet: newsgroups and bulletin boards, then blogs and forums, then social media and comment sections. And now it’s all gone.

Facebook is an unworkable mess, burying the things your friends say beneath piles of engagement-bait posts from groups you don’t follow or care about. Twitter is a collapsing building full of grifters and fascists. TikTok is linear TV for the algorithmic era. Comment sections are feral or gone because moderation cost too much (not to mention most of the good sites that hosted them have been stripped for parts, pour one out for the AVClub). Blogs are dead because outbound links are buried by every algorithm and RSS has been systematically strangled. There are a few dark-forest forums on discord and slack, and of course group chats, hidden spaces that only work well if participants are limited, and that’s about it.

Substack isn’t going to do it, either. We spent ten years getting all that stuff out of our email inbox, that pendulum isn’t going to swing back that far.

It didn’t have to be like this. But at least some awful people got very rich along the way.

Ruminator: Pink vs Blue

Yesterday turned out to be an interesting day. There was winning at basketball, which happens rarely enough these days that it’s a happy moment indeed. There was completing the serialisation of “in move”, my teenage-boys-in-the-Hutt novel, about which more soon (I need to get the ebook version prepared for release). There was getting a heat pump installed, hurrah for that. But the big thing was Pink vs Blue.

Pink vs Blue was a post I wrote over at The Ruminator. It’s about how being a dad to a little girl has given me some new avenues for thinking about the way our culture codes and scripts gender in a really limiting way. I spent a while scooping together lots of bits and pieces I’d been thinking and feeling for a while, and lined them up in what I hoped was an illuminating way.

As usual with this sort of stuff, the writing of it is also the thinking about it – I look for turns of phrase or metaphors or rhetorical flourishes that feel like they help me understand. Like if I can just line up the words in the right way, I’ll unlock some hidden secret. Sometimes it does feel like that.

Anyway, I’m pretty proud of this post, because it’s very personal and also very general, and I tried hard to get it right. It’s taken off in a moderate sort of way, lots of shares by people I’ve never heard of. Easily the most widely circulated thing I’ve ever written (excepting that time I cut and pasted a few Wikileaks tweets and added the words “this is interesting” and it went crazy on Reddit).

You can find it here. I hope you’ll have a read, and if you are so moved, do pass it on to anyone else who might be interested.

BAT: Why they do it

I think I’ve cracked it.

A few days ago I made a lengthy post about how the British American Tobacco “agree disagree” marketing campaign made no sense to me at all, at all, at all. Since then BAT has launched a third phase of the campaign, which is even weirder and less likely to be convincing and what the hell what the hell didgeridoo noise what the hell.

And as I thought about that and tried, again, to work out what on earth the advertising company & BAT think they’re doing, suddenly I came up with an explanation that makes sense to me. It might not be the truth, but at least it puts a comprehensible motive behind this apparently nonsensical marketing.

Here goes: they’re trying to rebrand the tobacco industry.

The advertisements to the mass NZ public, the petition, the Twitter stream, the stunted website – none of these are trying to convince people of the merits of the plain packaging case. That’s what the campaign claims to be about, but it just ain’t true. They know the NZ public isn’t going to take up pitchforks and demand plain packaging be tossed aside. A campaign to actually get the public behind you looks more like the one they ran in Australia, where it was all about your tax dollars being misspent and your neighbourhoods falling into ruin.

Nope. The purpose here is bigger. Consider the detail of this campaign:

  • the name, “agree disagree” which suggests a willingness to engage and consider
  • the upfront admission that smoking is harmful (this must be the largest sum of money ever spent by a tobacco company to frontload the message that smoking is bad for you)
  • the technical nature of the arguments raised (IP ownership, international trade implications, legislative comparability between NZ and Australia)
  • the “sophisticated” tone taken – the word “CREATE” which is firmly the symbolic territory of the liberal arts; the wine industry, or more pointedly, bottles of wine which is still the drink of the social elite
  • the overall tone of restraint in voiceover, writing, general messaging – consider also the negative space where a more screechy, nasty campaign might be
  • the sheer size of the campaign, which suggests that this is an issue that genuinely matters to them

Look at what comes through: we are considered, honest, clever, sophisticated, restrained, sincere.
Or: we are not your daddy’s tobacco industry.

They’re trying to position themselves as reasonable actors. This is the *exact opposite* of what they were doing in Australia, which was hitting very hard all the notes that would push for public outrage without worrying about how it made them look. That didn’t work.

So, where’s the value in this kind of rebranding? If they do it right, it will make a difference to their lobbying environment. The broad push will hit a lot of people, and they’ll forget the technical detail of what’s up but they will remember this: “it sounds to me like those tobacco companies are actually being pretty sensible”. The decisionmakers and politicians will get this message from the community, as well as being caught up in the saturation marketing themselves.

That means, when a BAT rep makes a phone call to a business lobby group and tries to get them to carry water on their behalf, the person on the other end is more likely to agree.

It means when Campbell Live has a face-to-face on the issue between a Green MP and a BAT rep, the public give the tobacco person a better hearing and response.

And it means, when a BAT representative stands up at Select Committee to talk through why this is a bad idea, the people on the committee are better disposed to listen.

All of this counts. All of this makes a difference. It gives them a better shot at keeping plain packaging out of NZ, and that’s the big prize. That’s why they’re doing this.

I like this explanation. It brings all the weirdness into a single line that pushes hard towards the only result that matters to BAT. It justifies the amount of money spent and explains why none of the elements do what they claim to be doing.

There’s one sticking point: as I’ve noted, the three technical arguments made are actually not very convincing at all. How does that help them? Well, it doesn’t help them, but it also doesn’t invalidate this explanation. You see, the reason the arguments seem meritless is because *the arguments are meritless*. They don’t have stronger ones to call on. It’s a bluff, but not the obvious kind (“these are great arguments, honest!”). No, the bluff is to argue in the style of a considered, sensible person, so people conclude you actually are a considered, sensible person.

BAT are taking a gamble, and if I’m reading it right then it is indeed smart and perhaps it’s their only shot left. With that all said: I still don’t think it’s going to work. I think plain packaging is going to happen here. Our society turned against smoking years ago, and this is just another way to show that.

(That petition I was puzzled about is still hard to read, but I’d guess it’s for two purposes, private lobbying and message refinement. In meetings they can say “We sent people out to talk to ordinary folks. They got X many signatures in only Y days, and told us A, B and C. Obviously there’s no appetite for this change.” At the same time, they can improve the way they talk about the issues based on feedback from their people on the ground.)

Big Tobacco: why you do this?

I’ve mentioned previously the Agree/Disagree campaign that has been running prominently in NZ media for the last month. It has been hard to miss, with many television spots in prime time every day, full page ads in newspapers, and radio placements too. The spend is enormous. The initial stated amount of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” is, a month later, clearly revealed as something of an understatement. (The equivalent campaign in Oz spent $4.5 million.)

The campaign, by British American Tobacco, is in opposition to government moves towards mandatory plain packaging of cigarettes. It argues that plain packaging is bad because it impinges on corporate right to use the brands they have carefully developed; and it hurts us on international trade, making us vulnerable to legal challenges for example. They also state that plain packaging just won’t make a difference. (That last point appears to be quite wrong; the science is developing towards a clear signal that plain packaging reduces smoking rates.)

The website itself is quite small and uninteresting (and a close match to the Aussie version). It has a statement of the argument, and reproduces their print, TV and radio ads. That’s it. Missing: any call to action, at all. Anyone who responds to these ads and actually visits the site will find a few bullet points and nothing else of interest.

After a month of this with no end in sight, the mystery of what BAT are trying to achieve remains unsolved. Why are they spending so much money, time, and brand capital on this campaign? As another blogger has put it, what is the point of all this?

It isn’t to persuade the public to accept their argument. This is unconvincing on two levels. First, it just isn’t going to work. Public support is never going to muster behind support for tobacco marketing (and branding is marketing, make no mistake on that) or the details of international trade. (If you want to get the massed public behind you, you need a better hook than this. Compare the recent Australia “nanny state” campaign.) Second, even if you do persaude the public – so what? How does that get you what you want? This matter isn’t going to referendum. Are you hoping all your new supporters spontaneously decide to lobby government on your behalf? That’s a ridiculous notion.

In fact, this whole campaign is so poorly conceived that it’s actively turning smokers against BAT.

So you have the deeply weird spectacle of an enormous, expensive public persuasion campaign that is not actually interested in persuading the public.

A further wrinkle has appeared since: BAT have hired a small team of people to go around NZ gathering signatures and discussing the plain packaging issue. They were out in Wgtn recently and a few of my friends were approached to sign a petition against plain packaging. What petition is this? Your guess is as good as mine. But a small team being flown around the country for a month aren’t going to get enough names to make much of an impact on anything. If the petition mattered, it would be online as well, wouldn’t it? So add to the weirdness above: a petition that has no interest in actually collecting signatures.

Clearly something isn’t what it seems here.

What else is at work? Chris Trotter suggests the spend isn’t aimed at the public directly, but at editors and columnists who are influenced by the dollars coming their way. That could be part of the mix, because getting editors and columnists on-side is certainly a way to influence political action in NZ. I find the notion that this is the core purpose of the exercise hugely unconvincing. (“Here’s the plan: we spend loadsamoney advertising our argument, and hope some influential columnists decide that’s a good reason to take up our cause, know what I mean?” “But can’t we just get pretty much the same result by taking out a few small ads and sending a personalised letter to the columnists who are inclined to support our point?”)

Look again at their core argument. IP issues? International trade concerns? These issues are not addressed with public marketing campaigns. They are pursued through direct lobbying to government, submissions to select committee, and corridor conversations with influential people.

And yet a big national campaign is what we have. What are they up to?

Here’s another explanation: BAT have gone mad. No, seriously. They are so terrified by the ongoing shift in public opinion that will destroy their business sooner rather than later that they are running around like headless chooks, not talking to each other, throwing any random thing they can at the wall and hoping to somehow connect with a hidden reset switch. It’s a satisfying mental image, but probably unwise to give it any credence…

Okay, looking at what they’re actually doing isn’t giving me any clear picture. How about starting from the other end – what should we expect them to be doing? Obviously, this is important to BAT and other tobacco companies. They are, presumably, terrified of a public-health domino effect. Australia has fallen, and we are primed to go next. Other smoking changes swept the world with great rapidity, e.g. smokefree restaurants and bars. They have to fight this one here, before it gets out of hand. They don’t have many options in how to fight, really. They can directly pressure decisionmakers (which is how things have traditionally been done) and they can try and keep public opinion on side so there is no appetite for change. Can this gigantic mess of a campaign really be their best shot at public opinion?

Comparing agree/disagree to BAT’s Aussie campaign is interesting. The framing is completely different. It’s all: “Will plain packaging cost the taxpayers billions? Will it make tobacco cheaper? Where’s the proof?” Here, incredibly, the ads all front up with “we accept smoking is harmful” and talk about fairness and debate on technical issues. It’s a fascinating switch-up by BAT and/or BAT’s creative agency G2 Sydney (who I presume did the Aussie version too). Some possible reasons: the Aussie version really, really didn’t work; the temperature of the NZ market was so different they felt a completely different angle was needed; they’re trying out a new strategy that might cross borders more effectively; they’ve adjusted their behind-the-scenes lobbying approach and wanted their public strategy to align with that; some new manager came into a senior role and wanted to stamp his authority on things by making a change. All of these are unedifying, and impossible to test or verify based on what we can see from the outside.

So where does all this leave us? I wish I knew. I’m no closer to understanding what on earth BAT think they’re doing. One thing is certain: this public campaign is not the whole iceberg. There will be a whole huge pile of hidden work going on – lobbying politicians will just be the start of it. (Keith Ng covered some BAT lobbying action last year.) And if this enormous public campaign is just to support that, just to provide a few anecdotes and the thin impression of public support to give lobbyists just that bit of extra edge on influencing policymakers? If that’s the case, be very afraid, because that suggests the war chest big tobacco has to call upon is much, much bigger than I would like.

One other thing. I would not be surprised if the online discussion around this issue was being infiltrated by paid fake commenters pushing the BAT line. The “discuss this!” line is being pushed hard (although, notably, not on the campaign’s own forum) and buying some sock puppets is a cheap way to get some real push on your messaging. It’d be nice if sysadmins at media sites kept an eye out for this, although it ain’t hard to make it pretty much invisible.

Insights from readers most welcome, because I am mystified by this whole thing.

Stuff’s “Ice Age” story has changed

Following up on this post: In response to a complaint from me (and presumably communications from others as well), Stuff has stripped the inaccurate material out of their “Ice Age” story and added an apologetic note at the bottom.

It can’t take away the effects of the earlier version, but it at least ensures that this isn’t another link that can be circulated through the climate change denier echo chamber.

The person I communicated with sounded embarrassed by the whole affair – as they should be, it is a humiliating failure. Here’s hoping the lesson has been learned.

Stuff.co.nz Journalism Fail

Main story at stuff.co.nz for the last hour or two: “Solar Minimum could trigger ice age”

Check the article’s opening paras:

The world could be heading for a new ‘solar minimum’ period, possibly plummeting the planet into an Ice Age, scientists say.

Researchers say the present increase in sun activity with solar flares and storms could be followed by this minimum period.

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of global-warming alarmists.

The research for this comes from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

WHAT THE HELL.

“Refuting the predictions of global-warming alarmists”? What kind of language is that? Completely inappropriate.

To google, and in moments I’ve found the abstract and ScienceDaily’s summary. From the latter:

…those findings cannot be directly transferred to future projections because the current climate is additionally affected by anthropogenic forcing.

So, from “climate is affected by anthropogenic forcing” to “refuting predictions of global warming alarmists” in one easy step.

This is UNACCEPTABLE. Where did it come from? A media release from one of the “climate sceptic” pressure groups? Heads should bloody well roll over this.

Too angry about this to say any more.

EDITED TO ADD: see also Hot Topic and The Atavism

How Wrongness Happens

The BBC:

Photos uncovered by the National Archives show how the police spied on the suffragettes. These covert images – perhaps the UK’s first spy pictures – have gone on display to mark the centenary of the votes-for-women movement.

Ninety years ago, a Scotland Yard detective submitted an unusual equipment request.

It was passed up the chain, scrutinised, reviewed and finally rubber-stamped in Whitehall itself. Scotland Yard duly became the proud owner of a Ross Telecentric camera lens. And at a cost to the taxpayer of £7, 6s and 11d, secret police photographic surveillance (in the shape of an 11-inch long lens) was born.

Within weeks, the police were using it against what the government then regarded as the biggest threat to the British Empire: the suffragettes.

Documents uncovered at the National Archives reveal that the votes-for-women movement probably became the first “terrorist” organisation subjected to secret surveillance photography in the UK, if not the world.

The BBC photo caption, written by a subeditor:

In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera to covertly photograph the suffragettes.

Nope. Scotland Yard had cameras in use by 1888, as anyone who is brave enough to google “Mary Kelly” will discover. A quarter-century later they finally began to use cameras for surveillance.

But, everywhere else:

In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera, to covertly photograph suffragettes. – The BBC

That subeditor’s error in the photo caption wasn’t accidental. The idea that an entire new technology was first brought to bear as a means of suppressing dissent and protest? That’s our current moment affecting their assumptions about what has happened in the past. Stories corrupt across multiple tellings in predictable ways; most obviously they change in order to fit with our expectations and beliefs. Even an instance as small as this is not entirely harmless – right now there’s someone out there forming the belief that law enforcement’s eternal priority is to crush dissent on behalf of the state. (And heck, they might be right, but they ought to be forming that belief based on some actual evidence, not misinformation.)

[edit: fixed that link to google search results. took about four attempts. finicky!]

CAN MUMS HAVE IT ALL?

What about Dads? Can we have it all too?

Saturday’s newspaper had a magazine section with a big article heavily featuring our little fambly – Cal, Willa and myself. It’s up online here. It is actually quite a good piece, I reckon.

One message in there is how much we are relying on family for support, and on employers being flexible. We are blessed with much support in all those ways, plus plus a babby who is happy and not much trouble as babbies go. We are lucky people.

I am feeling the lucky today. Today (and the whole week actually but especially today) has been manic to the extreme. But I am getting by and well-fed (good healthy home-made tucker) and wee Willa has been adored by many people today and has lots of cuddles and food and poor hardworking Cal was super supportive tonight as I raced to get a piece of work done…

This blog is gonna stay low-frequency low-thinking posts for a while I guess. Capacity is low right now. But I want to record this here so I can’t argue with myself later: for all the challenges fitting everything in? I’m having an amazing time.

Anyway, enough ramble. Go read the article. You know you want to.