Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work is a slender book with an ambitious purpose: to call attention to a damaging influence on NZ democracy. The book amounts to a detailed explanation of the activities of an extremely visible network of lobby groups, all run by Jordan Williams, and all serving the same underlying agenda.
I found it arresting. I particularly appreciated the section covering one of the first persuasion campaigns undertaken by Williams in New Zealand, the 2012 effort by British American Tobacco to push against the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes. Longtime readers of the blog may remember it as something I wrote about at the time, largely concerning myself with how mystifying this campaign was, as it was clearly conducted at huge expense, and clearly destined to fail. (The two big posts were this one, and this one.)
Among the political and media class, however, the book has received a mixed reception. Many journalists have found it underwhelming. Hager’s exposure of how the Williams network operates is not a revelation, it seems; everything described is routine and ordinary politics. This is just what lobbying is. And the book has little else of note, lacking Hager’s customary revelations. (See this summary of media reactions by Bryce Edwards.)
I do think the book is incomplete, but not for these reasons. To be clear, Dirty Work‘s clear description of the Williams network is sufficiently notable in its own right. Tze Ming Mok summarized the value of the book extremely well: It is for the public, to have summarised in one place, the story of an influential lobby group with the context, analysis and moral judgment that our gallery reporters have no incentive to provide. (From a fantastic thread on Bluesky, read it all.)
The missing piece of this book, in my eyes, is a clear-eyed look at the other half of this ecoystem. Hager describes clearly how the Williams spiderweb produces and circulates a set of toxic messages, but does not similarly expose the operation of the media channels through which this propaganda spreads. Why is there no incentive for our media to provide a framework in which we can appreciate the nature of such a powerful influence operation?
These two components, the Williams cinematic universe and political media, cannot properly be considered in isolation. They have evolved to fit together like host and parasite. This is where I wanted more than Dirty Work gave me. I wanted exposure of the media context in which Williams operates.
One piece is social media. Williams’s multiplex of lobby groups exploits the vectors for propaganda and recruitment that are all that is left of the world’s two major social media channels, Facebook and Twitter/X. These platforms are now set up to serve the goals of dark money operatives, who cultivate anger through manipulative and even misleading messaging. There is a developing global conversation on this subject, but the scale of it is out of scope for Hager’s meticulous local investigative reporting, so we can similarly set it aside for now.
The other piece concerns our news media and the commentariat the exists around it. The tactics of the Taxpayers Union and related groups have been developed and refined specifically for our local messaging environment, not just to spread there, but in fact to influence these environments to make their messages more successful. This, then, is what I see as the missing chapter of Dirty Work: how our news media allow themselves to be gamed by Williams.
(Yes I know, it is the same thing I always want to talk about.)
What is actually missing
Before continuing, I should make explicit that I don’t really think there is a missing chapter in any practical sense. Hager’s focus in this book is crystal clear and appropriate, and as I have noted above, the book stands alone perfectly well. Furthermore, this piece isn’t ignored; it appears throughout Dirty Work, in the ragged edges of stories and down in the secondary paragraphs. Hager’s focus throughout is on Williams, and he is not here to expose journalism and media, particularly given he is part of both (albeit a contentious part).
I call it a missing chapter because drawing together these threads and edges into something clear and strong would add immeasurably to our understanding of what is taking place here, and round off the narrative of the book in a way that would give readers a better understanding of its significance. And if not as part of the book, these matters can be addressed by the discourse around it. Unfortunately, so far this has not happened at all. It’s not surprising as to why: the media are in no hurry to indict themselves.
I think there is a call for both a descriptive and an investigative angle to our hypothetical missing chapter:
- What is observable about the functioning of our news media and commentariat that makes the Williams method so effective? What patterns are observable in the things that are not reported and not widely understood about the Williams spiderweb? What should the public know and understand that they do not?
- What is happening inside newsrooms and editorial conversations to create these patterns of emphasis and de-emphasis? What are the effects of ownership influence that might serve the goals of the Williams Performing Circus of Wonders? How seriously does the media take its mission of informing the public, how self-reflective is it regarding its limitations, and how does it balance these concerns with the increasing commercial pressures of operating an era where clicks mean survival?
Why the media exist at all
Maybe some first principles, to ensure we proceed from a solid foundation.
Democracy requires deliberation. It is designed to generate a series of acceptable compromises to protect everybody, heading off the possibility of tyrannny, fascism, and any number of other forms of society that load misery unequally.
Deliberation, in turn, requires information and analysis. The complexity of human society is such that this has to be, well, mediated. There is too much for citizens ever to appraise themselves of directly. To be successful, democracy requires a system that surfaces important issues and allows the filtering of the key arguments across them, so the voting populace can make an informed choice on the essentials.
Obviously that’s not going to happen. But we can at least try. And the Jordan Williams technique described in Dirty Work does nothing except hijack the processes we have to massively overrepresent one specific perspective: opposing any limit or burden on the wealthy by undermining the institution of government itself.
An example of the problems
In the days immediately following the release of Dirty Work, we saw an example of the very phenomenon it discusses.
The Parents Alliance is a new lobby group launched in September 2026. It has no direct connection to the Williamsborg (at least, none identified so far) but there are some second-order links, not least the involvement of David Farrar and Jonathan Ayling. This lobby group claims to speak for parents, with a platform of “common sense” positions arrived at by extensive polling.
And maybe they are exactly as they seem! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is, at least in part, a group which has been constructed to pursue a particular political agenda matching the direction of every Williams-linked group. Education is a particular focus of energised activism on the right, mostly oriented towards classic subjects and onerous testing, unbounded parental choice, and avenues for charter schools and private capture of educational funds. There are strong “common sense” arguments for all these things which downplay or occlude the significant costs associated with each of them.
To take just one example: on the post announcing his involvement with this new group, Farrar says his impetus for involvement was “when the “experts” produced a draft science curriculum that did not mention physics, biology or chemistry. This is when I realised that parents needed to speak up.” The scare quotes around “experts” is a tell. The 2023 curriculum was ambitious, embedding new critical approaches that were strongly based on robust evidence. However, these changes could be attacked in soundbites that excerpted small pieces and challenged “common sense”, and that is exactly what happened; the curriculum became an attack vector for a reactionary right ecosystem that was hungry for anything they could label “woke”. Nothing in the criticism at the time, and indeed in the whole replacement curriculum rushed through since, has been given equivalent evidence-based consideration.
So we have right-wing activists intimately involved in this project, and an appeal to “common sense” which has often been used as cover for a project of throwing red meat to their online base while pursuing their fundamental ideology. That, to me, is more than enough to call for some consideration of what is happening here. We rely on the media to help us determine what is happening. Instead, no questions have been asked, and this new group has been welcomed in media coverage entirely at face value.
Again, I’m not making any claim that this group is anything but earnest. Nor am I saying that the criticisms of the 2023 curriculum that launched Farrar’s piece of the project should be dismissed out of hand. But I am saying simply accepting its self-presentation is naive. Given the lacklustre track record of existing media coverage of education issues, a group such as this could significantly push public opinion further away from evidence.
Another layer of consideration: even if this is a genuine representation of a plethora of parental voices, we should consider also how it can be deployed in media disputes going forward. It is expressly positioned as a voice for parents, in opposition to teachers or public servants. What this will mean in practice, it seems likely, is that every time something new is introduced to the education system, the media will balance out the teacher or ministry explanation with a Parents Alliance reply. Detailed research and evidence-based conclusions will be held to the standard of “common sense”. And that, de facto, will serve the greater project of the right, undermining the idea of government itself.
All of these concerns are clearly prompted by the narrative account in Dirty Work. And they are, evidently, absent in how the Parents Alliance has been received and how it will be managed in the media going forward.
How the rules get played
The media is not a dispassionate observer, watching as if from a moon colony and reporting factually about the events of the day. It is an active social and political force. And the news media’s methods of accounting for this are underwhelming at best.
Consider by comparison the art of online discussion moderation. It is well understood that if you run a forum, comment section, chat group, etc, then eventually you will attract troublemakers. You need behaviour rules for your space, to set standards of expectation, or you will de facto exclude a bunch of people who do not want to be bullied or abused. But as soon as you have rules, the trolls will cheerfully find ways to walk the exact line of what is allowable to make life awful for others, and ideally to trick them into violating those very behavioural rules set up to protect them.
Bad actors do not care about the spirit of the place. They do not care about a shared purpose or a greater goal. They just want to have their fun, or spam their particular message, or whatever it is, and they will use every devious means they can to do so without violating any abstract rule. To moderate effectively, you can’t rely on the rule and say that does the job. You need to exercise judgement, constantly, and you need to aggressively make decisions that uphold the principles of your community. Part of this is accepting that sometimes you will over-police someone who is just having a bad day, or who expressed their ideas poorly, or whatever. Tough for them.
Journalism and the wider world of media really seems to believe that its code of balance and neutrality is a shield against exploitation and bias. In reality the bad actors trying to exploit media channels are going to use every trick they can to tilt media coverage their way, all without breaking a single rule.
“It is essential to cover both sides of an issue” is laudable but fraudulent, and led, for decades, to climate change scientists being balanced out in the media by fossil fuel spokespeople, or that species of rare scientist who doubts mainstream consensus and who has been coddled and funded and raised up by fossil fuel dollars. This still goes on across many issues of public interest; and this persistence is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.
“If both left and right are mad at us we’re probably doing okay” is convincing until you realize that the forces of wealth will never be satisfied and will never stop loudly complaining about even the tiniest misrepresentation, even in coverage that flatters them by adopting their priors; and this dissatisfaction is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.
“We just report the facts and let the audience decide” is convincing until you recognize that the production and distribution of facts is not neutral, and cannot be neutral, and agencies underwritten by bad actors work to flood the public space with facts carefully selected to reinforce their self-serving construction of reality, and to at least cast doubt on if not drown out any factual production that threatens it; and this flood is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.
“Opinion from journalists is fine as long as it’s clearly marked” is a sound principle except for how it has enabled extremely partisan voices to rise in media prominence by exploiting simplistic populism, and then have their political worldviews implicitly stamped with authority by the media apparatus around them that treats them as major figures of legitimate journalism (radio hosts Mike Hosking and Heather du Plessis-Allan are the most visibly examples of this, but the same phenomenon was present in how Cam Slater was treated until Hager’s previous Dirty book revealed some connivance in the background of his work; all three are of course recipients of NZ Media Awards, presumably for doing journalism the right way).
“Weight your coverage towards the political issues the population cares about” makes sense except the ways to discover the issues the whole population cares about are flawed and gameable, and the care of the population can itself be manipulated, by agents who work to shape both things without accountability or visibility; and this invisibility is by design, as a tactic deployed by paid strategists who are trying to influence the media on behalf of the wealthy.
Our neutral media apparatus presents built-in affordances for exploitation, and the Dirty Work of Hager’s book exposes a paid strategist working successfully to exploit them. But the book is limited by not examining these affordances directly. They are not inevitable and natural. They are choices made and reinforced by specific people within the media hierarchy. Like weak moderators who let trolls run rampant on their platform because they never quite step over the arbitrary line of the rules, the editorial cohort in media is (wittingly or not) complicit in allowing malign forces to twist our democracy to anti-democratic ends.
And this is only one aspect of the larger puzzle. Commercial pressures on news media have never been more intense than in this era of global tech hegemony and economic austerity. Billionaires purchasing and consolidating news media and then taking an activist stance to this ownership have led to an unprecedented open tilt to media perspective, one that doesn’t even pretend to the flawed neutrality discussed above. Competing sources of information filled with cheaply-made provocative lies are able to financially sustain themselves on the proceeds of ragebait, and crowd out traditional media channels. It’s tough out there.
Things to do
So, you’re a citizen. What to do?
Protect public media ownership. The wealthy would love to destroy public media. The BBC has been both boxed in and deeply wounded and is gasping in an alley right now. The Trump administration is aggressively attacking funding for and the legitimacy of PBS and NPR. Here in Aotearoa, TVNZ and RNZ have been targets for waves of accusation, undermining, and reform for many years. The present straitened media landscape provides perfect cover for thinning out public broadcasting, just as it is more essential than ever. There is no compromise here: once gone, these institutions will be lost for generations, perhaps forever. (As it is, recovering their strength is probably the work of multiple generations.) These are however high-visibility institutions, and the public attention and voice on their fate is strong. This means resistance from ordinary people can make a real difference. Join the fight.
Demand a citizen’s agenda. The citizen’s agenda was devised by Prof Jay Rosen. It is a toolkit approach for a media org to shift its approach to political coverage so, instead of being lost in the horserace-called-from-the-moon of neutral reporting, conducts a process to identify a set of policies that are of public significance and importance, and then uses its coverage to hold these as a measure for everything that happens in the election period. It is a responsible approach that would transform coverage. This is just one model, of course; the important point is that the path of least resistance employed at present is leading to exploitation.
Engage, carefully, with a fifth estate. If the media are not going to challenge themselves, then we must look elsewhere for a force that will hold them to account. Unfortunately, the world of media analysis and critique is rich with wild voices and conspiracism, and every conspiracy theorist from Trump on down is dubious about the mainstream media and its biased production. Devising a solid rubric to sort the good from the bad is beyond scope of this blog post but probably imperative. Perhaps there already exist some good criteria to apply?
Talk with real people. Ultimately these influence operations work by infecting the everyday conversations that happen all around our society. The only way to counter at that level is to add good messages into this conversational exchange. Chat to the hairdresser and the shop assistant and the person waiting in line to see the film. Be normal. And should any of these issues naturally come up, say what you think. It has an impact.
Dirty Work is available at bookshops and libraries all over. It’s a quick read, and a good one. Thanks, Nicky Hager.
