Category: mediawatch

The DomPost Monday led its World section with the headline ObamaMania: Cult-style fervour and fainting at Obama rallies comes under fire.. Big above-the-fold placement with lots of art, it was presented as a big deal and worthy of serious attention. Looking a little closer, it just started to look like a beat-up.
It’s a Sunday Telegraph story – you can read the original online – subedited to about two-thirds the original length but keeping the original’s tone. The guts of the story is in the lede:

…for a growing number of Barack Obama sceptics, there is something disturbing about the adulation with which [he] is greeted as he campaigns for the White House – unnervingly akin to the hysteria of a cult, or the fervour of a religious revival.

It goes on to present evidence that the Obama campaign is on the brink of becoming a cult. Among this damning evidence:

• large numbers of people wait in line to see him!
• sometimes people rush the stage!
• people chant his slogan and it sounds rhythmic!
• sometimes people faint!

Yep, that sounds like a scary cult to me. Or perhaps any rock concert ever. And let’s look at the people expressing concern in this article, in order of appearance:

• Joe Klein (a Clinton-linked “fake liberal“)
• “a senior Obama official, who would talk only on condition of anonymity” (mm-hmmm)
• “Dr Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and stern critic of the current administration of George W.Bush” (according to Wikipedia, a family friend of Bill Clinton – see also this and this)
• “New York Times columnist David Brooks” (who is always wrong)(see also this)

It doesn’t come to much. This is an attempt to spin enthusiasm into a scary “cult of personality” charge, using lots of loaded terminology like “messiah” and “hysteria”. And is it really that hard to think of reasons why voters would be enthusiastic about Obama – say, the fact that for the last 20 years every PotUS has been either family Clinton or family Bush? Or, the fact that Obama made his name standing against Bush and the war in Iraq when hardly anyone else was making noise? Or, just the fact that he isn’t another in a very long series of white guys?
Even the weirdest-sounding bits in this piece are just noise.

“…volunteers are schooled to avoid talking to voters about policy, and instead tell of how they “came” to Obama, just as born-again Christians talk about “coming to Jesus.”

This sounds dramatic but it’s absolutely unremarkable marketing.

A brilliant speaker, Mr Obama often uses the rhetorical trick of rapidly repeating words and slogans and using catchy phrases that tend to attract young Americans, while having very little substance.

Every politician in the US wishes they could do the same – and besides, catchy slogans can sit alongside sound policy easily enough.
Finally, 700 words into the 1,000 word piece we get someone offering the sensible counterpoint:

In Mr Obama’s defence, Robert Caro, historian and biographer of President Lyndon Johnson, said: “Today, attacks on the cult of personality seem really to mean attacks on the ability to make speeches that inspire.”

Overall it’s a pretty rubbish article. The pity is that it’s been so eagerly propagated all around the world, and of course to the usual sewer.
The author, William Lowther, is no political shill – witness this revelation of a Cheney administration attempt to spark war with Iran. But I just don’t buy that this story emerged out his journalistic instinct. He was handed a story on a plate by someone wanting to get this message into circulation. The ‘catchy slogan, no substance’ bit is perfectly on message for the Clinton campaign. Dollars to donuts this is a Clinton staffer’s PR angle.
Lowther wrote a stupid article. It certainly shouldn’t have made it into prominence in the DomPost. We deserve better from our newspaper than this nonsense dressed up as current affairs journalism.

I’ve been waiting for this to come online: Joe Bennett’s DomPost column on Political Correctness from Jan 31. It is a shining example of the type of curmudgeonly foolishness that is so frequently celebrated in newspapers.
In the column, Bennett sets out to provide an overview of Political Correctness, and to demonstrate why it should be opposed. He sets about this task with enthusiasm, but of course falls into the amateur trap: he doesn’t question his premises. Bennett’s Political Correctness is the fictional product of 1980s U.S. right-wing spin. He accepts it without realising that he’s been sold.
Joe Bennett, you have been sold. What you rail against doesn’t exist. It is a straw man designed expressly to give you something to rail against. Your column is unwitting propaganda, bought and paid for over twenty years ago.
Here’s Joe’s history of the term:
the term “political correctness” was coined to scoff at [a set of naive Leftish attitudes]… The word “correctness” implies that certain opinions are right by definition… Such a posture is called totalitarianism. It has killed millions of people… And that is exactly the danger that the phrase “political correctness” was invented to warn against and to deride.
But that warning and that derision have dissolved. People now use the term as though it meant what it said, as though there were indeed a right way of thinking and speaking. There isn’t.
The first paragraph, at least, bears some funhouse-mirror resemblance to the truth. References on wikipedia suggest that the term was used within the social movements of the 60s and 70s, as a way of mocking those who became too concerned with doctrine.
The second part is outright nonsense. There are no people who use the term ‘as though it meant what it said’. (There are some serious usages on the left, but not many, and not in the sense that Bennett gets at here.) This is a fantasy existing in Joe Bennett’s mind but not in reality.
“Political correctness” is a term used by cultural conservatives who are upset by challenges to their cultural dominance. It is used to discredit these challenges by imagining them to be part of a widespread conspiracy of social engineering. As an imaginary conspiracy it is, by nature, incoherent – witness the confusion over whether the new “violent” All Black haka was an example of political correctness gone mad (they only get away with it because its something Maori!) or was a victim of political correctness gone mad (they won’t let us have it because it’s too violent for their delicate sensibilities!).
Bennett’s whole column is confused and full of ridiculous claims, but this is perhaps the most ridiculous section:
The politically correct argue that language is tilted in favour of people in power, which means old white men… With its concern for the downtrodden, the outsider, the perceived victim, political correctness tilts the balance the other way. To take one inflammatory example, it is now unthinkable to call black people niggers. But it remains fine to call English people Poms. There may be a difference of degree there, but there is no difference in principle… the correct can’t have it both ways.
That’s right: political correctness tilts language in favour of those who are not old white men, because old white men can’t call black people “niggers”, but black people can call old white men “poms”.
This “inflammatory” example is Bennett’s big zinger, the one that is meant to stun us into sensibility. But it’s ridiculous. Bennett talks about power relations but it’s obvious he has no understanding of how they work. (Besides which, what’s he saying, that everyone should be free to call people niggers if they want?)
Bennett’s column isn’t really an argument – it’s just a muddle of thoughts roughly stranded together. It is far from the commanding summary I suspect he wishes it to be. It concludes with Bennett coming out firmly against political correctness, for the way it stifles free speech, and for the way it doesn’t have a sense of humour. That’s one mighty big straw man you’ve got there Mr Bennett. Go easy, you might hurt yourself when you punch it.
The bigger issue, of course, is why this kind of nonsense is given such privilege in our newspapers. These sorts of messages are given reverent space right next to the newspaper’s own editorial and the cartoon. Apart from designated-leftie Chris Trotter, is there a single columnist in the DomPost or the Herald who would do anything but nod in approval at Bennett’s blathering?
I don’t mind the curmudgeons. They have their place, deluded old fools that they are. What I mind is the diet of all-curmudgeon, all the time. We deserve better.

Ben sent me this link: Farewell Remarks from the editor of the LA Times. It’s a NYT pub of the departing speech by ousted LA Times ed James O’Shea. It goes into overdrive on page two:

This company, indeed, this industry, must invest more in solid, relevant journalism… We must build on our core strength, which is good, accurate reporting, the backbone of solid journalism, the public service that helps people make the right decisions about their increasingly complex lives. We must tell people what they want to know and — even more important — what they might not want to know, about war, politics, economics, schools, corruption and the thoughts and deeds of those who lead us. We need to tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears. We must give a voice to those who can’t afford a megaphone. And we must become more than a marketing slogan.

It’s a good piece, from someone who can speak of the newspaper crisis with some authority. Newspapers all over the world are facing trouble as readers evaporate under the internet sun, and O’Shea acknowledges this as a real and difficult phenomenon.
I don’t know that this message goes far enough, though. American (and global) newspaper journalism has declined for a number of reasons, and not all of them are summed up by “misplaced news priorities in newspaper management”. Another relevant link, this time via Making Light: What’s really wrong with newspapers, has more on this, identifying six key problems that got US paper news to its current unhealthy state.
For the record, the six problems are (1) The creation of monopoly markets and cartels of newspaper ownership. (2) Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held companies. (3) Reduced investment in journalism. (4) Emergence of a conformist agenda. (5) Collapse of leadership. (6) Advertising model proved unsustainable.

No.*
* That was the question asked by the Dom Post in the headline an article on Amazon’s new digital reader, the “Kindle”. The article in question is straight off the wire, a piece for the Times by James Bone. Except there it had the rather more sensible headline, “The digital reader that will provide 200 books at the touch of a button”.
The DomPost’s doughty subeditors might have found an answer to the question themselves if they’d looked online to find this disappointing review of the very same device, from, er, the same edition of the Times, and also by James Bone. Go figure.
(Actually, whoever put together the informative sidebar deserves some kind of reward for this bulletpoint: “Like a book, the device’s screen is not backlit and uses electronic ink to mimic paper.”)
The Kindle is going to fail, obviously. There is no market for a standalone book reader. Book-reader functionality will only ever become commercially viable as an add-on for your cellphone.
Speaking of which, I’ve seen this article linked from several blogs today. It’s Slate’s piece on how the new generation is moving beyond email, as they take for granted a range of channels (Twitter, Facebook, texting) each suited to a different kind of communication. At the end of the piece, Chad Lorenz writes: “You can now send and receive every kind of message—texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts—with most new mobile phones. It’s not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you’ll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived.” Yes, exactly. Except Chad leaves out two crucial channels: audio and video chat. “Telephone calls” will soon be an outdated term. So will individual call/text charges – soon you’ll be paying for the bitstream usage of your phone, just like you do for any other internet connection. And that’ll be the end of having to record your contacts on your cellphone SIM, too, because they’ll all be stored online on your MyCell homepage, as your Friends list.
I mean, isn’t this obvious to everyone? This is hardly Cory Doctorow insightful futurism. We already have all the pieces. How long will it take before someone starts assembling them?
Look for a big telecom to try to buy Facebook sometime in the next year.

I recently wrote about Venezuala and Chavez’s government there. Some recent action there has been in the news all over. Compare and contrast:
From the BBC:

Venezuelan troops have used tear gas and water cannon to disperse thousands of students in the capital, Caracas…The students are demonstrating against constitutional reforms proposed by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez… The students want a December referendum on the reforms to be postponed, to give voters more time to study the plans.

From VenezualaAnalysis.com:

Violent clashes took place yesterday between opposition students and the police when students tried to break police lines near Venezuela’s National Electoral Council building… Several thousand pro-Chavez students gathered in a counter protest in support of the reforms… the opposition students carried banners and placards openly calling for violence… When the opposition protest arrived, the CNE directors received a delegation from the students, giving them drinks and cake as they handed over their document. However, on leaving the student delegation attempted to chain themselves to stair well in the entrance of the building before being removed by the National Guard.
The protest then turned violent as the opposition students attempted to break through the police security cordon to get into the CNE, throwing rocks and bottles and setting fire to trash cans, trees and street poles. The police and National Guard then responded with teargas, water canon, and plastic shrapnel to disperse the crowd.

And while I’m on the compare and contrast tip:
A cartoon in the satirical magazine The Onion, October 27 2007:
Halloween: what is it teaching our kids?
* Everyone deserves handouts!
Fox news talking head Sean Hannity, October 31, 2007:
Halloween is teaching our kids to be liberals. Because we’re teaching kids to knock on other people’s doors and ask for a handout.
We are living in the land beyond satire.

[EDIT: added link to the article in question]
In 1992 I scribbled some notes on my pad about a story to write. The name I wrote down was “Gangsta NZ” and it would be about the adoption of US gangsta culture in New Zealand, about how teenage guys who were fascinated by the ghetto lifestyle depicted in hip-hop would claim its vocabulary and behaviours, with tragic consequences down the line.
I never wrote that book. (That note, in fact, was the starting point for what became ‘in move’, which I did write and may let you read if you ask nicely.) Even so, it was a response to a trend I saw playing out around me, where hip-hop music seemed to have potential as structure for violence. Many of the young Polynesian kids in state housing found a something inspirational in gang stories. Boyz n the Hood and Chicano gangsta epic Blood In, Blood Out were the must-see films. But it was all pretty harmless at the time. Indeed, a much bigger force in youth culture then was derisive dismissal of wiggers, white middle class kids who adopted hip-hop culture in an attempt to be cool. You were allowed to listen to and like the music, but unless you had at least some claim to an authentic hard-scrabble life, the NZ version at least, then the youth parliament would round on you fast.
Things seem to have changed. The Sunday Star Times yesterday had a big feature called “Little Boys Lost” which claimed that gang emulation among the youth of Auckland has reached a tipping point in the last few years, and is now a genuine problem. Since October 2005’s murder of Iulio Naea, another nine deaths have been associated by police with the gang culture.
Article writer Tim Hume obviously has some sympathy for the kids he’s interviewing, and the complex mix of pose and sincerity at work in their lives, and makes a good fist of engaging with what’s driving this subculture.
The SST subeditor isn’t as sensitive – the article’s lede calls it “an increasingly entrenched subculture of random violence which has middle class New Zealand very afraid.” (The article doesn’t actually have much to say about middle class New Zealand; occasionally gang violence catches some nice, ordinary SST-reading middle class types in its path but mostly it’s low-decile gangs being violent against each other.) The reliably Tabloid Police Association head Greg O’Connor is quoted with similar apocalyptic nonsense: the “biggest threat to New Zealand society is LA-isation of our mostly Polynesian youth.”
Inspector Jason Hewett, charged with addressing South Auckland’s gang problem, comes across extremely well as someone who has really thought about this stuff. He has seen the shift from Crips-and-Bloods aping kids who were just a silly nuisance, into something much more serious. After Naea’s killing, the problem escalated dramatically, and the article says he “blames extensive media reporting of the issue for inspiring the formation of a slew of copy-cat gangs.” (A case of middle-class fear creating its own nightmares?) He acknowledges a large number of posturing wannabes, but feels the actual problem has calmed a lot over the last year – 2006 was the bad year. The numbers seem to point at a fad-culture now in decline. However, featured gangster ‘Gucks’ thinks differently: he sees “gangsterism” a a subculture that is now so deeply entrenched that it can’t now be shifted. He thinks it’s Bloods and Crips for life from now on.
The heart of any such story as this is disaffected youth in poor circumstances. New Zealand’s poverty and deprivation are in a whole different league to hip-hop’s US exemplars, but they are real and crippling nonetheless. The article does pay heed to that fact with a boxout devoted to the poverty in South Auckland. The story’s key paragraph, though, is buried in its middle:

The adoption of foreign, music-oriented youth cultures by local teenagers is nothing new, with each successive pop cultural movement importing antisocial aspects to greater or lesser extents: hippydom’s drug culture, punk’s nihilism, Goth’s morbidity [sic]. But none, save perhaps the virtually extinct youth tribe of racist skinheads, has proven anywhere near as pathological, atavistic and violently antisocial as gangsta culture. While gangs, too, have long been part of New Zealand’s social landscape, never has their lifestyle been promoted through such an influential mass culture medium.

This is a lot more nuanced a claim than the traditional “pop culture is training our kids to be evil” that we’ve heard since Elvis. (Actually, since earlier than that, but y’know.) It’s an interesting point and one I find I can’t easily dismiss. Certainly, much of mainstream hip-hop depicts an aspirational lifestyle and one in which violence is normal or even celebrated. Certainly, NZ youth have always looked to foreign trends to copy and embrace. Certainly, NZ society has always had gangs filling in the social gaps in its poor quarters. The article seems to argue that these three trends come together in an incendiary way to make this problem; and if this equation is true, then Gucks will be right and the Crips and Bloods will be around for some time to come.
What do I make of it? I don’t know. I hope this is a spike that will soon resolve itself. The level of violence that is recounted in this article wasn’t part of my youth, and I would be very sad indeed if that was where NZ was headed.
—
I’m going to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire tomorrow night at the Paramount in Welly. Contact me if you want to come along.

I don’t pretend to be anything remotely like an expert on Iran, but I know that I have more knowledge than your average joker, because I used to be that average joker and then deliberately read a bunch of books to learn more about the place. (I was writing something with some action set there and wanted it to be authentic.)
Let me reassure you that through my marginally-better-informed eyes, the craziness going down in the US over the visit to New York of President Ahmadinejad seems even more crazy.
Conventional wisdom is that this is the start of the path to war in Iran. That Bush – well, Cheney, actually – wants to make military action against Iran either a done deal or actually underway by the time the election rolls around. There are a bunch of threads all converging at present, and the war drums are sounding all over the place. To which I have to ask, are they completely insane?
There is no way that the U.S. is remotely capable of any kind of sustained military action against Iran! It’s bogged down in Iraq and barely able to keep up its troop numbers there, let alone halt the violence or support Iraqi state-building!
All the U.S. military machine is capable of is bombing the crap out of a bunch of targets in Iran. It cannot follow that up with any kind of ground war. There just ain’t the warpower available. Is that the whole plan, then? “Bomb Iran until we win”? Look, here’s what would happen – it’s dirt simple. If the U.S. launches a serious air campaign against Iran, then Iran will mobilise its armies, move into Iraq, and make that country unliveable for the U.S. Then it will pull back to Iran and leave its Shi’a proxies to try and build something out of the even greater mess that will remain. End of story.
If the Iran war plan is real – and right now it sure seems that way, because there’s precious little to be gained posturing without intent – well, we’re in whole new areas of Emperor madness here.
Anyway. Ahmadinejad. The President of Iran is in New York to address the UN, as he does every year, only this year the entire U.S. machine is intent on calling him out. The media hate-on for Ahmadinejad is intense. Glenn Greenwald wrote about it superbly in Salon:

What this really illustrates more than anything else is the true danger to our national character and basic liberties from being in a permanent state of war fighting. When we become a society that just leaps from one New Ultimate Hitler Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed to the next, we ensure that all of our political values and institutions become infected by this bloodthirsty mentality.

Greenwald, who has become my favourite writer on US politics in recent weeks, also quotes the always-insightful Juan Cole, whose words also turned up in Salon:

The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

Rumour control: It is worth pointing out at this point that Ahmadinejad is not a dictator, for two reasons. (1) He was democratically elected. (2) He isn’t the boss.
Ahmadinejad takes his orders from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Political power in Iran has been vested in the clergy since the revolution, and that hasn’t changed any. Previous President Khatami was gently moving things in a secular direction, and was unpopular with the mullahs for his efforts; when the US rained down its condemnation and scorn on Iran despite its signs of rapprochement, the mullahs and the electorate both ran out of patient and the populist holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad was the result. Ahmadinejad has been gently moving things back towards social conservatism, which the mullahs support, and also building his own power base, which the mullahs don’t support.
The nadir of this stupid affair was Ahmadinejad’s appearance as a guest speaker at Columbia University in New York. Hugely controversial – how could the new Hitler enemy be given a platform to speak! – the end result was farcical, as Columbia’s Dean Bollinger introduced Ahmadinejad with a welter of aggressive questions and accusations. Many of these were right on the money, but a lot of them just read like Bush talking points. They certainly followed the media script that the Fox-White House axis has been anxiously putting about.
Distant Ocean writes about how this same Bollinger gave a fawning welcome in 2005 to an *actual* Dictator, President Musharraf of Pakistan.
But the extremity of idiocy is the gay issue. The most surprising thing about this whole affair has been the revelation of just how deep is the concern for the gays of Iran among the right-wing commentariat. They are so very, very worried about the gays! The gays are treated savagely! Truly Ahmadinejad is like Hitler!
(For any google drop-ins with low sarcasm detection abilities: yes, the above is sarcasm. These displays of hand-wringing are purely an act of convenience, just as the worries about the fate of women under the Taliban were a convenient humane rationale under which to set up tents supporting the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s completely cynical theatre.)
Which brings me, finally, to the lowest point of all. If the Columbia visit was the nadir, then this moment in it was the reverse-pinnacle:
“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” he told the audience (see video below). “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.”
This moment of absurdity has been repeated ad nauseum. He says there are no Iranian homosexuals! (He’s not just Hitler – he’s crazy, reality-doubting Hitler!) But that isn’t what he meant. Here’s Hooman Majd, who served as Ahmadinejad’s translator for his last two UN speeches:

…declaring Iran devoid of homosexual culture (rather than his declaring Iran as literally devoid of homosexuals, as was erroneously translated in much of the U.S. media)

Think about it. Considering gays in Iran can be executed for being gay, this makes complete sense. “Hiding at all costs” is the only acceptable gay culture in Iran.
So there you have it. The soundbite that will be remembered above all others from this ridiculous two-minute hate, and it’s a mistranslation. That’s so stupid it’s just sad.
(Do I have to say more? Yes, I guess I do, or some wingnut will spam my comments with how I’m a crazy pro-Islamofascist or whatever. For the record, I fully acknowledge that gays are treated appallingly in Iran. The word “savage” is appropriate. It is widely acknowledged that men are executed for homosexual behaviour. But there is, at least, more complexity than is often recognised. For example, it is often forgotten that Iran conducts more sex-change operations than just about anywhere. Also, I am in no way a fan of Ahmadinejad, was hugely disappointed when he won the election, and eagerly anticipate his departure from office. There, am I covered?)

Well, the wonderful Wellington Film Festival is in full swing here, with enormous numbers of incredible films drawn from all around the world. So here are my reviews of the two I’ve seen, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Knocked Up.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a British film (with American funding) about a troubled young wizard and his struggles against a repressive regime at his wizard school. For about ten minutes. Then it was about something else. Then it was about something else. The film never settled down into one narrative, constantly rushing off to the next plot-sequence in a way that never quite added up. There were wonderful bits aplenty, but the comings and goings of so many minor characters made it difficult to settle into the film. Adapting a lengthy and incident-driven novel into a film is a challenge, and this effort didn’t quite manage it. Still, like that other Festival mainstay Michael Apted’s Up series, there is pleasure to be garnered simply from watching the actors grow up on screen across the series of films.
Knocked Up was a shaggy comedy from the USA, about an overgrown layabout and a bright young thing with a career who find themselves facing adulthood when she falls pregnant to him after a one-night-stand. It’s a sincere and engaging film, although it loses many points for a startling lack of chemistry between the two leads (both of whom are very good, but there is no spark between them at all). Lighter on the laughs than I was expecting but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
===
The Nia Glassie abuse coverage took a turn for the unexpected today. The Dom Post made it eight paragraphs past its “SHAME” headline before it mentioned the word Maori, showing a restraint that surprised me.
Likewise, the Dom Post editorial took a useful tone saying that even though recent high-profile child abuse incidents have involved Maori, “child abuse is not a Maori-only problem”.
Of course, it squandered my goodwill a couple lines later by saying “For all the talk of the caring nature and superiority of the whanau approach over the supposed sterility of the Pakeha nuclear family, abuse is higher among Maori”, which implied an unlikely causality between family structure and abuse, and did so by inventing a cultural competition of which Pakeha are the winners.
And of course, down in the list of solutions to end the editorial was that old reliable: “What is needed is… the Government to accept that, for some, welfare payments are not the whole answer…”

Today I gave my first lecture. It was to a class of about 150 students, on the social psychology of groups, with a particular focus on the fairly well-known Robbers Cave experiment.
The lecture was not of my design – I was delivering one of Jim’s, but I had the opportunity to make it my own beforehand, and did so, making many significant changes to the powerpoint slides and building my own presentation around them. It helped that it’s quite a fun lecture – the Robbers Cave study involved rambunctious 12-year old boys raiding each others’ campsites and fighting snakes, so it holds the attention well.
It went fine. I was a bit nervy at the start but settled down pretty fast, and was completely comfortable by the second half. Somehow or other I got it to run exactly to time, as well, which was quite remarkable.
So, how about that. If you’d told me this time last year I would be giving a lecture now, I would have thought it quite unlikely. Just goes to show how much I know where I’m going with my life, what what?
—
Headline, page 3 of the Dom Post Monday: “Maori shame at abuse of toddler”. Highlighted quote: Maori have turned into “the most ugliest (sic) and violent people ever”. (That noted, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the director of NZ’s Family First organisation, who called for “a non-political commission of inquiry into child abuse, increased support for parenting groups and community organisations working with at-risk families”.)

One year on from the sad story of the abused and murdered infant Kahui twins, New Zealand’s news headlines are covered with another story of sickening abuse of a defenceless child, this time three-year old Nia Glassie who was, among other atrocities, apparently put in a clothes dryer and hung on a clothesline for the amusement of her teenage minders.
And yes, again a Maori family is involved. Michael Laws in his column asked why no-one had to guess the ethnicity of the family when the basic facts first hit the news, to which I can only reply that I certainly hadn’t assumed anything of the sort. But, it must be conceded, Laws’ assumptions were proved correct. Once again, all Maori find themselves on trial. Once again, the talkback radio waves will be full of deeply unpleasant condemnations of the “sickness inside Maori culture”, and accusations that this sickness is “sheltered by the political correctness of our liberal society”. (Both quotes are paraphrases from memory of Laws’ column.)
Again, Pita Sharples of the Maori party will have his work cut out for him as the token Voice Of The Maori People in the media, trying to put this in context. Again, it will be hard to get his points about structures of deprivation across in a soundbite media talking to a population unaccustomed to such analysis.
Horrible acts have been committed, and the more I find out about them the more bewildered I become – how could a mother allow her daughter to be treated so? How could any of these teenagers be so persistently violent and callous? – but I fear these questions will be lost in the coming storm of blame at the Maori minority group.
It won’t be pretty. Again.
—
EDIT (14 August): this post continues to pull a lot of traffic, including from a lot of schoolkids who are concerned about what happened to Nia. I should make clear that in this post I tried to say that blame should not be put on Maori people. I disagree very strongly with Michael Laws. You might want to look also at this post and this post, both from a few days later, for more on Nia.