One of the big stories in New Zealand’s media lately has been the awful murder of 12-week-old twins, and the way the family has closed ranks and failed to co-operate in any way with police. Politicians and pundits have weighed in. Talkback and letters pages and blogs are awash with calls for decisive action.
\nThe Kahui twins story, as it is being told, combines a bunch of conservative favourites in one neat package of indignation:<\/p>\n
(There are other aspects to the case as well, but those are the big three.) \n“Few dispute that early colonists forcibly took Maori land. But such theft happened more than 100 years ago and successive recent governments have worked hard to atonie for Pakeha sins. Neither colonists nor Pakeha killed Chris and Cru Kahui.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The nasty elegance of the final rhetorical question is particularly striking. Responsibility for the deaths is parsed in terms of categories, and if it wasn’t the colonist category or the Pakeha category who killed the children, the clear implication, left unsaid for obvious reasons, is that it was Maori, as a category, who were responsible. And this message is exactly what has been and will be picked up and circulated in the story we tell of the Kahui twins. One of the big stories in New Zealand’s media lately has been the awful murder of 12-week-old twins, and the way the family has closed ranks and failed to co-operate in any way with police. Politicians and pundits have weighed in. Talkback and letters pages and blogs are awash with calls for decisive action. The … Continue reading [mediawatch] The Kahui Twins: Opinioneering<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-61","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs usual, I’m most interested in how the media are dealing with the affair, and how opinions in the media guide and reflect the nation’s mood. There is much to consider.
\nFirst:<\/b> NZ media have certainly pushed a lot of angry conservative voices to the forefront, and made great hay out of their condemnation of the Kahuis, but the worst we have is still miles more considerate and dignified and sensible than the tabloid culture in the UK. This is something for which we should be very thankful. Once a tabloid culture is in place, it is all but impossible to shift, and for whatever combination of reasons we have avoided one so far. This is a definite positive for our national culture.
\nSecond:<\/b> That said, we don’t have any strong left presence in our media at all, or indeed any differences of opinion worth noting. The Evening Post<\/i> was NZ’s only remotely lefty paper, and when that was swallowed up into The Dominion<\/i> nothing remained on the left but the odd columnist in small community papers. (This is part of a bigger issue: the way in which NZ’s homogeneous media converge quickly on a single perspective, which becomes massively influential on NZ society’s perception.)
\nThird:<\/b> Today’s editorial in The Dominion Post<\/i> is as good a summation as any of the ‘party line’ on the Kahui affair. It certainly reflects the underlying premise of much reporting I’ve encountered, and of course the letters pages and talkback are full of less-eloquent expressions of the same ideas.
\nUnsurprisingly I have a lot of problems with the editorial, its premises and its conclusions. One thing that stood out as a good example of the kind of rhetorical gamesmanship surrounding this and similar issues is the speed of generalising. The whole affair is understood in terms of categories much more than people. (This tendency bears some relationship to the Either\/Or stuff I was thinking about two years ago<\/a>.)
\nCheck out this paragraph, answering a claim that this kind of abuse is due to the legacy of colonial injustice:<\/p>\n
\n(I am aware that the construction has an alternate reading, condemning the specific people attempting to shift blame to the general categories “Pakeha” and “colonists” instead of taking responsibility; but the meaning I talk about above is just as present, perhaps even more so.)
\nWhile I’m at it, have a look at the “But…” sentence. Aside from the charmingly naive Kiwi perspective that 100 years is a long time, the Pakeha response to injustice is framed in terms of ‘atonement for sins’. Actual redress for the harm done to Maori is nowhere to be seen; the injustice is implicitly constructed from a Pakeha viewpoint, such that a sufficient penance is all that is required to see an end to the matter. The real problem, one that our country has been struggling through for the past thirty years, is that those injustices were a systematic abduction of power which has perpetuated to this day. Penance is not at all what is required to answer what happened in our past; power redistribution is.
\nPower is precisely what is at stake here. The Kahui family, a screwed-up collection of relatives with no interest in social responsibility, surviving entirely on welfare, is an archetypal example of the legacy of powerlessness. This is exactly what we should expect to have created.
\nAs might be expected, the editorial puts great faith in the redemptive power of capitalism. Paid work, it claims, would have saved this family. This claim is made completely straight-faced, without elaboration, as none is needed; we all understand the assumptions at work here. Once, ‘christian faith’ would have been the solution; the babies would have been killed by godlessness, not joblessness.
\nThe moralism, however, is exactly the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"