Is there media bias in New Zealand? | Liam Hehir | The Common Room

There's an old joke about a man asking a fish about what it's like to live underwater. "What is water?" the fish replies. But what do fish, water and our media have in common? Liam Hehir questions whether there is media bias in New Zealand.

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[spkay]

There’s a reason why they hardly ever allow comments on controversial topics. Control.

[DrSamIAm]

Sounds like the journalists need some implicit bias training.

[andrewoh]

Liam, you need to read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Then you'll realize how we're being played.

[dougjohnstone]

The core underlying driver of media bias is the collapse of the legacy advertising industry into digital. While the industry is growing Digital spend has gone from 700m to 1.6B in 7 years with most of the benefit going to Facebook and Google Advertising. This has hollowed out the traditional funding for Journalism and is driving Click Bate Journalism. So extreme views get clicks. One answer is to go after Google/Facebook for a share of profit on journalism articles which is what Australia is doing.

[southpacific]

FingersX when Elon Musk gets his hands on Twitter he'll change the woke landscape of it and make it about Free Speech and real Transparency (Not the Labour type of Transparency!)

[jamesw]

The problem I have here is news is dominated by handful of outlets that seem to be mostly left. I like to have a range of opinions not just view of one. That’s before I then start with the fact everything is city focused and forgets about the rest of NZ.

[markhoffman]

If you have to ask you have been conditioned as per their plan ...

[southpacific]

Couldn't agree more, Nz left media are wet fish!!🤣

[willguynz]

Some interesting thoughts here Liam. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the following:

1) You said there have been 'more than enough .. research papers to establish that the average journalist is well to the left of the average voter', can you provide some details about these research papers or surveys? I'd love to read the primary sources myself.

2) Do you think there is generalisability of the Knight Foundation report (Professor Deen Freelon)? I note that this was commissioned in America, used American political issues, an American dataset and a novel (and subsequently untested/unproven) ideological scoring algorithm. We have a very different population (both in real-life and on Twitter) with our own unique political issues – I personally don't think that you can generalise the study. I personally think it is a bit of a stretch to say that New Zealand journalists on Twitter are surrounded by left-wing voices, we don't have any local evidence or data to support that and we are relying on very different data from America to make that case.

[iwritejacobin-bddr]

It should be legal to hunt you like wild deer #drake #godsplan

[Ghee]

Aren’t journalists trained in Activism journalism? This is part of their course. That is as left as Lenin.

[danielfeehan]

FFS Liam, you soggy snowflake! Mike "New Zealand's number one talk host" Hosking might like a word about how dominant left wing media is in NZ 🤣