"Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda." And John Campbell.

JOHN CAMPBELL IS SAID to be a journalist. What we used to call a reporter.

Over at The Halfling's blog, he critiques John Cambell's view "that journalism is not an objective craft but a subjective one and that, in the final analysis, objectivity is impossible." What we used to call: an excuse for bad reporting. 

Beneath Campbell's essay-length excuse, writes The Halfling, "there is a very strong element or subtext of post-modernist critical theory." Campbell, he says, "equates 'truth' with story-telling rather than ascertaining truth from an empirical and evidence based examination. ... He then sweepingly and without any evidential foundation suggests that objectivity is a myth."

Campbell's self-contradictory assertion (asserting relativism as an absolute truth) at once dismisses every reporter who risk their lives in pursuit of the facts about a story, while providing the self-serving basis for his argument that he is entitled to use state television to broadcast his own opinions in the guise of "journalism." But as The Halfling observes:

In the course of human endeavours it is possible and at times necessary and essential to separate the subjective from the objective – in journalism as much as in justice. It would seem from Mr. Campbell’s discussion that he is unable or unwilling to do that.

How might a more honest Mr Campbell go about that? How would you know yourself to separate objective journalism from the subjective? Does it matter? Well, since Mr Campbell thinks he's defending journalism, he might reflect that (as the Associated Press Handbook still asserts) while "reporters are each driven by their own individual brand of curiosity, empathy, or downright pushiness, [what's still necessary are] solid interview techniques, source development, investigative and organisational skills, and keen objectivity to recognise, obtain, and effectively communicate a story to a reader, viewer or listener."

In summary, "'journalism,' as a distinctive literary genre, does not exist without objectivity." At every step.

You could start by looking at what objective journalism once meant, as the author of that last statement has done.  In his thesis on objectivity in journalism, Les Lane defines defines journalism as “an objective account of current events”: 

Objectivity, currency, and the focus on events, are journalism’s key ingredients. Take away any of them, and 'journalism,' as a distinctive genre, disappears. Substitute a focus on ideas for the journalistic focus on events, and you get academia. Substitute the past for the present and you get history. Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda. 

Which is where Mr Campbell's work has ended up.

SO SINCE WE KNOW what propaganda looks like, let's focus instead on the objectivity that Campbell has abandoned. John De Mott of Temple University's journalism school identified three essential starting points for anyone calling himself a journalist:

Every vocation or occupational calling relies upon certain basic assumptions about the nature of reality ... Journalism is no exception, obviously. We assume three things:

    First, that there is such a thing as objective reality ... existingf incependent of our own individual existence.

    Second, that such reality ... can be comprehended – somehow – by a human mind.

    Third, that comprehension or understanding of objective reality ... can be communicated from one human mind to another.

It should be obvious that when a journalist (or alleged journalist, like Mr Campbell) denies objectivity in their profession, "they are also denying the possibility of it in any human endeavour."

Even if we're not clear on a definition of objectivity, when we tune into organisation purporting to report the news, there are several elements we would expect to encounter:

• Factual content: reporting the facts without the reporter’s own opinions, values, analysis, interpretation, partisan cause, or financial interests
• Accuracy: getting information right
• Impersonality/detachment: presenting the facts without first-person reference to the reporter’s impressions, feelings, actions, etc.
• Balance/fairness: reporting the different sides of a conflict, or opinions on an issue, without slanting toward one side
• Transparency: naming and explaining sources
• Independence: maintaining autonomy from sources of information and from other potentially biasing interests.

In coming out against objectivity, Canpbell is saying these things — accuracy, transparency, factual content – are less important than his own myth-making. 

Now that we know, we should take him at his word. And ignore him.

OBJECTIVITY DOESN'T SIMPLY MEAN pointing a camera at random and broadcasting the resulting "facts.  There are two issues: selection, and context.

Every good reporter selects the relevant facts to write about and broadcast; every newsroom editor which events and issues to cover. Every editor and reporter will have their own views, opinions and biases. Does that mean that "there is no real difference between factual reporting and opinion"? That all news is necessarily subjective? No:

"[O]bjective thinking is committed to truth and employs rational methods; subjective thinking involves willful disregard of the truth and/or the use of nonrational methods. The decisions journalists make in selecting what to cover and how to cover it can therefore be either objective or subjective, depending on their methods and their intent. ...

The key to objectivity is a commitment to telling the truth as best one can, without evasion.

HISTORICALLY, WRITES LANE, THE idea of  objectivity in journalism evolved through four stages, "from its emergence in the 1830s as Nonpartisanship, through Neutrality, Focus-on-Facts and Detachment, to the ambiguity of the present day." 

The 'Four Quadrants': the four evolutionary stages of journalistic objectivity
[from Lane, 'A reexamination of the canon of objectivity in American journalism (2001)']

Part of the problem, observes Lane, is "the assumption that objectivity is an ideal, absolute, impossible, incomprehensible, value-free state of being, outside of all physical, cognitive, psychological, and social contexts, where reality is perceived without distortions of any kind." To be objective in this confused view would be to somehow have access to "absolute truth" – to have the "God's-eye view on a story. To discard this impossible idea is the first step. The remedy, he argues, is what those four stages were struggling towards, which is Contextual Independence. There is one reality about which to report, and it is seen from many contexts — of which the reporter's is only one. An objective journalist therefore would be a reporter "who faithfully and accurately gets-both(all)-sides. ... In short, journalistic objectivity therefore becomes the ability to surf contexts."

Sounds like fun, right!

Note that arguing that "all knowledge is contextual" is not that same as saying that "everything is relative." It simply recognises that knowledge is always gained under certain conditions at certain times. "Journalists, like other seekers, must learn to trust themselves and their fellows and the world enough to take everything in" advises Michael Sschudson (author of the much-quoted Discovering the News), "while distrusting themselves and others and the appearance of the world enough not to be taken in by everything."

They would refuse, then, as some of them do now, either to surrender to relativism or to submit uncritically to arbitrary conventions established in the name of objectivity. This requires both personal and institutional tolerance of uncertainty and acceptance of risk and commitment to caring for truth. If this is difficult in journalism, it s nonetheless most vital, for the daily persuasions of journalists reflect and become our own.

Campbell has simply abandoned his calling. Perhaps his employers should be calling him on it.

Quote of the morning: Smalley on Campbell

“I don’t want to see it go. no journalist would ever want to see a current affairs show
axed – but if it is axed, there is no-one to blame except the public. New Zealanders
killed Campbell Live, because New Zealanders stopped watching.”
- Rachel Smalley, ‘The fickle old world of TV’

Campbell Live and the Culture of Cretinism

Guest post by Lindsay Perigo

The rumoured looming demise of Campbell Live has triggered an avalanche of obituaries for "true current affairs," of which John Campbell, his fans claim, is the last embodiment standing.

Rather than "lawyer up," as other rumours suggest Campbell to be doing in an effort to retain his slot, I'd urge him to negotiate a new slot where ratings pressure is not so intense, and where he can be himself unreservedly: sharp, ferocious, funny ... and somewhere to the left of Jim Anderton. "True current affairs" is ideologically non-partisan; in that sense, its death occurred long ago, in all media. Let Campbell be liberated from the necessity of pretending he's non-partisan, and be the John Pilger he's always hankered to be. Let him be a Sean Hannity of the Left ... and make no bones about it. If TV3 are worried about "balance," they can always point to Paul Henry.

Even as I dispense this unimpeachable advice, however, I have a sinking feeling the channel itself simply won't be interested. This is an enterprise whose executives are, rightly enough, primarily focused on turning a profit for its long-denied, long-suffering investors. As such, they must ensure that TV3 has as many viewers as possible in order to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. This is where a terminal problem arises in our current culture for any TV programme that even remotely smacks of substance.

For twenty-five years at least, state schools, captured by left-nihilists hell-bent on the destruction of civilised values and behaviour, of intelligence and idealism, have been diligently churning out zombies. Illiterate, innumerate, inarticulate zombies. The walking brain-dead. These infantilised deformities can barely read or write; they can't spell or punctuate; they think "grammar" refers to their parents' mothers; they imagine syntax is a levy on their crack; they have a vocabulary of 6 words ("cool," "awesome," "like" and "oh my god") with a few more incorporated into a sort-of complete sentence on a good day ("Like, oh my god, I'm like so totally over it!"); in lieu of speech they evince that lethal affliction sometimes charitably characterised as an "accent"; they cannot focus on one thing for more than a nano-second; and, most crucially, they cannot think conceptually (the distinctively human mode of thinking)—theirs is the perceptual world of babies and animals. Since they can't truly think, they don't truly feel—hence the chilling Narcissism noted by many commentators. Every part of their brain except that which deals with toys and gadgets has been lobotomised by the child-molesters of the mind who, decades ago, were let loose in our (anti-)education system.

Thus do we have a cosmic paradox that will astound future historians: in the words of comedian Louis C. K., "an amazing, amazing world wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care." Many of these zombies are now back in the classrooms ... as teachers. And it is now largely zombies whom television channels have to secure as viewers in order to attract advertisers.

It doesn't help that television executives and programmers, instead of engaging in zombification as though it were a regrettable necessity, do so with aggressive, unseemly relish; they are sleaze, in eager thrall to the stupefied.

In such an environment, John Campbell doesn't stand a chance—no matter how much he tries to accommodate it by hype and hyperventilation and saying "awesome" when he'd rather say "marvellous." Put him out of his misery in a slot where he's not obligated to do that!

I am not an advocate of the view that government should own television channels. Nonetheless, while government-spawned zombies rule, and government does own a television network, I would say the least government can and should do is make that network a place where zombification is halted and reversed. Restore "true current affairs." Restore genuine ideological neutrality. Restore well-spokenness as a crucial part of a broadcaster's craft. Let this channel be a haven to which non-zombies can repair. And apply the same philosophy to Radio New Zealand where, instead, a hybrid of zombification and hard-left political correctness is currently being pursued.

Such a course, in conjunction with the de-zombification of our schools, would go a long way toward creating a culture in which a) thinking is not only permitted but encouraged, and b) ideas are promoted and debated with the same zeal Mark Weldon and Julie Christie bring to their unutterably odious and vacuous "reality" shows.

That would be a culture fit for brain-alive human beings. I'm sure John Campbell would thrive in it.

---

Lindsay Perigo is a former TVNZ newsreader and current affairs interviewer. He left TVNZ in 1993, proclaiming its news and current affairs "braindead."
He is the author of “Shut the Duck Up—Kiwis Don't Quack,” Total Passion for the Total Height, and The One Tenor.
Visit him at  lindsayperigo.com, and follow him at SOLO, where this post first appeared.

Sorry, Campbell who?

May I interrupt the almost wall-to-wall social media handwringing about the demise of the John Campbell show to say that I don’t give a flying fuck?

Thank you.

I am one of the 96% who don’t watch him (the four percent of NZers who do not being sufficient, it’s reliably suggested, to justify shareholders subsidising his show). Truth be told, I don’t watch the other mob at 7 either – or any mob at all for that matter. Too much insulting viewers’ intelligence on all channels for my money, and that’s all channels both here and overseas bother to do. So my TV stays hooked up to my computer, and my interest in who’s dumbing down what and who gets sacked where is confined mainly to the small viewing portions of news-on-demand that I’m either sent or recommended – which generally only confirms my view that the longer the TV stays disconnected from the aerial the better (leaving me to enjoy Netflix, my monthly internet subscription to live AFL, and bludging off friends’ Sky subscriptions when cricketers and Counties are playing well).

Now, fair’s fair, for all I know NZ’s half-hour of Jon-Stewart-Without-the-Jokes may well have become the last bastion of intelligent journalism on the telly, just as its noisy advocates say it is. But I doubt it. So Socialism at Seven will have to die without my signing a petition to save it.

There it is.

PS: To be perfectly, absolutely, one-hundred percent fair, I have said good things about the Campbell show on occasions. Some of those occasions are in my archives here.

John Key & the GCSB [update 2]

Two politicians are having lunch together. All of a sudden
one stands up and shouts: “You’re lying.”
“I know,” replies the other. “But just hear me out.”

Circumstance and coincidence, as Russell Brown observes, but there’s a hell of a lot of both about.

Last night's Campbell Live report on the complex story of the GCSB, the Prime Minister, Kim Dotcom, Ian Fletcher and the Americans may have left a few viewers scratching their heads last night. What, exactly, was Campbell saying and what was its import?
    … Certainly, the report was principally a re-stating of previously-aired facts. But its new claims were not immaterial.
    The most interesting of them was that in December 2011, incoming GCSB director Ian Fletcher took leave from his job in Queensland and flew to Wellington for meetings with John Key, acting GCSB boss Simon Murdoch and Hugh Wolfenson … in the same week that the surveillance of Dotcom began, but we continue to be told that neither Key or Fletcher had any advance knowledge of the surveillance operation or the raid. Key has said he did not know who Dotcom was until the day before the raid and up till now we've thought that Fletcher only came into the picture when he officially started at the GCSB 10 days after the raid.
    The programme also went back over the series of misleading statements [and memory losses] Key has made over his relationship with Fletcher and the circumstances of Fletcher's recruitment…

For a Prime Minister who Fran O’Sullivan reckons is “world class” -- speaking without notes, “completely fluent,” “very much in the mode of a former top-flight international businessman,” “the guy who served on the board of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve” – he continues to have a heck of a lot of very convenient memory loss.

“But he’s such a *nice* man…”  He wouldn’t lie, would he. (Well, only about his achievements and about tax cuts and raising GST and smacking and his share ownership and complementary medicines and manifesto promises and Maori seats and whether or not his GCSB bill will enable them to spy wholesale on all NZers and where he was when the Springbok tour was on (or was that just another memory loss?).

And what of the meeting on

March 16, 2011, a week after it was announced that [former GCSB head General Jerry] Mataparae would be moving on from the job of New Zealand's top spy, [when] US director of National Intelligence James Clapper flew into Wellington for meetings with Key and others. … [And] another meeting, over dinner at the home of British High Commissioner Vicki Treadell on October 11, 2011, where the guests were Key, his head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Martin Wevers, SIS chief Warren Tucker, Ministry of Foreign Affairs CEO John Allen, Defence Force chief Lt Gen Richard Rhys Jones -- and Ian Fletcher, four months before taking up his role at the GCSB. All of them have declined to comment on the purpose of the meeting.
    The meeting at Treadell's home may simply have been a get-to-know-you for Fletcher. That wouldn't be unusual. But it does seem unusual that Fletcher, having been brought into the loop so far in advance of starting his new job, and then having flown over yet again for a meeting in the same week that surveillance of Dotcom actually began, remained innocent of what was a notable and legally perilous operation on behalf of the US government.

As Russell says, “Campbell Live may turn out to have grossly over-reached, as critics insist. But there seems every reason to keep digging.”

And to keep asking why foreign officers of the law like the FBI were given complete carte blanche to operate within our borders, with our GCSB acting apparently as handmaiden.

UPDATE 1:  Russell Brown updates subsequent events at Question Time this avo:

Key has just been pressed on the issues at Question Time.
        - He has admitted that *both* meetings with Fletcher were organised by his office.
        - But he insists he didn’t discuss the GCSB role at all with Fletcher at the breakfast meeting.
        - Asked about his false statement that Rennie came to him with the proposal to hire Fletcher: "that was
          my recollection at the time".
        - He “can’t be sure” whether DPMC briefed him about Kim Dotcom on December 14.
The last one is absurd. He’s been repeatedly pressed on his foreknowledge of Dotcom and insisted he’d never even heard of the guy until January 19. Now he says he hasn’t even checked to see whether he got a briefing on Dotcom from his own department?
    How on earth does he get away with this stuff?

UPDATE 2:  Dim Post:

But Kim Dotcom is only one of 88 instances of illegal spying that we know about, and the GCSB were, presumably, also conducting some surveillance that wasn’t against the law. Kim Dotcom is their only operation we’re aware of so I think there’s a temptation to build narratives around him. If we didn’t know about Dotcom and instead knew, say, that the GCSB had illegally spied on New Zealand based friends and relatives of Daryl Jones, the dual New Zealand/Australian citizen assassinated in a drone strike in Yemen in November 2013 (there’s no evidence this happened but it’s not unlikely) then we’d be looking at it all very differently and try to find meaning in Fletcher’s appointment there.
    Because Fletcher’s appointment is weird. Why did Key shoulder-tap this guy with no background in intelligence to be head of our signals intelligence agency and then repeatedly lie about it? Even if you don’t buy into the Campbell Live narrative and – like DPF – think its all an absurd conspiracy theory, that’s still a pretty relevant question.

John Campbell versus Charles Darwin

John Campbell is shilling for warmists again – in the process setting himself against observations made by none other than Charles Darwin.

Setting off a Twitter mini-feud with Matthew Hooton on Monday, Campbell informed his followers, presumably to raise the profile of the latest IPCC report – a report summarised (approvingly) by Palmerston  North blogger Idiot/Savant as predicting “war, famine and death,” and by resigning IPCC scientist Richard Tol as an unjustified “apocalyptic” survey heavy on exaggeration.

Campbell, of course, swallowed whole the four horsemen rhetoric and was already to air an exposé filmed months ago for the report’s release this week, tweeting:

The country that appeared on Campbell’s Socialism at Seven was the Marshall Islands. Drowning already, said Campbell’s reporter, under the effects of climate change.

Really?

As I responded to Campbell,

More that that below.

For background, like most of the coral atolls Tristram Clayton will no doubt be reporting on, their actual problem is not and never has been global warming. In fact sea level rise  has not been accelerating at all around the Pacific. Their problem is not global warming but rising populations interacting wit the geology of low-lying coral atolls, which use seawater for support. Indeed,

the most important fact was discovered by none other than Charles Darwin. He realized that coral atolls essentially “float” on the surface of the sea. When the sea rises, the atoll rises with it. They are not solid, like a rock island. They are a pile of sand and rubble. There is always material added and material being lost. Atolls exist in a delicate balance between new sand and coral rubble being added from the reef, and atoll sand and rubble being eroded by wind and wave back into the sea or into the lagoon. As sea level rises, the balance tips in favor of sand and rubble being added to the atoll. The result is that the atoll rises with the sea level.
    Darwin’s discovery also explained why coral atolls occur in rings as in Fig. 2 above. They started as a circular inshore coral reef around a volcanic rock island. As the sea level rose, flooding more and more of the island, the coral grew upwards. Eventually the island was drowned by the rising sea levels, and all that is left is the ring of reef and coral atolls.
    Why don’t we see atolls getting fifty feet high? Wind erosion keeps atolls from getting too tall. Wind increases rapidly with distance above the ocean. The atolls simply cannot get taller. The sand at that elevation is blown away as fast as it is added. That’s why all atolls are so low-lying.
    When the sea level rises, wind erosion decreases. The coral itself continues to grow upwards to match the sea level rise. Because the coral continues to flourish, the flow of sand and rubble onto the atoll continues, and with reduced wind erosion the atoll height increases by the amount of the sea level rise.
    Since (as Darwin showed) atolls float up with the sea level, the idea that they will be buried by sea level rises is totally unfounded. Despite never being more than a few metres tall, hey have survived a sea level rise of up to three hundred plus feet (call it a hundred metres) within the last twenty thousand years. Historically they have floated up higher than the peaks of drowned mountains.
    So the …. claim is not true ... Atolls are created by sea level rise, not destroyed by sea level rise.

You may take that as general background for all of John Campbell’s exposes about drowning atolls.

To which you might also add the general fact that while sea level itself has not been rising catastrophically around these “floating islands,” the atoll-based stations at which sea level is measured  have been sinking – sinking due to construction activity on the “coral sponge” associated with rising populations.

Regarding the specifics of the Marshall Islands, if I may quote myself from last year when NZ politicians and reporters headed to the Marshall’s

for a week’s grandstanding with each other over things they know nothing about.

The know-nothingism has started early this time:

The Marshall Islands, a series of 29 coral atolls and islands halfway between Australia and Hawaii, sit just 2m above sea level on average and are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increasingly intense storms and droughts.
    "Climate change is already here," said Marshall Islands Vice-President Tony de Brum before the 44th Pacific Islands Forum..
He said the Marshalls and their sinking neighbours Kiribati and Tuvalu should not be seen as disposable but as the canary in the mine…

Specifically, Vice-President  de Brum is saying the Marshall Islands is supposed to be drowning under the waves of rising sea levels that are rising at an increasing rate, that the acceleration is caused by increasing global warming, that it is our industrial production is causing the increase—and the industrial world should do something to help them.

And yet,  sea levels in the Pacific have been rising all century quite independently of the scare about global warming (which is only supposed to have started in earnest in the nineties) at a steady rate of 3.0 +/- 0.4 mm/yr.

And just as in the rest of the Pacific, around the Marshalls sea level rise  has not been accelerating at all:

Yes, there are sea level measurements you can point to showing an accelerating sea-level rise, but they’re taken at a place in the Marshalls called Kwajalein, which is affected by a local subsidence in the sensitive coral atoll induced by building construction.  Similar to the problems at Tuvalu.

It is not that the sea around coral-based Kwajalein is rising fast; it’s that the land at the stations measuring sea level is sinking fast. As it is at all the "floating islands" like the Marshalls so frequently cited as canaries.

But you wouldn’t tout those sorts of distorted figures from those sinking stations would you, just to make some headlines? “Sea levels on the Marshall Islands have risen 7mm a year since 1993. The global average is 0.4mm.” Oh, you would.

And already, the world’s media are lapping it up unquestioningly.

As too they are lapping up the claim that “extreme weather events” such as floods and droughts and decreasing fresh water threaten the population. But this is a population surviving on small, very low-lying coral atolls with little ability to store fresh water. A rapidly increasing population (more than five times bigger than five decades ago) is entirely dependent for its drinking water on what comes from the sky. And neither rainfall nor storage capacity is increasing.  As with its near-neighbour Kiribati, the real problem is really so many people, so little rain.

Not that either [John Campbell or] our intellectually-challenged Foreign Minister is likely to think that through.

Marshall Islands President Christopher Loeak will be happy to hear he has the ear of The Stunted One, since he argues “that western countries like ours need to do more, as they are the ones most to blame for climate change.”

Sounds to me like man coming to the world’s conclaves with a begging bowl in one hand and a gun at the world’s producers with the other.

If he wants help for his country’s very real problems, why doesn’t he just ask nicely instead of helping to perpetuate a fraud.

He is not drowning, but waving for foreign aid.

GUEST POST: Who pays for the Christchurch grandomania?

The release of the government’s CGI-powered plan for the ruined centre of Christchurch has got many people talking excitedly about living in a CGI city, but (apart from this story, for which kudos to the John Campbell Show) little attention to the 840 property owners who are to have their land taken for the forthcoming fantasy land.

I asked a thoughtful Christchurch friend to respond….

As a loyal Christchurch resident for most of my life, here’s my view on what was presented the other day.

The plan is misguided. Not just misguided, but expensive and well beyond our means.  Not just expensive and well beyond our means, this “plan” is economically suicidal.

Where do they think the money will come from in a ruined city to pay the bill for the grandomania? How on earth could it ever be repaid. Is Christchurch to be on welfare for life?

This “plan” will be devastating to ratepayers in Christchurch, and to taxpayers nationwide. In short, it is a disaster.

But it gets worse.

What about those unnoticed and unrepresented souls who have been and will be paying the greatest price for this “plan”?  I mean those land and building owners whose property will be taken from them to pay for a dream conceived in a bureaucrat’s office. Land and building owners, in many cases, who will now have done to them by government and council what the earthquake couldn’t manage: enforced confiscation, with the value of their “compensation” to be determined by the Gauleiters carrying out The Plan.

What does this do to the property rights land owners thought they once enjoyed? They’ve gone. Completely and utterly.

And what does the dismissive attitude by so many people to the wholesale destruction of property rights say about who we have become? I’ll leave that for you to answer.

Because rather than respecting property rights as one of the single biggest achievements of civil society, in this plan and the talk around it, property rights are treated as just a minor inconvenience for those in power to trample on. This is just the culmination of virtually every stage in the recovery process which have deteriorated the institutional integrity of the country.

Where is the outcry?

There is a word for a system of government that rides roughshod over property owners in the name of the greater good.  It was a system great men went to war to destroy. Now, it’s accepted for the price of a new stadium and a few trees.

That public sentiment accepts this—is unconcerned that this blatant fascism is now the new normal—is scary. It’s frightening. People casually look at the plan and debate whether they like it or not. Whether the “frame” should be one block further north or south; whether there should be more cycle paths or trams. What the public discourse totally ignores is the owners of the land on which these pretty pictures are based—and what it totally avoids is that this is going to be the biggest forced confiscation of private property* since the Maori Wars.

Have we learned nothing?

I never thought my fellow citizens would embrace outright fascism, but they have willingly done so on every occasion since the earthquake. This casual embrace of fascism is frightening. Anyone that is against their idealistic plan for a new order is just “not getting behind recovery.”  They’re not a good Cantab. They’re not working towards the “greater good.”

This is sick.

And take a look at who gets to define this “greater good”? They are far from uninterested outsiders. Two of the biggest players in the  plan, with their mugs all over the report, are Ngai Tahu and the Christchurch City Council. These  are not passive players in the game. They are very the two biggest landowners in the city, with significant pull already in setting the rules of the game.  Forget Graham Henry’s theories about Wayne Barnes, this is a fixed match. And on the losing team will be 840 private property owners and the long-suffering taxpayer.

And how ironic that Ngai Tahu, whose current fortune was built on restitution for alleged confiscations of the past, are now up to their meres in having carried out for their benefit a broad-based confiscation of the present.

Pastor Niemoller’s warning has never sounded so ominous in New Zealand:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak.

 

* Under the guise of ‘negotiation,' but confiscation no less—at prices determined by the confiscator.

Leaders debate ‘Die Wurm’

As you’ve possibly already heard, if you’re planning on giving yourself nausea tonight by watching TweedleDum and TweedleDummer pretend to slug it tonight out over their minute differences in policy on TV3’s sanitised “debate,” then you’ll find that downloading your own “worm” in either Android or iPhone form will allow you to add to the pretence debate by making your own contribution to the rise and fall of the onscreen “worm.”

Which means that every time either Smile-and-Wave or Smile-and-Cringe says something you can agree with, you can give them a loud online cheer.

Which really means you can set your own worm to “disapprove” for the whole evening, and then head off to do something much more productive with your night than watching these morons pretend they have anything fundamental about which they disagree.

Here below is ‘Die Wurm’* I’d prefer them both to meet tonight. Instead, they’ll face John Campbell…

* * * * *

* As every Wagner lover could tell you, ‘Die Wurm’ is German for dragon.

Don’t listen to the lunatic

Moon Man Ken Ring has made a lot of noise by saying he predicted the big Christchurch earthquake.

Technically, he’s right.  He did. But…

Source: David Winter,  S C I   B L O G S

… and he can’t even get his magnitudes right.

This man is now telling people there will be another serious earthquake on March 22, scaring already scared people so much that some are even talking about leaving.

Ken Ring is a shroud-waving disgrace.

Not only is the charlatan scaring people so he can help himself to a headline, but when the inevitable aftershock occurs on March 20 (hopefully a minor one), Ring and his lunatics will jump and down and say “see!”—forgetting that even a monkey on a typewriter will eventually make a word, especially when there’s  so many words you can make.  Because since September 4 Christchurch has endured over four thousand aftershocks.

Source: EQ.org.nz

And “the embarrassing fact is that Ring himself did NOT expect there to be another major earthquake in Christchurch.” [SCROLL DOWN to comment 147]

And while correlation is not causality, and Ring says the moon causes earthquakes,  no correlation is really nothing at all, is it. See below. (The grey line at the top of the graph below shows the moon illumination percentage …  the blue line shows the distance between Earth and the moon … the red line shows the total energy released each day … the orange line shows the total number of quakes each day.)

Source: Paul Nichols’ Christchurch Quake Map

Ken Ring is a man who predicts the weather, while telling people he doesn’t make predictions.

He says he has opinions but no proof. On that we can certainly believe him.

He can’t predict the weather.

He can’t predict earthquakes.

Ken Ring is a charlatan.  Catabrians, if any are reading this, please don’t change your lives on the basis of a man who’s selling you snake oil.

You can have an open mind, but not so open that you allow anything to crawl in.

PS: No, I didn’t see the interview with John Campbell on Socialism at Seven last night. I don’t watch him. (You can see it here if you like.)
    If it’s true that Campbell bullied Ring, the greatest damage done by the bullying is not that it was the worst piece of egotistical, self-important, out of control, closed-minded, biased, unprofessional  non-interviewing Brian Edwards has seen in more than 40 years of New Zealand television (because that pretty much describes every interview Campbell does, which is why I don’t bother watching him), but that it didn’t give Ring a chance to bury himself in his own words. That’s surely the point of good interviewing. To let your audience see for themselves when a flake is being interviewed.

And in bullying rather than burying his interviewee, Campbell would have allowed Ring to gain his viewers’ sympathy instead of their contempt. Surely not at all what he intended.

Beehive bludgers

Wasn’t last night’s news hour-and-half delicious.  Just for once, instead of watching the usual footage lauding your politicians as demi-gods, it was possible to sit back and bask as both news teams went to town and put their talents to use picking apart the venal bastards who pick your pocket for their own peccadilloes.  Instead of lauding the Beehive bludgers for their ability to perform miracles, as they usually do, Campbell and Sainsbury and the main news reports before them took apart the Ministerial heavy spenders and their hefty case of entitle-itis.

"It's the sort of thing that can undermine confidence in politicians," said your Prime Minister.  No, John, it’s the sort of thing that can allow us all to see the scum for what they are: sordid little power-lusters. 

Just the facts, ma'am [Update 2]

Deborah Hill-Cone suggests in today's Business Herald that "bitter bloggers" who lambast the mainstream media for its manifest failings are duty bound to solve old media's problems for them, i.e., to shed some light on "how the [mainstream] media might turn a buck so we [the royal "we"?] can fund quality journalism." Ironically, her column is not online, so her audience have to rely on bloggers to retype it all for her, but here's her main beef, that

"all this old versus new media aggro is just a distraction from the fact that neither [bloggers nor] Rupert Murdoch . . . have an answer for the future of journalism."

Well, it's not like I'm duty bound to solve all the problems for the profession of journalism (there's more than enough problems in my own profession of architecture, thanks very much), but here's a simple enough solution for the old media to adopt -- so simple that even a journalist might understand.  Here it is::

            Recognise the division of labour, boys and girls, and just report the news!

We, the bloggers, can get on with commenting on the news, since that's what we do best; and you get on with finding and reporting the news, since that's what you're supposed to do best. In other words:

• don't editorialise;
• don't pontificate;
• don't ask how people feel, ask instead what they saw;
• don't report events as if people are outraged, just report the events themselves;
• dobn't report what everyone knows is transparent science fiction; report real science fact instead;
• don't report what "celebrities" do as if it matters a damn;
• don't report puff pieces about actors/musicians/writers as if they're not just puff-pieces for their new film/album/book;
• don't report what everyone knows is just spin) -- report instead what's being spun, and the news that someone is spinning, and who;
• don't assume the whole world has the same values as your friends;
• don't just rewrite press releases as if they were news;
• and don't create the news yourself.
• In short, just report the news. All of it. As if the truth actually mattered.

Your role model in this new endeavour should not be Woman's Day, which your front pages and the Six O'Clock News more and more resemble, but the classic private detective whose motto should be hung over your desk in copperplate lettering: "Just the facts, ma'am."

This week offers the perfect example of why people are switching off the mainstream. With 400,000 Americans taking up pro-freedom signs against their government, the mainstream media has either pretended they don't exist -- preferring instead to focus on the tough issues like the new White House dog -- or tried to suggest all the protesters are insane. Meanwhile, the issue of the week in New Zealand, according to every news report every time I switch on the local media, is the latest in the Tony Veitch saga -- giving numb-nut so-called journalists the opportunity to interview each other over how well they did (or didn't) handle the story, and Mark Sainsbury and John Campbell the chance to wring their hands over the courage/bravery/pluckiness [delete one] of the two protagonists.

No wonder no one can take mainstream journalism seriously any more. Instead of Philip Marlowe, we have to endure endless re-runs of Barbara Cartland.

UPDATE 1: Why do so many journalists blog, despite their apparent opposition to the concept? Simple, says one journalist cum blogger: "there’s a part of me that loves blogging because you’re allowed to break the journalism rules."

So read on here, journalists, for the top 10 journalism rules you should go right ahead and break on your blog. Do it, it's okay.

UPDATE 2:  Deborah Hill-Cone's blog column is now online.