A review commissioned by Radio New Zealand finds the broadcaster upholding international best practice with its coverage of a "complex and contested" issue.
There is something systemically wrong at RNZ that is compromising its ability to be a fair and balanced news organisation in pursuit of telling the truth.
I have heard RNZ report Israeli propaganda as fact and anyone who reads the independent review regarding what happened with Mick quickly realises it is RNZ who behaved appallingly and without any integrity.
The organisation needs to be dismantled. We need a journalism reset at both RNZ and TVNZ. It is to our detriment if we keep listening to mouthpieces of Western bias in a world where those very countries are supporting and funding the genocide of the Palestinian people.
It is also of note we get a hard Western line when it comes to China. We need the truth not the USA’s manipulation of news outlets so we will buy into warmongering with our biggest trading partner.
RNZ has compromised its own integrity and this made itself irrelevant when it comes to journalism. How do we know what to trust and not what to trust as the truth when their own investigation into their reporting on Gaza was total bs.
We see the raw footage. We get reports directly from journalists in Gaza. If anyone from RNZ is reading this, instead of regurgitating Western sources why don’t you get reports directly from journalists in the ground in Gaza?
> His review may have offered useful advice to media managers looking to protect their news brand
That's precisely who this was written for, Mick, not for the public at all.
Everything in our system is built on lies, everyone in any position is just a skilled deceiver or lickspittle. I'm so ashamed of my country... probably we were always like this...
This is a really excellent piece Mick. Thank you so much for writing it. RNZ has been appalling on Gaza - in common with every other mainstream NZ outlet - so seeing them basically exonerating themselves via this ludicrous report was galling in the extreme. I can't believe Feslier resorted to the concept of 'proximity' to provide cover for RNZ's shocking and frankly quite obvious bias. The dismissal of complainants as 'emotional' was also disgraceful - in the face of the horrors that have unfolded over the last 17 months you'd have to be dead inside not to be at least a little 'emotional' and being 'emotional' does not necessarily negate valid points complainants may have been making. As for some complaints being due to 'antisemitism' - I wonder what definition of that weaponised concept they were using to come to that conclusion? Anyway - thank you again for calling them out. I just hope that one day Western media - including the pack of noddies currently cos-playing as journalists here in NZ - are forced to face their complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Thank you Karyn. Yes, Feslier definitely seems to assume a dichotomy between emotion and reason and use it to invalidate those motivated by very human (and rational) responses to injustice. He'd rather focus on false dichotomies than false narratives, it seems. I hope we are approaching a watershed moment and these newsroom managers are held to account for the banality of evil they've presided over.
Given how propagandised our societies remain, I think you may be right, the livestream martyrdom of the Palestinians may not be enough to remove the scales from Western eyes.
The corruption and ineptitude of the fourth estate in Aotearoa beggars belief. The acceptance and journalistic obfuscation of Israel’s genocide and decades of brutal occupation is a travesty for the health of NZ society and will contribute to our decline and fall unless somehow realised and negated.
Just doing his job - if I didn't do it someone else would & fully complicit by Hannah Arendt's & Nuremburg standards. We now have the answer to old question of why the Germans went along with it, while getting emotional in the face of mass butchery is somehow now a crime - for an empty bureaucrat at least.
Good article Mike! I used to be an avid RNZ fan and these days, with every passing month it just keeps getting worse. At this point I'd genuinely support the shutdown of it I'm sad to say. The MSM are resting on their laurels like the monopolists. The sooner they're gone the better.
In any war both sides are going to make allegations of war crimes and atrocities against the other. The war in Ukraine and the Gaza genocide have that much in common. Propaganda and misinformation will also be rife in any war, although the extent to which one party to the conflict may have "right on its side" is closely correlated to its ability to record and report events objectively and truthfully. By this standard RNZ and the Realm of New Zealand are on the wrong side of most international conflicts.
However Ukraine and Gaza are fundamentally different in respect of the fact that Ukraine is a war that "never should have happened" and was "unnecessary". All wars are of course, but the point about Ukraine was is that with a little bit of good will from the collective west it would have been avoided, peace could have been made with honour at various earlier points in the conflict, and now peace, short of total mutual destruction, does appear to be close.
With Israel and Gaza, on the other hand, there always was a sense of inevitability. The position of the West was so vicious and so willfully genocidal that there was never a serious possibility of a peaceful resolution. New Zealand's talk of a "two state solution" was as hollow as its claimed commitment to peace in the region. Gaza and all the other conflicts in which Israel is involved were only ever going to be resolved by military means.
So is talking about Gaza a waste of time? Sometimes it feels like that, and I often read only the first paragraph of reports on the latest round of atrocities because I pretty well know what is to come. I know that the reporting must continue, because not everyone knows and understands what is going on. Yet even if 80% or 90% of us see the genocide for what it is, will our rulers budge from their position? I don't believe they would. Ultimately, what is true of the situation in Gaza and Lebanon is true of our own situation here. The truth cannot confront evil on its own. People will have to fight. They will have to make sacrifices in and of their lives if we are to overcome evil. Talking alone will not do it.
What upsets me is that our govt (doesn't matter if it's Labour or Nats) don't even have the decency to stay out of these things altogether. If we aren't in a position to intervene (we aren't, in both wars), why do we have to open our big mouths? Why do we have to be Yankee lickspittles? At the very least we could be neutral, but we can't even do that...
Colin Feslier's ideal for a journalist, a politician and a citizen is one who can witness brutality without feeling anger and untold suffering without feeling compassion. More than that, it is a person who can inflict unbearable pain without remorse. His ideal is a person who is not necessarily incapable of emotion but who has the knack of separating off areas of life where the ordinary human emotions are not permitted to apply.
This cannot help but remind us of the words of Heinrich Himmler who declared in his Posen speech “to have gone through [the extermination of the Jewish people] while remaining (apart from exceptions of human weakness) decent, has made us tough. That is an unwritten and never-to-be-written glorious page of our history…,” and went on to say that through all that glorious page of history “we have not been harmed inside, in our soul, in our character.”
I am sure that Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters, David Seymour and Colin Feslier go home each night confidently believing “we have not been harmed inside, in our soul, in our character...”. Like Herr Himmler they hold themselves to be thoroughly decent people who have done what has to be done in the interests of the state. To borrow Himmler's words, they have "toughed it out". In these individuals we see the "decency" claimed by Himmler combined with "the banality of evil" so astutely discerned by Hannah Arendt.
Eighty years have passed since the idea of "decency" was explicitly linked to the perpetration of genocide in a supposedly civilized European state, yet it is now become the rule throughout the western world, and not least in the Realm of New Zealand.
We are now confronting evil in all its banality dressed in the garb of "decency".
Thanks for the extremely important work you are doing Mick. People are waking up to what traditional media has become, and sadly turns out NZ is no different. Control the narrative and keep the general population distracted in order to obscure the machinations of imperial power centres. We’re witnessing Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent being played out in NZ’s media landscape.
Are you sure you're not on the hamas payroll too? Whilst generally about as objective as John Minto, this piece is a new low. The very fact that you speak of 'genocide' as if it has already been established - it hasn't - is amusing. That you manage to completely ignore Hamas's public statements promising genocide, but throw muddy aspersions against Israel, just shows your (lack of) class. Still, you could have a successful career writing for pallywood.
Most of us know genocide when we see it and we see it very clearly in Gaza. There are others who will not admit that it is genocide until Mr Netanyahu himself uses that word to describe what the State of Israel is about. The facts speak for themselves, and the intent is not hard to discern from the unguarded statements of Israeli politicians. The genocide deniers only make themselves complicit in the genocide and God will be their judge.
Bryce Turner would deny the holocaust was real because (a) some of those who assert that it happened were not present in Berlin in 1942 or at Auschwitz in 1940 (b) the allegations of mass extermination have been made by Jews and anti-fascists, not by the Nazi leaders themselves (c) holocaust affirmers have failed to produce DNA evidence that the ashes recovered from the furnaces were actually Jewish ashes (d) those Jews who avow that the holocaust really happened appear to be not so concerned about other abuses and atrocities that have taken place in our world.
In other words, Bryce Turner is talking nonsense. In the modern parlance we would say he is gas lighting. I would show him more tolerance than others will, but there you go.
There is something systemically wrong at RNZ that is compromising its ability to be a fair and balanced news organisation in pursuit of telling the truth.
I have heard RNZ report Israeli propaganda as fact and anyone who reads the independent review regarding what happened with Mick quickly realises it is RNZ who behaved appallingly and without any integrity.
The organisation needs to be dismantled. We need a journalism reset at both RNZ and TVNZ. It is to our detriment if we keep listening to mouthpieces of Western bias in a world where those very countries are supporting and funding the genocide of the Palestinian people.
It is also of note we get a hard Western line when it comes to China. We need the truth not the USA’s manipulation of news outlets so we will buy into warmongering with our biggest trading partner.
RNZ has compromised its own integrity and this made itself irrelevant when it comes to journalism. How do we know what to trust and not what to trust as the truth when their own investigation into their reporting on Gaza was total bs.
We see the raw footage. We get reports directly from journalists in Gaza. If anyone from RNZ is reading this, instead of regurgitating Western sources why don’t you get reports directly from journalists in the ground in Gaza?
> His review may have offered useful advice to media managers looking to protect their news brand
That's precisely who this was written for, Mick, not for the public at all.
Everything in our system is built on lies, everyone in any position is just a skilled deceiver or lickspittle. I'm so ashamed of my country... probably we were always like this...
So important to expose this media bias. Bravo!
This is a really excellent piece Mick. Thank you so much for writing it. RNZ has been appalling on Gaza - in common with every other mainstream NZ outlet - so seeing them basically exonerating themselves via this ludicrous report was galling in the extreme. I can't believe Feslier resorted to the concept of 'proximity' to provide cover for RNZ's shocking and frankly quite obvious bias. The dismissal of complainants as 'emotional' was also disgraceful - in the face of the horrors that have unfolded over the last 17 months you'd have to be dead inside not to be at least a little 'emotional' and being 'emotional' does not necessarily negate valid points complainants may have been making. As for some complaints being due to 'antisemitism' - I wonder what definition of that weaponised concept they were using to come to that conclusion? Anyway - thank you again for calling them out. I just hope that one day Western media - including the pack of noddies currently cos-playing as journalists here in NZ - are forced to face their complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Thank you Karyn. Yes, Feslier definitely seems to assume a dichotomy between emotion and reason and use it to invalidate those motivated by very human (and rational) responses to injustice. He'd rather focus on false dichotomies than false narratives, it seems. I hope we are approaching a watershed moment and these newsroom managers are held to account for the banality of evil they've presided over.
Sadly I think you are too optimistic, Mick, and we are much further away from the real reckoning required.
Given how propagandised our societies remain, I think you may be right, the livestream martyrdom of the Palestinians may not be enough to remove the scales from Western eyes.
The corruption and ineptitude of the fourth estate in Aotearoa beggars belief. The acceptance and journalistic obfuscation of Israel’s genocide and decades of brutal occupation is a travesty for the health of NZ society and will contribute to our decline and fall unless somehow realised and negated.
Just doing his job - if I didn't do it someone else would & fully complicit by Hannah Arendt's & Nuremburg standards. We now have the answer to old question of why the Germans went along with it, while getting emotional in the face of mass butchery is somehow now a crime - for an empty bureaucrat at least.
Great work.
Good article Mike! I used to be an avid RNZ fan and these days, with every passing month it just keeps getting worse. At this point I'd genuinely support the shutdown of it I'm sad to say. The MSM are resting on their laurels like the monopolists. The sooner they're gone the better.
In any war both sides are going to make allegations of war crimes and atrocities against the other. The war in Ukraine and the Gaza genocide have that much in common. Propaganda and misinformation will also be rife in any war, although the extent to which one party to the conflict may have "right on its side" is closely correlated to its ability to record and report events objectively and truthfully. By this standard RNZ and the Realm of New Zealand are on the wrong side of most international conflicts.
However Ukraine and Gaza are fundamentally different in respect of the fact that Ukraine is a war that "never should have happened" and was "unnecessary". All wars are of course, but the point about Ukraine was is that with a little bit of good will from the collective west it would have been avoided, peace could have been made with honour at various earlier points in the conflict, and now peace, short of total mutual destruction, does appear to be close.
With Israel and Gaza, on the other hand, there always was a sense of inevitability. The position of the West was so vicious and so willfully genocidal that there was never a serious possibility of a peaceful resolution. New Zealand's talk of a "two state solution" was as hollow as its claimed commitment to peace in the region. Gaza and all the other conflicts in which Israel is involved were only ever going to be resolved by military means.
So is talking about Gaza a waste of time? Sometimes it feels like that, and I often read only the first paragraph of reports on the latest round of atrocities because I pretty well know what is to come. I know that the reporting must continue, because not everyone knows and understands what is going on. Yet even if 80% or 90% of us see the genocide for what it is, will our rulers budge from their position? I don't believe they would. Ultimately, what is true of the situation in Gaza and Lebanon is true of our own situation here. The truth cannot confront evil on its own. People will have to fight. They will have to make sacrifices in and of their lives if we are to overcome evil. Talking alone will not do it.
What upsets me is that our govt (doesn't matter if it's Labour or Nats) don't even have the decency to stay out of these things altogether. If we aren't in a position to intervene (we aren't, in both wars), why do we have to open our big mouths? Why do we have to be Yankee lickspittles? At the very least we could be neutral, but we can't even do that...
And I thought it was just me who’d noticed the craven grovelling subservience of RNZ to the genocidaires and their enablers.
Shame on all of US. Eternal shame.
Colin Feslier's ideal for a journalist, a politician and a citizen is one who can witness brutality without feeling anger and untold suffering without feeling compassion. More than that, it is a person who can inflict unbearable pain without remorse. His ideal is a person who is not necessarily incapable of emotion but who has the knack of separating off areas of life where the ordinary human emotions are not permitted to apply.
This cannot help but remind us of the words of Heinrich Himmler who declared in his Posen speech “to have gone through [the extermination of the Jewish people] while remaining (apart from exceptions of human weakness) decent, has made us tough. That is an unwritten and never-to-be-written glorious page of our history…,” and went on to say that through all that glorious page of history “we have not been harmed inside, in our soul, in our character.”
I am sure that Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters, David Seymour and Colin Feslier go home each night confidently believing “we have not been harmed inside, in our soul, in our character...”. Like Herr Himmler they hold themselves to be thoroughly decent people who have done what has to be done in the interests of the state. To borrow Himmler's words, they have "toughed it out". In these individuals we see the "decency" claimed by Himmler combined with "the banality of evil" so astutely discerned by Hannah Arendt.
Eighty years have passed since the idea of "decency" was explicitly linked to the perpetration of genocide in a supposedly civilized European state, yet it is now become the rule throughout the western world, and not least in the Realm of New Zealand.
We are now confronting evil in all its banality dressed in the garb of "decency".
Thanks for the extremely important work you are doing Mick. People are waking up to what traditional media has become, and sadly turns out NZ is no different. Control the narrative and keep the general population distracted in order to obscure the machinations of imperial power centres. We’re witnessing Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent being played out in NZ’s media landscape.
Are you sure you're not on the hamas payroll too? Whilst generally about as objective as John Minto, this piece is a new low. The very fact that you speak of 'genocide' as if it has already been established - it hasn't - is amusing. That you manage to completely ignore Hamas's public statements promising genocide, but throw muddy aspersions against Israel, just shows your (lack of) class. Still, you could have a successful career writing for pallywood.
Most of us know genocide when we see it and we see it very clearly in Gaza. There are others who will not admit that it is genocide until Mr Netanyahu himself uses that word to describe what the State of Israel is about. The facts speak for themselves, and the intent is not hard to discern from the unguarded statements of Israeli politicians. The genocide deniers only make themselves complicit in the genocide and God will be their judge.
I would say that ethnic cleansing accomplished by destruction and wholesale killing of civilians is beyond doubt. Would you agree to that, at least?
Bryce Turner would deny the holocaust was real because (a) some of those who assert that it happened were not present in Berlin in 1942 or at Auschwitz in 1940 (b) the allegations of mass extermination have been made by Jews and anti-fascists, not by the Nazi leaders themselves (c) holocaust affirmers have failed to produce DNA evidence that the ashes recovered from the furnaces were actually Jewish ashes (d) those Jews who avow that the holocaust really happened appear to be not so concerned about other abuses and atrocities that have taken place in our world.
In other words, Bryce Turner is talking nonsense. In the modern parlance we would say he is gas lighting. I would show him more tolerance than others will, but there you go.