People are once again talking about the New Zealand media being broken and wondering what it will take to fix it.
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Everyone is talking about the cost of living crisis. Inflation in the first quarter of 2022 was 6.9%, up from 5.9% in the last quarter of 2021 — the highest level we have seen since 1990. The price of food, rent and, in particular, fuel is going through the roof.
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On Friday morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered the Harvard University Commencement Speech. Standing before the assembled university officials and graduates, she used the platform to rally against disinformation
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Inflation is hammering much of the world and working people are on the receiving end twice, both in terms of increasing costs of living and tighter monetary policy pushing up mortgage rates and the cost of commercial borrowing
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We have been inundated lately with stories about guns, gangs, drug seizures, murders, violent robberies, and the current flavours of the month: youth crime and ram raids. Scarcely a week goes by where there aren't multiple sensational headlines making claims about some kind of crime wave.
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With the release of quarterly figures highlighting New Zealand’s domestic version of the global cost of living crisis, a more overtly politicised tone has begun to dominate local news coverage of inflation.
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As organisations like NZ Police, Oranga Tamariki and The Ministry of Health grapple with their own racism, the Public Service Commission has been implementing the Papa Pounamu ‘diversity and inclusion’ work programme. Priority Area 2 of Papa Pounamu: ‘Te Urupare i te Mariu | Addressing Bias’ says organisations “can and should be addressing bias and discrimination in all its forms”.
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Tauranga is not Northland, it is not 2015, and National will win Tauranga – with or without Winston Peters gearing up for one last big score
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There is an opening for Key’s protégé. Opinion polls gave National an average of 34% in January-February; a seven percentage point increase since Luxon became leader.
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It can be tempting to decide that someone who, blithely oblivious, is standing alongside white-supremacists, anti-semites, and proto-fascists, is too far gone. For some, that might be true. For many, they’re being hoodwinked and used, and if we care about them (and we have the spoons) I believe we should reach out in whatever ways we can.
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The battle lines have been drawn, on Twitter, facebook, and in Council planning meetings. We are either pro-intensification, or we don’t care about equitable housing. This forced and simplistic dichotomy makes any debate about how we do intensification, often very difficult to have.
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A week ago a majority in Berlin voted to turn over 200,000 private rental properties owned by corporate landlords into public housing
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This week, we’ve seen the synthesis of the opposition to Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 strategy emerge in three similar forms.
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Saturday 18 September is the fifth international day of action by the BDS movement calling for a boycott of the global sportswear company Puma over its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA)
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Stark differences are apparent between the two terror attacks that New Zealand has experienced in the past three years
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We’ve seen constant attacks from media in the US, UK and Australia, often spreading outright disinformation about Aotearoa being a prison camp, or using other such language to describe the (imaginary) authoritarianism that has taken over our country.
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Back in 2016, the IMF reported that New Zealand had the least affordable housing market among its list of the 30 wealthiest countries, with prices rising 11% in the year prior.
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Trying to trap the lost baby whale in a net of austerity clichés through headlines and press releases came across as a vote loser rather than a vote winner. It might have gotten people to click and share but turning the poor creature into a main character in the culture war seemed relentlessly negative, cruel and pointless.
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As far as an eyeball check for reasonableness and believability, it’s a big problem if your analytics system spits out an assessment of media bias that roughly accords with the conspiratorial claims of deplatformed white supremacist Twitter accounts
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