Some of the stuff that made the news during the summer break. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
Mediawatch - "With the politicians doing their Great Walks, at the bach or courtside at the tennis -- the mainstream media only have domestic homicides, drownings and road fatalities to report on. Oh ... and scaremongering with scrub fires," writer Ana Samways said in the new year.
She could have added shark sightings, cruddy weather ... and city council Christmas penny-pinching.
News that Invercargill's cost-cutting council planned to can Christmas lights was a gift for talkback in the run-up to the festive season. ZB's political editor Jason Walls, who put in a solid holiday shift as a fill-in talkback host, discovered hosting talkback ages you by a generation.
"I've become the very person that my younger self loathed, the person that gets on the radio and starts talking about how the taxpayer shouldn't have to pay," he told listeners on Christmas Eve.
"To my younger self, I say: 'Listen, mate. You weren't a ratepayer facing these massive rate bills. I'm sorry, but this is who you are now.'"
The day before Walls found his inner curmudgeon on ZB, the Media Council sanctioned his predecessor as political editor there - veteran broadcaster Barry Soper.
On 23 December, the council said Soper had "cast unfounded doubt on the legitimacy of the process" that led to Tory Whanau becoming Wellington mayor. The comments had been made in in a strident ZB and NZ Herald online column earlier in the year, which had to be rewritten.
The capital's daily The Post also had tough news for Whanau just after Christmas.
"A lame duck mayor that has blundered from one political disaster to another. Led by the nose by equally unsavvy senior council officials, and talked about for her personal problems - rather than leadership," The Post said, ranking her a lowly 44th of 50 most important Wellingtonians.
But straight after that, The Post added: "She's down but not out. Without the emergence of another credible candidate on the Left, the Greens could still win this thing by leaning into her persecutive narrative."
So wouldn't that make her influential in the capital, like it or not? (The Post seemed not to like it).
Wellington mayor Tory Whanau was ranked 44th on The Post's list of the 50 most important Wellingtonians. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Last year, The Post itself revealed its own owner is part of a group that wants new strategies for the capital.
But Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch that Vision For Wellington was not undermining anyone or taking sides. And if it did, she'd quit it.
In December, The Post revealed Vision For Wellington's Dame Therese Walsh had given both the prime minister, and Hutt South MP Chris Bishop, a heads-up about the group's creation - and former Wellington mayor Dame Kerry Prendergast had volunteered her services to the then-Local Government Minister Simeon Brown.
Recently, The Post reported movie titan James Cameron would be backing a Vision for Wellington event, under the headline "Titanic boost for Wellington 'vision'aries" .
Stuff and The Post will livestream the 19 February event and Patrick Gower, who was hired by Stuff last year to generate more absolutely positive news, will be emcee.
Power-ranking the power rankings
The Post says it will be polling the public on ideas for making Wellington great again too, and - maybe - power-ranking those as well.
There was more of that in the media over the summer silly season.
On New Year's Day, The Spinoff even power-ranked all of its own power ranking lists from its first decade online.
(All 87 ice blocks in New Zealand from worst to best outranked all others, in case you're interested.)
Meanwhile, the Herald power-ranked the best (and worst) films of Sam Neill in January, giving a 'Golden Turkey' to a vanity project lavishly funded by world football body FIFA in 2015. United Passions was described as "pure excrement" by the Guardian at the time. Ten years later, some of that stuck to Sam Neill in the Herald.
"Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," Mark Zuckerberg says. Photo: AFP
Fact-free first drafts of history
Nelson mayor Nick Smith worked overtime to put the record straight in the media when President Trump claimed Americans split the atom.
And we can expect floods of fact-free stuff on Facebook and Instagram in 2025 after Meta's billionaire boss Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of fact-checking in the new year.
Zuckerberg said Meta was dumping fact-checkers because they were "too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created".
Ironically - and tellingly - he gave no examples of that for anyone to check.
But Bloomberg News did check the gingernut-sized watch he was wearing at the time. It retails for NZ$1.5m.
Outgoing US president Joe Biden warned of a new breed of robber barons in his farewell address in January. He named no names, but Mark Zuckerberg was among the media bosses bringing their bling - and cash - to Mar a Lago in early Jan to grease up the next president.
A cartoon depicting that by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes included the Post's own billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes resigned after that image was spiked by the Washington Post.
But Bezos wasn't the only media baron doing 'anticipatory compliance' before Trump's inauguration - and those who donated all appeared in the best seats in the house on the day. TikTok hosted an inauguration celebration which was paid for by the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform Trump once tried to ban.
And it wasn't long before the pay-off for that became clear.
The behaviour of the new president also served as void-filling stuff for silly season media here. Stuff even has a 'Trump in Power' section signposted under the homepage masthead banner now.
When Mike Hosking returned to his breakfast show last Tuesday, Dennis Kneale, author of The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk, claimed Musk might believe we all live in a computer simulation from the future.
"This frees him up to take huge risks, to do things no one else will do, right? Whoever is running that simulation ... wouldn't run it for boring outcomes. They run it for the most entertaining unexpected outcomes."
Normalising nonsense in US politics seems to be the new normal in parts of our media now.
Some Herald readers would have wondered whether head of business Fran O'Sullivan was joking or not in a 11 January piece asking: Should Donald Trump simply buy New Zealand and 'Make it Great Again'?
"This thought experiment has provided plenty of light mirth" at barbecues around the country, she claimed.
"Why not host a US defence base in Northland?" she asked, prompting Herald readers to wonder why she rated their region as so disposable.
Anti-social media?
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg cited the Community Notes function on X as a blueprint for moderating misinformation. But it didn't stop billionaire owner Elon Musk producing some of the very worst of it lately.
Musk repeatedly accused the the UK's new Labour government of responsibility for historic gang rape and child abuses in northern England more than a decade ago.
Remember these names next election pic.twitter.com/ifNX53CxfY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2025
"Here is a list of MPs who voted against deporting foreign rapists. They all need removing," he wrote, while accusing media of a cover-up.
It fell to X users to point out the list from February 2020 actually named MPs urging the former UK government not to deport victims of the Windrush Scandal to Jamaica.
"What exactly do I fail to understand about your failure to stop the mass rape of little girls?" Musk asked critics.
Almost everything, according to the journalist who uncovered the scandal 12 years ago.
"It was the mainstream media that kept writing about this, until eventually Rotherham Council was shamed into ordering the independent inquiry, which finally produced the extraordinary finding that 1500 girls had been brutally abused. I don't think Elon Musk and the concept of truth really are very familiar with each other, right? He's the richest man in the world. It's all his play thing," Andrew Norfolk told the News Agents podcast in early January.
In early January Musk announced the algorithm for X would be tweaked to promote what he called "more informational/entertaining content".
"Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time. Our goal is to maximise unregretted user-seconds," Musk said.
But among media regretting use of X was TVNZ - which quit Musk's platform in the new year. Many other media outlets have either canned their accounts or stopped using them.
Parliament's website gave out as people made thousands of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill. Photo: Supplied
Treaty Principles Bill scrutiny under way
Another online platform needing a technical tweak in the new year was Parliament's website, which gave out under the weight of a record-breaking volume of public submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill before the 7 January deadline.
But news media have had no problem accommodating coverage of the controversy surrounding the Bill.
Its main mover has been interviewed many times but ACT leader David Seymour complained he wasn't getting a fair shake in his first interview of the year with Newstalk ZB on January 14.
"It's pretty difficult not to despair with the standards of media coverage. We've got a problem now that we don't have newsrooms with a diversity of thought, far too much groupthink," he said.
"They are actually unable to produce news that works with the way that New Zealanders actually think - at least the majority of New Zealanders."
It wasn't the first time that ACT's leader had upbraided the media for that - and specifically TVNZ, of which he is a shareholding minister . As such, he isn't really supposed to comment on operational matters and editorial content.
On ZB, Seymour also said TVNZ's past interviews with him have been more widely watched after ACT posted them on social media channels than on TVNZ's own broadcast outlets.
But in spite of an audience approaching half a million, ACT's leader and its MPs and ministers have boycotted RNZ's Morning Report show for more than four years.
Will ACT's leader keep that up when he becomes deputy prime minister in a matter of months? We'll see.
Cuts keep coming
Just before the new year, one of Seymour's coalition colleagues had warmer words for TVNZ shows - and Country Calendar.
"It is relentlessly positive. It tells stories of real people who have an idea, try something new, overcome adversity and are good people who care. That is what is needed. Less doom and gloom. More hope and happiness," Judith Collins told
social media followers.
Country Calendar has been funded from the public purse since 1991, but without the backing of a major foreign carmaker, that show could have been sent to the works by troubled TVNZ by now as well as it strives to cut $30m of costs over the current financial year.
In 2024, Sunday and Fair Go were dumped by the state-owned broadcaster to cut costs as commercial revenue slumped.
Since her words of praise for Country Calendar, Collins has been appointed as public services minister.
Public services minister Judith Collins. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
In 2025, her government will have to decide if state-owned TVNZ is a public service to be secured - or cut it adrift. The pro-privatisation ACT party allies certainly wouldn't be squeamish about that latter.
TVNZ's main TV rival Warner Brothers Discovery has its own acute problems these days.
In the upcoming comedy series Vince, Jono Pryor plays a TV breakfast news show presenter dumped by his network after unintentionally exposing himself live on air.
But since the series was green-lit two years ago, Warner Bros Discovery has cut all its news shows in the biggest single news media shutdown the industry here has ever seen.
News publisher and radio network owner NZME seemed to be weathering the media storm a little better - but just last week cut about 12 percent of the company's 300-odd editorial staff. Nineteen other jobs went just before Christmas when NZME closed or sold 14 community papers.
The new Herald plan is for fewer staff to produce fewer stories and focus more on stuff that people like, according to the increasingly sophisticated analytics.
Taking the bait
Back in 2020, Stuff said it was giving clickbait a swerve in order to boost trust in its journalism.
But it now seems to be embracing it again - sometimes even trolling readers.
"Sorry Wellington. Your summer sucks, you know," said an online story about the worst start to summer this millennium in the capital on 4 January .
The headline 'Watch: Man's unsavoury act out of car window on motorway' was deployed to hook readers into watching a roadside video provided to Stuff soon after.
Those who took the clickbait were confronted with a man urinating out of the window of the car on Auckland's southern motorway.
However - there was a silver lining here.
"Urinating in a public place other than a lavatory can lead to a fine of $200," Stuff said.
"Intentionally exposing yourself in public can lead to three months in prison or a $2000 fine."
That helped counter repeated claims on talk radio last year insisting it's perfectly legal to pee on your own car.
Crimes against cuisine
Here at Mediawatch we're not food snobs - and summer is a time for pleasing yourself, and trying new things.
But when the Marmite and chip sandwich appeared at number 17 in an international ranking of bad national dishes, the only surprise was that there might be 16 worse things in the world to eat.
Stuff deemed the dish a Kiwi classic combo and ZB's Francesca Rudkin defended it on air.
Talkback callers also endorsed it - along with the abominable Marmite and lettuce sandwich. (Distressingly, the website of Marmite's maker Sanitarium still carries a recipe for it.)
"On Coronation Street they're always eating chip butties. Beautiful," Albie from England called in to say.
Is the cuisine of Coronation Street the way our nation can punch above its weight?
Though a bit like comfort food, the stickability of the British TV soap is something of a comfort to the embattled media companies here.
A show that's stayed on air since 1960 and is still going strong is something to cling to.
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