67. We're still stuck on this bloody election trail

After months of campaigning, and political machinations, and outright lies, and the usual betrayals and downfalls, the 2017 general election still ended up exactly where everybody fucking knew it would - with Winston bloody Peters arsing about with the balance of power.

The proportions of power changed changed, but all those polls that Peters continually derided as garbage turned out to be pretty fucking spot-on - the numbers seen on Saturday night were very close to the ones seen in recent polls. Especially the various poll of polls, which were so much more than just a "an intern with a calculator", as some sneered.

So now the entire system of government is stuck in a holding pattern as the various coalition negotiations go on, and it could be weeks before anybody has any idea who is going to be in government, and we all just have to sit back, think of Aotearoa and take it.

In the meantime, as we wait out the inevitable hesitations of the negotiation process, we can expect the usual bullshit - endless analysis and opinion, but nothing to really back it up. Peters' refusal to talk about any possible coalition deals before the election means we're all stumbling around in the goddamn dark, wondering if the old fool will go out as an establishment man to the end, or an unlikely savior for the cool young things on the left. What sort of legacy does Winston want? Does he even know?

And it hasn't taken long for the various under-performers to lash out at the mean old media coverage, for not giving their boring-arse personalities and policies more airtime or page views. While there was some moaning about this kind of thing when the pre-election debates were all going on, Act leader David Seymour was one of the first to lay into the media coverage after the ballots had been counted.

In one of his first post-election interviews, Seymour lambasted RNZ, saying his party suffered due to an over-representation of the bigger parties. If only he had that kind of platform, he reasoned, then everybody would have seen how wonderful and smart Act's policies are, and the voters would have come flocking.

Unfortunately for Seymour - despite whatever they're putting in the water in Epsom - the rest of the country are just never going to vote for somebody who looks and acts exactly like Rimmer from Red Dwarf, (a Lister or Cat candidate, on the other hand...). It didn't matter how much media time he got, nobody really wants a Rimmer in their government.

Seymour also conveniently forgets that there is a fucking shitload of stories on the election campaign to follow up on, along with a massive cast of personalities and an absolute tsunami of press releases . There just isn't room - or enough reporters - to cover it all, and someone has to miss out.

In the end, news editors can only go for the most newsworthy - the biggest election bribes, the most idiotic moves, the most egregious abuses of power. There are more than enough of those to go around. Some politicians have become masters at manipulating this news flow, and it can appear that the media is unable to resist it, but you can't just ignore this shit.

So when, say, Simon O'Connor makes a totally bone-headed comment connecting suicide and euthanasia, then he has to be called out on it. And when Steven Joyce says there is a fiscal hole in Labour's accounts, it doesn't seem to matter that everybody except Bill English says he's wrong, he just sat back smugly and let the doubt take hold.

There is the argument that the news media shouldn't rise to the bait, but all it can do is show the facts - John Campbell's slow, methodical reading of all the economists who said Joyce was full of shit has been an election coverage highlight - and hope like hell that its audience can look at the data and make up their own goddamn minds. Any more hand-holding, and you're in the realm of pure bias, but it's not like this crap is totally ignored..



Still, thank fuck it's almost over, because this is all getting a bit much. The great game of politics and media needs something new, because this relationship is getting old.

- Ron Troupe

66: Fix your heart or die

We're all up to our fuckin' necks in election coverage, so no 'top class whinging' until all this shit is over. Normal service will resume next week.

In the meantime, here are our favourite quotes from the BSA, from their summary of a recent decision against a fuckwit who got all hot and bothered by RNZ's use of some words from one of its national languages. Considering the BSA usually goes out of its way to be polite about the people who lay complaints, this is fuckin' scathing:

"The Authority further noted that, even if the complaint referral had been validly made, it would have found the content of the complaint to be trivial and vexatious, and would have declined to determine it."

"The complainant wanted to complain about a presenter on RNZ National who ‘calls herself “A HO” at the end of each news bulletin’. He said that the presenter also used ‘Te Ngae’ ‘as an alternative’. The complainant said that the presenter ‘reads the news in English, not Mardi’ and that the presenter made herself ‘a laughing stock’ by using the term. He said that this amounted to ‘over Maorification [sic] of Language’ which was ‘offensive when words [like] “ho” are used. It is an Americanisaton of the expression “Whore”’."

"RNZ did not accept the complaint as it related to the complainant’s personal preferences."

"We consider that the tone and language used by the complainant, both in the content of his complaint and in his correspondence with Authority staff, to be offensive, derogatory and dismissive of the proper purpose of this Authority."

"The policy behind section 11 is that the time and resources of the Authority, which are sustained by the people of New Zealand, should not be wasted on having to deal with matters which objectively have no importance."

"In this case, we observe that even if RNZ had responded to this complaint formally, we would have declined to determine it, as we consider HM’s complaint to be both trivial and vexatious."

"His complaint disregards te reo Māori which is an official language in New Zealand and he has persisted in wasting Authority time and resources on a matter that is without foundation, either procedurally or substantively."

The BSA just told you to go fuck yo'self, fool. Classic.

65: The Tuesday morning that changed the news forever

Everyone remembers where they were when they heard about the World Trade Center towers coming down in 2001. The horrific dust clouds from those collapsing buildings are still blowing around the world and right through our heads.

Maybe you were a kid at school, feeling sick and talking with classmates about the uncertain new future, maybe you were woken up by a loved one's phone call and told to turn on the bloody telly, maybe you were out of contact for a few hours and came back to find the whole world had turned upside down.

It was 16 years ago now, but unless you're a teenager or younger, you know exactly where you were.

There were far greater examples of man's inhumanity to man throughout the 20th century, but this attack, right at the heart of capitalism, right on the goddamn doorstep of the 21st century, shook western civilisation to its core. It led to more useless bloodshed and an air of fear and paranoia that has slowly and painfully led us here, where there are genuine fears of a nuclear Armageddon in the year 2017.

Any chance that we were on the fast-track to universal enlightenment was kicked in the fucking balls by the September 11 attacks. All that raving in the '90s about a glorious new aeon were just the same old shit.

And after a public display of naked aggression that was unparalleled in our modern age, the first thing everybody did after they saw the skyscrapers coming down was turn on the news, and look for some kind of information or explanation, just to help us make some sense of it all. News ratings spiked, circulations went through the roof and the internet instantly became the news delivery source for the next generation.

9/11 was the first multi-media terrorist event, but we've come so far since then. Now there are live blogs and video feeds, tweets. You can Facebook Live the end of the world when it all goes down, and everybody has got a HD camera in their pocket, as long as the battery lasts.

But as connected as we all are, there is also that feeling that you could be missing out on something huge, happening right now. That you just need to check in, to make sure North Korea hasn't been destroyed, or to find out the latest score in the cricket. Smartphones give us that connection to the world, through a huge variety of feeds, wiping away any suspicion that we're missing out on something important. We haven't been able to look away for 16 years now.

TV has tried to get in on the act, by filling the hole with 24-hour live news, which is fantastic when there is a big world-shuddering event going down, but not so much when they have to fill the rest of those hours throughout the other slow news days and resort to mindless, dull punditry to fill in the gaps between the ads.

Newspapers are, of course, still trapped into printing schedules, so can only really provide valuable context, background and reaction. Radio has always been super-immediate, but doesn't have the pictures to grab the attention. Unsurprisingly, it's online that the real 24-hour action is happening, with big news websites crunching through huge amounts of news every day - something like the NZ Herald is easily putting several hundred stories every day.

It's taken years for the big media websites to learn the lessons spelled out on a sunny Tuesday morning, 16 years and one day ago. They're still not quite there, still blindly reaching out for an audience that it knows is out there, selling its soul to social media and acting affronted when it bites back.

But we have also come a long, long way. Look at the 9/11 websites, and how crude they are, and how unacceptable they would be in this data-hungry age. If some thin-skinned buffoon sets off the end of the world any time soon, or even just ignores the disastrous effect of unquestionable climate change, we all face potential catastrophes that will dwarf the horror of 9/11. But at least we'll all have a front row seat.

- Margaret Tempest

64. Fuck you, Mr Peters (again)

While the authors of this blog maintain an absolutely professional attitude to dealing with politicians in our day jobs, we can be just as opinionated about them in our private lives as anybody else and it's fair to say we fucking loathe Winston Peters as a bigot, a hypocrite and an old fool.

Astonishingly, despite not having a new idea since the 1980s, he's campaigned this year on a platform of change and new directions, like he hasn't been in Parliament for fucking decades. Even more astonishingly, he still has enough support from other scared old people, to the point where he is still likely to hold the balance of power after the forthcoming election.

But the ball always bounces perfectly for the leathery old shit. It looked like he could be in trouble last week, with the revelation that he had been overpaid for his superannuation for years, to the point where revealing an exact figure would have been truly embarrassing. But it only took a few days before he managed to be the fucking victim again - a true, solid man who was being undermined by lesser creatures.

Even without getting into the morality issue - why the fuck does a working person on a stunningly good public salary need to claim the money for anyway? - there were legitimate questions about how a man who is extremely up-to-play on the ins and outs of the super system could miss the wrong data for years. Suggesting it was a simple, honest mistake might impress the rubes, but since he's a leading politician who has been hip-deep in the finer details of the pension for years, it just makes him look incompetent as hell.

But somehow, the shit just slid off him, and by the end of last week he had managed to portray himself as a victim of a smear campaign, threatening prosecution on anybody involved in leaking the information.

Mr Peters has, of course, never stopped himself from using his own leaked information to smear his opponents, but got right on his fucking high horse when it started coming his way. Suddenly, a man who has built his career on some jaw-dropping leaked data was the paragon of privacy, outraged that people would use the same tactics he had happily employed for years.

Peters set his sights on the usual political targets, and unsurprisingly, a lot of it was also apparently the media's fault for daring to report on an interesting news story.

The news media has long been a target of Mr Peters' ire, but it's only got worse in recent years. After he made the outrageously racist claim that Herald journalists were only working on stories about the property boom because they were Asian, Mr Peters didn't really suffer any consequences, so it's no surprise that when it comes to his latest media criticism, he once again played the man, not the ball.

It was, admittedly, a pretty fucking lame assault - claiming that the Newshub reporter who confronted him about his super overpayments was a young, inexperienced reporter out to prove himself by beating up a nothing story.

Which is the usual heaping pile of bullshit. The reporter involved has been around a while and knows the fucking score, and only the most catastrophically inexperienced journo would hear that a major political figure was overpaid his pension for years and think it was a non-story. To ignore that would have been the true incompetence, but no, it's all part of some sordid conspiracy to bring the Last Honest Man In Parliament down, apparently.

Mr Peters is getting nastier as he gets closer and closer to death, and the truly funny thing about his nastiness is that it just doesn't work politically - his poll numbers have been fucking tanking for weeks now. While he is still a folk hero to the kind of morons who gladly drink poisoned Kool-Aid if Winston said it would get rid of immigrants - there were plenty of voxies last week from the usual idiots who sneered at the media to just leave him alone - he's scaring off the more moderate voters, who can see through his thin veneer of charm.

Still, at least he has some real competition for biggest shithead of the campaign this year, after Paula Bennett revealed in the weekend that a little concept like 'universal human rights' wasn't really something she subscribed to. It's an interesting tactic for National to try appealing to the moron vote as much as Peters has been doing, although Bill English was hitting the morning shows hard yesterday to let everyone know that Paula didn't really mean what she said (an admirable trait for a career politician), so maybe they looked at those poll numbers for Peters and realised there are only so many idiots willing to buy your bullshit.

Mr Peters has, with dull predictability, written off his terrible poll results as 'fake news' and they're still not terrible enough to stop him from having that grip on power later this month, so he's unlikely to change. Maybe all we can do is ask the press gallery to soak up some more of his bile, because he might think he's being big and clever by blaming the media for everything, but he just looks like a fucking tool.

- Ron Troupe