Why do New Zealand columnists suck so much?
The art of writing a column was once considered a noble form. Now it’s just another branding opportunity for TV/radio talking head egos like Duncan Garner and Mike Hosking to spread their patented brands of ignorant shit.
The Kate Hawkesby/Mike Hosking hellspawn duo over at NZME sum up the worst of modern columns, usually done with a strong right-wing bent as the parent company aims for that sweet, sweet Fox News-addict demographic. In journalism on a par with a high school student’s snarky Snapchat posts, Hawkesby ranted recently about how Labour MPs didn’t dress up in tuxedos and gowns for their informal summer retreat.
At Newshub, Duncan Garner interviewed MP Chlöe Swarbick about cannabis this week and didn’t have the slightest fucking idea of what he was talking about. Dipshit Garner has a long history of this stupidity, once writing a column once about shopping at Kmart that somehow turned into a racist rant, which thankfully got pinged by the Press Council.
NZ media are obsessed with giving loudmouth radio and TV personalities columns to share crap versions of their aired rants. Transcribing a radio host’s meandering speech into a column format rarely ends well, and we genuinely feel for the junior journos who have to do it. You end up with bizarrely meandering, poorly written diatribes on the same level of quality as your Uncle Nigel’s Facebook posts about chemtrails.
A big hoo-ra was made about fossil talkback host Leighton Smith leaving Newstalk ZB last year - but no worries, the Herald quickly picked him up for a weekly column, where granddad continues his ultra-right-wing blather on issues like why climate change is a hoax.
Columnists in NZ usually fall in two camps - shallow political hot takes or pretentious lifestyle wankery.
In the latter category, Deborah Hill Cone finally yanked her own never-ending self-analysis session masquerading as a column last year. Cone would occasionally write blatantly offensive shit about Charlotte Dawson’s suicide or foment insane conspiracy theories about the PM’s partner Clarke Gayford for kicks. She also had sheer balls to show up a few weeks after she quit her column with an article in the Herald magazine Canvas about how darned bad public shaming is … you know, especially when you write shallow columns intentionally geared to generate outrage and are called on it. This was kind of like having Donald Trump write a guide about etiquette in politics.
The dregs of the columnists that plague NZ media all cover similar bases - they’re horribly full of themselves, they’ll throw out controversial hot takes in the hopes of getting clicks, and they contribute little or nothing to the public discourse. They’re about riling up the sort of people who contribute daily to Stuff comments, not engaging the rest of us who are increasingly sick of bullshit and con artists.
But who’s good? Well, there are a few left who don’t constantly scrape the bottom of the barrel. The Herald’s Brian Rudman consistently writes some of the best, most cogent takes on Auckland politics, and former Metro editor Simon Wilson is also doing a great job at the Herald writing opinionated long-form analysis.
Andrea Vance and Claire Trevett also write very solid political columns that avoid ranting. Stuff’s Sunday Star-Times has recently hired several new diverse voices for their paper and RNZ manages to thankfully avoid talking heads syndrome entirely in its opinion pieces. But the intelligent voices are constantly being drowned out by the inept baying to the crowd by the ranters and ravers, all aiming to be today’s trending topic.
The bloviating opinionators who dominate the columnist realm tend to be from one demographic - almost entirely white, mostly male, coming at you from a basis of privilege and comfort few Aucklanders really live in. (Hey, did you know Mike Hosking crashed a $140,000 car? He’s one of us!) There are pitifully few Maori columnists on the ground, or Pacific voices, and good luck finding an Asian columnist in mainstream media who represents the quarter of Aucklanders of that background.
Once upon a time, you could rely on a columnist to give you a real sense of the city they live in, of its people and quirks and ideas. Long-gone names like Herb Caen of San Francisco, Mike Royko of Chicago or Jimmy Breslin of New York pounded their beat and told stories.
There aren’t a lot of columnists like that any more - in NZ, Steve Braunias has come close with works like his great “Eating Lincoln Road” series, but columns that have a voice and a story to tell that aren’t just about raking in clicks and outrage or narcissistic blather are a dying genre.
We’re all the poorer for it, really.
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