The Media & Hekia Parata: Christchurch School Closures

This is not a post about the Christchurch school closures, indeed, because I’m against state education given the New Zealand Curriculum Document has for a long time been our founding document of statism (the middle paragraph of my blog by-line above shows the disaster of this), I don’t think we need a Minister of Education. Putting that to one side, this post concerns the infantile behaviour of the mainstream media, and how badly served we are by it.

Ele Ludemann has put a good post up about the School Closures this morning, all I want to put on this post is the comment I put on her post – well, amended to what I wished I’d said originally:

I’m growing respect for Hekia Parata ... And as for the newscasters, John Campbell last night, and I see Rachel Smalley this morning, trying to brow-beat [the Minister] to extract a ‘sorry’ from her, that’s infantile, and not the role of media, which is to extract the relevant information and present it to me. News broadcasting is not a confessional; by trying to get a sorry, you’re putting yourselves in the role of some sort of moral arbiter of morality proper: the minster is doing her job, with 95% of teachers signed up to the teacher union, she’s never going to do anything they agree with and they’ll politicise every damned thing, and you are pandering to that, giving you the look of having an agenda (the PPTA’s – so do I now need to view charter school reporting by you through a filter?); you’re newscasters, stick to reading from the prompter, and please bugger off with the emoting nonsense, or put it on your blogs.