The Political Press in New Zealand

One of the big differences between the US and New Zealand is that New Zealand has an overtly political press. In US lefty blogging circles it's quite popular to call for the media to drop its "non partisan" and "balanced" pretension and acknowledge its biases.

While I agree with these calls in principle, in practice, at least in New Zealand, it's not very satisfying as the newspapers here are abysmally and uniformly conservative. For a country of four million people I would hope there would be at least one major paper that represented left-of-center views but I have yet to find it. I would also hope to find "alternative" weekly papers that provide some sort of balance to the mainstream media. These too are sadly lacking.

So what I'm left with is reading the Dominion Post and having my blood boil. The DP has been on a particularly irksome climate-change-denialist rampage of late. Blatantly biased climate change-ain't-real "news" articles mix freely with other more benign articles on the paper's pages. Even more demoralizing is reading the letters to the editor. While I suspect that letters are selected primarily based on their agreement with the DP's editorial bias it's still disheartening to read how many people buy into the DP's view.

I do admit some deriving some sick pleasure from the Junior Scientists that write letters to the editor. A recent classic was the crank that claimed that he had googled the volume of the world's oceans and the volume of the Greenland ice sheet, and that his maths proves the ratio of the ice sheet to ocean volume is tiny so dipso facto there is no way we could see the type of sea level rises predicted. I really wish I could help him understand the surface area/volume relationship and help him work through the maths so that he could understand that BP/Shell/Chevron/DP aren't really on his side. But that's not going to happen. Nana only had to turn her electric blanket to 6 this year - climate change can't be real!!!111!!!!

I understand that National Radio and TV actually does a reasonable job of reporting the news. Not being a big consumer of radio or TV I can only hope for the sake of NZ that this is true.