How fascinating. Eight years ago, I had high hopes for this Christopher Luxon, according to this blog. Who knew that as a politician, the guy would really let me down?
I Tweeted:
Remember how the Dom Post treated me in two elections? This is the opposite. A lot of the media love their rich white guys. Easy peasy. https://t.co/Yq9bowZH66
The reality is I see a guy who doesn’t have a full grasp of the issues at hand, spouting soundbites that fail to satisfy any real analysis, yet media are giving him an easy ride.
I’ve recorded my gripes with how some media cover politics before鈥攁nd I reflect on how suited my 2010-campaign policies, authored in 2009, could have placed this city in such a great position for the pandemic鈥攁nd once again, we realize that coverage is not meritorious.
In some cases, it will be down to the limited intellect of the journalist or editor to grasp the issues at hand (can I name some names!), and I believe in other cases, there is an editorial slant that proprietors want (and hire accordingly).
We saw it with Tony Blair in 1997 (‘Change’; ‘New Labour, new Britain’), and we’re seeing it again.
I tend to vote for people who do the hard yards, and this bloke isn’t the knight in shining armour that many thought he was. The likes of George Gair would not recognize this National Party.
Above: Coverage in Business Desk, with me pictured with Lucire fashion and beauty editor Sopheak Seng.
Big thanks to Daniel Dunkley, who wrote this piece about me and my publishing work in Business Desk, well worth subscribing to (coincidentally, I spotted an article about my friend and classmate Hamish Edwards today, too).
I had a lengthy chat with Daniel because he asked great questions鈥攖he fact he got a lot out of me shows how good a journalist he is. And he reveals some of our more recent developments, as well as my thoughts on the industry in general鈥攖hings I hadn鈥檛 really got on to record often to a journalist, certainly not in the last few years.
I had my Business Desk alerts switched off so I didn鈥檛 know he had already written his story (on the day of our interview) till another friend and classmate told me earlier this week. It also shows that Google鈥檚 News Alerts are totally useless, something that I realized recently when it took them three weeks to send the alert (the time between its original spidering of the article and the email being sent out). Those had been worsening over the years and I had seen them be one or two days behind, but now they rarely arrive. Three weeks is plain unacceptable for one of the last services on Google I still used.
Back to Daniel鈥檚 story. It鈥檚 a great read, and I鈥檓 glad someone here in Aotearoa looked me up. I realize most of our readers are abroad and we earn most from exports, but a lot of what we鈥檝e done is to promote just how good our country is. I鈥檓 proud of what we鈥檙e able to achieve from our part of the world.
Above: Google News Alerts take an awfully long time to arrive, if at all. I hadn’t seen one for weeks, then this one arrives, three weeks after Google News spidered and indexed the article. Google feels like another site that now fails to get the basics right.
Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff.
Some highlights:
As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space 鈥 like the media, politics or corporate leadership 鈥 if you play by the rules. And really, there鈥檚 only one rule: blend in. You鈥檙e expected to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking, acting and being 鈥
I sound like you. I make myself relatable to you. I communicate in a way that makes sense to you. I don鈥檛 threaten you. I don鈥檛 make you uncomfortable. And I keep my most controversial opinions to myself.
And:
Kiwis love stories about ethnic people who achieve highly: winning university scholarships, trying to cure diseases, inventing new technology or entering the political arena. These people are lauded for generating economic and social value for the country 鈥
We do not hear stories about ethnic people who work in thankless, low-skilled jobs 鈥 the refugees and migrants who stock our supermarket shelves, drive our taxis, pick our fruit, milk our cows, fill our petrol tanks, staff our hospitals and care for our elderly in rest homes.
Jehan says that now he is in a position of influence, he鈥檚 prepared to bring his Sri Lankan identity to the places he gets to visit, and hopes that everyone in Aotearoa is given respect 鈥榥ot because of their ability to assimilate鈥.
He was born here to new immigrants who had fled Sri Lanka, and I think there is a slight difference to those of us who came as children. Chief among this, at least for me, was my resistance to assimilation. Sure I enjoyed some of the same things other kids my age did: the Kentucky Fried Chicken rugby book, episodes of CHiPs, and playing tag, but because of various circumstances, as well as parents who calmly explained to me the importance of retaining spoken Cantonese at home, I constantly wore my Chineseness. I hadn鈥檛 chosen to leave my birthplace鈥攖his was the decision of my parents鈥攕o I hung on to whatever I could that connected me back to it.
I could contrast this to other Chinese New Zealanders I went to school with, many of whom had lost their native language because their parents had encouraged assimilation to get ahead. I can鈥檛 fault them鈥攎any of them are my dearest friends鈥攂ut I was exposed to what Jehan wrote about from a young age.
It saddened me a lot because here were people who looked like me who I couldn鈥檛 speak to in my mother tongue, and the only other student of Chinese extraction in my primary class who did speak her native language spoke Mandarin鈥攚hich to many of my generation, certainly to those who did so little schooling before we left, find unintelligible.
At St Mark鈥檚, I had no issue. This was a school that celebrated differences, and scholastic achievement. (I am happy to say that sports and cultural activity are very much on the cards these days, too.) But after that, at one college, I observed what Jehan said: the Chinese New Zealanders who didn鈥檛 rock the boat were safe buddies to have; those who were tall poppies were the target of the weak-minded, the future failures of our society. You just have to rise above it, and, if anything, it made me double-down on my character鈥攕o much so that when I was awarded a half-scholarship to Scots, I found myself in familiar surroundings again, where differences were championed.
But you do indeed have to play the game. Want your company recognized? Then get yourself into the media. Issue releases just like the firms that were sending them to you as a member of the media. Don鈥檛 bring your Chineseness into that, because you won鈥檛 get coverage. Jack Yan & Associates, and Lucire for that matter, always had a very occidental outlook, with my work taking me mostly to the US and Europe, with India only coming in at the end of the 2000s鈥攂ut then we were bound by the lingua franca of the old colonial power.
Despite my insistence on my own reo at home, and chatting every day to my Dad, I played the game that Jehan did when it came to work. I didn鈥檛 as much when I ran for mayor, admittedly鈥擨 didn鈥檛 want voters to get a single-sided politician, but one who was his authentic self鈥攂ut that also might explain why Stuff鈥檚 predecessor, which was at that stage owned by a foreign company, gave me next to no coverage the first time out. They weren鈥檛 prepared to back someone who didn鈥檛 fit their reader profile. The second time out, it still remained shockingly biased. Ironically the same publishing group would give me reasonably good coverage in Australia when I wasn鈥檛 doing politics. That鈥檚 the price to pay for authenticity sometimes.
Jehan finishes his piece on a positive note and I feel he is right to. We still have issues as a nation, no doubt, but I think we embrace our differences more than we used to. There have been many instances where I have seen all New Zealanders rise up to condemn racism, regardless of their political bents. (What is interesting was I do recall one National MP still in denial, residing in fantasy-land, when I recalled a racist incident鈥攁nd this was after March 15, 2019!) People from all walks of life donated to my fund-raising when a friend鈥檚 car had a swastika painted on it. We have a Race Relations鈥 Commissioner who bridges so many cultures effectively鈥攁 New Zealander of Taishanese extraction who speaks te reo M膩ori and English鈥攚ho is visible, and has earned his mana among so many here. The fact that Jehan鈥檚 piece was even published, whereas in 2013 it would have been anathema to the local arm of Fairfax, is further reason to give me hope.
The second item? Have a watch of this. It’s largely in accord with my earlier post.
Well, that was a rather sycophantic interview with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, on Radio New Zealand, as the online encyclop忙dia turns 20.
So I was rather excited when a Tweeter said he was going to interview Wales and asked for questions from the public. I responded:
Why did your co-founder Larry Sanger accuse Wikipedia of being anti-expertise?
What are you doing to ensure that bad actors do not scam their way into senior editor positions?
Why is Wikipedia in English so much less reliable than Wikipedia in German or Japanese?
Let鈥檚 say they鈥檙e not going to get asked. He wrote:
There's not really such a thing as a senior editor position. It is unlikely that a bad actor would make thousands of good edits just to get a reputation within the editor community only to then try to undermine the project. Openness means bad actors are identified quickly.
Semantics aside, are there not editors who rise up the ranks to have more editing privileges than others? They don鈥檛 necessarily undermine the project within the Wikipedia domain. Happy to discuss more if you鈥檙e genuinely interested.
No reply. And of course there are senior editors: Wikipedians themselves use this term. I can only assume that it’s going to be another sycophantic interview. Why aren鈥檛 some people willing to ask some hard ones here? I’m guessing that the only way tough questions are asked about tech is if a woman gets on to it (someone like Louise Matsakis or Sarah Lacy).
There鈥檚 plenty of evidence of all three of my positions, as documented here and elsewhere, and I didn’t even include a great question on bullying.
When I ran for office, there was often a noticeable difference between how I was treated by locally owned media and foreign- owned media. There are exceptions to that rule鈥The New Zealand Herald and Sky TV gave me a good run while Radio New Zealand opted to do a candidates鈥 round-up in two separate campaigns interviewing the (white) people who were first-, second- and fourth-polling鈥攂ut overall, TVNZ, Radio New Zealand with those two exceptions, and the local community papers were decent. Many others seemed to have either ventured into fake news territory (one Australian-owned tabloid had a 鈥減oll鈥, source unknown, that said I would get 2 per cent in 2010) or simply had a belief that New Zealanders were incapable and that the globalist agenda knew best. As someone who ran on the belief that New Zealand had superior intellectual capital and innovative capability, and talked about how we should grow champions that do the acquiring, not become acquisition targets, then those media who were once acquisition targets of foreign corporations didn鈥檛 like what they heard.
And that, in a nutshell, is why my attitude toward Stuff has changed overnight thanks to Sin茅ad Boucher taking ownership of what I once called, as part of a collective with its Australian owner, the Fairfax Press.
The irony was always that the Fairfax Press in Australia鈥The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald鈥攚ere positive about my work in the 2000s but their New Zealand outpost was quite happy to suggest I was hard to understand because of my accent. (Given that I sound more like an urban Kiwi than, say, the former leader of the opposition, and arguably have a better command of the English language than a number of their journalists, then that鈥檚 a lie you sell to dinosaurs of the Yellow Peril era.) A Twitter apology from The Dominion Post鈥檚 editor-in-chief isn鈥檛 really enough without an erratum in print, but there you go. In two campaigns, the Fairfax Press鈥檚 coverage was notably poor when compared with the others’.
But I am upbeat about Boucher, about what she intends to do with the business back in local ownership, and about the potential of Kiwis finally getting media that aren鈥檛 subject to overseas whims or corporate agenda; certainly Stuff and its print counterparts won鈥檛 be regarded as some line on a balance sheet in Sydney any more, but a real business in Aotearoa serving Kiwis. Welcome back to the real world, we look forward to supporting you.
Another late-night calculation of COVID-19 cases as a proportion of total tests done, so the figures will be out of date again, and I鈥檝e also discovered that the total testing numbers some countries are giving are out of date. The ones with asterisks below are those that haven鈥檛 cited increased testing numbers (at least none that I can find; a search actually yielded lower and older figures in some cases), so I imagine the real percentages might be lower. The order of countries hasn鈥檛 changed.
France 109,069 of 224,254 = 48路64%*
Spain 146,690 of 355,000 = 41路32%*
UK 55,242 of 266,694 = 20路71%
USA 400,549 of 2,082,443 = 19路23%
Italy 135,586 of 755,445 = 17路95%
Sweden 8,419 of 54,700 = 15路39%*
Switzerland 22,789 of 171,938 = 13路25%
Germany 109,178 of 918,460 = 11路88%
New Zealand 1,210 of 46,875 = 2路58%
Singapore 1,623 of 65,000 = 2路50%*
South Korea 10,384 of 477,304 = 2路18%
Australia 6,013 of 319,368 = 1路88%
Hong Kong 961 of 96,709 = 1路38%*
Taiwan 379 of 40,702 = 0路93%
I was buoyed by news on what some of us have cheekily dubbed The Ashley Bloomfield Show (the Ministry of Health director-general’s press conference) that we had only 29 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours here. As a sporting nation I think we understand that you can鈥檛 shirk when you鈥檙e playing the second half of the match. If anything, you need to go harder. By now I suspect many of us are finding the hand-washing and other advice second nature.
Hasn’t it been revealing to hear which journalists ask crappy questions at the Bloomfield press conference? Since the pressers are watched by a huge number of New Zealanders during lockdown, I think the scales have fallen from many eyes lately to see how the stories get edited and even editorialized. And which members of the media don’t seem to want to work with the good advice being given by our government, yet have nothing solid (e.g. other experts) to counter it with. In my opinion, it’s put TV1 in a good light, and shown its reasonable balance. It also reinforces that many of our talking heads are irrelevant (see below, from The Press in Christchurch). Science is saving the day and showing loud-mouthed opinions for what they are.
Now for something actually important beyond my first world problems. Journalist Suzie Dawson has a fantastic piece outlining how the smear of ‘serial rapist’ is part of the playbook used against senior members of Wikileaks. Her article is well worth reading, especially in light of how the mainstream media have spun the narrative against Julian Assange. He’s not alone: two other men have had campaigns launched against them, with no substantial evidence, thereby diminishing the seriousness of what rape is.
It is lengthy and well researched, but if you haven’t the time, at least consider the briefer post linked from here.
I’m finding it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat the UK Government’s official statements, that they lack any originality, or that they lack basic analytical skills expected of professional journalists. Or all of the above.
You don’t have to like Assange. You can find him rapey [even if the evidence doesn’t support this鈥攍ink added] or creepy [and that’s subjective]. You don’t even have to respect Wikileaks. We can all disagree with whether we believe Wikileaks is a publication and Assange a journalist. But you should be also aware of how stories are being reported to paint a one-sided picture, and how this has been going on for seven years, with blatantly obvious factual omissions in all that time. Jonathan Cook sums it up incredibly well on his blog, and I recommend his piece.
The only major media outlet I have come across that is allowing commentators defending Assange is the Russian government-backed Russia Today.
Some of what Patrick Henningsen said in the wake of Assange’s arrest is already coming to pass, and confirms his suspicions that Assange will not get a fair trial.
The occident, especially the Anglosphere, cannot hold its head up high as a defender of basic human rights. It hasn’t been able to for quite some time with its interference over others’ sovereignty and its yielding to globalist multinationals at the expense of its own citizens. Now the rest of the world is watching this event and seeing how it’s desperate to crush one of its own to keep its wrongdoings from coming out. China, with its kidnappings of publishers and booksellers critical of the Communist Party, will simply say that the US and UK are pots calling the kettle black when this issue is raised in the future.
And given their willingness to join the throng, some of our media won’t be able to complain if any of our journalists are silenced using the same techniques in future.
PS.:It’s worth quoting Suzie Dawson on the word rapey and I now regret using it: ‘The term 鈥渞apey鈥 is itself, offensive. With its use, the definition of rape is being willfully expanded into borderline meaninglessness and obscurity. As if there can be 鈥渞acisty鈥 or 鈥渟existy鈥 or 鈥渉omophobicy鈥. There cannot. Rape is an absolute, and a serious crime against humanity. The term should not be callously invoked; watered down for the social convenience of he or she exercising the privilege inherently wielded when bastardising the language of the violated.’
Facebook鈥檚 woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They don鈥檛 care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you weren鈥檛 looking.
And it鈥檚 nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wired鈥檚 Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louise鈥檚 article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isn鈥檛 big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that it鈥檚 the victim. Sorry, you鈥檙e not. You鈥檝e been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebook鈥檚 value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, 鈥楢ll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as we鈥檝e discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebook鈥檚 record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a company鈥檚 promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.鈥
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: 鈥楩inance is broken.鈥 It鈥檚 not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you can鈥檛 trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonesty鈥攁nd millions do鈥攚ill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. There鈥檚 less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: I鈥檓 here because of my kids鈥攖ill the kids depart; I鈥檓 here because of my friends鈥攖ill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebook鈥檚 user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
It鈥檚 a very simplified analysis鈥攐f course brand equity is made up of far more than trust鈥攁nd doubters will point to the fact Facebook鈥檚 stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg won鈥檛 be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so they鈥檙e not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isn鈥檛 the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.
With how widespread Facebook’s false malware accusations were鈥擣acebook itself claims millions were “helped” by them in a three-month period鈥攊t was surprising how no one in the tech press covered the story. I never understood why not, since it was one of many misdeeds that made Facebook such a basket case of a website. You’d think that after doing everything from experimenting on its users to intruding on users’ privacy with tracking preferences even after opting out, this would have been a story that followed suit. Peak Facebook has been and gone, so it amazed me that no journalist had ever covered this. Until now. Like Sarah Lacy at Pando, who took the principled stand to write about 脺ber’s problems when no one else in the tech media was willing to, it appears to be a case of ‘You can trust a woman to get it right when no man has the guts,’ in this case social media and security writer for Wired, Louise Matsakis. I did provide Louise with a couple of quotes in her story, as did respondents in the US and Germany; she interviewed people on four continents. Facebook’s official responses read like the usual lies we’ve all heard before, going on the record with Louise with such straw-people arguments. Thank goodness for Louise’s and Wired鈥檚 reputations for getting past the usual wall of silence, and it demonstrates again how dishonest Facebook is.
I highly recommend Louise’s article here鈥攁nd please do check it out as she is the first journalist to write about something that has been deceiving Facebook users for four years.
As some of you know, the latest development with Facebook’s fake malware warnings, and the accompanying forced downloads, is that Mac users were getting hit in a big way over the last fortnight. Except the downloads were Windows-only. Basically, Mac users were locked out of their Facebook accounts. We also know that these warnings have nothing to do with malware, as other people can sign on to the same “infected” machines without any issue (and I had asked a few of these Mac users to do just that鈥攖hey confirmed I was right).
Facebook has been blocking the means by which we can get around the forced downloads. Till April 2016, you could delete your cookies and get back in. You could also go and use a Linux or Mac PC. But steadily, Facebook has closed each avenue, leaving users with fewer and fewer options but to download their software. Louise notes, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook,” which is vague. The company did not immediately respond to a followup request for comment about how exactly it uses the data it collects from conducting malware checks.’ But we know data are being sent to Facebook without our consent.
Facebook also told Louise that a Mac user might have been prompted to download a Windows program because of how malware spoofs different devices鈥攏ow, since we all know these computers aren’t infected, we know that that’s a lie. Then a spokesman told Louise that Facebook didn’t collect enough information to know whether you really were infected. But, as she rightly asks, if they didn’t collect that info, why would they force you to download their software? And just what precedent is that setting, since scammers use the very same phishing techniques? Facebook seems to be normalizing this behaviour. I think they got themselves even deeper in the shit by their attempts at obfuscation.
Facebook also doesn’t answer why many users can simply wait three days for their account to come right instead of downloading their software. Which brings me back to the database issues I discovered in 2014.
Louise even interviewed ESET, which is one of the providers of the software, only to get a hackneyed response鈥攚hich is better than what the rest of us managed, because the antivirus companies all are chatty on Twitter till you bring this topic up. Then they clam up. Again, thank goodness for the fourth estate and a journalist with an instinct for a great story.
So please do give Louise some thanks for writing such an excellent piece by visiting her article, or send her a note via Twitter, to @lmatsakis. To think this all began one night in January 2016 鈥
