Andrew Dickens: Newshub has been broke for ages

Author: Andrew Dickens,
Publish Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024, 2:16PM

So the culture wars that erupted after the closing of Newshub continued over the weekend.

The go woke-go broke crowd have been out in force trying to prove their claims.

Economist Rob MacCulloch has written a piece entitled: 'Economics 101 explains why Newshub bankrupted.'

In it, he uses a David Farrar survey of Kiwiblog readers that guessed at the political leaning of media offerings.

Knowing that Kiwiblog is openly right wing and its readers are of one mind already puts a big question mark on the findings.

But anyway, Rob determined that all the media is left wing except the Platform and Newstalk ZB and this is what caused Newshub to go broke.

Newsflash, Newshub has been broke for ages. Economics 101 says if you load your company up with debt and then enter a recession that heavily affects marketing budgets- then you go bust.

Newshub has existed on the kindness and deep pockets of its owners. Warner Bros. Discovery are themselves in difficulty and they thought nothing of cutting off a New Zealand newsroom, and in doing so, making 15 percent of New Zealand journalists redundant.

David Farrar's survey also says the Herald is the most left wing. Which is exactly what I was thinking as I read opinion pieces from Stephen Joyce, Richard Prebble, and Bruce Cotterill- and even current Health Minister Shane Reti was given free reign in recent days. But I guess all it takes is Shaneel Lal, Shane Te Pou and Rod Emmerson to convince you it's a lefty rag.

So it occurred to me over the weekend that the problem with the media is not bias, but not enough bias.

Overseas, you know exactly what you want and what you get.

In the UK, you read the Guardian or you read the Times.

In America, you watch CNN or you watch Fox.

You choose your echo chamber and you choose never to challenge yourself with other ways of thinking.

Seems like New Zealand is going the same way. You may want to ask yourself if this is a good thing.

Correction- an earlier version of this article said that Stephen Franks wrote the article referred to above. This has since been corrected to say it was written by Rob MacCulloch.