KARL DU FRESNE: What privilege looks like in 2025

Two weeks ago, in a blog post headlined What privilege sounds like in 2025, I made the case that the broadcasting organisation formerly known as Radio New Zealand is the embodiment of privilege. 

I argued that the dwindling number of New Zealanders who listen to the state radio station are in fact doubly privileged. Not only are they able to hear taxpayer-funded content that’s carefully curated so as not to offend their sensibilities or challenge their cosy assumptions, but they are spared the indignity of being bombarded with crass, intrusive advertising. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who choose to tune into commercial radio (which, in this context, essentially means NewstalkZB).

I also noted that despite this disincentive, NewstalkZB’s audience keeps growing at the expense of RNZ. You’d think someone at the top of RNZ might have noticed this and started asking the obvious question – namely, why are listeners abandoning us? But even if they’re asking that question, the evidence suggests that they can’t bring themselves to answer it honestly.

As if to prove this, when my old colleague (and former broadcasting journalist) Barrie Saunders linked to my blog post on Facebook, RNZ board member Jane Wrightson sneeringly responded: “Oh good grief!” In doing so, she obligingly illustrated the problem.

I suspect that Wrightson, who has had a glittering career at the heart of the Wellington public service, inhabits an insular world that is largely deaf to critical outside scrutiny. They can’t see anything wrong, therefore there’s no problem. Wrightson apparently doesn’t pause to wonder why people like me no longer listen to RNZ.

For decades my radio was permanently tuned to the state broadcaster. I habitually listened to it at home and in the car. I should be RNZ’s target audience.

I miss some RNZ programmes and would gladly become a loyal listener again, because it still does some things well. I miss Jim Mora and I still sneakily listen to Phil O’Brien when no one’s around. But for me the entire organisation is fatally contaminated by the naked, systemic bias inherent in critical areas of its programming – most notably in its choice of presenters and in the way it deals with touchy political and ideological issues such as race, climate change and gender.

RNZ’s partisanship in favour of what are smugly and misleadingly labelled “progressive” values is evident not just in the issues it chooses to cover and how it deals with them, but just as critically in the issues it prefers to ignore and the people it refuses to engage with.

The parallels with the beleaguered BBC, currently grappling with the reverberations from a damning report exposing embedded biases on issues such as Gaza, crime and immigration, are obvious.

As a board member, Wrightson should be asking why RNZ has lost so many listeners like me (and you can be sure there are countless others. Not only do the audience figures bear that out, but I meet them all the time). But she prefers to dismiss criticism with an airy wave of the hand. “How tedious”, she seemed to be saying. It was what you might call a Marie Antoinette response.

But RNZ is hardly the only media organisation whose editorial priorities scream of privilege. If you want to know what privilege looks like in 2025, just read Stuff.

The Post’s Saturday magazine Your Weekend, in particular, wallows in privilege. I have no doubt that its editor and staff sincerely see themselves as champions of the marginalised. But this sits awkwardly with their choice of content, which invariably reflects the interests and preoccupations of a narrow demographic group consisting largely of affluent, young, educated, left-leaning, middle-class Pakeha women.

This highlights a besetting fault that pervades much of the New Zealand media. Editorial agendas are too often determined by journalists writing for and about people like themselves; people with the same interests, priorities, values and tastes. This is not a formula for success, since it ignores the rather substantial part of the community that doesn’t fit that profile.

Every time I look at Your Weekend (which I do quite often, because there are few things more satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed), I’m struck by the incongruity of editorial content that vacillates between earnestly woke on one hand and breathtakingly puerile, trite and self-indulgent on the other. YW appears unable to decide whether it’s a progressive socio-political pamphlet or an adolescent fanzine, slavishly pandering to elitist, designer-label consumerism.

A flick through a couple of recent editions reveals a preoccupation with actors, writers and artists (oh, and a burlesque queen last weekend and the weekend before that, a social media “influencer” and a food forager). In other words, a snapshot of an effete metropolitan café society that enjoys a lifestyle shared by a privileged few.

Nowhere is that privilege better encapsulated than in the sections devoted to subjects such as fashion, makeup and wine. Here you might see a pair of women’s shorts that costs $550, shoes priced at $595 and a handbag with a tag of $430. In the wine column I rarely see anything priced at less than $30, and often much more. I wonder, how many Your Weekend readers can afford the prohibitively expensive stuff the magazine promotes?

I accept that YW is targeted at a particular demographic group, but I would argue that it doesn’t even reflect the broad interests of that target market; merely a carefully selected subset of it.

A similar self-centred blindness to real-world interests and concerns seems to permeate the entire Stuff universe. Last Saturday’s Post, for example, included a wordy review of an esoteric Te Papa exhibition, a half-page by the same writer devoted to the woke podcaster Toby Manhire, another half-page about an obscure Australian musician (ah yes, obscure, but a close associate of Nick Cave, darling of the rock music cognoscenti - say no more), and an interview with the director of a Wellington food festival in which she listed all her favourite places in the city – mostly trendy bars and cafes, but with a sauna venue and a dance-fitness studio thrown in.

That last-mentioned item was a quintessential reflection of Wellington as it’s experienced by a well-paid, hedonistic, apartment-dwelling elite. I wait in vain for one of these regular “My Wellington” pieces to feature a checkout operator or a bus driver. Perhaps the Post assumes such people couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say.

This type of non-journalism set a new bar earlier this year with a series of Post articles called “The Yummy Mummy”, in which a Stuff journalist who’s also a first-time mother visited various Wellington cafes with her baby to assess their suitability for “Mums and their pint-sized partners”. This was peak self-indulgence, speaking to a tiny minority of readers who share the Stuff editors’ strange ideas about what’s relevant, important and interesting.

As someone who recalls when the Post’s precursor papers, the Evening Post and the Dominion, were stuffed full of actual news stories – stories about court proceedings, council meetings, car accidents, crime, parliamentary debates, business and the economy, cats up trees – I naturally couldn’t help thinking how many such stories could have been accommodated in the hectares of space lavished on these overwritten and often pointless articles.

Of course it’s true that newsrooms have been hollowed out and that papers no longer have the resources to cover the stories they used to. Nonetheless we can draw our own conclusions from the fact Stuff chooses to squander its limited editorial resources pandering to a segment of the market that doesn’t reflect New Zealand society at large.

There’s a word for this: privilege.

Karl du Fresne blogs here