PETER JACKSON: I don't know what to believe

My mother, typically, I suspect, for her generation, had total faith in the media. If it was published in a newspaper or broadcast by radio or TV, it had to be true. Didn't it? No one would publish or broadcast anything they knew to be wrong or weren't sure about.

Mum died almost 30 years ago, and I have no idea if she would still be so trusting today if she was still with us. Perhaps she would be. Her faith in human nature and the fundamental decency of others ran deep. Mine, not so much.

Quite frankly, there are times now when I don't know what to believe.

For instance, I'm not sure that Gazans are starving. The war there is a true human tragedy on a grand scale, but I honestly don't know if what we are repeatedly told is a case of genocide by starvation is actually happening. Some of the images I've seen suggest, to me, that it isn't.

Recently I saw a photo of an 11-year-old Palestinian girl who, we were told, weighed 15kg. She was a living skeleton, the result, we were told, of starvation. The woman holding her, who we were told was her mother, to my untrained eye did not look at all malnourished.

She might have been hungry, but she appeared to be in good health. So are Palestinian children starving while their parents aren't? Or are the photos we are seeing portraying disease? I have no idea. Israel says there is no starvation in Gaza, but no one believes a word Israel says. It would help, no doubt, if Israel allowed international media into Gaza; the fact that it refuses to do so represents a fairly large, malodorous rat.

But compare photos of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto. You will notice a difference.

Think too of the sight of Palestinian children clamouring to be fed. Believe me, it would not be difficult to construct such a scene. It's been done before, most famously perhaps by a photographer, who won a lot of awards and made a lot of money with a photo of South African street urchins diving into rubbish bins behind a restaurant in Cape Town looking for food.

In fact, they weren't waifs at all, and were looking for the gold coins that the photographer told them he had put in the bins.

Maybe I'm wrong to be sceptical, but don't think for a moment that this world, as portrayed by the media, operates according to truth and transparency. The stakes in the Middle East are perhaps as high as they have ever been, and if there is an advantage to be had in portraying diseased children as victims of deliberate starvation, whoever stands to gain will take it.

There are lots of less extreme examples of `news' being fashioned, deliberately or otherwise, to support an agenda. The calamitous wildfires in California last summer came into that category. We were told, over and over, that the fires were a natural phenomenon but dramatically the worst on record thanks to global warming.

In the US, ProPublica, took issue with that. It reckoned that in prehistoric times, some 4.4 to 11.8 million acres of forest burned, without human intervention. Then conservationists got involved. Between 1982 and 1998 the annual managed burn averaged 30,000 acres; between 1999 and 2017 that fell to 13,000 acres.

What burned so spectacularly last year was an accumulation of fuel that nature would not have allowed. Now Nature Sustainability says 20 million acres needs burning to restabilise what has got so out of whack.

It's a similar story in Australia, I believe. And our problems with forest slash might well stem from the same conversationist zeal.

And when do you reckon the media will stop bleating about the cost of living crisis and tell us how much the Paris agreement is contributing to that? And...

Peter Jackson retired as editor of the Northland Age in 2021