David Cormack
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The Risk of Mr Hosking
🕑 Added 2021-09-05 21:50:02 +0000 UTCThis piece was pulled for a few days while I tidied it up, I'm now republishing it in the wake of news that Peter Williams, the poor man's Hosking, has left Magic Talk.
"He's a great broadcaster". That's what a lot of journalists tell me about Mike Hosking.
But he's not really, is he? He's utterly contemptible.
Last week he had a Cabinet Minister, Dr Ayesha Verrall on. Dr Verrall is a truly accomplished individual. She was the go-to expert last year before becoming an MP that Labour used to up the contact tracing in New Zealand.
Then when Dr Verrall was elected, she went straight into Cabinet.
Hosking had her on the show yesterday morning, and he didn't like the way she talked. After she'd finished, he then replayed some of the interview and said there'd been a "honk" and a "gabble" and played truck and goose noises over the top of Dr Verrall's comments.
You can go have a listen here if you'd like. It's pretty awful [I'm told he uses this device with other guests, which isn't actually an excuse].
Hosking is no longer a national broadcaster of repute, he's basically the Douche from Parks and Recreation [link for the non-parks and rec fans].
Aside from being a coward who waited until Dr Verrall had left before mocking her, Hosking is also genuinely dangerous for the country. Often when people say shit like that, I think they're using hyperbole.
Te Pūnaha Matatini did some research on Covid-19 disinformation in New Zealand's social media. Except it wasn't just confined to social media.
The only media figure to feature in the research, from every segment of New Zealand's mainstream media, was Mike Hosking.
Here's a link to the abstract and here's a link to the full pdf of the research.
If you do a search for Hosking, you'll find him a few times. He's there for dog whistling up racist rhetoric against China, he's there for spreading lies about Covid's impact, including the fatality rate, undermining the Government's response, arguing that it's only the elderly who are impacted, arguing that lockdown is ineffective, and arguing that lockdown is an over-response.
Mediawatch devoted an entire segment to the fact that Hosking just belches out any old shit. Often in direct contradiction to himself.
Usually I don't like to single out particular members of NZ's media landscape. I work (or have worked) with a lot of them and they are decent humans who do a good job. But Hosking was singled out by the research, so I’m singling him out here.
The Herald has stopped running his pieces as often as they did, but it's still there on the NewstalkZB site.
I completely understand the Prime Minister's choice to not go on his show anymore. By the PM going on, she would legitimise him, and he's a disseminator of misinformation. Misinformation that is dangerous and could have terrible consequences for New Zealand.
So it's not just the terrible treatment of a cabinet minister who has achieved more for New Zealand than he ever will, it's not just for the wrong-headed opinions that I disagree with, it's because he is actually a risk to our country.
The sad thing is he rates, and he rates well. I think he's the #1 radio programme in the country at the moment, which means a plurality of radio listeners are potentially getting dangerous information from a man who argues he can lie on air because he is not a journalist.
And he certainly is not.
Yes, Twitter will gnash its collective left-wing teeth at him on a near-daily basis, and yes, a lot of Facebook probably loves him for his “tell it like it is” attitude, but we need more people to understand that he doesn’t just peddle right-wing tropes, or self-contradicting positions, he is literal fake news.
And now with the news that Magic Talk has dropped Peter Williams, to go with John Banks and Sean Plunket, it seems that Mediaworks is doing a better job of cleaning house than NZME.
