. .Thanks for reading Frankly Speaking ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. There are times when I despair that some (most?) of the mainstream media are living in a far-away fantasy land, perhaps only a heel-click or two away from Wonderland, Oz, or Neverneverland.
It starts to ‘make sense’ if you accept that these stories are produced with ‘business’ as their focus - pretend it is Simon Bridges doing an opinion piece.
Our media is especially bad when it comes to "rankings" like these. They just publish the results without reading the reports. Recently 1News and other media ran with "Auckland the least-safe city in Australasia, new report says" and when you actually found the report and read it, it was a) just some random website using "user-submitted data and perceptions", b) part of a much larger report that actually had good results for Auckland that 1News decided to not lead with, and c) the crime part of it was all about "perceived safety" anyway, not including any actual crime statistics. 1News then used this for a jumping off point to say "it comes as the new government's tough on crime approach is introduced" as if that will fix it and not make it worse. Just pure propaganda. But none of that matters: most people only read the headline, so go away thinking Auckland is the least-safe city in Australasia. Now repeat for every "study" and "ranking" reported in the media and you can see why nothing gets better.
It starts to ‘make sense’ if you accept that these stories are produced with ‘business’ as their focus - pretend it is Simon Bridges doing an opinion piece.
Well said, and why does it take the alternative media to state these obvious facts. RNZ should be more careful.
Our media is especially bad when it comes to "rankings" like these. They just publish the results without reading the reports. Recently 1News and other media ran with "Auckland the least-safe city in Australasia, new report says" and when you actually found the report and read it, it was a) just some random website using "user-submitted data and perceptions", b) part of a much larger report that actually had good results for Auckland that 1News decided to not lead with, and c) the crime part of it was all about "perceived safety" anyway, not including any actual crime statistics. 1News then used this for a jumping off point to say "it comes as the new government's tough on crime approach is introduced" as if that will fix it and not make it worse. Just pure propaganda. But none of that matters: most people only read the headline, so go away thinking Auckland is the least-safe city in Australasia. Now repeat for every "study" and "ranking" reported in the media and you can see why nothing gets better.