David Seymour did what any interviewee of the news media needs to do whenever they are interviewed. Take their own recording of the conversation. It got the desired result. Checkmate.
Show Script:
1News Forced To Report Facts, Not Spin
As you probably already are aware of, there’s not a lot that leader of the ACT Party and now Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour and I agree on – there’s a few – but one of the concerns that we do share is the behaviour of the mainstream media.
And recently, David Seymour did what I think any interviewee of the news media needs to do whenever they are interviewed. Take their own recording of the conversation.
And in the recent interview between Seymour and TVNZ’s John Campbell, the coverage was so revealing that TVNZ did something it doesn’t usually do and published the full interview – proactively – including the chatter before the interview formally starts – they don’t usually show all that (even though I warn people that the camera and mics are always on when speaking with the media). I suspect they did this because of what it revealed and they knew that ACT were going to release it anyway.
Let’s check it out. It’s a fun watch.
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At the beginning of 2019, we released some exclusive polling to TVNZ 1News.
Sometimes when you have a breaking story or an exclusive poll to release, you can sometimes get more interest from media if they know they’re the first to have the story – rather than a general media release.
And we did this with this polling – offering it to the 6pm news on TVNZ.
And they ran a story on their website entitled “Strong public support for cafes, other businesses to block porn sites on in-store Wi-Fi”.
A new poll suggests there is strong public support for cafes and other businesses to block pornography websites on their in-store Wi-Fi. It comes after Starbucks Coffee rolled out an international block in this year, following consumer pressure. Family First commissioned the poll by Curia Market Research that found 79 per cent of respondents thought there should be adult filters in place for public Wi-Fi, with 16 per cent opposed and six per cent unsure. Bob McCoskrie of Family First said the result was “indicative of the growing community concern over this issue”. Family First supporters went around some cafes and fast food restaurants testing if they could access pornography on the Wi-Fi, finding some blocked pornography, and some did not.
Pretty good and accurate report.
But here’s the 6pm news report by the intrepid reporter Benedict Collins.
Note the focus of his report. The sarcasm. Not focusing on the result, the implications, the actual problem at hand – but getting all excited about how we tested the premise of what the problem was. Even though Starbucks – a major company that can’t make a decent coffee to save itself – had already admitted there was consumer pressure to deal with the issue.
And note especially Benedict’s final comment
You can see why Benedict will never get another exclusive from Family First. In fact, he’ll be lucky to get any response from us ever again. We weren’t expecting a soft report going on about how great Family First was. We just didn’t expect such a juvenile report which was avoiding the actual issue.
But it does explain – and it’s not the only example – of why I don’t have the greatest trust for the mainstream news media. Some of the journalists I do – not Benedict obviously – but in general, I’m far more cautious than trusting, sadly.
And David Seymour feels the same way.
In fact, it has become common practice for senior political leaders and now other people being interviewed by the media to record the whole conversation. You can often see a staffer behind senior political figures holding up their iPhone and recording the whole conversation – so that if and when the comments by the politician are reported, the interviewee can then say “hang on, here’s the full transcript of what was said”.
More and more people are doing that on social media to undermine the narrative that the mainstream media may be pushing.
It’s sad that it’s come to this.
So let’s check the interview between David Seymour and John Campbell – and it doesn’t start well because David claims that John made a statement about what Seymour probably said when asked for the interview. John Campbell says I wouldn’t say that – but then basically admits that he probably did say that, or something like that – but it’s because he’s so self-deprecating. Yeah right.
And remember John Campbell is slightly thrown that the ACT party are doing their own reporting of the interview – and this doesn’t sit too well with the media who have always set the narrative.
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So the interview continues – but it’s quite clear that John Campbell is still very thrown or annoyed about Andy – the ACT party cameraman. And then comes the “how can we be nice and civil” question – as though the media is the victim.
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Now the one other clip worth watching is where Seymour puts a question back to John Campbell that he can’t answer. And then as is the usual approach becomes very indignant….
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Very interesting.
But we’ve already called out the media in the same way that David Seymour is.
Remember last year – we did a McBlog entitled “NZ media’s propagandisation of the US Election”
Examples after examples of the NZ news media think you’re idiots and that you’ll fall for anything, and their propagandising coverage of the US election.
As I warned, you can be sure they’re doing it to many other issues as well.
Now the NZ Herald actually reported on this David v John show.
Act leader and deputy prime minister David Seymour has turned the camera on TVNZ broadcaster John Campbell – with the politician using his own cameraman to film a recent interview in a tactical move to ensure media don’t “shape the narrative”.
…A TVNZ spokeswoman said Campbell’s interviews with Seymour and Winston Peters were made available at the same time – and in full – on TVNZ+, before an edited version at 1 News at Six. These had been available for weeks, and in advance of the Act party posting its own footage, TVNZ said.
Seymour responded:
“It’s certainly true that they put the raw footage of the Campbell interview up prior to us releasing footage. They knew that we were going to release the footage. So they didn’t need to wait for us to put it up to change their behaviour.” He said it was unusual to see raw footage of an interview posted in full. “I certainly can’t think of any other examples.”
I suspect that Seymour is correct.
I stumbled across another member of the mainstream media from Radio NZ Jesse Mulligan lamenting what had happened between Seymour and Campbell, but here’s the interesting comment he makes
Now the left is stuck with a new problem. Not only are its messages more subtle and wholesome than the vote-grabbing slogans of the populist right, but voters are now getting all of their information from asynchronous broadcasters like YouTube, which scout for videos featuring the most awful aspects of human interaction and super charge their audience reach.
Oh dear. Poor Jesse is worried that videos are popular on YouTube because people like watching them.
There’s an example of the worst of the media mentality.
As I mentioned, there’s a lot that David Seymour and I disagree on, but we share a deep suspicion of the news media – a suspicion shared by the overwhelming majority of NZers who no longer trust the news media.
And Seymour gave us a simply media training lesson.
Control the narrative by showing the media that you will keep them accountable to the facts and not the spin.
It’s a win-win.
