More churnalism

On page 4 of today's Press newspaper, there's a story, headlined "Child poverty puts NZ on 'roll of shame' " – the Children’s Commissioner deploring, yet again, the fact that this wealthy nation has an estimated 125,000 kids living in poverty.

Taking up two-thirds of the front page, is a story with a huge photo, headlined: "Transgender woman who waited 80 years to be herself".

To me, those two headlines and their relative positions, sum up the superficial, diversionary priorities of the Neo-liberal era. 

 

The transgender story also takes pride of place on the Stuff website and includes a 5 minute video with a suitably reverential voice over. The child poverty story does not figure on the Stuff website front page at all, and nor was it in the Press Twitter feed at the time of writing this.

 

To a person who lived as a boy and man for 80 years, married, and fathered four children, and who now wants to dress openly in stereotypically female clothing, use a stereotypically female name, and have people use female third person pronouns when referring to them – I would normally say, do whatever makes you happy. I would not make a big deal out of it being written up as a human interest story. 

 

But occupying almost the entire front page of the weekend edition of a major NZ newspaper and headline story on a major news website has made me take a huge decision. For the first time in my long life there will be no printed mainstream newspaper in my house. I will not be renewing my Press subscription and I will write to the editor to explain why. 

 

Furthermore, until such time as New Zealand no longer has:

 

appallingly high rates of child poverty, extreme and growing differentials in income and wellbeing, and a growing number of so-called working poor;

 

obscenely differential Māori incarceration rates, especially of wāhine, and grossly differential post-surgery survival rates and life expectancy for Māori;

very high rates of family violence and rape;

one of the worst records in the world for native land and marine species extinction; 

 

an economy that is reliant on a mainly for export, industrialised form of primary production which is resulting in a catastrophic loss of top soil, and is dependent on imported artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and anthelmintics, the use of which has resulted in high and growing levels of water contamination and wider environmental pollution ....

...I will continue to call out this sort of knee-jerk, diversionary, superficial, miserable excuse for journalism which, as well as being an insult to women, and promoting what will be viewed in the future as a social contagion, may – by fuelling a conservative moral panic – put transgender people and a host of others, at risk in the future.

I remember the Press too often engaging in populist, tub-thumping, moral panic inducing reportage such as the deplorable coverage of the prosecution case in the Lipine Sila trial. I remember all those crass and racist cartoons. 

This sort of flag-waving in its way is worse than that because it poses as progressive.

This is not a game. This is not a means by which middle-class people, who otherwise tacitly or overtly support the socio-economic status quo, get to acquire some political brownie points and make themselves feel better about their social and economic privilege.

This serves as a diversion away from the vast array of current and looming economic, social, and environmental crises which will hit the poor and especially poor women and kids, first and worst.

If I live long enough to see the knee-jerkers wake up from their gender-identity stupor, I'll get no satisfaction from saying "we told you so".