NZME approaches D-Day; will it lead to impartial reporting?

Philip Crump will sit on an NZME editorial board if shareholders approve proposed board changes. Source: LinkedIn.

If any NZME shareholder had been in any doubt that the current board should go, the company’s decision to bar journalists from attending its annual shareholders’ meeting next week should have convinced them.

Reportedly, NZME was requiring journalists who wish to attend to get express “permission” from the board and journalists are also banned from using recording devices.

But it seems the board thought better of excluding journalists, because when I asked whether the board would let me attend the meeting online, scheduled for 2pm next Tuesday, June 3, I was told I would be able to.

Even so, a board that is supposed to be governing a news organization had put its distrust of journalists on full display, reckoning it could control the narrative.

This is conduct unbecoming any public company, let alone a news organization and any PR person worth their salt would have so advised the board.

Banning journalists from AGMs is rare, although I have encountered it from time to time.

But I’m not sure a publicly NZX-listed company has ever done so, though a handful have threatened to do so.

I’ve only once been refused admission to the AGM of a company that was public but not NZX-listed and that was only because I was unprepared.

Legally, companies can exclude journalists

However, companies are within their legal rights to ban anyone other than shareholders and/or their proxyholders from attending an AGM.

As I’ve learnt, if there’s any doubt, the trick is to tee up a proxy from a willing shareholder ahead of time.

I’m making no secret of my wish that the dissident shareholders, most prominently represented by Canadian businessman Jim Grenon, succeed in the proposed board changes.

And that’s not because I particularly agree with Grenon – he is dead right that the company’s financial performance has been woeful – but because I do think the company needs a shake up.

(Except I often think of media organisations such as NZME as dinosaurs that need to get out of the way to allow new media, such as Substacks, to spring up to replace them).

The slate of directors now proposed, with former cabinet minister Steven Joyce as chair, couldn’t possibly do worse than the current board in governing the company, at least I hope not.

I’m not entirely sure what Grenon’s politics are, and I don’t know him personally, but the media paints him as a right winger wishing to use NZME’s newspapers and radio stations to shove his ideas down New Zealanders throats.

Fear and loathing among journalists

Unlike many of my colleagues who fear Grenon gaining control – he owns 13% of NZME and has received public backing from other major shareholders – I don’t read it that way.

Grenon owns the Centrist newsletter that for the most part aggregates news published by other outlets. I’ve been receiving it for a while now and don’t see anything particularly right wing about it.

But I wouldn’t be particularly worried in any case.

That’s because lawyer Philip Crump, who is on the boards of the Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand on Air, and who was originally proposed as an NZME director but, after the to-and-fro of negotiations, is set to be a member of a new editorial board, should the compromise plan Grenon and the current board have arrived at be approved by shareholders.

Crump has his own Substack, Cranmer’s Substack, and has published several articles outlining his approach to try to combat the low esteem that newspapers and news organisations have fallen into among the public which you can find here:

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His latest missive outlines veteran journalist Karl du Fresne’s views on why there’s so much distrust of the media.

“I want my news free of spin from either end of the political spectrum … I still scan the papers, but finding political stories that are free of spin is a constant challenge,” du Fresne wrote in a column published by The Spectator Australia.

Rigid intolerance

Du Fresne also highlighted the profile of the typical journalist in 2025 - young, university-educated, female “and rigidly intolerant of ideas she doesn’t agree with”.

My colleague, Tim Hunter at the National Business Review, typifies the fear and loathing expressed by many journalists in a piece he published on LinkedIn last week https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-journalist-tim-hunter-qhulc/?trackingId=PV7vCajkS0ad%2BeVb0VeRfg%3D%3D.

Tim is an excellent and much-awarded business journalist who again won the NZ Shareholders’ Association’s business journalist of the year award last year, and I’ve worked with him at various different outlets over the years, most recently at NBR until late 2018.

But I found his piece disingenuous in its refusal to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with NZ’s media, though he did acknowledge its fall from public trust.

He also mischaracterized Crump’s stated six principles for improving journalism in a manner that I thought unfair and overly defensive.

Hunter talks about Crump’s “advocacy for an approach that abandons the search for truth” but Crump has done no such thing.

“I’m not advocating for the abandonment of pursuing truth,” Crump told me.

Rather he’s arguing for a greater degree of impartiality than is displayed by many in the NZ media currently – in a fashion, I might add, that would have been impossible for me when I started in journalism in the mid-1980s.

It just wasn’t done

Even had I wished to push my own pet projects, that just wasn’t done back then, and certainly not by young journalists just beginning their careers.

My quibble with Crump’s principles is that I don’t like the “ping pong” style of journalism that simply relays what he said versus what she said and makes no attempt to establish the facts.

Crump said he was particularly offended that Hunter made all sorts of assumptions about his views and linked him to people he had never heard of and publications such as the Centrist, which he has never written for.

If Hunter had been interested in Crump’s views on a wide range of matters, he had been publishing Cranmer’s Substack since 2022 with more than 100 articles available, as well as articles written for ZB Plus for about 18 months.

“Climate change bores me to tears,” Crump said of Hunter’s allegation that he’s a climate-change denier – for the record, Crump has never expressed any views on climate change.

I wouldn’t criticise Hunter’s work, but I do think he’s wrong about the lack of standards among journalists currently.

Too many see their jobs as promoting social causes, which is greatly at odds with my view that journalists’ primary job should be to provide readers with facts and accurate portrayals of events and to leave it to readers to decide what to think.

Room for advocacy

That’s on the news side of the business. I’m unashamedly a columnist these days and readers will know I don’t spare them my opinions, but then I’ve spent more than 40 years earning the right to have opinions.

There is room for advocacy journalism, but as it’s practiced currently in NZ it amounts to pushing particular, mostly left-wing views and censoring all that disagree.

I can cite three particular views I hold that are deeply unfashionable among lefties:

· I’m a feminist and am against the notion promoted by trans activists that their rights trump women’s rights;

· I reject the concept of co-governance by Maori and believe there’s plenty of evidence that the Maori who signed the treaty at Waitangi in 1840 knew very well that they were ceding sovereignty to Queen Victoria. I believe in equal rights for all and oppose hereditary race-based rights;

· and I think NZ’s role in the conflict between Israel and Gaza should be to side with all the civilians on both sides caught up in that horrible war. “Queers for Palestine” particularly offend me since Gazans would be quick to throw them off the nearest building if they could get their hands on these useful idiots.

Anyone who shares my views on these three issues can very easily point to examples of bias in the media in reporting on these issues.

What are puberty blockers?

For example, a march advocating for the use of puberty blockers on demand held in Wellington in March was reported uncritically and absent crucial facts.

Facts such as that puberty blockers are actually the same powerful drugs that are used to quell the libido of sex offenders – how many people being told that would think these drugs were appropriate for children?

Britain has now banned these drugs for use as puberty blockers and I hope New Zealand soon follows suit.

Articles uncritically talked about “gender-affirming healthcare” without telling readers what that care entails, such as removing the balls from boys and breasts from girls, or that it is based on the premise that the instant any child announces they’re the opposite sex, everybody around them has to “affirm” that this is so.

If your child said it was really a train, would you rush to attach wheels to him or her and search from a train track for him or her to ride on?

The articles fail to give even a hint of the adverse health effects of such “healthcare,” such as kids growing up unable to experience sexual pleasure or to have children of their own, as well as girls going straight to menopause and developing osteoporosis in their 20s.

Telling lies to children

Whether interfering with puberty in the first place is at the very least questionable is hardly ever, if at all, examined in the mainstream media

Adults know very well that humans cannot change sex and that nobody was ever born in the “wrong” body, so we shouldn’t be lying to children.

In any case, we’d be horrified at the idea that the best way to treat an anorexic would be to “affirm” she was indeed very fat when she’s as skinny as a rake.

All in all, I disagree with Hunter and think the media, and journalists ourselves, bear at least some of the blame for the public’s loss of trust in our work.

On the treaty, the media informed us the overwhelming number of submissions opposed Act’s bill that aimed to codify the treaty’s provisions.

Then I learnt that the more than 20,000 submissions that Hobson’s Choice submitted had been counted as a single submission and that the submissions Act put forward were similarly treated (the information came from Hobson’s Choice and Act, not the media).

If you have to resort to such distortions of fact to push a particular barrow, how can you expect people to believe what you publish?

Should Grenon win the changes he’s sought next week, I’ll follow the progress of Crump’s editorial board with interest.

Correction: Jim Grenon sold out of the Centrist in 2023.