Don’t Let the Herald take You In
The omens are not good for Christopher Luxon. The polls tell a story that – as interpreted by the Herald – suggest that his failure to improve his personal polling means that he could deny National an election victory in 2023; and the conclusion? That Luxon is therefore dragging National down rather than pulling them up, and must therefore go.
The loss of faith in Luxon on the part of the Herald may signal the end for the National leader. The Herald’s close coordination with the National party makes it virtually certain that they would not be talking Luxon down without the nod from National and their supporters.
What is not clear is whether or not the Herald has a favoured successor in mind. If so, the options look pretty limited – could it be Nicola Willis or perhaps Chris Bishop? both of whom have received kind treatment from the Herald from time to time, but without ever suggesting that they would go down better with the public than Luxon has done.
Or could the Herald be thinking of going the whole hog and backing Act and David Seymour? The Herald’s editorial line is certainly far enough to the right to make even that possible.
Whatever their limited options on the right, no one can doubt the Herald’s continuing commitment to getting rid of the Labour government. We can see this repeatedly, not just in their constant anti-government reporting but also in the subtlety they use in their attempts to discredit the government.
One tactic they use is worth remarking upon, because it illustrates the care they take to show the government in a bad light, even when there is nothing of substance to report upon. The online Herald is no doubt skim-read by many readers, who will pick up the general drift of the day’s news from the headlines they see.and the Herald has been quick to exploit that.
The Herald has become adept at putting up headlines that suggest to the casual reader that the government has somehow failed on a particular issue, when the story that follows does nothing to bear this out. A classic example was a headline from a few days ago that highlighted a huge blunder by “the Government” – a blunder that had cost the country billions. It turned out that the story related to Muldoon’s failure to set up a pension fund forty years ago, but the skim-reader would never have got that far.
And then there was the headline about our chances of avoiding a recession, when the story that followed had the economist Tony Alexander saying that we had a good chance of avoiding recession.
My advice to Herald readers? Don’t let them take you in with misleading headlines.