By Chris Trotter*
That Television New Zealand saw fit to run a news item on the subject of political debate tells us something. Unfortunately, what it tells us is that we have a very big problem on our hands.
A generation has grown to adulthood for whom the idea that all the important issues have at least two sides has acquired a counterintuitive aspect. It is a generation raised to believe that all the great questions that formerly divided society have been resolved.
To indicate otherwise, by affirming ideas that have been consigned, with extreme prejudice, to the dustbin of history, is to signal a form of individual and social pathology. Such persons may merit treatment, but what they absolutely must not be given is an audience.
What was it, then, that prompted TVNZ’s Laura Frykberg to pull together an item on political debate? The answer would appear to be the events surrounding the visit to New Zealand of the controversial women’s-rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull – also known as “Posie Parker”. Those events have clearly caused a number of journalists to re-examine the way New Zealand’s mainstream news media responded to Keen-Minshull’s visit. A much smaller number may even have asked themselves whether the media’s response played a part in stoking the violence which Keen-Minshull’s presence unleashed.
Frykberg’s framing of the item was, however, rather curious. Viewers were introduced to a clutch of high-school debaters – as if their highly formulaic “sport” in any way resembles genuine political debate. Skilled debaters are expected to acquit themselves effectively regardless of the subject matter. Being on the “Affirmative”, or the “Negative”, team should be a matter of supreme indifference to these “sporting” debaters. They expect to be judged solely on the organisation and delivery of their team’s arguments.
Genuine political debate could hardly be more different from this argumentative cleverness. When real human passions are engaged, debates can become extremely fraught affairs. One has only to encounter the fiercely committed protagonists and antagonists of abortion in the United States to gain some appreciation of the powerful emotions that are all-too-easily aroused by profound differences of opinion.
It is possible that the increasing disinclination to debate contentious issues, a trend already evident in the nation’s universities, is a reflection of the emotional frailty of many younger New Zealanders. More and more we hear the argument that free speech causes real harm to persons of a sensitive disposition. Certainly, hearing one’s cherished beliefs trashed by someone with finely-honed rhetorical skills can be a devastating experience. Especially so, if one’s personal identity has been, to a large extent, constructed out of those beliefs.
In order to avoid upsetting their paying customers, universities have begun to downplay the idea that there are multiple ways of looking at contentious issues, in favour of the notion that there is only one “correct” viewpoint which, if not acknowledged by students, may severely impede their academic success. From this position it is but a short step to denying those with “incorrect” views a “platform”, or to the shouting-down of any dissenters who make it as far as the stage.
Emerging from this environment, it is easy to see why university graduates – especially those from the liberal arts and communications studies – might find it both strange and intolerable to end up in institutions where the tradition of allowing all sides of an issue to be aired remains deeply entrenched. Trained to espouse only the “correct” version of reality, the idea of giving “incorrect” ideas access to the “bully pulpit” of the mass media, can only strike a large number of these youngsters as just plain wrong.
But, what to do about it? The experience, both overseas and here in New Zealand, is for younger journalists to stage in-house uprisings against what they see as editorial tolerance of incorrect ideas and practices. Rather than defend the tradition of ideological diversity in journalism, most editors, publishers and broadcasters have opted to bow to the will of the young people who will, ultimately, replace them.
Thanks to the events surrounding Keen-Minshull’s visit, however, at least some journalists have been given cause to re-think their attitudes. The news-media’s repetition of the charge that Keen-Minshull was an “anti-trans activist” – rather than a “women’s-rights campaigner” – contributed significantly to the aggressive temper of her opponents. Educated to regard the exercise of the “Heckler’s Veto” as an entirely legitimate tactic, trans-gender activists felt morally entitled to monster Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull off her stage and out of the public square.
That this led directly to serious assaults against those who had gathered to hear Keen-Minshull speak (much of it captured on video) only made it harder for mainstream journalists to square their consciences with the behaviour a growing chorus of critics are condemning as overtly partisan media incitement.
Frykberg is to be congratulated for addressing the pros and cons of political debate on the Six O’clock News. Traditionalists might quibble that it would have been more enlightening to examine the way in which Members of Parliament deal with the passions aroused by genuine political debate, rather than the amoral artifice of school debaters. She might also have touched upon the highly contestable claims of Sarah Hendrica Bickerton of Tohatoha – a not-for-profit outfit dedicated to a “just and equitable Internet” – and Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s discombobulation at social media’s subversive mobilisation of non-elite opinion.
Taken as a whole, however, Frykberg’s item constitutes a welcome indication that the mainstream media is finally engaging in a little self-reflection. And it’s catching, at least within Television New Zealand. Frykberg’s Saturday item was followed the next morning by the Q+A programme’s decision to interview the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Professor Nadine Strossen, whose forthright defence of freedom of expression – even Keen-Minshull’s – left the host, Jack Tame, looking ever-so-slightly (and uncharacteristically) contrite.
Back in the 1970s, the Right used to joke that a liberal was a conservative who had yet to be mugged by reality. Both Frykberg and Tame, while not exactly the victims of a mugging, show signs of having, at the very least, witnessed something uncomfortably close to one.
As an old lefty, I can attest to the emotional wrench involved in having to own-up to the wrongs of people you once believed were doing the right thing. It took me a long time to realise that exposing bad behaviour – especially by those who purport to share your values – is the best way to ensure the survival of those values. Journalists, in particular, must never play favourites. There are two sides to every story – usually more than two. The trick is to give every side the opportunity to present its case – and then allow the audience to make up its own mind.
*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.
38 Comments
I think you’ll be disappointed, we don’t do debate and discussion in this country. A few grumbles and looking at shoes and maybe a comment online. No real intellectual vigour or debate applied, lack of passion and knowledge and recycling of tired tropes from overseas.
Also bud light tastes terrible.
This is quite good.
Musk having a chat with a journalist about hate speech and a big mirror being turned on the BBC. 5mins long for those who can be bothered.
I felt the Jack Tame interview was a bit of a watershed moment. He had nothing to come back to the cogent reasons put forward for free speech. I went to one of the talks for Nadine Strossen, she highlighted as 'chilling' when former PM Ardern was asked to define hate speech she responded 'i'll know it when i see it'.
Yes the true debater presents the argument according to his or her brief, not belief. In the past NZ politicians had quite a few exponents of this skill. For instance one of such Robert Muldoon, was able to summon up some respect for his nemesis David Lange in that the latter did not himself, initially at least, support the nuclear separation from ANZUS but given the mood of the nation was then able to advocate brilliantly for that cause.
I have argued before that when people tend to argue for a position in any debate the tendency is for extremism. CT appears to actively avoid using this word, but his description still sounds like extremism. Perhaps people come on so strong to suppress dissent? But none the less our entire society seems based on people having to accept political positions presented by more influential people, but which they might not be entirely comfortable with. In organisations, especially Government departments, advancement usually appears to more on political conformity than ability. But the devil is always in the detail, and every topic should be examined in detail. CT states that the school debates are far from the reality of political debate, but I'd suggest that the school debates should be what political debates should become, where the weight of argument defines the winner and loser, not the ability to suppress the opposition through politics.
For student debaters, the real benefit in their emotional development comes by presenting powerful arguments that they don't actually agree with. This "steel manning" (opposite of a "straw man") requires true empathy and the ability to put one's own agenda aside. It is a prerequisite for having an open mind.
Genuine political debate could hardly be more different from this argumentative cleverness. When real human passions are engaged, debates can become extremely fraught affairs.
UK newspaper removes interview with Russian ambassador
The Times “caved in” to pressure, envoy Andrey Kelin has claimed in a damning open letter
Continually dishonest Chris. You know the real reason for this and always misrepresent it.
The harder left believe absolutely in their moral righteousness because of their political narrative. As such they feel it is totally acceptable to lie about, be violent towards or commit any number of inhumane acts to their opponents because they are the "right side of history" or "morally correct".
This is why they place emphasis on lying about their opponents from the centre right to the far right and misrepresenting them. These are not people to make concessions to. They are cry bullying their opponents, screaming out about the 'violence' of whoever opposes them, then committing violence 'in self defence' before finally gaslighting you about how they never did that. The media spent three weeks spinning narratives and coping about their violence.
They (the power hungry and the political left) are attracted to the media because of the power it gives them. The media is completely unaccountable for whatever lies it tells because who is going to rectify it? The media themselves? All the establishment media have the exact same editorial narrative. Any journalistic upstarts or alternatives are 'disinformation' or 'misinformation' by whoever the media enemy category is. They use their power to punish and humiliate people, then claim anyone who doesn't believe them is evil.
Journalists are the scum of the earth and the sooner they are sent to the wall the better.
No, I think they really are not capable of anything better without further education or some harsh leadership forcing them to grow up (and determine fact from fairy-tails). You can see it in the interest comments, when pedicular users encounter an argument they don't understand but can't fault they assume it's some opposition talking point and "match" a correct reply from a "table". Also, that our international news is all reposts and copy and paste opinions.
All most all of the MSM can't be competent enough to hold up the lie of self righteous benevolence without accidentality saying the quite parts out loud way more often. It's not evil towards population is a "survival" mechanism. If they lose their position (which they subconsciously know they are capable of doing properly) they will all be sacked and good for only min wage jobs. It's an existential fight for their survival or worth and you don't care about rest of world when those are the stakes.
I think Conservatives are plainly just retarded and cowardly. They are primarily interested in conserving their money rather than conserving what is good in our society. The alt-lite, free speech absolutists are largely just playing a game of semantics, trying to 'own the lefties'.
The whole concept of Debate exists on the premise that you agree on core assumptions about what you are attempting to do. You debate with an objective in mind, either in a platonic sense of reaching higher truth or in the rhetoric scene of persuasion. You agree with your opponent on many things implicitly and only discuss what is explicitly different to reach some end.
The current discourse is essentially one sided, in favour of the cultural revolution which is being imposed by the current Labour government. Outside the walls of the legacy media, of the establishment box, there is much debate going on all the time. The establishment discourse is a boxed view of what is politically allowed, i.e. the Overton Window. Very little is allowed to filter to the masses, for fear they will 'believe' the disinfo as if it were a mind virus from Snow Crash.
"You debate with an objective in mind, either in a platonic sense of reaching higher truth or in the rhetoric scene of persuasion. You agree with your opponent on many things implicitly and only discuss what is explicitly different to reach some end. " Some debate is just trying to convince everyone else that you have a case that is worthy of merit.
With any party having total sway over Government, any discourse is one sided. The debate in the chamber is a mockery of what it should be, and question time a joke. There is no discourse where any party is open to discussing the merits or otherwise of their policies, but is more like an expression of privileged power. I was appalled at the way John Key simply dismissed many of the questions he faced. I think the politicians are highly disrespectful of the institution of Government, and by direct linkage the public they serve.
I suggest that debate is now the extreme positions ( both left and right) yelling at everyone else, and we are sick of listening, so the silent majority are now ignored by the press as we don't make news, so don't sell newspapers.
Some decent facts would get my attention.
Also, everyone wants to hide behind pseudonym's, just like here, if we used our real names, would we be so aggressive??
AGI will soon make all this debating seem childish and silly. An intelligence millions of times more advanced and more expansive than that of humans will be able to answer all questions and win all debates. There wont be "two sides of an argument" just cold, hard,reality. I have a feeling it's not going to be Left leaning.
Some interesting beliefs at the foundations of this column.
The portrayal of universities and students as not allowing debate and not understanding debate (respectively) seem - to my experience over the years - rather disconnected from the reality of universities. Yet, this is a critical assumption in this column.
E.g. this just looks ridiculously out of touch with reality:
In order to avoid upsetting their paying customers, universities have begun to downplay the idea that there are multiple ways of looking at contentious issues, in favour of the notion that there is only one “correct” viewpoint
I suspect elements of cherry picking and confirmation bias at play. There are probably similar other folk looking at anecdotes of Right Wing cancel culture and likewise deciding that the entirety of the Right is largely anti-free speech and only in favour of their own.
Yeah, I thought a bit the same - and wondered when the last time he took a uni course was. I reckon many of us over 60 would likely struggle to keep up with the current generations if we were to sit a uni course. All knowledge taught - given so much more knowledge is at our finger tips (e.g., when I started uni we used slide rulers.. so the equations were much, much, much simpler) has become more complex to my mind.
I looked at my grandsons 6th form maths exercise book last year. When I was that age maths was taught as unique subject subsets (i.e., geometry, algebra, etc) - now they seem to mix it all into a single course - and at 6th form he was doing calculus and quadratic equations as well. I just thought - wow - the complexity had most certainly risen since I was in secondary school..
I see that the medical council is prosecuting a retired NZDSOS doctor, and that the herald article was gleeful, and laden with emotive propaganda language. The same sad state of affairs surrounds the imprisonment of Billy Te Kahika, an anti-lockdown protestor. In both cases these dissenting voices were legitimate, both at the time and more importantly they were correct in hindsight. Yet the full force of the state's power apparatus is being leveled against them.
The message is crystal clear. In NZ we have an orthodoxy and we'll crush you if you disagree with us. We'll destroy your reputation, and if you think that you're immune because you're retired then we'll send you to prison. The big problem with that is that the essence of problem solving is knowledge creation, and the essence of knowledge creation is conjecture and criticism. By eliminating criticism, the government and media are relegating the country to stagnation. This was what life was like in the dark ages before the Enlightenment period.
I'll leave you with a little quote from David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity". He's talking here about one particularly corrosive philosophical movement which, in my opinion, has infested NZ universities. “One currently influential philosophical movement goes under various names such as postmodernism, deconstructionism and structuralism... It claims that because all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially arbitrary, they are no more than stories, known in this context as 'narratives'. Mixing extreme cultural relativism with other forms of anti-realism, it regards objective truth and falsity, as well as reality and knowledge of reality, as mere conventional forms of words that stand for idea's being endorsed by a designated group of people such as an elite consensus, or by a fashion or other arbitrary authority. And it regards science and the Enlightenment as no more than one such fashion, and the objective knowledge claimed by science as an arrogant cultural conceit.”
I see that the medical council is prosecuting a retired NZDSOS doctor, and that the herald article was gleeful, and laden with emotive propaganda language.
I haven't read the Herald article (I assume its paywalled?) - but here's the Stuff one on the same matter;
Just curious as to whether you find that article is also "gleeful and laden with emotive propaganda language"?
The problem is really more broad and more serious that this covid issue. I was just using that as an example. There are all sorts of orthodoxies in NZ now, and that's detrimental to knowledge creation, problem solving, and progress.
Regarding Dr Canaday, he appears to me to be a stoic defender of the Hippocratic Oath, specifically regarding issues of informed consent. Some people complained because the scientific literature that he was referencing went against the government narrative, and they didn’t like that. The medical council suspended his license as a kind of a Pavlovian response. Dr Canaday appealed the decision and won. Now they’re going after him again. Here’s the Herald article.
Thanks, much the same manner of reporting I thought - I didn't see any 'gleefulness' on the part of the reporter, just reporting the facts of the case and the things said during that case were in quotations (i.e., correctly attributed to those persons saying those things).
I was interested more in the way you said the media slanted the story (i.e., media bias), than I was about the substance of the story itself.
If anyone is demonstrating bias it is you - for example;
The medical council suspended his license as a kind of a Pavlovian response.
My observation is that many folks who criticise the meda about their bias demonstrate more bias in their comments on the issue, than the media do in their reporting.
It's an odd paradox or contradiction that is quite common. Not sure whether this has always happened or not. But I suspect it got worse with COVID.
Hi Kate. It appears the Herald article has been sanitised since I commented on it here. You can however find the original piece by the same author here at the Otago daily times. That will likely be removed soon so I’ve copied and pasted the original & sanitised articles into word and tracked the changes see here. You can clearly see the author is trying to cover up her glaring bias.
Of note – That article was proudly funded by the public interest journalism fund. This absolutely stinks! Essentially the government is paying the media to besmirch the reputation of individuals whose opinions they don’t like.
' Journalists, in particular, must never play favourites. There are two sides to every story – usually more than two. The trick is to give every side the opportunity to present its case – and then allow the audience to make up its own mind.'
No, Chris, that's not journalism - that's reporting.
Journalism is investigative, and at the end of the day puts up a concluded fact, or at least a probability-trail.
He-said vs she-said just give equal oxygen to a falsehood. Can't not. It's one of the reasons the MSM is in trouble.
Got to give CT a big ups for his articles. As an ancient leftie he knows where he went wrong. As an ancient working class boy I could do chapter & verse of my own failings, of which there were many.
For more than 40 years now I've been watching this story unfold - initially & primarily through the tertiary institutions but increasingly through the media of recent times. It has reached the point of outright violence, as to which the article refers, & to which I view as a new low in the long running saga.
The shear naivity of the 'so-called' educated classes to appreciate how good we have things, considering the enormity of the effort going into their 'so-called' education, leading to their absolute ungratefulness as to their well being & culture generally, have eventually turned me away from my own society, sadly.
Now I am sitting here watching my own country self destruct, like a two year old throwing a tantrum, doesn't leave me too much room for... well, for anything really.
My views are considered irrelevant, old fashioned & certainly out of date & by the way, would you please hurry up & die you f......... boomer.
Such is the making of my end of days on Earth. Having watched Africa go from tribal to industrialised & back to tribal again & seeing the makings of exactly the same taking place right here, I can only conclude that my allocated time here was the appropriate one & that I will have no regrets signing off, whenever that moment may arrive.
To my children & to their children, I wish you all the very best. You're going to need it.
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