When will the Reserve Bank of NZ Stop Spinning and Stop Misleading Parliament and the Nation?

Yesterday the Reserve Bank kept the Official Cash Rate Unchanged. It released a statement saying, "The NZ economy continues to evolve as anticipated by the Monetary Policy Committee". What a line coming from a Governor who told Bloomberg News in the US in 2021, whilst he was busy printing $50 billion in cash, which is the primary cause of our current high inflation, that "The fear of the 70s, the 80s, stagflation, it is such a different world [now]". How unamusing, given that stagnation, recession & inflation is exactly what we are now experiencing. How unamusing that the RBNZ says our economy continues to evolve as anticipated when its forecasts could not have been proved more wrong.

It gets worse. The RBNZ marketing-Comms-PR-Spin merchants have waged a multi-year misinformation campaign saying that what NZ is experiencing is the same as elsewhere, so it can't be blamed for anything. The takeaway from its Monetary Policy Propaganda Release yesterday was, "Globally, while there are differences across regions, economic growth remains below trend & is expected to remain subdued .. Economic growth in NZ remains weak". That's such a spun, misleading line that even Orwell's Ministry of Truth would struggle to come up with it. NZ's economy cannot remotely in a billion years be currently associated with other nations "growing below trend". There are few countries on the planet presently in recession - experiencing declines in GDP & plummeting GDP per capita like us. What's with the Marketing-PR-Comms line that "Economic growth in NZ remains weak". Its not weak. There is no growth. Duh. We're shrinking - in recession - contracting. GDP per capita is falling at around negative 2%. The IMF ranks us near bottom of 168 countries on these measures. Meanwhile, countries like the US are booming. It is growing above trend - in the third quarter of 2023 Gross domestic product increased at a 4.9% annualized rate.

New Zealand is in recession as the rest of the world grows since the RBNZ Governor wanted to "engineer a recession" to get himself out of the inflationary mess he created. This Blog argued that NZ should instead try avoiding recession & engineer a soft landing which most others have successfully done. We're a worst-case outlier but you'd never know it from the Reserve Bank's Self-Promoting "We're the Best" taxpayer funded ad campaign. The RBNZ Spin Doctors are literally using the line they're a "Great Team" at the "Best Central Bank". Best Dog in Show. Do they look in the mirror & tell themselves so? The Bank has officially become, on the objective criteria of NZ's recessionary hard landing which nearly every other nation has avoided, one the world's poorest performing central banks, run by a Team who seem to religiously believe their own spin. Maybe they should get out more to experience the cost-of-living crisis they caused.

Sources:

https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/hub/news/2024/04/official-cash-rate-remains-unchanged

Don't Trust the Biased AUT "Trust in the News" Survey. Why blame Winston for weakening democracy & defend RNZ manipulation of Ukrainian war "news"?

How can the Auckland University of Technology "Trust in News" report - which should be a dispassionate reporting of scientific survey results on perceptions of media bias - have an introduction based on a litany of quotes from biased journos all with the terrifying theme, "Trust us, we're from Big Media and We're Here to Help You How to Think". We don't trust them since nearly every outlet in NZ has gone strongly leftist, whereas the majority of NZ'ers voted for a center-right government. So of course people don't trust getting a one-sided diatribe about most issues when its not even the one we support. But no, the AUT report says that as a result of the demise of Newshub, "the country would be left with an even more concentrated media market, with less diversity". That's not true. Newshub - Stuff - OneNews - and most of the rest are certainly not diverse - they support similar left-views of the world. So who cares if one of them goes?  The crux of the problem is that NZ Big Media despises diversity. The journos say they support diversity but its only at a superficial level. Its not about supporting the diversity of beliefs. And that's what we're talking about.

The AUT report says that "Deputy PM [Winston Peters] questioned whether Radio NZ and TVNZ are "editorially independent .. I haven't seen evidence of that in the last three years”. It then counters Winston by quoting Newsroom editor Mark Jennings who says news media is at the heart of a democracy “yet we see some of the most important figures in democracy - politicians - attacking the media". Why argue that when an elected leader questions the independence of our journalists it is a democracy-shattering "attack on the media"? Isn't the problem that NZ's Big Media companies have become the true threat to democracy - first & foremost by ignoring the General Election outcome and trying to brainwash everyone so we never elect National-ACT-NZ First ever again? Who elected these journalists? What God-given right does Big Media have to argue that it should be able to hold anyone it so wishes to account but that no-one has any right whatsoever to hold them to account? Who the heck do these journalists think they are? Judge, jury and executioner?

It gets worse. The AUT report says "In June 2023, RNZ made headlines when it was reported one of its digital journalists had altered news stories from Reuters concerning the Russian invasion of Ukraine by inserting pro-Russian sentiment into news stories. It goes on to say "an independent inquiry found .. that the journalist responsible for inappropriate editing genuinely believed he was acting appropriately to provide balance & accuracy & was not motivated by any desire to introduce misinformation, disinformation or propaganda  .. it also noted that the leadership of RNZ had overreacted while commenting on the case". What place does mounting this defense of the journalist have in AUT's reporting of survey statistics on distrust in the media? I have personally had many stories manipulated by our Big Media outlets - they do it all the time - to the point I gave up writing for them and started this blog. When I tried questioning the "competency" of our Central Bank in a Big Media outlet for printing $50 billion in cash which was the primary cause of our present high inflation, that word was censored out of my article without my knowledge.

Furthermore, AUT's Trust in News survey has not been done by speaking to a single person, either face-to-face, or by telephone. It is online. The quality of results of such surveys, done because they are cheap, is controversial. The results in this report are drawn from a national online survey of 1,033 NZ adults who are members of Horizon Research’s Horizon Poll. Members of "Horizon Poll", eh? So straight away you're open to selection bias. This is not a random sample, so is "weighted on "age, gender, highest educational qualification, personal income, ethnicity & region to match the NZ adult population". Good luck to them doing that weighting, which appears to mean that if they only have 100 people from Auckland in their survey, which would be 10% of it, then they'd have to multiply the responses up by a factor of around 4 to better represent Aucklanders, even though they never surveyed 400 Aucklanders. I've used survey data for donkeys years & those kinds of manipulations explode the inaccuracy of the results. I'm dubious when they say that a 95% confidence interval for their results is just "plus or minus 3%". Even if it is at that level, this survey is about reporting trends, but never is a trend-standard error quoted in the report. So, for example, if the proportion of respondents to one of their questions drops from, say 43% to 38%, from one year to the next, which this survey reports as a fall, then it could easily be that within the 3% margin of error, the true proportion actually rose from 40% to 41%.

One of the authors of the report says, "Journalism has lost its authority as the main source of news and information. In general, people distrust the information they see, and they are increasingly checking their ‘facts’ themselves. This phenomenon is highly problematic". Why is it problematic that people are trying to find out facts for themselves? Is it bad we don't put faith in The Great Oracle, He Who Tell Us the Whole Truth, John Campbell, or The One Who Shows Us The Way, The Light, Jack Tame? Why shouldn't we search ourselves for where truth lies? More power to the people & less to Big Media - what's wrong with that? Why is it problematic not to trust strangers? So why do I think there's rising distrust of NZ media? It's for none of the reasons outlined in the AUT report: our journos just don't get that the problem is them. The best studies about how the media industry works argue that it's like any other industry: there are "consumers", most of whom want to reinforce their own views, so leftists tend to watch leftist outlets & rightists watch rightist outlets. Let's say over time Big NZ news outlets have gone from being half left and half right - to 100% left (which is close to the truth). Then whereas before we were once all pretty happy since we could find points of view supporting our own, now when we see the Big News channels, at least half of us are hacked off since they in no way reflect how we feel. That's why distrust has risen.

Sources:

https://www.jmadresearch.com/_files/ugd/a95e86_2fd2baf7a9484fff8e0451045e8b7dd1.pdf