Mediocrity Watch: DAVID FARRAR Mediawatch, Radio New Zealand National, Sunday 15 September 2013
Media whores and self-publicists Gareth and Jo Morgan have foolishly gotten themselves into a spot of bother. They have been sponsored by the North Korean government to go to North Korea and have a look at a few Potemkin villages. Predictably, they have made asses of themselves by raving about how wonderful it all was. On Mediawatch this morning, both Morgans were Holmesian in their effusiveness…
GARETH MORGAN: Their clothes are unbelievable! We were the scwuffiest people in North Kowea without a doubt!
JO MORGAN: There could be problems in the country that we didn’t see, but what we did see was fantastic!
How contemptible are people who get paid by brutal regimes to tour around with blinkers on and then speak and write positively of those regimes? Undoubtedly they deserve condemnation for their naïveté and their willful blindness. They deserve rigorous criticism.
Not all critics, however, are credible. Unfortunately, the producers at Mediawatch went to a notorious apologist for one rogue regime and let him cut loose on the hapless Morgans for their support of another rogue regime. The Morgans deserve to be admonished, but not by this bloke.
I flicked Chris Laidlaw a quick email to express my, and no doubt many others’, consternation. Keep listening, fellas, and you might hear an on-air slapdown of one of the nastiest hypocrites in the country…
Dear Chris,
While Kim-boosters Gareth and Jo Morgan might well be the modern equivalent of Stalin-boosters Sidney and Beatrice Webb, it was astonishing to hear Mediawatch give the right-wing blogger David Farrar a platform to attack them. Apparently Farrar objects to them being sponsored by the North Korean regime, claiming that this destroyed any credibility they might have had.
In late 2009, David Farrar accepted the sponsorship of another rogue, pariah regime—Israel—and came back to New Zealand full of praise for a regime which has violated more international resolutions than any other. Farrar chose to stay away from the devastated Gaza strip, which had only months earlier been attacked, including with phosphorous munitions, by Israel in what Israeli spokesmen boasted was “twenty-two days of madness”. He did, however, walk around occupied East Jerusalem and afterwards noted, with resolute Webbian blindness, that “things were generally very relaxed in this area”.
For Farrar to criticise the Morgans for acting towards North Korea in exactly the same way as he did towards another pariah regime, is an example of gall and chutzpah on the grand scale. Disappointingly, the Mediawatch interviewer failed to challenge Farrar’s hypocrisy.
Keenly onto it again I see Morrissey ! Appreciated. Don’t blame poor Farrar too much though. Any problems he didn’t see are surely down to those truly ghastly Gazan youths throwing stones.
JO MORGAN: There could be problems in the country that we didn’t see, but what we did see was fantastic!
Problems? Like a regime that routinely executes enemies of the state including their leader’s ex ‘girlfriend’? Those ‘problems’? So no one lynched anyone in front of you, Jo? How lovely.
“The Government has stopped a review of New Zealand’s controversial terrorism laws, a move being greeted with suspicion by critics.”
“Green party co-leader Russel Norman said the move raises suspicions that the Government is unwilling to risk further public scrutiny of the state’s search and surveillance powers, at a time when it is already under fire over the GCSB Amendment Bill.”
Mediawatch, Radio New Zealand National, Sunday 15 September 2013
Morrissey Breen
Northcote Point