Barristers often warn their juniors of the dangers of excessively badgering or humiliating a witness in court. There is always the risk that the jury’s sympathy will shift sharply towards the witness if they are suddenly seen as a victim of bullying.
The media may be making a similar error in their attacks on Christopher Luxon, which many voters will see as going well beyond reasonable political criticism. In fact, some media outlets are making themselves look recklessly partisan in what appears to be an attempt to unseat the Prime Minister and reduce the chances of a National-led government returning to power in November.
That has certainly become a common opinion after 1News ignored the news that there were 49,000 fewer victims of violent crime in the year to October 2025 than two years prior. Instead, on the same day Luxon had fronted a press conference to announce the sharp fall, TVNZ’s evening bulletin focused on gang membership rising to slightly exceed the number of police officers.
Even after an outcry from senior government ministers and critics excoriating the apparent bias, 1News only pretended to care. It produced a follow-up story that manipulated the axes of the graph so that the fall-off in victims of violent crime looked less dramatic under the Coalition government than it had been in reality.
The apparent attempt to deny Luxon’s government publicity for its wins in an election year is so brazen it beggars belief. And the media’s enthusiasm for seizing on his fumbled answer about the Iran conflict and a poor result in one Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll as a harbinger of doom for National at November’s election has also seemed overcooked.
Last week, 1News’ political editor, Maiki Sherman, gave a masterclass in disingenuousness. She said the Curia poll result of 28.4 per cent was “damaging” but claimed, “We are waiting to see the trend… to see if National consistently appears in the 20s when it comes to those poll results.”
Of course, few will believe the media is “waiting” to see a trend develop; rather, many will see journalists as having seized on one poll in the hope of creating a continuing trend — downwards. As David Seymour put it: “The media are doing their best to manufacture a crisis for Chris Luxon.”
The hits keep coming. Stuff, for instance, reported comments by the Samoan Prime Minister that before Luxon went to Samoa this weekend he had asked for a matai (chiefly) honour to be bestowed on him.
Luxon’s office, which denied the claim, was not contacted until after the story had been published. The original allegation has turned out to be untrue but Stuff’s correction has not prevented the damaging assertion from circulating widely, completely undermining any positive publicity Luxon might expect to have received from his visit.
Unfortunately, journalists seeking the Prime Minister’s scalp have made a major misstep. It is a fundamental rule in fomenting a leadership coup that there needs to be someone in the party who is jockeying to take over and has enough support — both within the caucus and among voters — for it to have any chance of success. Luxon’s tormentors have so far failed to flush out a successor from within National’s ranks, which means their campaign is already fizzling out.
And no doubt to their surprise, Luxon has remained calm under the onslaught of critical coverage, including ignoring a posse of reporters hurrying to keep up with him as he strode through Wellington Airport while they belligerently demanded to know whether he had considered resigning.
His staunchness seems to have disconcerted his critics — not least a columnist in The Post who described his attitude as “cocksureness”. In fact, Luxon’s composure under pressure will be seen by some voters as an admirable steeliness, and an attractive attribute in a Prime Minister.
The NZ Herald’s editorial writers also seemed chagrined by Luxon’s survival, warning last week that although he had “weathered the weekend storm” he “faces many more polls before November”. To many readers it would have sounded like: “Don’t worry — there will be plenty more chances to bayonet the Prime Minister before November.”
The editorial came after Herald columnists had indulged in a paroxysm of hyperbole in the days after Luxon had suggested “any action” to stop Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would be a “good thing” and then felt obliged to make a correction.
One senior commentator compared Luxon to former Broadcasting minister Clare Curran fumbling an answer in Parliament — as if a Prime Minister who makes the occasional faux pas is as disposable as a junior minister outside Cabinet.
Another presented the preposterous claim that Luxon’s awkward assessment of the Iran conflict made him a threat to national security.
The newspaper’s political editor even compared the Prime Minister’s communication skills unfavourably with Jacinda Ardern’s abilities, describing her as “famously a very good communicator of difficult issues”.
Why the media continues to promote this extravagant myth remains baffling. Ardern was one of the silliest prime ministers New Zealand has had. She couldn’t articulate the articles of the Treaty when asked at Waitangi in 2019; couldn’t understand the difference between consensus and majority rule in a democracy; confused GDP with the Crown’s financial statements; and she routinely dismissed difficult questions in Parliament with “I reject the premise of that question.”
She was also completely out of her depth in defining hate speech despite having campaigned in 2020 to include religion as a protected category in law. Under pressure, she resorted to the asinine “You know it when you see it.”
She was mocked by The Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, as being “as silly as a two-bob watch” when she claimed China’s push for hegemony in the Pacific shouldn’t be seen as a clash between “authoritarianism and democracy”.
He said there is no political leader in the world who “talks so much nonsense so consistently” and “gets such lavish, wonderful praise for it”.
Luxon obliquely referred to Ardern in his post-Cabinet press conference: “We’ve had prime ministers in the past who are fantastic communicators who don’t deliver, and New Zealanders are over that, and they just want me to get on with the job and that’s what I'm doing.”
Some observers will think he was being far too generous in his assessment of her skills. And there is an obvious contrast with how journalists often passed off Ardern’s stumbles as minor gaffes rather than career-ending mistakes — and how much more harshly Luxon is treated.
Ardern’s inability in 2019 to summarise the articles of the Treaty, for instance, was excused by a 1News report as her being “caught off guard”. This despite the fact she emphasised in the same interview that her government was committed to fulfilling the principles of the Treaty “not just in legislation but in the policies and programmes that we roll out”.
The legacy media risk being badly burned in the public’s estimation if they are seen to be unfairly hostile to the Prime Minister. Surveys have shown they are already deeply distrusted by a majority of voters, not least because of perceptions of bias. And they are hardly going to win it back by a half-baked campaign to unseat him. As former National MP Simon O’Connor told Platform host Michael Laws, the attacks have been “media driven” and don’t “reflect political reality”.
In fact, they are inadvertently fuelling what might have been once dismissed by many as a wild conspiracy theory. That is, legacy media organisations want a Labour-led government to win the election because there’s a good chance it might again hand out millions in cash to them as the Ardern-Hipkins administration did.
Such speculation — no matter how flimsily based — is immensely damaging to what remains of their credibility and trustworthiness.
Labour, of course, has already proposed a “levy” on international organisations streaming content — such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video — with the money being funnelled to the local TV and screen industry. Broadcasters and streaming platforms would benefit.
And mainstream media can hardly claim to have the moral high ground. Their willingness to accept the $55 million offered by the Ardern-Hipkins government via the Public Interest Journalism Fund on the condition they presented the Treaty as a “partnership” — which was essential to Ardern’s push for co-governance — leaves them in a very weak position to dismiss such speculation as a fringe theory.
Last week, Nicola Willis told Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan that media were “mischief-making” in trying to undermine Luxon’s leadership. And the radio host didn’t come off at all well in the comments on her programme’s Facebook page.
One commenter said: “There is a left-leaning agenda by the media at large. It has to do with funding from the left versus less funding from the right. It’s a disgrace across the board, and it has to stop!”
Some will say, of course, that the attacks on Luxon’s leadership are nothing more than an example of the media hunting as a pack. Most will go in for the kill if they smell even a trace of blood.
No matter how their motivation is explained, however, they are certainly doing their reputation a serious injury by recklessly boosting the widespread suspicion they are not the honest brokers of information they pretend to be.
*****