Our State Broadcasters Have Crossed the Line
It’s time for a full, urgent, independent editorial inquiry into TVNZ and RNZ
By Ashley Church, widely read and watched political and business commentator
For years we believed that the BBC was the gold standard of public broadcasting. Trusted. Balanced. Above the fray.
That myth is now in tatters.
What we’re now seeing isn’t the odd slip-up under pressure. It’s a pattern – a long series of misrepresentations later claimed as “errors” that all just happen to lean the same way, on the same issues, in the same direction. But at some point, pretending this is accidental stops being credible and becomes what it is: sustained contempt for the audience.
Not a one-off, but a pattern
Take the BBC coverage of Israel and Gaza. When the al-Ahli hospital explosion in Gaza occurred in October 2023, the BBC immediately claimed that Israel was responsible, despite the facts being unclear and contested. Only later did they retract this claim in light of the evidence – but the damage was already done: millions heard the initial claim; comparatively few saw the quiet correction.
Then there was the Gaza documentary How To Survive a War Zone, fronted by a 13-year-old boy(pictured) later subsequently revealed to be the son of a Hamas government minister. The documentary was pulled a few days after airing – not because the BBC acknowledged what they had done, but because others called them out.
Then there was the BBC broadcast of a Glastonbury performance where chants of “death to the IDF” and “from the river to the sea”, went to air. The broadcaster later issued a grovelling public apology and admitted that it “should have pulled” the live stream and that the content was “utterly unacceptable” and antisemitic – but the footage remained on the BBC website, only eventually being pulled after an outcry and a police investigation.
Which brings us to the latest act of deliberate deception – the Trump clip – in which the BBC finally crossed a line you don’t come back from. The programme reconstructed Donald Trump’s 6 January speech by splicing together audio and video that never ran in that sequence — creating a version of events that simply did not happen.
Internal memos describe a “doctored” clip, and the BBC has now issued a full apology in an attempt to stave off legal action – but the damage has been done. One or two incidents could perhaps be chalked up to pressure and speed. But when you stack them up – hospital blast speculation, Gaza documentary omissions, platforming anti-Israel incitement, and now a manipulated Trump clip – the “whoops, our bad” line wears thin. This looks less like random mistakes and more like an editorial culture that is perfectly comfortable bending reality when it suits the narrative, then issuing a tidy apology when caught.
And that matters, because the BBC is a template. Other public broadcasters watch it, copy it, and import its habits. Including here.
TVNZ and RNZ: different country, same sickness
But these aren’t new issues to New Zealanders. We’ve been walking the same track for several years – because our own state broadcasters, TVNZ and RNZ, are guilty of the same practices.
RNZ has already been caught in one of the most extraordinary breaches of trust we’ve ever seen from a New Zealand newsroom – and this isn’t just a matter of opinion. RNZ’s own audit and an independent panel found dozens of wire stories had been edited in ways that breached RNZ’s editorial standards, inserting a pro-Russian framing into coverage of Ukraine and other geopolitical stories.
RNZ’s board-commissioned review accepted that at least a substantial subset of 49 audited stories involved “inappropriate editing” and recommended 22 changes to newsroom oversight and culture. New Zealand’s spy agency, NZSIS, later confirmed it had investigated the pro-Russia case – a measure of how serious these “edits” were considered at national security level.
On the Israel–Gaza front, the concerns aren’t just grumbling from the sidelines. In 2015 the Broadcasting Standards Authority upheld a complaint that RNZ’s Sunday Morning coverage of Israel and apartheid South Africa breached the balance standard: the segment carried a strongly anti-Israel narrative with no alternative perspective anywhere in RNZ’s coverage in the relevant period.
A decade later, after more complaints and rising public anger over its Gaza content, RNZ commissioned its own review of Israel-Palestine coverage. That review conceded the 2014 breach, but then largely cleared RNZ’s subsequent Gaza reporting, insisting it had “abided by editorial policy” and met watchdog standards – exactly the kind of self-exoneration critics call “not credible”.
TVNZ hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory either.
Back in 2018, TVNZ admitted significant inaccuracies in several 1News bulletins on the Gaza border riots – getting casualty figures wrong in two out of three items. The BSA decision on that case notes that the latter two items contained “significant errors” on a highly sensitive conflict, and that TVNZ had to apologise and warn its newsroom about the handling of such figures.
More recently, TVNZs Gaza coverage has been heavily criticised as biased and misleading, with claims that 1News routinely underplays key context and frames events in ways that tilt public understanding.
“Independent” reviews that look anything but
Faced with cratering public trust, TVNZ’s big answer has been to commission an “independent” review of its news which, in practice, took the form of a one-week sampling of content reviewed by former ABC and SBS executive Alan Sunderland. The result of the review was unsurprising. TVNZ told us it had found only “minor technical or editorial issues” and “no evidence of systemic bias or lack of impartiality” – but then refused to release the full report, even under the Official Information Act.
Commentators have not been fooled. One analysis described the exercise as “TVNZ investigating itself and, surprise, declaring itself saintly…the broadcasting equivalent of marking your own exam and giving yourself an A+.”
The loudest alarm bell: the audience they ignore
And look again at who did the review: a long-serving ABC insider, from an organisation currently facing its own intense criticism over anti-Israel bias and internal culture. If you were trying to rebuild public confidence, you wouldn’t pick a reviewer from a sister outfit with the same ideological baggage. Unless, of course, your real goal was not reform but cover.
These issues are complicated by the role of the recently-under-fire Broadcasting Standards Authority which has specifically made a virtue of claiming not to rule on ideological bias. So if you’re looking for a BSA ruling that literally says “TVNZ/RNZ favoured the left”, it doesn’t exist. The system isn’t built to make that call – which is precisely the problem.
Instead, the strongest evidence of that bias and misinformation isn’t found in formal reviews or carefully worded press releases. It’s in the sheer volume of backlash from the people these broadcasters are supposed to serve – and the way that backlash is treated.
Scroll through social media whenever TVNZ, RNZ or the BBC run another piece on Gaza, Trump, climate or culture. The pattern is unmistakable: thousands of comments accusing them of double standards, missing context, selective outrage, or outright misrepresentation. Listeners and viewers point out factual errors, supply sources, and highlight what was left out. They tag editors and presenters. They write long, detailed threads.
And what happens? In most cases: nothing. A bland “we stand by our story”, a cut-and-paste reference to “editorial standards”, or total silence. Complaints vanish into internal systems; online criticism is dismissed as “trolls”, “right-wing commentary” or “conspiracy theorists”. The overwhelming public signal – that large chunks of the audience no longer trust the product – is treated as background noise.
That wilful deafness is the tell. If you were genuinely worried that you might be getting it wrong, you’d treat sustained, detailed public criticism as an early-warning system – initiating truly independent reviews and establishing focus groups to get to the source of the issue. Instead, our state broadcasters behave as though the only opinions that count are those inside the building – or inside a cosy circle of like-minded reviewers. The ideology doesn’t just show up on screen; it shows up in what they refuse to hear.
It’s not just me saying it
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A growing chorus of high-profile is calling out exactly the same behaviour – many with media credentials going back decades
Family First / Bob McCoskrie called the TVNZ review “a massive smoke screen,” and has repeatedly hammered both the BBC and New Zealand media for what he calls “blatant bias and lying” in coverage of Trump and Gaza, warning that our media “is misrepresenting events…to fit a specific narrative” and telling viewers: “They think you’re an idiot and will fall for anything.”
The Platform (Sean Plunket) has been highlighting state-media groupthink for years. Plunket has publicly described the regulatory environment around broadcasting – including how state media are shielded – as akin to “Soviet-era Stasi”-style control and has spoken from experience about “blatant left bias” inside RNZ during his time there.
Duncan Garner, now running his own Editor in Chief podcast, devoted a full episode titled Our Media is BIAS to the collapse of trust in New Zealand media, featuring Ani O’Brien and arguing that mainstream outlets lean left and have “lost touch with half the country’s views.”
The Centrist has documented cases where state media simply withheld the truth from the public. One investigation found RNZ knew a climate-change “heatwave” story had major accuracy problems but chose not to tell other newsrooms – a deliberate decision to let wrong information stand.
Pro-Israel groups and academic critics. There are at least ten significant organisations producing factual information about the Gaza/Israel conflict in New Zealand – yet these bodies are almost never quoted to provide context in media stories about the crisis, or their views are portrayed in such a way as to underplay them and minimise their contribution to the debate. Meanwhile, Pro-Hamas and Pro-Palestinian groups are routinely platformed and quoted. As such, it is little wonder that many are confused about the facts of this conflict.
Private media can take sides. State media can’t
Let’s draw a clear line.
Private broadcasters and publishers – Stuff, NZME, niche online outlets – are free to lean left, right, or off the map. They’re owned by private shareholders, funded by advertisers and subscribers, and their audiences are voluntary. They can be biased, they can be partisan, and they can live or die by the choices they make.
TVNZ and RNZ are different.
They are owned and (in the case of RNZ) funded by you – whether you ever tune in or not. They are supposed to serve the whole public, not an in-house political tribe. Their core obligation is not to “shape the narrative” or “lean into lived experience” or whatever the latest jargon is. It is to provide:
- Factual reporting
- A genuine spread of credible viewpoints
- A clear line between news and opinion
Right now, they are failing on all three.
The problem is not what they cover. They can and should cover Gaza, Trump, Ukraine, New Zealand politics and everything in between. The issue is how they cover it: which facts they promote, which they bury, who they platform, which Political Parties they favour, who they freeze out, and how often the “mistakes” mysteriously point in the same ideological direction.
And if you’re hoping the State watchdog will fix this, think again. As I mentioned earlier, the BSA almost never rules on ideology. It will occasionally uphold a Gaza segment for lacking balance or a news item for getting its facts wrong – but it has made it explicit that its balance standard “does not require news to be presented… without bias”. This means that complaints that 1News or RNZ show “left bias” are routinely dismissed, even when the same programmes keep tripping over the same issues.
A Government pretending this isn’t its problem
This is where Wellington needs to stop hiding. Yes, the Government has already leaned on TVNZ to improve trust levels – but the TVNZ response was the aforementioned ABC-linked whitewash and a carefully edited press release touting “no systemic bias”. RNZ answered criticism of its Gaza coverage with an internal report declaring itself compliant with its own policies.
And the Government’s reaction? A collective shrug.
Meanwhile, public trust in media is plunging, and taxpayers are increasingly furious at being forced to bankroll outlets they see as openly hostile to their views and casual with the truth. You can feel it in talkback, in online commentary, and in the growth of alternative platforms: more and more people have simply switched off the “official” channels.
Instead of treating this as a democratic crisis, the Government behaves as though it’s an awkward HR issue that can be managed with a couple of reviews and a slightly sterner letter to the boards.
It’s not good enough.
What must happen now: a real inquiry, not another box-ticking exercise
We are well past the point of tinkering. Nothing short of a full, formal and independent inquiry into TVNZ and RNZ will do – and it needs teeth.
At minimum, that inquiry must:
- Expose and overhaul editorial leadership and culture
Identify where and how bias has been baked into story selection, framing, and hiring. If leadership has presided over repeated breaches and spin, it should be replaced. - Create a clear, binding News Charter
Not a PR brochure – a legally robust charter that requires:- strict separation of news and opinion
- evidence-based reporting
- transparent corrections when wrong
- and a firm ban on stealth editorialising in news copy.
- Guarantee genuine editorial balance – all serious views represented
On any contested issue – Gaza, climate, gender, race, economics, you name it – the default must be: if a view is held in good faith by a significant part of the public and backed by evidence or expert argument, it gets a voice. Not a token quote tacked on at the end, but real airtime and fair framing. - Introduce simple, public-facing mechanisms to challenge deception
Ordinary viewers and listeners should have a fast, clear way to flag manipulation, omissions, and mis-framing – with public, time-bound responses and visible fixes. No more complaints disappearing into bureaucratic black holes. - Require full transparency around “independent” reviews
Any future reviews of bias or balance must publish their full reports, not cherry-picked summaries. No more TVNZ-marking-its-own-exam, no more ABC-style insiders posing as neutral auditors.
Enough is enough
Public broadcasters don’t have a divine right to exist. They operate on a very simple premise: the public is forced to fund them, and in return they stay ruthlessly honest, broadly neutral, and scrupulous about separating fact from opinion.
That deal has been broken.
When a state newsroom repeatedly edits reality – whether it’s the BBC stitching together a US President’s speech into something he didn’t say, or TVNZ and RNZ quietly filtering the world through the same narrow ideological lens – this stops being about the odd bad call and becomes a question of legitimacy.
You cannot have taxpayer-funded broadcasters behaving like campaign machines and still pretend the system is neutral. If TVNZ and RNZ want the privileges of public money and statutory protection, they don’t get to behave like partisan outlets that just happen to be sitting on the “official” masthead.
This is why a real inquiry is non-negotiable. Not another PR exercise, not another insider review, but a full, public, no-nonsense investigation with the power to haul in emails, scripts, draft edits and decision-makers under oath – and to recommend concrete changes to charters, staffing, and complaints processes that the Government is then required to implement.
And yes, this is now squarely the Government’s problem. Ministers can’t keep shrugging and hiding behind boards and “independent” panels. If they refuse to act, they are not bystanders – they are endorsing the status quo, and they will own the collapse in public trust that follows.
So the choice is stark:
- Either we get a serious inquiry that forces a reset – with editorial neutrality as the default, all serious views given fair representation, hard walls between fact and opinion, and real consequences when those lines are crossed…
- Or we continue down the current path, where more and more New Zealanders simply tune out, build their own media ecosystem, and treat anything stamped “official” as spin until proven otherwise.
Public broadcasters exist only as long as the public believes them. That belief is evaporating.
If TVNZ, RNZ and the Government don’t treat this as urgent, the audience will make the decision for them.
And when that happens, it won’t be the public that’s lost the plot.
