New Zealand Equality Education Foundation

(incorporating the International Ex-Fetus Association)

Australia's Channel Nine Copies the "Mother of the New Zealand Nation"

© Peter Zohrab 2006

The Manipulators

Some people think that television is a form of entertainment and information transmission. There may be some truth in that, but what television stations do not tell you is that television is also a form of government. Rural people used to be very different from their urban counterparts as regards their attitudes, but now you can go on a farmstay, as I have, and find that the people there get most of their knowledge -- and misinformation -- about the World from the box in their living-room, just like their city counterparts.

Judy Bailey, who was just a newsreader with a pretty face, fronted the News on New Zealand's TV Wom for decades, before she recently left. She has been called -- with a straight face -- the Mother of the Nation. Pinch yourself, and ask youself what power that gives television to control people's minds, when a silly bint with no obvious qualifications but a pretty face and a nice voice can be given that title. Is there no limit to people's stupidity ? Well, no, there isn't -- we believe in Feminism, don't we ?

Now Australia's Channel Nine has started copying the Mother of the New Zealand Nation (or maybe most TV channels do what they did independently). On September 1st 2006, the "Today" show started teaching us, the viewers, Femidykism 101. First Karl, the frontman who apparently knows how to ice-skate, interviewed some women mountaineers, and he called them "strong women" at least three times. I bet he has never called men "strong men" three times in an interview, and there was no evidence that these women were actually "strong" -- except in the Femidyke meaning of "self-centred and anti-male". Straight after the interview, the camera switched to Jessica (who, with her world-beating smiles-per minute ranking, is a sure-fire candidate fot Mother of the Australian Nation). Jessica was cooking on a barbecue -- for no obvious reason, except to teach us that not only men cook on barbecues.

Ignore the issue of strong women and men cooking on barbecues, for a moment, and ask yourself: Do we watch television so that ice-skaters and world-record smilers can teach us what to think about political, social and ethical issues? Do they advertise the fact that this is what they aim to do, or do they do this covertly, in a conspiratorial, elitist and arrogant manner? Do they have any qualifications or moral authority to exploit their power over our minds for political purposes?

 

The Manipulated

The scene now is outside the New Zealand Parliament's Grounds on Fathers' Day (September 3rd 2006). I was talking to a couple of fellow Fathers' Rights protestors about Feminism, and one of them said something about the bad things that he thought men did to women (i.e. that women did not do to men), such as beating them up. So I asked him how he knew they did that. He said he thought they did that. So I said I was not interested in what he thought -- I wanted to know what evidence he had that men hit women more than vice versa. He had no answer to that.

(As I keep saying in these sorts of situation, look at the evidence, from hundreds of studies, that women hit men at least as much as men hit women -- on the Web at http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm .)

I told this guy that what was in his head had been put there by television. That is a bit simplified, of course, since television is only one of our sources of information. But television is a multimedia institution that hits us when we are relaxing and off-guard. We do not think of it as the enemy that it is.

 

Last Update: 4 September 2006