Hosking’s better in plain sight
Don’t take him off air, I want to keep an eye on the Hosk.
Iam not a man given to personal invective against fellow journalists. Lord knows, it’s a tough job, with declining pay rates, workloads ever increasing and newsroom staffing levels shrinking faster than an arctic swimmer’s scrotum after a midwinter plunge.
But despite his ubiquity on TV, radio and in print and his willingness to express ‘‘the facts’’ at great windy length, Mike Hosking readily admits he’s not a journalist, so he’s perhaps fair game.
I have always found Hosking deeply distasteful. His patronising tone, his tortured hair, his meticulously frayed ageing hipster jeans, his endless claims to represent the viewpoint of ‘‘middle New Zealand’’ while hoovering his Ferrari, those excruciating Libertarian monologues he delivers with an empathetically furrowed brow at the end of Seven Sharp – everything about the man offends me.
But a petition doing the rounds to get him ‘‘removed from public broadcasting at TVNZ’’ strikes me as wrong-headed. First, Hosking has as much right to express his views as anyone else, no matter how repellent those views may be.
Second, as any amount of military strategists have noted down the ages, it’s better to have your enemy where you can see him. I prefer to have Hosking in plain sight, available in a corner of my living room whenever I stab a button on my remote, his little chest puffed out like a pigeon, pontificating to camera on the issues of the day, so that I can tell precisely what it is that I am up against.
In the same way Donald Trump’s success on the hustings offers a peek into the dark heart of America’s resentful far right, the sight of Hosking in full flight, his reactionary rants unencumbered by either compassion or hard facts, confronts the viewer with a side of New Zealand many of us wished did not exist.
Both men are arrogant narcissists doing their best to convince us they’re selfless public servants. Both men attract a large constituency of disaffected souls who are ‘‘hard of thinking’’: grumpy old folks, unrepentant racists, climate change deniers, the rich and callous, the poor and bitter.
And in both cases, their apologists like to says things like ‘‘You’ve gotta hand it to this guy; he says what most of us are thinking.’’
No, he doesn’t. As a dyed-inthe-wool pinko liberal of long standing, I’m in no danger of ever believing that a man like Hosking speaks for me. He does, however, routinely make me laugh.
Like most blowhards, Hosking is most useful as a subject of satire, perhaps the sole area where he ever appears generous, so numerous are his lampoonable attributes.
Still, some would prefer to see him shut down. The organiser of the anti-Mike petition, Shanghaibased lawyer Dan Wayman, has called Hosking ‘‘a harmful role model to young New Zealanders,’’ and he’ll get no argument from me.
Even so, our kids need to learn the difference between the mouthpiece and the message.
My daughter came home from school last week all wound up after a class discussion that touched upon the fact that a protestor had tried to snatch a cop’s gun at a Trump rally. Her classmates had decidedly mixed feelings about the guy being caught.
‘‘What if that man had shot Donald Trump?’’ she said. ‘‘That’d be great, right, to get rid of someone like that?’’
No, I said. If you detest someone’s politics, you can’t just get rid of that person and assume that world view will vanish, too. Trump represents a very real sense of disenfranchised anger in American society, and if he were to miraculously disappear, someone else would rise up as a figurehead for those ideas.
Here in New Zealand, we have Mike, a man Winston Peters once memorably described as ‘‘a National Party stooge’’ whose ‘‘jowls are up the prime minister’s cheeks’’, pushing his particular world view across multiple media platforms. We don’t have to like the guy, but Hosking has as much right to bang on about the things that bug him as anyone else, and I’m in no hurry to sign any petition that seeks to take away his voice.
My strategy would instead be to do whatever’s possible to make that voice a lonely one. Hosking is only offered his current soapbox because he gets the ratings. TVNZ says Seven Sharp is its most watched weekday show.
That’s a depressing fact right there, but there’s often a global swing to the right during troubled times, as also evidenced by the rise of Trump and the success of the Brexit poll. As history has shown us time and time again, there’s no better manure for selfish, right wing ideology than fear.
But it won’t last forever. I eagerly await a corrective swing back to the left, towards a more compassionate, inclusive and thoughtful society I want to live in.
In such a society, far fewer people would be very interested in Hosking’s smug pronouncements on TV and radio, and his employers would get rid of him themselves, without any such petition being necessary.
Hosking would find himself without an audience, mooching around his Remuera mansion, with a lot more time to wax and polish his fleet of luxury vehicles. In the meantime, his current popularity is a handy reminder of how far we still have to go.