Airline anticipated susceptibility to progressivist ideologies

Faced with having its newspapers chucked out of Air New Zealand’s Koru lounges the Fairfax chain could only respond by claiming that its newspapers were made from otherwise unwanted offcuts and were thus sustainable.

No mention was made about the value of the information such as the actual news held in the newsprint.

Neither was there any mention of the unique benefits to the airline’s premium travellers in for example the crossword puzzles, quizzes, word games, anniversaries and other such intellectual minutiae still favoured by newsprint buffs.

Instead of castigating the airline for its thoughtless action in dissing its high-end passengers, the newspaper chain in its own newspapers chose merely to claim that in terms of being “sustainable” its newsprint titles in the materials used in the manufacture of them were just as progressive as anything Air New Zealand was doing.

The incident was mentioned by National Press Club Peter Isaac as symptomatic of the Fairfax chain’s determination to see everything in terms of climate change. It had become so fixated on the issue that the chain in this instance had allowed it to obscure its own priority to protect and promote its titles.

Isaac had been talking to farmers at a meeting of South Wairarapa Rotary.

They could only barely comprehend the pervasive grip that climate change notions had on the contents of daily newspapers, and especially those under the aegis of the Fairfax chain, he said, noting that the chain had been honest enough to disclose its refusal to run anything at all that could be construed in the denier category.

Any moves by the Labour coalition government to identify farmers as primary movers in human-induced climate emissions would be warmly applauded by newspapers, claimed Isaac in a speech entitled “Newspapers Today.”

He said that agricultural reporting in a few short years had made the trajectory from helpful farming pages to a demonization of the industry at large, and which had left the once all-powerful farming lobby voiceless, directionless.

Greenpeace had taken over much of the abandoned ground claimed Isaac, a founder member of the Guild of Agricultural Journalists, and especially so when a new piece of climate change legislation was imposed on the productive sector.

Greenpeace in this orchestrated duet now chimed in to the effect that the restrictions were trifling, should be much tougher….harsher.

This said Isaac was a cute piece of political triangulation designed to encourage the productive sector on the receiving end to believe that they had got off lightly…that the penalty could have been much worse….harsher.

So the productive sector thus simultaneously duped and dealt with got the message: it had better toe the line, or else……

Farming lobbies seeking to cope with this ideologically-driven state of affairs sought to do so from a logical standpoint with the result that they further enmeshed themselves in the barely calculable decimal points and abstract data used so effectively by the climatists.

The factual focus was never going to rise above the media noise level just because farmers and the rest of the productive sector were confronting a moral movement.

Underpinning this claimed Isaac was the accelerating trend for media people to be recruited from a narrowing socio-economic background, far removed from the common herd, and one long defined in social mobility studies which in contrast to other university outputs were ignored by the media.

Therefore it was futile for productive sector lobbies to talk about the nation’s loss of competitive edge when they found themselves slugged with these unilateral productivity restrictions.

Climate change had become the prevailing moral conviction of the era and with it an entire package of associated and elitist beliefs claimed Isaac. This “devoutly” held catechism of assertions suffused the daily newspaper and state broadcasting.

This common media allegiance was shared openly “and even enthusiastically” with the Labour-led coalition which saw this creed as the password to United Nations approbation, and thus to electoral victory in this same activist domestic constituency.

Confronted with Air New Zealand’s “rather petulant” announcement to cease stocking its newspapers in its luxury airport lounges, Fairfax’s response had been to lose its own argument in dwelling on the physical composition of the newspapers, instead of on the value of the contents, the information contained by these same newspapers.

Isaac claimed that the advent of climate change was the overarching media moral issue of the era and it had turned upside down the traditional agribusiness-newspaper relationship.

This was underlined by the Fairfax chain passing up the opportunity to promote the value of the contents of its own titles in the Koru lounges.

Instead and because of the self-hypnosis induced by climate change activism, the chain meandered into a meaningless and weird dissertation devoted exclusively to what it saw as the climate-friendly physical composition, componentry, of the paper newsprint.

The airline had been aware of the chains’ susceptibility to progressivist ideologies and had used this knowledge to slickly rid itself of an unwanted housekeeping chore in its loyalty lounges.

Fairfax had swallowed the climate bait “hook, line and sinker.”

Fairfax allowed itself to become diverted in spite of the chain being particularly vulnerable to restrictions on physical newsprint outlets just because it had “valiantly” kept its web site open, without any pay walling.