Paddy Still Has Issues – Especially Credibility

Via Alia Bee


So Paddy Gower Has Issues has put out a video apologising for his conduct during Covid.

Five years after the fact…

Now that the dust has settled. Now that it’s no longer career-ending to admit you might have got something wrong. Now that it’s… safe.

And even then… the apology is pretty light. He admits he crossed a journalistic line, but then says if he went back, he’d probably do it again because getting people vaccinated was “important”.

Which sort of tells us all we need to know.

During the most divisive period many of us can remember in this country, journalists were meant to be doing their job. Asking questions. Testing claims. Digging. Digging some more! Giving people the information they needed to make decisions in a climate of enormous fear and uncertainty, and amongst a boatload of ‘nudging’.

Instead, a good chunk of the media decided their job was to help run the campaign. They received their cheerleader costumes in the post and couldn’t squeeze into them fast enough!

Not only did they shut down debate, but they mocked people who had concerns. They amplified the worst stereotypes about anyone who wasn’t on board. They received public funding to create “documentaries exposing” people like us and all our “misinformation”.

They took complicated medical and ethical questions and boiled the whole thing down to a nice tidy little story for the six o’clock news: good citizens on one side, selfish idiots on the other. We even got a special name. Well, one of many, actually. Covidiots. Antivaxxers. Scum.

And in Paddy’s case, he quite literally got up on stage and danced around promoting the product, ruining an entire generation’s happy memories of Telethons.

Crack open the cringe.

Then there was the sting operation on the Canterbury doctor who was pretty much the devil for helping people to obtain exemptions during the mandates. At the time, it was framed as some heroic act of journalism, exposing a rogue doctor undermining the rules… using an “undercover” tradie with a spy pen.

What it actually did was pour petrol on a fire. It painted anyone seeking an exemption as dishonest and dangerous, at a time when people were already under extraordinary pressure from our Kindness™ PM and her mandates.

Now, years later, he says he understands why people hated him for it. That people who were suspicious of the vaccine were treated harshly by society and by the media.

Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.

People lost jobs, careers, businesses, and relationships. Families were split down the middle. People who experienced adverse reactions struggled to be believed or even listened to. Entire groups of New Zealanders were pushed out of public life for months on end, with no end in sight. Some even lost the zest for life…

Those harms weren’t hard to foresee at the time. None of this hindsight nonsense. Plenty of people were warning about them while it was all happening. You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have seen it.

But the media didn’t want to hear. And the uncomfortable truth is that plenty of journalists knew something didn’t feel right at the time… but they went along with it anyway.

They enjoyed leaping around in their Pfizer tutus, helping enforce the narrative.

And now, years later, some of the same people who helped create that climate are starting to say they regret parts of it.

I suppose that’s something.

I am usually one to see the bright side of events like this. And, anger aside, I can. I do. This is an indication of another shift in public thinking, perception, and what is “safe” to now talk about. And for that I am grateful.

But apologies delivered years after the fact can’t undo harm, and they don’t restore trust. The damage to public trust in institutions, including the media and the health system, is obvious to anyone paying attention.

We’ve been doing our own digging in this space, and some people are going to be surprised at the results. (Bites News readers will be the first to know! www.biteme.news )

So, close to tears, Paddy has told us all about the abuse he still suffers to this day from people disgusted by his sellout behaviour. No one likes to receive abuse. But he was part of Team NZ Media, who made sure that was precisely what happened to those of us who declined the experimental injection… 

You have to wonder what exactly we’re meant to do with this now.

Because if a journalist knows they’re crossing an ethical line, and does it anyway because they believe the cause is important enough… then the obvious question is why anyone should trust them not to do the same thing again the next time there’s a crisis and the pressure is on.

The simple answer is: we can’t.

New Zealand’s media cooked their own goose the moment they pulled on the cheerleader outfit. And I think our Paddy is only just beginning to realise that fact.

Turns out trust is a lot harder to rebuild than a media career in a tiny country…

People remember who was asking questions… and who was doing the dancing.