#mediaawards

Welcome to what is by now a New Zealand Christmas tradition, on par with jandals, eating a hot meal in the middle of summer, and a record road toll: The Daily Indignation Year-End Media Awards!

Once again, we have an esteemed panel of judges* who have picked out only the best and the brightest from the media landscape to award. Our guest judges this year are:

Paul Henry, in-between jobs as Professional Agitator, who had only one criteria on which he based his judging this year: whether there was the possibility of "titties". We're not sure what he meant by that, but we didn't want to talk to him any longer than we had to in order to find out.

The New Zealand Herald editor Shayne Currie, who this year oversaw that paper's slow decline from "better than Stuff most days" to "Jesus, I'd rather get my news from the shapes of my shits in the toilet bowl." Midway through an impassioned speech about how his paper was the bastion of non-partisan political coverage, a magpie attacked his shiny head and he stumbled off, falling into a lake. 

And our last judge is Richie McCaw. You may be thinking, 'but Richie isn't qualified to judge media awards', and you'd be right, but he's also not qualified to be Prime Minister and yet New Zealanders still want him to be theirs. Also, the mere thought of Richie as PM was enough to make Paul Henry and Shayne Currie spontaneously orgasm, so they all got along famously.

*Once again, not really.

And the winners are...

Speaking of National Goddamn Hero Richie McCaw, it’s not a year-end wrap-up without a look back at what he got up to in 2016. McCaw started the year the toast of the media, as always:

But in August, things got dark as The New Zealand Herald dared to ask whether the 2016 New Zealander of the Year was actually a curse preventing our Olympic team from winning. Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm, and our atheletes managed to win some medals despite McCaw's demonic presence.

“Finally.”

By the time the Kaikoura earthquake struck, the media was fully back on board with McCaw being awesome:

And so, inevitably...

Speaking of someone the media adores for no reason, the resignation of John Key as Prime Minister of New Zealand left a hole in the hearts of many journalists, who'll now have to look elsewhere for a politician willing to plank, derp, and mannequin-challenge their dignity away: 

But more importantly, New Zealand has lost its most prolific reporter, someone capable of commenting on anything and everything, even if – especially if! - he has no insight into the topic. And so, a tribute to the best reporter New Zealand never had:

No idea why this guy was so popular, eh media?

Remember ‘The Dress’? Our media’s bank accounts do. And so, a small sampling of some of the approaches our media took in order to trick you into creating another cultural phenomenon:

For all of the media’s current obsession with lecturing us about how anonymous Russians are disseminating ‘fake news’, they did a pretty good job of reporting bollocks throughout the year:

This goes to The New Zealand Herald for three stories in six days from the perspective of millionaire property investor Roy Hoy Fong, who has absolutely nothing to gain from encouraging people to invest in housing, possibly even attending one of his seminars in the process. 

If the Herald didn't get paid for these "stories", they're missing a trick.

You can always rely on Stuff to bring the pain with their headlines:

But when The New Zealand Herald puns, they pun hard:

"Like a lamb cut off from the herd, he presented a desolate sight as he wrestled with his emotions.”

No, not a line from Alan Duff's latest novel, but a description of a young boy deciding whether he should go up to NBA star Steven Adams.

The Spinoff continues to grow. Tim Murphy and Mark Jennings are starting something called Newsroom that promises to focus on serious news. And the Stuff Circuit team, made up of investigative journalists that Mediaworks dumped so they could do The Bachelor New Zealand instead, look like they’re doing proper journalism and shit. 

There. Feel better? Now onto the most depressing award of the year.

Trump.

What were the reasons for Trump's Presidential success? There's no shortage of pundits giving you plenty, but one that can't be ignored is the media's culpability in aiding and abetting an unqualified fuckknuckle to attain the highest office in politics.

Sure, the media eventually realised the role they'd played in Trump's success and turned from laughing at his antics to serious sermons on how disastrous he would be if he won. But it was too late – by the time they'd pivoted, the public already had a lovingly formed opinion of Trump, and it was much easier to simply dismiss the press as hysterical or biased.

(From here.)

The ironic thing is the Trump election bid meant big money for the media. Trump could successfully claim the media was full of shit, and the media would happily cover him, all the while bringing in their biggest ratings ever. Both CNN and Fox News had record-breaking years.

And of course the reason they're making so much moolah is because we're all watching! We're watching as a dangerous, infantile shitheel becomes President of the United States, and our watchdogs do as little as possible to stop him. Can you blame us? It's riveting. 

Totally unrelated, trust in the media is at an all-time low. Luckily, I get my news from Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg says that has no influence on how we think, so please ‘Like’ my page here.

The 2015 Awards