All That Glitters: Hosking is not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror.
WHEN IT COMES TO RATINGS, Mike Hosking is a winner. He knows
it, his employers know it, and, if they’re honest with themselves, the Daily
Blog’s firebrands know it too. What he says to Newstalk-ZB’s listeners is,
for the most part, well received. Which is why Newstalk-ZB’s breakfast show is
the most popular product on commercial radio. Seven Sharp’s viewers,
likewise, are insufficiently offended by Hosking’s opinions to change channels.
And that’s all anyone has to do, FFS – if they don’t like or approve of
Hosking’s shtick – change the bloody station or switch channels. Their
forbearance, in the case of Seven Sharp, is what made the programme roughly
twice as popular as Campbell Live.
Though it pains the Left to admit it, Campbell Live
was a vehicle for values shared by fewer and fewer New Zealanders. Thirty years
of neoliberal hegemony will do that to a country. The social-democratic culture
in which Kiwis over 50 were raised, while very far from being dead, can be
accessed now only through the indistinct portals of nostalgia. By contrast, the
culture which succeeded it, whatever people choose to call it, is everywhere
you look. Love it or hate it, this is the culture we are all required to move
and function in: the culture that counts.
Mike Hosking is a perfect fit for this new, market-driven,
culture. The social-democratic culture that permeated the old state broadcasting
system was never one in which he felt comfortable. It was too sedate, too
elevated, too wedded to the Reithian ethic, for a broadcaster of his voluble and
quicksilver temperament. [Reithian: Named for John Reith, the first
Director-General of the BBC, who held that the role of a public broadcaster was
to “inform, educate and entertain” its listeners and viewers – C.T.]
The Hosking personality: self-confident, thrusting and
ambitious; scornful of those who cannot reach conclusions quickly and
definitively; and unshakeably wedded to the idea that if success is not
recognised by, and reflected in, increased material wealth and higher social
status, then it isn’t really success; was, however, supremely well-adapted to
the new world ushered in by the changes of the fourth Labour Government.
Who could forget the Hosking interview with a Labour Cabinet
Minister during which the hapless politician was incautious enough to ask the,
by now extremely well-paid, broadcaster how much he earned. “More than you
do!”, Hosking snapped back without missing a beat. Seldom has a Cabinet
Minister looked so crestfallen. It was vintage Hosking. In the new era, ushered
in by Rogernomics, human worth was measured by the quantum of an individual’s
income. If he earned more than a Cabinet Minister, that could only mean that he
was better than a Cabinet Minister – and Hosking wasn’t the least bit
afraid of letting Cabinet Ministers know it.
The Left, of course, rejects Hosking’s world view as utterly
repellent, and condemns it as antithetical to everything they believe in and
want for the world. From their perspective, it is morally indefensible that
such a person should be accorded the privilege of daily addressing
hundreds-of-thousands of their fellow citizens. But the corruption they believe
his unabashed worship of wealth and status is bound to work in the body politic
was already dissolving “Old” New Zealand long before Hosking took possession of
Sir Paul Holmes’s prime-time batons.
The sad fact is that Hosking is not the problem, merely its
artfully tousled personification. His high ratings among 18-35 year-olds is
explicable only if we accept that, in the eyes of those who have grown up under
neoliberalism, being rich and famous is the indisputable desideratum of
twenty-first century life. These youngsters have no wish to tear Hosking down,
on the contrary, they want to be just like him. Wealth and fame have become the
markers of a life well lived. By this reckoning, reiterated over and over again
in Hosking’s speeches and columns: success is well-earned, by definition; and
failure is merely Nature’s way of delivering her pink slip to those
unfortunates on the wrong side of the Bell Curve.
If this is “right-wing bias”, then the whole era through
which we are living must be adjudged in precisely the same terms. Hosking is
not a megaphone for neoliberalism, he is its bright and shining mirror. And
those who accuse him of being John Key’s “stooge” simply do not appreciate the
chemistry at work between them. Mike Hosking might earn more than the average Cabinet
Minister, but all his thrusting ambition has not come close to earning him a
fortune of $55 million. To the Hoskings of this world (and there are many more
of them than the Left would like to think) Key’s fortune is proof positive that
the Prime Minister is a superior human-being.
Mike Hosking’s heart of gold: cold and glittering as any
precious metal; goes out to the ubermensch born in a state house. When
God and Mammon have become one and the same – where else would it go?
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 19 August 2015.
