On his Newstalk ZB show, Hosking said Peters must have woken up grumpy, bored and in need of a headline. He dismissed Little and Shaw calling him a journalist by saying it's "not true, never has been".
"I should be thankful my name isn't Mike Chow - [Little] would probably have called me a foreign investor," he said.
Yesterday, Peters said Q+A still treated politics as a two-party race and seldom offered any representation to the smaller parties. Panellists were chosen to represent the extreme left or extreme right, he said.
"They are still carrying on like MMP never happened ... we will be writing to TVNZ telling them they are not going to keep getting away with it."
TV3's The Nation, however, did not have a sole focus on National and Labour. "They are perverse in their treatment of all of us," he laughed.
Part of the issue is that Hosking has such a high profile and has been basking in the ratings while TV3's early evening lineup has been a shambles.
Talk radio tends to have a conservative audience, and when he appears in the Herald, Hosking's opinion is one of many. But TV has a pervasive influence, and in my opinion the state broadcaster has been incautious.
Making it personal
AUT University communications lecturer Dr Sarah Baker said it was very unusual to have three party leaders attacking the independence of a current affairs show.
Baker - who completed her doctorate on TV current affairs shows - said there had been a stark deterioration in the way issues of balance and opinion were being treated by the media.
If TVNZ did not aim to correct it, they should at least include a disclaimer for opinions expressed by Hosking, she said, spelling out that they were not the opinions of the state broadcaster.
She said broadcasters had become focused solely on ratings to assess programmes.
Mike Hosking interviews Prime Minister John Key on Newstalk ZB. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Ratings!
TVNZ's head of news and current affairs, John Gillespie, believes the public knows that Seven Sharp does not have a political stance, and that the views expressed by Hosking and co-presenter Toni Street are their own.
"Editorial opinion is part of the Seven Sharp format and we believe our audiences understand and appreciate this - hence how well the show is rating," said Gillespie.
"They are also later posted on Facebook clearly marked as each presenter's individual viewpoint.
"Toni's views will often counter those of Mike and vice versa. We have no plans to introduce a disclaimer."
Gillespie said, "viewers have had an unprecedented range of alternative programmes to choose from over the last few months and throughout this period Seven Sharp has attracted an average of over half a million viewers per night".
He said Seven Sharp's 2015 audience share was up 18 per cent on the same period last year.
New world order
TVNZ says it is happy with the Seven Sharp format and is playing down rumours that it plans to tweak the show for next year.
But TVNZ will be well aware that the ratings success is due in part to a shambles at MediaWorks in the early evening timeslot.
It is early days for TV3's new 7pm show, Story. What is clear is that it has not been a disaster and seems likely to stay around.
Story's hosts Heather du Plessis-Allan and Duncan Garner are not darlings of the left, in the way John Campbell was.
When Campbell was on air, Hosking's brusque calls for people to pull up their socks could be seen as being balanced by the more liberal offering on TV3.
But the 7pm timeslot has changed. The question is whether TVNZ adjusts to the new world order.
Gillespie is hanging tough. But with a new chairman on the board of TVNZ, a key issue will be whether Hosking's conservative opinions should be reined in.
EXTRA!
Video streaming service Netflix is still deciding whether New Zealand customers will pay extra once subscriptions are liable for GST.
Netflix, Amazon and iTunes have all agreed to changes that would force them to pay the tax, but a spokesman said it does not know how much, if anything, would be added to the $9.99 monthly Netflix subscription.
In media, the next arguments will be over the taxation of companies such as Facebook and Google, which sell GST-free advertising in the local market, and there are even bigger issues in the wider e-commerce arena, and over the lack of tax paid by overseas-based retailers.
