Claims of media bias won t wash

I landed on Radio Live with that old professional Mark Sainsbury in the chair. PHOTO/FILE

DRIVING to work yesterday morning I was flicking between radio stations in the vain hope of finding something to keep me sufficiently entertained for the 45-minute journey as I like to save my music CDs for the return home as a way of unwinding.

Lo and behold I landed on Radio Live with that old professional Mark Sainsbury in the chair, a man who thankfully seems to have endured a lengthy tenure in broadcasting without developing an ego so big he trips over it.

I came in when callers to Sainsbury's talkback were discussing the performance of politicians, in particular Labour leader Andrew Little and results from the latest political poll which apparently has Labour dragging the chain behind National.

I have about the same level of interest in political polls as the former Prime Minister Jim Bolger who famously said "bugger the pollsters" on election night in 1993 when tipsters had predicted a Labour win, but the National Government was returned.

What I was interested in though was a caller who got in Sainsbury's ear over how he perceived the media treated the two major parties.

He trumped out that hoary old chestnut that the media was heavily biased against Labour and that somehow journalists managed to skew the news so effectively that everything Labour politicians said was misrepresented or rubbished whereas National survived under a cloak of media protection.

To his credit Sainsbury didn't do what I would surely have been tempted to do in his position, that is tell the poor man to progress to the present day and get real.

Instead the radio host treated him a little gently and then demolished him by asking the caller to name a single instance when that had happened.

He was, of course, unable to.

We journalists can be accused of many things, cynicism being among them, but in nearly 40 years in the job I can't recall a single instance of a political party being favoured above another.

I can recall many occasions when politicians of all colours and creeds have made goats of themselves by something they have said or done and have suffered media exposure as a result.