Good on Breakfast for following our lead by playing the full clip of Goff’s AltTv interview this morning and saying ‘make up your own mind’.
Bit of a change that, asking people to judge for themselves. Most political reporting treats politics as if it’s some mystical art or complicated science that must be analysed by an expert and presented dumbed down because it is beyond the ordinary person.
Of course, it’s not. Politics is essential to humanity: we all understand power and relationships, goals and trade-offs, loyalty and opposition, altruism and selfishness, immediate gratification vs long-term gain. Sure, there’s a place for political analysts to provide us with the nitty-gritty details of policies and legislation in an accessible way, and to give us background on the relationships between political actors but ordinary people are quite capable of working out for themselves the politics of an event.
In the case of the Goff interview, for example, people can work out themselves what Goff meant without some guru in a suit telling them what to think. People will see it as some weird power play or (like the interviewer) conclude that Goff is just acknowledging reality (and when did that become such a bad thing in a politician?). People are perfectly capable of making this political judgement for themselves without being force-fed an opinion.
As Aristotle said, man is a political animal. We don’t need to be treated like sheep.
