NZ news media carry a lot of responsibility for promoting anti-male sexism and for making it extremely difficult for men to influence public opinion with reason or facts. Yesterday’s NZ Herald carried several stories in which bad behaviour by men towards women was emphasized in gender-specific headlines. While those stories involved bad events likely to interest people, what about the many events of harm experienced by males that were not reported?

This headline stated “Woman shot in Auckland’ referring to an incident in which a woman was shot in the leg and police were seeking the assailant(s). Ok, that’s newsworthy, but note that the victim’s female gender was headlined. We believe that when males are victims of anything our news media are much more likely to avoid highlighting gender and often fail to mention the male gender at all. This is a device of propaganda, contributing to the maintenance of public beliefs that women are much more under seige from violence than males are, which is not true. For example, this story carried the headline “Aggravated robbery in Dunedin’ and made no mention of the gender of the victim who we can therefore assume was male. (By the way, if anyone has the time it would be a useful thing to do a count of headlines over, for example, the last year or two, to establish how often male victims of crimes and accidents are referred to in headlines without mention of their gender (such as ‘person’, ‘worker’, ‘police officer’) compared with how often this is done for female victims.)

This headline stated “Heavyweight champ’s sexist tirade’ reporting boxer Tyson Fury’s expressed belief that women are best on their backs or in the kitchen or making him a cup of tea. Well, ok, that’s probably newsworthy but notice how any comment by a public figure that might be objectionable to feminists is reported in a criticizing way while the constant tirade of anti-male hatred and dishonesty is never called out as such. If media took a comparable approach to Fury’s statement as they do for feminist statements the headline would have read ‘Heavyweight champ supports separate gender roles’ Fury’s ignorant-sounding comments were taken out of context; they were part of his responses in a pre-fight interview (when boxers are developing maximum aggressive attitude) to questions (58 minutes into the inteview) about his opinion of women’s boxing. He replied “It’s up to everybody what they want to do…I’m all for it, I’m not a sexist. I believe if a man can to go work all his life, a woman can. Who am I to say “don’t do that cos you’re a girl’? But I believe a woman’s best place is in the kitchen and on her back, that’s my personal belief. Making me a good cup of tea, that’s what I believe.” Asked whether his wife Paris is a good fighter, Fury said: “Sometimes she needs an uppercut, but other times she doesn’t.” This context didn’t make his opinions any less neanderthal but it did suggest that the gender statements were somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It seems unlikely that his wife of seven years with whom he has two children and who is described as his biggest supporter would tolerate being restricted to the kitchen. Certainly, his expressed belief about women’s right to work in any career they want to cannot be seen as fitting into a ‘sexist tirade’. But balance and accuracy is redundant when it comes to encouraging feminist ideology.

This headline stated “Woman escapes grave dug by fiancé’. This was an Australian story and the woman=victim, man=bad theme appeared to be the only reason this story was considered more newsworthy for a NZ paper than the many murders and attempted murders of males that will have occurred in Australia or dealt with in Australian Courts over the same time period. Oh yes, the headline suggested the story was an especially interesting and newsworthy one, but actually it was blatantly misleading and deserves a complaint to the NZ Press Council. No grave was dug at all, but this man who apparently thought he had killed his partner after choking her during an argument simply covered her body with some foliage. Never mind, let’s not let the facts stop media from inventing headlines that exaggerate the evil of males, in this case implying that a man dug a grave that his fiancé realized he would soon throw her into. (That’s not to justify or minimize this man’s violence in any way; he was convicted of attempted murder and will experience due punishment, probably less than MoMA would mete out.)

This diet of male-demonizing and female-as-victim headlines has long been extending feminist propaganda and creating misandry in our society. It’s incredible that despite our news media’s relentless conspiracy against men, a sea change of attitude change is evident and growing among the NZ public. Our news media are now well behind the 8-ball and will soon feel sufficiently shamed regarding their feminist lies that they will start to catch up with public awareness.