Wiremu Kingi Te Awe Awe of Rangitāne reflects on the relationship between Māori and the media.
As Carmen Parahi wrote in her editorial, “the superiority of European, mainly British, migrants, and the inferiority of Māori was repeated over and over by our editors and newspapers. It was racist”.
That racism existed through the decades and centuries, up and down the country, and one of the aspects of the investigation I found most illuminating was the region-by-region examination of our reporting.
The
Taranaki Daily News,
Stuff’s oldest newspaper, said it needed to “account for the legacy of our journalism forefathers”, which, in the case of Parihaka, involved reporting which “was complicit in the calculated attack by the Crown. We purposefully sided with the Government to protect the economic aspirations of settlers in Taranaki to the detriment of the rights of Māori”.