The Government's reforms for local government show a thoughtless disregard for New Zealand's media businesses.

In an era of misinformation, disinformation, generative artificial intelligence, and deep fakes, real journalism, produced by real journalists who research, write and fact check real stories that real people can rely upon is more important than ever before.

The battle over who owns and profits from local news content took a new and disturbing turn recently, when Google threatened to pull New Zealand news from its search engines if the Government went ahead with a fair bargaining bill.