![]() The bubonic plague that swept Europe, North Africa and Asia was a consistent feature of the top-ranking morning shows on ZB for seven years from 1346, but Hawkesby and Hosking were equally consistently unimpressed. “But I’m much more interested in those gorgeous sunsets than some comicon of autograph seeking.” Hosking noted a 249.13 point drop in the Nasdaq before doing some very funny banter and launching into a full-throated defence of Jeremy Clarkson against the “wokerati”. “Waitangi, lovely place,” said Hawkesby on February 6, 1840. “Hardly the Proclaimers,” said Hosking in an editorial on June 29, 1914. Exactly.” The assassination of Franz Ferdinand “Goes to reason – does it not? – that one of them is going to split at some point or other.” After the 6am bulletin, Hawkesby launched into a tirade about the gruelling realities faced these days by hardworking broadcasters searching for a decent tradie to install a pool. “The moon? Wake me when they land on the sun,” said Hawkesby in the early hours of July 20, 1969, over the noise of somebody vacuuming the studio. “Every day,” said Hosking, thumping his microphone, lurching from falsetto to bass. “Walls fall over every day,” said Kate Hawkesby. “In no way, shape or form,” Mike Hosking told listeners on November 10, 1989, “is a wall falling over a big deal.” Instead of getting angry, we sent our researchers into the archives to unearth what those great truth-tellers have told us through years gone by. To be fair to Hawkesby, she did say on the country’s most popular news station on Monday, “I reserve the right to be wrong.” A national state of emergency was declared and the army, navy and air force were deployed in the most severe weather event to strike New Zealand this century. Entire communities were cut off from the rest of the country: transport, communications, power. ![]() What happened next was that Cyclone Gabrielle unleashed rain and wind, floods and landslides, uprooted trees, cut power to more than half a million New Zealanders, taking at least five lives and displacing more than 10,000 people from their homes. He, too, was appalled at the way New Zealanders had “whipped ourselves into this extraordinary frenzy”, how we’d “got ourselves into this mental state …” “Couldn’t agree more,” said Hosking, picking up the baton. “Better to be safe than sorry! Ooooh, goodness, better hunker down!” In her own voice, she said: “What’s happened to us as a country that we’ve become this paranoid and this soft?” Hawkesby turned on a cod, nasal, mocking voice: “Oooh,” she said. “They’ve gone overboard on all the warnings,” said Hawkesby. ![]() That the weather in Auckland didn’t look so bad on Monday morning was enough to send Hawkesby and Hosking into fits of cheery bewilderment at these crazies (scientists, experts, people with information, etc) who were “fear-mongering” about this silly old cyclone. ![]() To close the border was “overblown” and “hysterical”, and the whole thing was “not as bad as they’ve made it out to be”, he said of a virus which would go on to claim more than six million lives. The NBD tendency was conspicuous in March 2020, when Hosking said Calm Down, Dear, over fears about an emerging coronavirus. (To be clear, multi-award-winning journalist Mike Hosking, who hosts the most popular radio show in New Zealand journalism and is one of the two or three most compelling and effective broadcast journalists we have, is not a journalist. ![]() The power couple of New Zealand talk radio have never seen a political scandal, pandemic or downpour that hasn’t been bloated, overblown and exaggerated by hysterical journalists. As regular listeners know very well, morning broadcasts by Kate Hawkesby and Mike Hosking freight the tone of late British personality Michael Winner in an insurance ad. ![]()
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