Author: Ashley Church
Image featured was created by AI. OPINION: Ashley Church If the recent Newstalk ZB claim that “there is no bias in our newsroom” – attributed to TVNZ CEO Jodi O’Donnell – was intended as a joke, then it revealed an extraordinary sense of humour and a missed career in comedy. If it wasn’t, then it leaves only two other possibilities: either a level of naivety that is concerning in someone holding such an important role, or a belief that the public are too stupid to recognise what is going on front of them. Because the ‘fact’ of bias at TVNZ…
OPINION: Ashley Church. Right now, much of the world’s attention is focused on the events unfolding in Iran. We follow every development, debate the details, and argue it all through the lens of our own worldviews. As a result, today, in every sense, Iran is shaping the international narrative. But go back six months, or a year, or five years, and the focus would have been on something completely different. That’s the rhythm of modern history. One crisis replaces another. One global drama gives way to the next. And like obedient marionettes, we shift our attention to whatever event currently…
Opinion: Ashley Church. As decent people everywhere mark the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 – serious questions need to be asked of the Western left. For nearly 5 decades, the Islamic Republic suppressed speech, denied women equal legal standing, executed dissenters, and exported militancy abroad – all while influential voices in the so-called “progressive” left in the West framed Iran as a victim of U.S. influence and as the heroic face of “resistance” against Israel. The contrast with reality could not be more stark. In 1979, just before the Revolution, Iranian society was making…
OPINION: Ashley Church January 27, 2026 The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault. So the early years were not…