Fresh Hell at 3 AM: Peter Bale on the View of America From Down Under

Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody, we are reversing the lens today. Rather than looking at America from the inside, we're looking at it from the outside in with an old friend of mine. Peter Bale is a long-time media executive. He's based in New Zealand. He's had very senior jobs at CNN and News Corp and all sorts of other big media companies. In fact, we met many years ago in CNN. He had me on his show to talk about technology. He is a native New Zealander and now is back in New Zealand. Peter, welcome to Keen on America.

00:30 - 01:00
Peter Bale: Andrew, thank you very much for having me. It’s a privilege to be on since I see some very serious intellectual names, so I’m not sure I can quite live up to the intellectual billing, but it’ll be great to have a conversation with you and it’s lovely to see you.
Andrew Keen: Well, do your best, Peter. If you’re no good, we won’t run it.
Peter Bale: Yes. We can talk about what Spike was if you want at some point when we get into the media section, but do carry on.
Andrew Keen: Well, what’s the view then? Very simple, easy question, Peter. What’s the view from New Zealand of the United States? Have you been shocked, so to speak—those famous words from Casablanca—with what’s been happening over the last few years?

01:00 - 02:00
Peter Bale: Yeah, I think, you know, very hard to put the views of five and a half million people on one person, but I would say there is a perception that it is—since 2016, we have been in extraordinary times. And I think since Trump was re-elected, of course, the speed of action—what he learned from that first term, the speed of action on so many huge things that affect us all globally has left us over here, you know, 18,000 miles away, just as punch-drunk as anybody there. And it does affect us in very strong ways. The Trump era has affected dialogue in New Zealand; it's affected daily conversation. But also, when you have, for example, with tariffs—New Zealand had 15% tariffs, which of course again we do again today. And that really jolted people and certainly jolted the government because the government here, particularly the current government, which is a somewhat conservative, small-c conservative one, really felt it had done its best to be at Washington's side.

02:00 - 03:00
Peter Bale: You know, small countries like New Zealand depend on the international rule of law. So that kind of thing has really been very disruptive. And then you've got this sort of unilateralism that a small country like New Zealand fears when you think about, you know, whether it’s the Maduro thing in Venezuela or the potential for an attack on Iran that is without any UN or international consensus. So I think there’s incredulity, but there’s the same punch-drunk nature. I mean, I admit I am a journalist, but I wake up in the middle of the night probably about 3:00 in the morning, check my phone to see what fresh hell has come out, and it’s usually two words: "Trump threatens."
Andrew Keen: And of course, Trump threatens and people are beginning to punch back now. What do you make of the Carney doctrine, or at least of Mark Carney? He is behaving certainly, if not as a Canadian, as a New Zealander in being willing, or an Australian, or perhaps a Frenchman, in being willing to punch back. Has there been a very positive response to this thing now called the Carney doctrine of medium-sized countries like Canada or New Zealand or Australia standing up for themselves against the United States?

03:00 - 04:00
Peter Bale: Up to a point, but the government here is a bit wimpy about that. The government is extremely cautious—the current ruling government, which is a coalition of one conservative, rather right-wing nationalist group, a libertarian group, and then a sort of somewhat more English-style conservative party. They have been extremely cautious of that. The foreign minister in New Zealand is nearly 80, and he’s grown up with that kind of "the Americans protected us, the Americans are under the shield."
Andrew Keen: Is this, Peter, the Keith Richards of New Zealand, as one local newspaper called him?
Peter Bale: Yeah, that’s a very good—that’s a very good phrase. He is a man full of character, uses—is very influenced by the United States and really believes in that alliance. Because of course, you will remember that New Zealand tested that alliance in the mid-80s by going non-nuclear. And that led—so we denied access to an American ship, which then broke what was then called the ANZUS treaty—the Australia, New Zealand, US defense treaty. So New Zealand was on the out with the United States for many years. And he has been very determined to be quite conservative about this. He did welcome elements of the Carney speech at the World Economic Forum, but he also said, "Hang on a minute, I think Carney's been listening to what I've been saying." So he took some credit for Carney, which I think is probably a little ridiculous. But New Zealand is part of...

04:00 - 05:00
Andrew Keen: So as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards—if Carney is Jagger, then Peter's Keith Richards.
Peter Bale: Yeah, yeah, I think I’ll write to him and tell him that that’s a very good parallel. But he—it is—New Zealand is part of this kind of 40-nation loose grouping at the moment of a sort of coalition of the willing coming in behind Carney. And I think New Zealand will also be very strongly aligned with Anthony Albanese, even though he's the Australian Prime Minister, even though it's a Labor center-left government there and a center-right government here, because where Australia goes, we tend to go fairly soon after.
Andrew Keen: Although I'm not sure all New Zealanders would quite put it in those terms. I like the phrase "coalition of the willing." I think it was borrowed probably from Bush 1 or 2 or 3. Peter, whatever happened to Jacinda Ardern? There was an interesting piece in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about why New Zealand turned her on. At one point, she was your brand—a very articulate, impressive woman. What happened to her, and what does this tell us perhaps of the way in which maybe Trumpism has become internationalized?

05:00 - 06:00
Peter Bale: Yeah, I think that’s exactly it, Andrew. As usual, you put your finger on it. That there was—so she led—she was—I came back to New Zealand after maybe 35, 40 years of—more than that, 50 years of living abroad. And she was the Prime Minister when I arrived in 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was starting to spread. And you will recall that the Jacinda Ardern government imposed extremely strict curbs on even people coming back to New Zealand. We were under lockdown for extended periods, but it also really worked. The estimates are that there would have been something like 20,000 additional people having died of COVID without the lockdowns. But they led, as they did in the States, of course, they led to a really extraordinary movement—an anti-kind of control movement, which was fed very much by right-wingers and nationalists and a strange kind of coalition sometimes between racists and supporters of the indigenous Maori.

06:00 - 07:00
Peter Bale: And that coalesced into a kind of very strong anti-establishment and anti-Jacinda movement, which led to an invasion or an occupation of the grounds of Parliament here. It’s arguable that they would have done a January 6th if they could at the Parliament in Wellington. There was huge concern and big protests about vaccine mandates. People in the police and the army and various other places—teachers—were required to be vaccinated. And of course, it was extremely effective in controlling the spread of COVID until it wasn't, because of course, once we went through those various variants, the ability to control it was really broken down. But Jacinda also did a thing—it was remarkable for me to see this, especially having come out of to some extent the Johnson government, the Boris Johnson government in London, where its process of dealing with COVID was characterized by chaos and ignorance and stupidity and rule-breaking, if you like.

07:00 - 08:00
Peter Bale: Jacinda Ardern did a daily press conference. She always, as they call it in New Zealand, "fronted to it." She took an immense amount of personal responsibility. She didn’t hide behind her health officials. And it was always striking in these daily appearances how deeply she had been informed—she was informed about COVID, the pandemic, what was going on. She did a remarkable job of staying on it, continuing the message. And I think people forget—certainly they do here—what it would have done to New Zealand, a country of five million where everybody really does know everybody pretty much, to have 20,000 further people die would have been a very difficult thing to go through.
Andrew Keen: So in a way, could you suggest that Ardern is kind of New Zealand's version of Tony Fauci—loved by some, hated by others?

08:00 - 09:00
Peter Bale: Yes, absolutely. And she had a Tony Fauci beside her, a guy called Anthony Bloomfield, who was the head of health. And he is also now hated. He’s had to resign—he's left his job out of stress and exhaustion having done that. And there’s a part of the thing with Jacinda Ardern is also profound misogyny. You know, she experienced a level of vitriol and attack that I think I have—well, other than maybe Hillary Clinton, if you like, but Hillary Clinton of course never quite made it as leader. But I remember being absolutely stunned back in the Clinton era—the Bill Clinton era—when Hillary started leading the programs to improve American health outcomes. And the vitriol and misogyny that she experienced was awful. But the Jacinda Ardern stuff was on another scale, and she faced physical threats and kind of moral threats, if you like, that no New Zealand Prime Minister had ever experienced. It was also—it gelled with a couple of other things, Andrew.

09:00 - 10:00
Peter Bale: In 2019, we had one of the worst mass killings in the world at that time when an Australian livestreamed himself shooting 51 Muslim people in two mosques in Christchurch. And again, Jacinda there flew almost immediately to Christchurch—the sort of rather English-style city in the South Island. And this was deeply shocking to New Zealand. And she, very memorably, she wore a hijab or at least a head covering and arrived in Christchurch and said of these 51 people—and of all of the other Muslims affected, many of whom were refugees—"They are us." And it just hung in the air as a really powerful—just the right three words at the time.
Andrew Keen: And then why—I mean, that's the astonishing thing—is why she's become—I don't think she even lives in New Zealand anymore.

10:00 - 11:00
Peter Bale: No, she can't. She lives in Boston at the moment. She's working out of Harvard, I believe, or out of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, I believe. The reason I mention that first is that that then also led to—she created a thing called the Christchurch Call with Emmanuel Macron and to some extent Mark Zuckerberg, which was an attempt—because this guy livestreamed it on Facebook—it led to the likelihood, although it didn’t come in the end, of hate speech laws in New Zealand. And it also fed the agenda of a pretty—I didn't realize how big it was—a quite dark racist or perhaps even fascist tendency amongst a small group of New Zealanders who believe in creating a kind of Christian nationalist New Zealand. And they believed that a liberal media was in cahoots with Jacinda Ardern to suppress free speech and to do gun control, which they did again. I mean, New Zealand already had very strict gun control, but that was amplified by this attack. And then when you then get that coming into COVID, you had this sense of an overarching, overbearing state that she became the beacon of.

11:00 - 12:00
Andrew Keen: Yeah, and if this happens in New Zealand, one wonders what hope there is anywhere.
Peter Bale: Well, that’s right. It’s a very—like I say, coming back, and I’m not an intellectual like you about the philosophical understanding, but New Zealand—there are very few people that one perceives to be as kind of reasonable and sensible on mass as New Zealanders. But, and I sent you a piece that I'd written about this, I went into this quite deeply because there is a dark heart of nasty political dialogue here which is exclusionary. A lot of it is anti-Maori, because in the last 50 years in New Zealand, we've had huge progress in land rights recognition, recognition of the Maori language, recognition that Maoris live 25% shorter lives than white New Zealanders do. And that's kind of not exactly being unwound, but it's being questioned. And I see that as very much like in the United States.

12:00 - 13:00
Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's about othering, yes, as you would say. Peter, I think a Mexican politician once remarked, or someone from Latin America, that when the US catches a cold, Latin America gets pneumonia. In terms of your analysis of this, shall we say, "Trumpification" of New Zealand or parts of New Zealand, do you see these things as in parallel, or do you think you had to have MAGA and Trump in America to somehow legitimize some of the stuff you've been writing about and observing in New Zealand? Is what's happening coming from America? You talked about the kind of RFK Jr. style reaction in COVID—I'm assuming that you have an RFK Jr. style character driving a lot of this. Have you caught this kind of philosophical pneumonia because of what's happening in the United States, or would it have happened anyway?

13:00 - 14:00
Peter Bale: I think there was always an underbelly. Funny enough, the Deputy Prime Minister described it to me for my story as what he calls "Christchurch skinheads." And there is, in that very English city where the mosque killings happened, there is a kind of latent heartbeat of really unthinking conservatism. The rugby union team there is called literally "The Crusaders," and they come onto the field of play riding white horses with the cross of St. George on them. You know, it's completely insane for anybody who's read the Crusades through Arab eyes, for example. But I think what's happened to us all, whether it's in Canada with those truck drivers some years ago, whether it's in Australia, is because we're living in a world dominated by US communications platforms where the First Amendment takes precedence, however one chooses to read that. There is a permission now to speak in a way that would have otherwise been unacceptable or antisocial.

14:00 - 15:00
Peter Bale: And when a lot of that rhetoric comes directly from the President, the permission is sort of quadrupled. And I think certainly here, X is a really big part of that. We have somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 New Zealanders are on X here, and it is most definitely where the most right-wing conversations are held. The other thing that New Zealand has in common with the United States, and it’s to your point of it not being necessarily chicken and egg or pneumonia, is the loss of trust in the conventional media here has been profound. When I was growing up, there were 48 daily newspapers in New Zealand serving a country then of about three and a half million. You have a national broadcaster, one separate one for radio and a separate one for television, very much like—or that try to operate to the standards of the BBC. And all of them have lost a tremendous amount of trust and are portrayed very often as part of a kind of liberal conspiracy against right-thinking New Zealanders.

15:00 - 16:00
Andrew Keen: How much of this, Peter, do you take personal responsibility for, given that you had very senior positions in CNN where you and I met, you've worked very closely with Rupert Murdoch, you've worked closely also with Will Lewis, the former Washington Post chief who just decimated the newspaper? In all seriousness, what has happened to media? You ran WikiTribune for a while, you've been involved with the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. So you are as keen an observer of media, mainstream media, as anyone. What's happened over the last seven years, Peter?

16:00 - 17:00
Peter Bale: Well, in this particular case in New Zealand—you're obviously being slightly facetious about me having responsibility for it, but I did contribute to a discussion about trust in media with various government departments which led to the creation of a $75 million fund to support various forms of journalism that were perceived to be at threat during the COVID period when advertising collapsed and so on. And that fund has triggered almost single-handedly the most extraordinary reaction. Even my brother said to me that I was in the pocket of Jacinda Ardern because I'd been involved in setting this thing up.
Andrew Keen: Man, she’s got a big pocket.
Peter Bale: She has. But it’s, you know, that backfired. It backfired for various reasons. One reason in that particular case was that in order to get the money, the journalistic organizations had to agree to abide by the Treaty of Waitangi, which is an 1840 treaty between the sovereign and Maori in colonial times, which is what I was saying has now been implemented much more effectively over the last 50 years.

17:00 - 18:00
Peter Bale: And so because they did that, that was seen to be that the government was directing the news organizations. I think more broadly, Andrew—as you know, I spent 15 years—my journalistic birthplace in a sense, apart from working for newspapers in New Zealand, was Reuters news agency. And I embraced the Reuters trust principles and ethics and continue to try to live by them in all of my journalism now because I find it suits—it’s extremely difficult for me to write opinion because I’m a sort of born reporter. I think the trend of news organizations in failing to distinguish between opinion and news reporting has been incredibly damaging. It’s particularly damaging, I suspect, fundamentally when everything you’re reading is on your phone because it is very hard to differentiate color-wise or whatever.

18:00 - 19:00
Peter Bale: The Guardian has done a very good job of trying to do this now from a design point of view where the audience can more clearly know whether they’re reading commentary or opinion. But commentary has become so dominant ahead of strong reporting or good reporting that I think that has been a real problem, and particularly in areas like politics where we’ve always had a tradition of political sketches and humor and so on that overlay it. But we no longer report Parliament the way we used to. Maybe we don't—well, Congress is irrelevant of course now, so...
Andrew Keen: Right, well we have our own Congress. Peter, someone coming to this fresh doesn't know much about your background might be slightly surprised when you say, "Well, you have a Reuters background, you're not biased." Some people might be listening and thinking, "Here's a classic example of a senior left-liberal media executive. You guys have lost control of the message, your orthodoxy about COVID and race and identity—all these things have been shattered, and you’re just denying the reality of what’s happening." Is that a credible narrative—that the old media that you lived in London for many years at News Corp, Reuters, CNN—that guys like you controlled the media and you've lost control of it now?

19:00 - 20:00
Peter Bale: Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as liberal-left, but probably a lot of other people would. I think, and I learned this a lot working for US organizations and particularly working for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, which was unfortunately defunct, but was very much a watchdog organization. The perception that journalists are liberal or leaning liberal is, I think, a sort of misreading, but an understandable misreading of a very profound American aspect of journalism, which is that it is to afflict the comfortable and protect the weak—that the powerful already have a voice and that our job is to give a voice to the voiceless. I think that’s profoundly embedded in American journalism, certainly in serious and responsible places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and less so perhaps in CNN. Well, actually no, not less so.

20:00 - 21:00
Peter Bale: And so I think journalists can come across appearing liberal because they do these stories. But I think a bigger issue is this explosion of commentary at the expense of decent reporting. Let me give you a good example: there’s a piece in the Guardian yesterday by Shaun Walker, their Kyiv correspondent, which is clearly the work of five or ten years of incredible contact building in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Russia. Deeply informed, deeply reported, has absolutely no commentary in it, but is the work of somebody and an organization that really cares about getting to the facts of a story. Reuters was and is always about facts. We didn't really even run any commentary when I was there until Reuters bought the Breakingviews commentary platform. It didn't really run any commentary at all, and that suited me fine. But you're right, that meant I never had to stick my neck out and think about what I did actually believe until I joined the FT, a startup at the FT. I’d never had to really write my own opinion about anything.

21:00 - 22:00
Andrew Keen: Reuters has been in the news the last few days because one of their photographers captured, I think, an iconic image of the former Prince Andrew in the back of a car. I’m curious as to your take on the Epstein scandal in a broader media sense. Jason Pack, the host of the excellent Disorder podcast, is coming on the show next week, and I think he's going to argue that he thinks a lot of this Epstein stuff reflects the failure of the Anglo-American media to really account for what happened under Epstein. Is there some truth to this in your view?

22:00 - 23:00
Peter Bale: I think there is a lot of truth in this. I think I mentioned to you that I’m quite good friends with Michael Wolff, the American author who’s done four books on Trump, and was also very involved in the Epstein papers. Michael’s methods are often quite controversial, but he gets close to his sources—he got very close to Steve Bannon, very close to Roger Ailes. I’ve often thought with Michael that he’s actually a bit more akin to Tom Wolfe than Michael Wolff in some respects.
Andrew Keen: Which is a nice compliment.
Peter Bale: They both dress very well as well, of course. But Michael has been for at least three years trying to interest mainstream media outlets in his story about the Trump-Epstein connections and Epstein. You know, some of Michael’s journalistic methods and exchanges with Epstein don’t come out terribly well when you read them. But I don't know how invisible Epstein could have been, but he certainly made himself somewhat invisible to the rest of the media. That woman, Julie K. Brown in the Miami Herald, has obviously done a fantastic job on that original prosecution.

23:00 - 24:00
Peter Bale: And you see also Tina Brown, former editor of the Daily Beast, has been able to come back and say, "Look, I warned you about this guy." She was one of the few from mainstream media who was really clear, and actually looks rather good now. She sure does. And I forget the name—is it Landon from the New York Times who was clearly far too close to Epstein and advising him as well? I don't know quite why that happened. But when you look—because I haven't seen too many media executives coming out in the Epstein files. And that slightly surprises me. I have looked for Rupert Murdoch, I have looked for Lachlan, I have looked for Jeff Zucker, I haven't seen Larry Ellison even in new media guys.

24:00 - 25:00
Peter Bale: But that network—I mean, the Financial Times has done an incredible job on Jes Staley, the former head of Barclays, who absolutely bullshitted his way for years on that story. And they’ve really claimed some very important business scalps in that. But the connections and reach that Epstein had have been absolutely extraordinary. And I imagine you look at them too, but there’s a couple of citizen journalism investigators on X doing the most extraordinary excavations into some of this Trump stuff about Jean-Luc Brunel, his collaborator in France, how he died, where he died, linkages even to the Iran-Contra cases and so on. If it's not done by somebody like the FT or Reuters or the New York Times or the Washington Post, it's much harder to be sure whether they've done their work behind the scenes. But I think the Financial Times deserves a tremendous amount of credit for the way it's hung onto that story. And in fact, it was them who really took down Peter Mandelson in the UK.

25:00 - 26:00
Andrew Keen: Right, you mentioned the Washington Post. You know Will Lewis pretty well. What do you make of what he has done to the Washington Post? We did a show last week about the impact on the literary world of the Post just closing down its entire book review section. How catastrophic is this? What’s your read of Lewis’s role in this undermining of mainstream media and indeed his relationship with Jeff Bezos?
Peter Bale: Well, unusually, I’m not going to blame Will 100% singularly for this. There is a proprietor; the proprietor has obviously decided to change his approach to it. I suspect that Will said, "I will preside over the cuts and then I go." I don’t believe that his turning up at the Super Bowl was what cost him his job. I believe that he implemented and got Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal person who’s his executive editor, to do those cuts.

26:00 - 27:00
Peter Bale: I think those cuts are utterly reprehensible, particularly the cultural ones. But the elimination of international bureaus by the Washington Post is a disgrace because they were having the opportunity or building on an opportunity to create a kind of American alternative to the New York Times, which has done very well internationally. Anna Fifield was the Asia editor for the Washington Post based in Wellington in New Zealand. This is eliminating an opportunity to create a truly independent and interesting American news source on international news. The books section thing just sounds to me like philistinism, especially at a time—as someone pointed out—when Amazon really started with books. I think that once you lose the newsroom, you never get it back. He lost the newsroom from day one when he told his own journalists that nobody was reading their copy. He insulted his own staff, tried to force them to think about data in ways that I think is both valuable and ignorant. Data is a brilliant guide, but it isn’t a god and it is no substitute for judgment. And I think there was a lack of judgment in the way the place was being run.

27:00 - 28:00
Andrew Keen: Let's end with the view of a well-informed, smart New Zealander of America. What do you expect the Epstein thing to do in the US? Do you expect this to have a real impact in the US, or are senior Americans—influential, wealthy, powerful figures in media, finance, sports—are they immune to this kind of thing whereas in the UK and maybe New Zealand they're not?

28:00 - 29:00
Peter Bale: Well, I think the level of presidential immunity, you know, the whole shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it, is extraordinary. Michael Wolff made a very good point yesterday and quoted Trump as saying, "I'm not a schmuck enough to use email." So the evidentiary trail connecting Jeffrey Epstein to Donald Trump is not the same as the evidentiary trail to everybody else, it would appear. But we still have three million documents that are still sitting in the Justice Department. I thought that the positioning of that enormous Trump portrait on the exterior wall of the Justice Department this week was one of the most authoritarian things that you can possibly imagine and is so symbolic that the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA—the FBI and the Justice Department taken together are in his pocket.

29:00 - 30:00
Andrew Keen: Yes, it seems to have come out of a moment in Michael Palin's Brazil or some other slightly absurd dystopian novel.
Peter Bale: Yes, absolutely. But it is the absurdity of it that brings home the reality of it, I think. I find the Les Wexner evidence fascinating. The Victoria’s Secret guy. I don’t think we’ve got anywhere near to the bottom of that—how that was the foundation of Epstein’s wealth. And the references in some of the emails to Jamie Dimon—Jamie Dimon says he never met him. What’s going on there? Because clearly Jes Staley knew him when he was working for Jamie Dimon.
Andrew Keen: Everybody didn't know him until they did.
Peter Bale: That's right. Finally, Peter, is America done, or is this just going to—are we going to wake up in two years and it’s all going to be some—like watching Michael Palin’s Brazil and we suddenly get back to normal?

30:00 - 31:00
Peter Bale: I don't think America is ever done. Every time people perceive it to be done, it has either a political or an economic renewal. Its ability to rebuild itself constantly is astounding and incredibly exciting when you live there because you sort of feel as though you're part of an engine. I think it will depend to some extent on who comes after him, whether that's Vance or somebody worse.
Andrew Keen: Well, Peter Bale, the voice of reason. It’s always an honor. Peter Bale, honor to have you on the show, Peter, and we'll get you back because America certainly—this story hasn't finished yet. Thank you so much.
Peter Bale: Let me know if you get any feedback, and I’d love to. I really appreciated it, Andrew, and it's always good to see you too.