The team of $55 million

"Prime Minister Chris Hipkins insists that many voters are suspicious of co-governance only because politicians haven’t explained the concept clearly — but that failure also falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists.
    "As [one former politician] put it: 'One might have expected journalists to delve into what, precisely, the government meant when ministers incorporated this 'misunderstood' concept into lots of Acts of Parliament over recent years'....
    "There can never be a definitive answer to the question of exactly how much the Public Interest Journalism Fund has helped shut down criticism of the Treaty at a crucial time in our political history. But by accepting its conditions, it is undeniable that the media has inflicted a terrible wound on itself by being seen to have compromised its principal assets — trust, credibility and independence....
    "The widespread disdain for the recipients of the Fund’s cash was summed up by the epithet 'The team of $55 million' — a play on 'The team of five million,' which Jacinda Ardern used to rally the country behind her Covid management strategies....
    "The first of the general eligibility criteria [for the Fund] requires all applicants to show a 'commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner' — alongside a commitment to te reo Māori. The section describing the fund’s goals includes “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi [and this despite Te Tiriti's own three principles being Sovereignty, Property Rights, and Citizenship] ...
    "The lesson to media organisations seems clear: if the government ever comes calling with a bag of money that requires editorial prescriptions to be followed, take the advice of the advertising campaign that ran in the early 1990s to discourage children from experimenting with illegal drugs — and just say no."

~ Graham Adams, from his essay 'Has Government Money Corrupted Journalism?'