‘It’s Labour, but not as we know it’. Media lesson drawing and the disciplining of social democracy: a case study

This hypothesis-generating case study explores the extent to which the domestic politics of other countries is exploited by the media not so much for its inherent interest but for the ammunition it is thought to provide to political antagonists on the home front. It uses a qualitative content analysis of selected newspapers in New Zealand from 1997 to 2002 to show how the print media in that country used a highly partial version of Tony Blair’s New Labour to try to help set parameters for its New Zealand counterpart. These parameters transnationalised a business-friendly common sense concerning the proper, indeed the inevitable, response of a modern social democratic party to a globalised political economy.