Do we like Mike Hosking?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A few real stains and a thin list of good deeds, with no sign of him campaigning against any group's rights.
Mike Hosking is the New Zealand broadcaster who gets paid to have a strong opinion before breakfast. He fronts Newstalk ZB's morning show, and back in 2017 TVNZ picked him to host the pre-election leaders' debates, which drew criticism of the choice. He is still where a prime minister goes on a bad week: in August 2026 he had the first of two interviews on Luxon's Monday media round.
The messiest story is John Tamihere and Whānau Ora. In December 2018 Hosking made comments about Whānau Ora funding that Tamihere's lawyers described as reckless. Hosking said he had been talking about a surplus payment to the National Urban Maori Authority, not to Tamihere personally. In July 2020, as part of a confidential settlement, Newstalk ZB and Hosking apologised, and the station said it “sincerely apologises to John Tamihere”. Hosking was on holiday, so an NZME lawyer read the apology in the High Court.
Then there's Covid. On 6 April 2020 his Mike's Minute segment said 99.2 percent of Italy's Covid deaths involved underlying health issues, set next to the country's overall daily death toll. The Broadcasting Standards Authority upheld a complaint that this was misleading, saying it ignored excess mortality. It made no order, just a censure and a lesson in reading statistics.
On the harm check, the record is mixed rather than damning. The regulator found his 2019 comments on refugee and parent-visa policy were a genuinely held opinion and did not breach standards. It also didn't uphold complaints over his 2021 description of Meghan Markle as a “hussy”, though it accepted the word can refer to women. In 2015 it did uphold a fairness complaint over his on-air dismissal of the waitress in the ponytail saga, with no penalty. I found no words of his own against LGBTQ+ people and no campaigning on trans rights.
The recent bit is the Luxon interview. After the leadership challenge, Hosking praised the PM's speech at a Newstalk ZB event, played down the missteps and pressed him on why he wouldn't rule out the Opportunity Party. Whether you read that as a sympathetic interviewer or a mate going easy on a mate depends on where you sit. Either way, it's opinion radio doing what it says on the tin.
Honest gap: I couldn't open anything solid on charity or personal kindness, so the good side of the ledger is thin here. What the record does show is a pattern of confident claims that cost him an apology and a censure, set against a regulator that has also cleared him more than once. Not a villain, not a hero, and the data doesn't push him either way.