The world changed last week. The United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader, sinking warships, and plunging the Middle East into its gravest crisis in decades. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil prices are spiking. European nations are evacuating citizens and deploying destroyers.

The New Zealand Herald, meanwhile, led with a courier van shooting from eighteen months ago.

To be fair, the Herald did not entirely ignore the unfolding global catastrophe. Somewhere in the middle of the page, between butter prices and a rare whale rescued from Auckland harbour, readers could find a reference to Iran. But it was competing for attention with an out-of-work Better Call Saul actor resorting to delivery driving, and a real estate power couple’s big plans for Christchurch.

The Post, for its part, gave its top billing to the new All Blacks coach. Dave Rennie’s appointment is undeniably significant. The question of who will guide fifteen men around a paddock with an oval ball clearly rivals the question of whether the Middle East will still exist next month.

One could accuse our newspapers of failing in their duty to inform. But that would miss the point. As any economist will tell you, newspapers give readers precisely what they demand. And what New Zealand demands, apparently, is rugby, real estate and the occasional stranded cetacean.

It was not always thus. There was a time when New Zealand papers maintained foreign desks and covered international affairs with genuine depth. That era died alongside the classified advertisement, which once cross-subsidised the sort of journalism readers would never have paid for directly.

What remains is a media landscape perfectly calibrated to our appetites. And our appetites, it turns out, are parochial in the extreme.

This is not entirely unreasonable. New Zealand does sit a very long way from everywhere, and the war in Iran feels remote from these shores. Until, of course, petrol prices spike, shipping routes close and export markets wobble. Then it will suddenly feel rather close indeed.

But for now, we can take comfort. The All Blacks have a new coach. The butter situation is being closely monitored. And somewhere in the middle distance, empires are quietly rearranging themselves without us.

They do say that ignorance is bliss. If that is true, then New Zealand must be the happiest country on Earth.