Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Some things I've been meaning to link to | Apr 18, 2008 09:56

Amid the recent flurry of commentary about China, I particularly enjoyed a couple of vivid and thoughtful posts by Simon Grigg about a week in China, the first "from the 19th floor of a riverside hotel in Guangzhou," and the second, still sorting through his thoughts about the experience, from back home in Bali.

NBR has finally lured David Cohen to the blog side as part of its new online Comment section. He has a little more on the Sunday magazine flap. Nevil Gibson did say the new site was going to be like a right-wing Public Address, so perhaps you could pop over and give them some comment love …

At Blogging it Real, dc_red conjured the magnificent phrase "this ball-scratching monstrosity of an MP".

At Synthetic Thoughts, Chris Esther visits a small-business expo and finds that the best thing there is … Statistics New Zealand!

Tim Robbins' keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on Monday has been something of a sensation since; not least because of the circumstances in which it was made. Conference organisers appear to have only discovered in the green room what Robbins planned to say. The speech, urging broadcasters to rise above the tawdry, almost wasn't given at all, and (ironically) cameras in the room were ordered off when he did speak. But, of course, mobile phones are digital recorders. You can hear the final, rousing six minutes, or a lesser-quality MP3 of the whole speech.

And, of course, there's always something good at The Hand Mirror.

And that'll do. I'm at the boardroom on NZ On Air in Wellington for a meeting of the NZ On Screen Trust, and we get to see a live demo of the new website, which will launch later in the year as an archive and showcase for New Zealand screen culture. The prospect of the demo almost makes up for being inside on such a lovely day. Especially after yesterday afternoon, when I arrived from 21-degrees-warm Auckland to what seemed like a midwinter southerly …

PS: Might I draw your attention to the ad on these pages offering a free bag of Eden organic coffee if you pre-order the new Portishead album? It's quite a good deal.

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Hot Media | Apr 17, 2008 10:18

Hot Topic has a fairly extraordinary story this morning, about the circumstances of the departure of Ecologic columnist Dave Hansford from The Listener in the wake of what seems to have been fairly heavy pressure from the "sceptical" Climate Science Coalition after this column ran in the magazine.

The complaints -- and a threat to go to the Press Council and perhaps further -- wound up with the publications of these letters in the magazine, and a "balance"-style feature pitting two members of the CSC against scientist Dave Kelly in respective opinion pieces.

Poneke, who has devoted considerable energy to the topic of intimidation of journalists in the climate science debate, tells me he'll be contacting Listener editor Pamela Stirling and will be reporting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, an American journalism blog has a report on the ripping out of pages from the Sunday Star Times' Sunday magazine after someone decided that some asterisk-heavy (and unflattering) quotes from a sex blog in the magazine's editorial were too strong for public consumption. And, yes, it has a scan of the page everyone's talking about. You can see that in the Media7 blog.

The full video from last night's show is up on ondemand, and clips are on the main site (Windows Media). It should be on the podcast soon.

What's it about? Political spin, and how it makes its way into the media and our minds.

And, in particular, this search result. .

It was a slightly difficult recording this week, not least because it was very bloody hot indeed on the set, but I think it's edited up quite well. The panel is Ben Thomas, David Slack and Simon Wilson.

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Turning the page | Apr 16, 2008 12:31

We can now officially give up on the always-far-fetched-idea that the emails at the heart of The Hollow Men were snatched from the Parliamentary email system by some master hacker.

The police have closed the investigation and declared what should have been obvious to anyone who read the book: the emails were obtained over a period of time, and probably in printed form. They have "eliminated the suggestion that an external 'computer hacker' had breached the computer security within Parliament."

It's slightly ominous that Detective Inspector Harry Quinn (what a great pulp fiction name for a cop!) talks in terms of theft and about fixing "loopholes" in computer crimes law.

The distinction between theft, leaking and whistleblowing is a fuzzy one, and journalists should be a little worried about the prospect of the powerful being handed a tool to shut down stories they don't want aired.

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Campaigns | Apr 15, 2008 09:50

Poneke has a forthright post this morning about the news that the MeNZB vaccination campaign is being drawn to a close. The epidemic is over, and there is a desire to make way for Prevenar, an infant vaccine that can prevent pneumonia, ear infections, septicemia and pneumococcal meningitis.

The post notes a blog post I made in 2004 about our experience with the vaccination campaign (there was a follow-up the next day) and says: "Russell is neither anti-science nor anti-vaccination, so it would be interesting to hear in hindsight if he feels he was fooled by the anti-MeNZB campaign when he wrote that article."

Well, no. And if you read that post and various things I've written about the people involved in the anti-vaccine campaign I think that's evident. But as I explained in a reply on Poneke, I remain of the view that the official consumer information about adverse reactions -- as suffered repeatedly by our son -- was superficial to a very unhelpful degree.

Meanwhile, I'll do Audrey Young the credit of thinking that she didn't have any context for the notes from the Labour congress at the centre of her story yesterday.

The story about "confidential strategy notes" in which delegates were advised to distribute pamphlets on KiwiSaver produced by the Inland Revenue Department and on Working for Families produced by Work and Income" and "also advised to tell voters when handing out the pamphlets that National voted against both measures," could have led a reader to think that such behaviour was actually part of a party strategy.

But, as Young acknowledges this morning, One News reported last night that the suggestion came from a delegate on the floor and Mike Williams -- the fool -- uttered words to the effect that it was a damned good idea. The Prime Minister has been obliged to wade in and Williams has, once again, put his foot in it quite badly.

Update: I've just noticed that Audrey has explained in a comment on yesterday's thread that "My story this morning was based on notes taken by a participant in the closed workshop run by Mike Williams, not by any notes he distributed." The story could have been clearer, I think.

There's an interesting thread about the new Roy Morgan poll on The Standard, especially one comment about sample sizes in a multi-party environment. Given the way crazy way the Greens' support jumps around in some polls (Morgan has it tripling since its last poll), I do wonder.

I've also been meaning to mention The Standard's Interview the Leaders feature. Regular readers will know The Standard can be clatteringly partisan, but this is a good initiative. Jim Anderton and Jeanette Fitzsimons have answered questions so far, and the editors say they'll have Helen Clark's answers to readers' questions by next Monday. They're currently soliciting questions for Rodney Hide.

Meanwhile, the US primary mess trundles on. I must say, the Clinton campaign's assault on Obama over his reported comments at a private meeting about why small-town Americans were "bitter" about the government sets a new bar for disingenuousness, especially when Clinton went so far as to reinvent herself as a huntin', shootin' pro-gun country gal, in contrast to Obama's "elitism". The shame of it is that it's entirely destructive in a way that the same attack would not have been coming from a Republican.

I think Josh Marshall gets it right:

And seeing Hillary go on about how Obama has contempt for folks in small town America, how he's elitist, well ... no, it's not because I think she's either. I never have. But after seeing her hit unfairly with just the same stuff for years, it just encapsulates the last three-plus months of her campaign which I can only describe as a furious descent into nonsense and self-parody. Part of it makes me want to cry. But at this point all I can really do is laugh.

Meanwhile, Hilary took a stage and declared that when she last actually fired a gun or went to church was "not a relevant question". Obama, after initially declining to return fire at his fellow Democrat (he bagged McCain, with whom Clinton has been double-teaming him, immediately), was very funny when he did respond.

Salon has a lengthy article by Rebecca Traister about how the cultish "Obama boys" don't like Hillary Clinton because, well, they're sexist. There's no doubt there is creeping misogyny threaded through the political sphere. But I don't think that's the main reason so many Democrat voters are turned off Clinton. I think it's more that she's seen as a hypocrite and a political brute who's damaging her own party. That would be it.

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Pamphleteering | Apr 14, 2008 08:33

Audrey Young has herself a good scoop in the Herald this morning: in a conference workshop addressed on Saturday by Labour Party president, "delegates were advised to distribute pamphlets on KiwiSaver produced by the Inland Revenue Department and on Working for Families produced by Work and Income."

Young's story is based on "confidential strategy notes" handed out by Williams, which she says advised delegates to hand out the information leaflets whilst noting that National voted against both policies. This is not unlawful in itself, and the material is not political, but if information pamphlets were to be used as core campaign material it would not look good.

But it would have been handy for readers to have seen the notes, or at least to have a verbatim quote in the story.

An NZPA story also mentions the workshop, but less in the context of a machiavellian plan for the public purse than an effort to stay the right side of Labour's own defective electoral finance law. It says the law "follows general confusion among the parties over its provisions, including Labour's president Mike Williams saying the law was in need of a 'shake down' ahead of the election."

Labour is the only party so far to have committed a clear, if minor, breach of the Electoral Finance Act, and it is facing a significant campaign of litigation from National, which is seeking judicial reviews of the Electoral Commission's decisions not to prosecute Labour's breach (it didn't list the name of the promoter on a leaflet which it now says will be declared as part of its campaign budget) and that the EPMU can register as a third party under the act.

Bill English gloated to NZPA: Labour was so confused about its own law that "Our understanding is they've had to clean out their electorate offices of all promotional material and they will have to start again."

In Young's story, English takes a different view: "It confirms Labour's strategy, which has been to use the Electoral Finance Act to shut the critics up and use the resources of Government to broadcast its message with no competing views."

So it's cock-up versus conspiracy again; a scramble for something safe to hand out versus a cunning plan. It would be a good idea for Williams to speak up today and, ideally, release the notes himself. And he might even find it expedient to vent his own frustrations with the Electoral Finance Act …

Update: The Herald's story has just been updated with the following:

Helen Clark this morning reiterated that explanatory pamphlets produced by Government departments were not election advertising.

"Things that government departments put out, are not - underline not - campaign material," she said on TVNZ's Breakfast programme.

"Things government departments put out should be in every MPs' office electorate office, regardless of what party they are in, because the whole point of an electorate office is to be the interface, the link, between the MP and what government programmes are about."

However Helen Clark said on Newstalk ZB she would advise her MPs and their staff not to hand out the materials in a campaigning way, which some legal experts believe could fall foul of the Act.

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Late-breaking announcement:

The people at Portable Film Festival of Melbourne, Australia, have been kind enough to bring their latest guest to New Zealand. That's Ezra Cooperstein, "chief evangelist" for Current TV, the Al Gore-founded citizen journalism and user-generated content network. He's speaking at a free symposium at the Auckland Town Hall, 6pm tonight.

The event is free, but I gather that it's a good idea to email rsvp@portablefilmfestival.com with "CURRENT NZ" in the subject line to let them know you're coming. I think this will be worth the effort.

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