Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Given that John Key has stepped in, I assume it's already privately decided that the films will be made here. I guess PRs have been talking to PRs to set it all up for him. They'd never have let him near it otherwise, surely?
Maybe. Key does have a history of announcing that he has solutions to topical problems (whaling in the southern oceans, for example) that he does not, in fact, have a solution for.
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And now you're just ducking the substance of the argument altogether.
I've made all the points I wish to make, we're now at the stage of the debate where people repeat the same arguments I've already addressed. I have nothing more to add.
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Not so. English was tossing large porkies around at Budget time which I recall at least the Standard and Cunliffe writing about, but which strangely enough didn't interrupt the handjob the media were delivering at that stage.
Quoted to illustrate a final point that people with a strong political bias are really bad judges of things like objective truth and the impartiality of sources.
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But, yes, I wouldn't mind a little sober, reality-based forensics following pretty closely behind. That can't be unreasonable, can it?
Finance Minister bullshits about state of the economy, opposition finance spokesman disagrees isn't really all that worthy of analysis. The only reason this one got picked up is because the bullshit was so egregious.
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So who did the analysis and fisking 10 years ago before blogs became part of our media diet?
Well, it did happen so someone must have done it. My money would be on journalists.So unfashionable now.
If you go to the archives and look at newspapers from ten years ago you'll find plenty of columns and features and opinion pieces, just as you do today! I mean - have you ever actually looked in a newspaper? You'll find pages and pages and pages of commentary and analysis! You just don't find it in wire service stories about breaking news that are posted to the web sites, for reasons I've already explained.
If you go back twenty or thirty years you'll be quite shocked by the very poor standards of journalism. Political stories are only a couple of paragraphs and contain no balance. There is no commentary, other than the anonymously written editorial. Things are a lot better than they used to be.
What does, for example, NZPA provide that Scoop doesn't? Completely predictable quotes containing nothing but platitudes from the opposing side? Slightly more snappy copy?
Let me put it to you like this. How would you like to learn about what the political news of the day was:
1. Go to Scoop and read the forty or so press releases issued by different MPs, Ministers and lobby groups every day, read the Select Committee transcripts and Hansard when the house is in session, call MPs and Press Secretaries and ask for clarification on various points.
2. Read three or four NZPA stories.
If journalists don't have any subject knowledge, or have the time and aptitude to learn about it, then I don't see what value they actually provide.
Yeah, this is a complaint I hear from my colleagues a lot when they read science journalism and fly into a rage because the science journalist doesn't know as much about the subject as a professor who has studied it for thirty years. Economics and statistics are your area of expertise, so you know more about them than most journalists. But looking at the NZPA gallery wire, here's a list of stories they've covered in the last day (I think they have two journalists on at the moment):
The Health Quality and Safety Commission
The House
The cost of living
Natural Dairy and the Crafer farms
A housing New Zealand tenant dispute
Youth offending programs
Tau Henare misbehaving in a select committee
The Foreshore and seabed legislation
The Tuhoe negotiations
Chris Carter
Rebuilding in Christchurch
McCully's trip to Asia
Inflation(!)
The Greens and National updating their MoU
Changes to the maternity system.Would you be able to write in depth commentaries on all these subjects on the same day without some expert in, say treaty law throwing a tantrum because there were errors in your legal analysis?
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Woah! And now you've jumped arguments. Originally, it was that journalists (well, actually, reporters) don't do that stuff because it's not objective and balanced -- and now it's a resource issue?
'Jumped arguments?' I made one point and then I made another related point.
Not to knock your thirty years of journalism experience but the type of reporting we're discussing here and linked by Keith in his column is hard news journalism, not features or columns or blog posts. Maybe you've worked in the gallery or a newsroom in the past, I don't know, but the comments made here don't reflect the nature of the journalism being criticised - and since my wife and a lot of my friends work in the gallery, or in newsrooms I'm just trying to inject some second-hand reality. And that reality is that time pressure and objectivity are related - if the Finance Minister makes a statement about the economy and you have five minutes to turn around a story on it then you can (a) write it up, call the opposition for balance and file a proper objective news story or (b) go off and research the topic and write an articulate critique of the Minister's statement and miss your deadline by several hours.
It's not as if we're starved for commentary and analysis - there are loads of economics and political commentators writing columns and blog posts - it's just that breaking news is presented objectively for reasons that are pragmatic as well as philosophical.
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What would happen if my blog post was sent out as a press release from Goff's office? How much traction do you think it'd get?
Given the high profanity count, quite a lot.
Let me make one more point about the PAS fantasy model of journalism.
Let's say you're a reporter in the press gallery and the Finance Minister puts out a press release and you decide to fisk it, because you know a lot about finance. Ten minutes into your fisk you're going to get your web editor calling up and demanding to know where their copy is. And when you publish the fisk you're going to get the Finance Minister's - very smart, very knowledgeable - press secretary calling you to debate each point in the piece, and if you've made any serious errors in your (quickly written) fisk you're going to get the Finance Minister calling your editor.
And then the Attorney General puts out a press release on treaty negotiation. And then a report is released on maternity care. And then there's a story about building regulations in Christchurch. And under the PAS model of journalism you happen to be an expert on all of these diverse subjects, so you can take on the relevant Cabinet Minister or opposition spokesperson on this subject without making any mistakes and you have all the time in the world to do so. But back in the real world these are complex subjects and they take time to write about intelligently. There's a reason most columnists only write a couple of columns a week, at most. -
The job for a reporter would be to find someone to explain how B'linglish is spinning, not just parrot his words ad nauseum. Which is, I think, what people are getting at.
Yes. And - like I keep saying - that is the role of the opposition. If you link to the Herald story at the top of Kieth's post we read standard pablum from the Labour Party:
Labour finance spokesman David Cunliffe said the CPI reflected increases in basic costs and were a further blow for those left behind by National's tax switch.
"The Government claims it is rebalancing the economy, but any rebalancing it is doing is making it tougher for Kiwis who already have it far too tough and easier for wealthy Kiwis who already have it good," he said.
The core problem is that we have an opposition who are really terrible at communications.
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Danyl, adding the additional information that the original claimant has no evidence (really? how did you make that judgment?), consulting experts and contrasting their authority with the claimant's seems awfully like fact-checking to me. You're clinging to the form of being disinterested, but the content is nonetheless contradictory of the original claim.
Let's try it your way. The PAS model of journalism could look like this:
Man lies about shape of Earth, falsely claim Earth is torus shaped contrary to overwhelming evidence in favor of spherical model.
but it could also just as easily look like this:
Scientists lie about shape of Earth, falsely claim Earth is spherical contrary to overwhelming evidence of torus model.
Which is why I'm happier for them to stick to to balanced reporting, rather than 'fisking'.
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Danyl, fine to report differences of opinion but lies about fact should be pointed out as such. That's what journalism used to be before the free market version you're talking about took hold. "Objectivity" doesn't mean giving equal space to flat earthers.
But English isn't flat out lying - he's bullshitting. Inflation IS low. Real after tax wages ARE higher. Kieth does a fine job of explaining why he feels those are not valid measures and that the government is spinning for Africa, and I agree with him - but that's a job for a commentator/analyst, not a news reporter.
The man will appear with A. Scientist on Close Up tonight, where we hope to get to the bottom of the matter.
The fact that many so-called news shows are actually lcd infotainment masquerading as journalism is a genuine problem with the industry, I'm not gonna disagree with you there.