Posts by Russell Brown
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
On the other hand the utterances of politicians – perhaps especially their justifications – appear to increasingly be pitched for effect rather than meaning. Reporting on the utterances, no matter how, would be at best facilitating that approach to politics, at worst making yourself the servant of whoever is best at it or whoever you report the most.
You've phrased what I was trying to say very well.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Woodward and Bernstein spent two years working the story, and didn’t go to press with anything they didn’t have solidly corroborated from multiple sources and/or with documentary evidence to back them up – which I know is dreadfully old-fashioned nowadays, but there you go
I wasn’t gagging for there to immediately be more dumps after Rawshark signed off and said the rest of his material was with journalists. We were past the time of simply throwing out more correspondence.
The next story you see from Matt Nippert will build on his really good work on the way Slater et al (and possibly Collins) tried to undermine financial regulators, and will include new information brought to him as a result of that story. That definitely won’t go away. Although I think it’s time for the police to say something about the status of David Parker’s criminal complaint over that and other matters.
Likewise, David Fisher also has more material and anyone who knows Fish knows that he’ll write that story when he’s ready. I suspect there are quite a few OIA requests in the system right now.
Everyone had assumed that if Mediaworks had unpublished Rawshark material it would be with Gower, but I wonder if it’s actually with Campbell Live, who are currently being dicked around by Judith Collins’ (former) office on an OIA request for correspondence between Collins and Slater.
So stuff’s going on and journalism’s being done.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Second, even if the media has some influence, the fact is that Keith starts his post by saying that “the media” actually worked really hard on chasing the Dirty Politics story and tried their hardest to get the PM, etc to answer the questions. And Glenn Greenwald praised the NZ media for doing a good job on chasing up the mass surveillance issues that he revealed in Auckland.
I'm pretty sure Nicky Hager offered praise too.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
What do you mean by “a vehicle”? If you mean that the media quoted Key, et al saying this, then … yeah. That’s what the media does, unless you really want it to stop reporting things that the journalist in question happens not to believe. But if you mean that the media actively promoted this meme … I’m not convinced.
No, no. But it got repeated to the point where it virtually became the truth. I was really relieved when I was asked about it on Firstline and was able to point out what bullshit it was.
The way the protagonists kept on being invited onto The Panel as if nothing had happened was fairly troubling. And of course you had the likes of Hosking telling large radio audiences, day after day, that there was nothing to see here, and Larry Williams inviting Slater on as an election commentator at the other ed of the day on ZB. The idiocy of TV3’s poll question asking people whether Kim Dotcom was Whaledump, long after it was clear that he wasn’t. Sean Plunket’s declaration of of same – and then his inadvertently hilarious account of being contacted by Rawshark (spoiler: he wasn’t).
Then you had the unaccounted casualty of the whole thing – the word “hacker”, which became roughly synonymous with “kiddy-fiddler” . Farrar’s ludicrous claim to have been “hacked or spied on” was reported as fact even after he admitted he hadn’t really been. Key consistently referring to Snowden as having “hacked” private information neatly turned the whole issue on its head. Even Fran O’Sullivan was declaring that Snowden shouldn’t be listened to because his information was “stolen” – and how many stories has Fran broken off the back of leaks?
EDIT: And of course, the list of people being slammed and smeared as “hackers” included … Keith Ng.
But I don’t disagree at all with your original point: that voters had other priorities.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
So here’s a thought. Maybe the reason that the media’s reporting of Dirty Politics has had no effect is because voters actually didn’t care that much about it. Maybe they discounted the ugliness and wrongdoing – especially once Collins went, accident or no – because they judged National and Key to be doing a good job on the things that they believe matter. And maybe people like us who were sickened by what we read are just outliers who live in a social media bubble with other people like ourselves, and so have no real clue what the rest of New Zealand think or believe.
I don't disagree with any of that.
Which has nothing to do with the media at all
Not quite. The media were after all the vehicle for what turned out to be a successful pushback -- the "everyone does it/the left briefs its own attack bloggers", bullshit that muddied the water enough so that most people accepted that it was all dirty politics and turned away from it.
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While Ede scuttles off to wherever, Carrick Graham has emerged from his sewer, returned to Twitter and yesterday tried to intimidate Otago University nutrition researcher Lisa Te Morenga by going through her Twitter history and finding something he could quote out of context.
He even tried to shop the "inappropriate tweet by an academic" line to me. Apparetly he's never heard of (a) NWA or (b) irony.
It turns out that Te Morenga aroused their ire yesterday by giving Jordan Williams a serve about this disingenuous hit-job earlier in the year on the Fizz anti-sugary-drinks lobby group, presumably on the dollar of Katherine Rich and the Food and Grocery Council.
Te Morenga apparently called Williams a "twat", occasioning this amazing post by Whaleoil, who professes to be shocked that someone said a mean word on the internet and then suggests that it might be trouble for Ana Samways at the Herald because she tweeted Williams and Graham to advise that "no one can take you assholes seriously".
I can never work out whether they're disingenuous or really delusional, but it really is quite funny when they declare themselves to be the victims.
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It's interesting that that this post is getting plenty of views (and 50-plus retweets on Twitter) but only a few comments. Because it's hard to know what to say. I could have posted this yesterday when June sent it to me, but I felt like I needed time to process it myself before I could do that.
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Remember, the Espiner interview hinged on his point-blank, repeated refusal to answer a reasonable question about the conduct of a Minister of the Crown.
Why did Richard Worth have to go as a Minister?
Because the Prime Minister made a very firm judgement about his conduct and said, from memory.
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I don’t understand why ,what I think are bright people will stick their head in the sand and want to look like an idiot for actually voting for this lot after knowing about their operation.
1. Most people haven't read the book and, because they don't follow politics, didn't understand (or even care about) the substance of what it depicts. They did form the view that Judith Collins was pretty dodgy -- I'm confident that there were Curia polls to that effect before she was finally dispatched.
2. They didn't feel secure about Cunliffe, or about Labour leading a government.
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Felix Marwick,
It is not over the top, nor inaccurate, to use the terms “disarray” or “divided” when the majority of the caucus has taken active steps to block the leader’s desire to have a leadership contest before the end of the year.
No, those are reasonable words. Having Shearer running around flouting his party leader’s instruction not to speak to the media certainly indicated that. "All out war" is probably going a bit far, though.
Labour’s caucus is divided. The gallery is reporting that fact. It’s that simple. I know there are those on the left that are uncomfortable with the state Labour is in and are looking for people to blame. But I can assure you it’s not the media’s fault. The blame for Labour’s predicament lies fundamentally within its own ranks.
Yes. But that’s not the same as demanding an apology from Cunliffe to the country. That’s just silly.
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