Posts by Craig Ranapia
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Rob S,
Just for the record Craig what is your take on the Hager book’s claims viz dirty tricks emanating from the Beehive?
For a start, I wouldn't believe anything Cameron Slater says without independent corroboration from multiple sources.
How do you feel about your favoured political party using what seems to be criminal methods and character assassination as one of there main methods of staying in power.
I expect a little more than :"seems," especially when the primary source is someone I've long considered a pathological fantasist whose relationship with the truth is distant and intermittent.
If I got pulled up before the Judiciary for entering a website in the same manner as Jason Ede and Cameron Slater and said to the court that “everyone does it” how well would that wash do you think?
Not at all, but I'd do you the basic courtesy of extending you the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law rather than by Mr. Farrar's free-range troll farm. The judicial process seemed to work just fine when Slater was convicted of eight breaches of suppression orders and one of identifying a victim in 2010. (The penalties were farcical, IMO, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
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Good to see Claire Trevett's latest "exclusive": David Cunliffe pauses to reconsider future.
Exclusive: Labour leader said to be taking a break to think about his future as caucus trembles on the brink of open revolt.
Half of that is "no shit, Sherlock" and the other absurdly melodramatic. "Trembles on the brink of open revolt"? Really? I'm expecting things to escalate to a twerk-off to the death by afternoon tea time, and I'll be seriously pissed if it's not so.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Bart Janssen,
For me, it would have been nice if the media actually fact checked Key’s quotes before they published them.
Can't argue with that, then again the dark art of sub-editing seems to be going the way of dressing for dinner and the Latin mass. Hell, I'd be happy if newsrooms just hired people who grasp the idea that correlation does not imply causation. At least that would start to reduce the incidence of junk health and pseudo-science stories, quarter-arsed moral panics and statistically innumerate beat ups.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Russell Brown,
The one that did creep me out was the bookending of traffic reports on Radio Live and ZB with “party vote National” ads. This was in the middle of the news, with the electoral ad spoken by the same announcer who gave the traffic information, almost in the same breath. That really crossed a line for me, but I suppose I’m not a commercial radio listener.
Woah... that's weird even by the standards of... unfortunate ad placement. Then again, it strikes me as inappropriate having advertising inside news bulletins full stop and period. Guess that's my inner National Radio-loving liberal elitist popping up again. :)
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Steve Barnes,
You mean Niicky Hager the Left Wing conspiracy theorist hacker criminal?
No. Next question.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
and it as fatuous when you re-present it as it was when Andrew Geddis first mooted it, obviously channelling that slick operator Key, with his oft repeated rejoinder on the ‘living wage’ – “$20, why not make it $50…”
Again: I will and do engage with opposing viewpoints. I won't engage with your tiresome imputations of bad faith.
This is the line that is getting my knickers in a twist – that it’s partisan to point out when someone is breaking the law or being blatantly immoral in a public office. It’s not partisan, except in as much as it’s taking the party of the f*cking public.
Greg: You know what's getting my panties in a bunch? People who think that just didn't happen (and it did a lot), who don't distinguish between reporting allegations and facts, and when it's politically useful elevate the media to a judicial body. Which it isn't.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Russell Brown,
So stuff’s going on and journalism’s being done.
Well, exactly. I know for some people, the meme is "supine media with tongue so far up the Smile-and-waving Assassin's arse it's downright pornographic" (and it will flip 180 degrees as soon as there's a change of government) but it's a wee bit more complicated than that.
I remember an interview Philip Kitchin did on Media (7? 3? I lose track) that made a salient point -- complex investigative stories of lasting value require pretty serious investments of time, resources and attention. IIRC, he was chasing up leads and building the story around Donna Awatere-Huata for over a year before anything saw print. And I think that work stands up precisely because he puts getting the story right over getting it "right now". Too often, I think media outlets fixated on getting the gotcha have perfectly legitimate stories that get buried under half-baked hype.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I’m aware of that. I’ve also taken the trouble to actually read Dirty Politics.
Guess, what Joe - on Saturday electors didn't have to exchange a fucking book report for their ballot. Sorry about that, but I'm still struggling to see what the media could have possibly done to satisfy you without (as Andrew put it) becoming nakedly partisan in a seriously troubling manner.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Joe Wylie,
So back in the day, would you have advocated that Woodward & Bernstein simply assumed the position and got with the program?
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.
Now it’s back to cold arses on parliaments marble floors for seven hours on the off chance Cunliffe might choke up for the clown Gower. Who gives a fuck for mass surveillance anymore?
It must be awfully crowded if every journalist in the country is doing that. Damn lazy kids, back in my day we learned how to walk and chew gum at the same time.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Against this background we have pretty serious evidence of impropriety on the part of the National party and yet those same media were happy to wander along behind (or on) the National party bus phoning in John Key quotes.
Were we watching the same campaign there, Bart? Because I saw an awful lot of stand-ups where every fucking question was about “dirty politics” and it dominated the news for day after day.
But to use a ghastly political cliche, the only poll that counts is the one on Election Day, and it really seems clear that what the media deemed to be a matter of all-consuming public interest didn’t interest a very large section of the public very much at all. Maybe it should have. Maybe it will turn out to be New Zealand's very own slow-burn Watergate. We shall see.
But again, I’m going to repeat Andrew’s question:
Are you saying they should have actively campaigned against National, in the sense of explicitly told their readers/listeners/viewers “this Government is not fit to be re-elected and you should vote for someone else”? Sorta like the NZ Herald did with the Electoral Finance Bill back in 2007 (remember how much we loved that)?
Or are you really saying that John Key was so obviously a dirty lying liar the media should have said “Fuck it, we’re not even going to pretend to be objective any more, and we’re going to take everything in Hager’s book at face value and ignore any response from Key”? Because that’s somewhere I’m not willing to go.