Category: mediawatch

Coverage of Gaza has discussed the slide into violence since the ceasefire ended. Why is no-one asking why the ceasefire was allowed to lapse? Could Hamas’ decision to let the ceasefire end be because the citizens of Gaza were still living under a cruel blockade, with no signs of political progress in sight?
What does it even mean to be neutral in this conflict, to call for both sides to end the violence? Which decisions by which people would make this happen in Israel and in Gaza? What would be the relative political costs for these decisionmakers? Is there truly equivalence in this call for neutrality?
Does Hamas truly exercise military-style authority over all the rocket-firers in Gaza? What are the lines of control in the organisation? To what extent can either diplomacy with or attacks on Hamas affect the number of rockets fired into Israel? Clearly there is some relationship – but how close is it?
Coverage of Gaza, and the Israeli state, talks enthusiastically about Hamas. But what does that even mean? Is it the leaders of Hamas? The military leadership? The military wing? Everyone in a Hamas military uniform? Everyone who voted for Hamas? Everyone in Gaza?
Further to the above, a fundamental rationale for the Israeli offensive is that Hamas wants to exterminate Israel, to drive it into the sea, and is not rational in its desire for this goal. This claim is extremely common in the popular discourse, particularly in letters to the editor and comments to online news stories. If it is true, then it ultimately justifies any atrocity against Hamas. Why is this extremely common thread of argument absent from official comment, reporting and analysis? What does it mean to say that Hamas wants to exterminate Israel? If this is the rationale behind much international support for Israel, surely it is urgent that this claim is tested rather than left to stand unexamined?

I posted last year about the so-called “anti-smacking bill” that removed the defence of reasonable force for those accused of assaulting their children. It passed, but proved to be a subject of great media controversy and is widely tipped as being the moment that the Labour government passed its use-by date.
The Children’s Commissioner (I love that we have a Children’s Commissioner) has just released a report, One year on: Public attitudes and New Zealand’s child discipline law (pdf, 190K). It found general support for the new law:

…participants were asked about their support for the new law… Those who were aware of the law change (n = 681) were asked to use a 0 to 10 scale (where 10 means ‘strongly support’) to rate how much they support or oppose the law change. A majority (43 percent) said they firmly support it (7-10 on the scale), scale), while 28 percent were firmly opposed (0-3 on the scale)

Of course, silly lobby group Family First were quick off the block with their response, which leads with this wackiness:

there is an 80% opposition to the anti-smacking law…

This is pretty much a straight denial of reality. FF asserts that this research is consistent with 80% opposition to the law change, when it plainly is not. On FF’s topsy-turvy planet, up is down, black is white, and 30% opposition is 80% opposition.
Of course, the NZPA exercised the proper function of journalists, and ran FF’s nonsense alongside the Children’s Commission study results for “balance”, because clearly Bob McCoskrie’s ravings are equivalent to an independent study published with full methodology and results.
In summary: go away Bob McCoskrie; and, thanks, media!

Furthermore – can we have new political commentators please?
It was hard to stomach the presence all over the TV of professional **** Matt Hootron, smugly spinning for his Nats inner circle masters. Hooting is just getting more and more visible, despite being neck-deep in the mire of the Brash National leadership, as revealed in Hager’s “The Hollow Men”. His newspaper column is pure PR for the Nats – how come no-one is talking about the inexplicable moment on Saturday when a victorious John Key, live on TV linkup talking to Hootsmon, told him he was pleased that Hooting could run the “Key wins” newspaper column he’d read earlier? Do all political columnists send drafts of their columns to party leaders the day before they run? I mean, WTF?
I’ve talked before about the huge bias in NZ political punditry towards conservative white men, and the surprisingly large representation among them of active National party operators such as Hootron. Our media continues to do us a grave disservice by perpetuating this state of affairs.
Which by no means is an endorsement of token lefty Chris Trotter. Incredibly, his post-election column in the Sunday Star-Times began “the NZ left has just suffered its own 9/11”. This epic lapse in taste and judgment leaves me feeling nauseous.
My recommendation – razor gangs for the commentariat. Chop out the grumpy old men and give the space to new blood, new faces, new perspectives, and particularly to political and perhaps even ethnic diversity.
And please put Matt Hootie back in his box.

Today the Dominion Post, our capital city’s newspaper of record, features as its below-the-fold front page article the demented rantings of the online reactionary lunatics. (Not so prominent online, thankfully. The comments themselves are here, and they’re just as stupid as you might expect.)
Anyone who reads comments anywhere online will know these people – emboldened by anonymity, aggrieved by a world too complex for them, they seize the opportunity to decry political correctness and to call for a return to barbarism. They’re everywhere, sadly, but they are also a vanishingly small percentage of the total population.
They have been mercilessly lampooned for a long time, even by such outlets as the Private Eye, which for all its many virtues is hardly up with the play in the internet age. There is an addictive website devoted to ridiculing the more idiotic bletherings of this disgruntled rump. And yet, there they are, reported as front page news. As if they matter; as if they’re worth listening to.
Another fine journalistic decision by the DomPost. You know, I bet if you google for five minutes you can find people online calling for Obama to be lynched – that can be your front page story tomorrow!

I spent last night thinking and reading about the “terror raids” of last October. First I attended a public meeting on the subject organised by the October 15 Solidarity crew, with Media Law Journal blogger Steven Price speaking on the contempt of court case surrounding the raids.
It was interesting stuff, and Steven (as ever, I’m advised) was a great and interesting speaker. The case he talked about, currently before the courts, concerns the publication of excerpts from a leaked affidavit by the Domionion Post and other related outlets.
It alleges that the editor of the Dominion Post (Tim Pankhurst) and colleagues prejudiced the right to a fair trial of the October 15 defendants. Price thinks the case is likely to succeed, and he outlined several reasons why:

• The newspaper article was highly sensational and ran at a time of high public interest
• The article cherry-picked the most sensational parts of the affidavit and did not represent its overall contents well.
• The affidavit was itself a cherry pick of evidence by the police, who meant to use it to convince a Judge to allow search warrants; so the article was a cherry-pick of a cherry-pick.
• The newspaper’s decision not to identify who was speaking in published quotations had the effect of encouraging the public to attribute the inflammatory statements to all the defendants, even if these views were not shared
• The affidavit was suppressed and would never make it to trial, so the evidence presented would never be encountered by jurors and could not be addressed and contested in a trial context

Steven thought last night that the likely outcome was a guilty verdict that would see Pankhurst & co. fined for their act of publication. That would be an outcome I wholeheartedly support. In this I part ways from the sage commenter on NZ affairs Russell Brown, who recently said “If Pankhurst and his employer are not successful in their defence, it would worry me if the court were to apply a very harsh penalty.” I personally think a very harsh penalty is entirely in order. It isn’t, to my mind, the fact of publication that makes Pankhurst et al. so deserving of punishment – it’s the manner of that publication. It would have been entirely possible to run the leaked affidavit in a less sensational and prejudicial way, tempering the most dramatic material with contextual information and generally trying to avoid the leap to conclusion. It would still have been a leak, it would still have been a suppression breach, and it would still have been a bad decision in my opinion, but there I think Russell’s point about the public’s “right to know” stands up. If that “right to know” is being fed highly biased and prejudicial material that is in turn sensationalised, then that is a distant bridge too far, and Pankhurst and the others involved should bear the consequences.
Steven continued, however, with something I hadn’t seen coming but that is obvious in hindsight: should the contempt case be found against the DomPost (as he thinks is likely to happen), he believes the Judges hearing the “terror raids” cases will be hard pressed to deny a request for a stay of prosecution. In other words, the DomPost’s eagerness to show that the arrestees were worthy of being arrested may directly result in them getting off the charges.
There was much more to the evening’s discussion, including a memorable aside about whether the Prime Minister’s words about “napalm blasts” meant she herself was in contempt… In any case, I read all the material I could track down on the case that evening, and to my mind the best account still comes from Nicky Hager (no surprises there). The two relevant quotes in this post are all the refresher you need.
Anyway. This story is developing, as they say.