Published in The New Zealand Herald 30 April 2018

There’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing too.

There is nothing original about that sentence. It was the title of an essay by an American legal scholar named Stanley Fish. In it he argued that speech cannot be free because it is never free of consequences and responsibilities.

He is right. For several decades, as a journalist and editor on this newspaper and later as an academic, I have championed free expression. At no stage, however, was I under any illusion that speech was entirely free of consequence and responsibility. I knew that it had limits. Continue reading “No such thing as free speech” →

A paper in MediaNZ on realistic expectations for change in New Zealand news media by the beginning of the next decade:

Vol 17, No 1 (2017) Agenda 2020 Imagining the Future of New Zealand Media

The well-established Mirror and the depression-era launch of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly

 

A frisson of fear must have passed through the owners of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in the first week of December 1932. Continue reading “Poor cousin who came to stay” →

This commentary appeared in the New Zealand Herald on 1 June 2017

The question is not whether New Zealand will be confronted by fake news in September’s general election but what form it will take.

The recent track record of falsehood is too seductive for it to be ignored here. Brexit, the U.S. and French presidential elections (and no doubt the forthcoming German federal election campaign that coincides with our own) shows fake news has a ready audience among those who would like it to be true. Continue reading “Fake News and the 2017 General Election” →