Tag: Social media

Media employees’ right to voice personal opinions

The BBC’s suspension of Gary Lineker over a social media comment raises a question that is wider than the shambles it created: Do people in the media have a right to voice a personal opinion?

Last Tuesday Lineker, the BBC’s highest paid star and presenter of Match of the Day, posted a tweet about the UK Conservative government’s plan to stop refugees crossing the English Channel. He described it as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.”

By Friday an extraordinary meltdown had occurred, with the corporation announcing Lineker would “step back” from Match of the Day. In plain English, the director-general Tim Davie had suspended him because ‘a red line has been crossed’ on BBC neutrality. Several colleagues walked out in support of the former professional footballer. There was no Match of the Day last weekend and football coverage on the BBC was reduced to a pallid 20-minute substitute.

The Times reported Davie taking the moral high ground on Friday: “(as) editor in chief of the BBC, I think one of our founding principles is impartiality and that’s what I’m delivering on.” However, over the weekend, support within the corporation rank-and-file seemed to move toward Lineker. Davie, who had been in Washington, flew back to London for crisis meetings to head off what was rapidly becoming an internal revolt. Continue reading “Media employees’ right to voice personal opinions” →

News media face distrust by association

A new study suggests that the news media’s tanking levels of public trust may made worse merely by association with social media.

The study, released this month by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, has exposed gaps between trust in news via conventional delivery and the same thing consumed via social media.

It doesn’t matter whether people use social media or not: Levels of trust is lower if they simply associate news with the platforms.

The gap varies between platforms and between countries but the overall finding is that levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.

And our media is becoming more and more associated with social media. Continue reading “News media face distrust by association” →

A one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple person eater

New Zealand’s media must stop pandering to over-sensitivity about gender identification.

I am becoming annoyed by ongoing reports that “a person” has been the subject of this or that, with no indication that it is man, woman, boy or girl.

The only plausible reason for the nomenclature is that “person” avoids the possibility of giving offence to someone who may no longer identify with their sex at birth.

How likely is that?

I am not a statistician but if less than five percent of the population identify as LGBT+ (according to Statistics New Zealand estimates), that means there is at least a 95 per cent chance the ‘person’ in the story would not be offended by reference to their birth gender. Continue reading “A one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple person eater” →

Carefully chosen front page obscenity

On Saturday, the opening sentence of the lead story in the Dominion Post Weekend contained an obscenity referring to female genitals. Not an abbreviation, not an acronym, but the full word spelt out.

I was shocked. And that was exactly the reaction editor Anna Fifield hoped to achieve with her courageous decision to demonstrate the full impact that an avalanche of online abuse is having on New Zealand women.

If I was shocked, imagine how female MPs and councillors feel when they open their email inbox or social media accounts and are confronted by obscenities, personal abuse and threats. Continue reading “Carefully chosen front page obscenity” →