Gavin Ellis is a media consultant, commentator and researcher. He holds a doctorate in political studies. A former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, he is the author of Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights (London, Palgrave) and Complacent Nation (Wellington, BWB Texts). His consultancy clients include media organisations and government ministries. His Tuesday Commentary on media matters appears weekly on his site www.whiteknightnews.com
Justice Minister Kiri Allan’s call for a review of name suppression in New Zealand courts should send shivers down the spines of the rich and famous. And rightly so.
She was asked on TVNZ1’s Q&A whether the current system appears to favour them, and she agreed.
“If you’re well-funded, well-resourced, then you can seek to have your name suppressed for a range of different reasons,” she said. “I don’t think that leads to just outcomes.”
Allan told the show’s stand-in host Jessica Mutch McKay that she has sought urgent advice on this particular area of the law and added: “I don’t think it’s just, I don’t think its fair, and I don’t think New Zealanders looking in on the system think the system is working adequately either.”
The disclosure that Stuff is to drastically reduce its regional newspaper local reporting staff came as a shock, but I fear that worse is to come for this sector of the media.
Our regional newspapers are following a path which, for counterparts in Australia, Britain and North America, has quite literally led to nowhere.
The pattern established here by both Stuff and NZME – staff cuts, shared content, reduced frequency, and closures – has a familiar ring to anyone in the regional media in other English-speaking countries.
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.
Should the restoration of Peter Ellis’ reputation from beyond the grave have publishers worried and defamation lawyers rubbing their hands in anticipation that a basic tenet of the law had been overturned by Tikanga Māori?
Well, not yet. As things stand, only living people can be defamed, and your reputation dies with you. However, could we be feeling the first winds of change?
Certainly, the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent Audrey Young believes the Supreme Court has opened Pandora’s box. In a highly critical commentary yesterday she accused the Supreme Court of “judicial activism with a capital A” and described the court’s use of tikanga as “audacious”.
She claims the court is rewriting the law on tikanga and pre-empting a Law Commission study, requested by the government, on the role of tikanga in common law (also known as case law or judicial precedent).
Peter Ellis, who was no relation, had his convictions for child molestation at Christchurch’s Civic Creche quashed by the Supreme Court last week. He had died in 2019.
In the 152-page judgement that overturned the case against him, there is no mention of tikanga or his reputation. The findings are limited to the conduct of the case against Ellis and the various appeals that followed his conviction. The judgement is based solely on established legal principles.
Young’s criticism related, in fact, to an earlier decision by the court to allow Ellis’ appeal to continue after his death, in part because a majority of the court accepted that Tikanga Māori should be woven into the fabric of our justice system. Tikanga includes an enduring place for mana that transcends death. Reputation may be seen as a simplified definition of mana. Continue reading “Peter Ellis Appeal: Does reputation extend beyond the grave?”→
