This feature, and an accompanying story on Taiwan’s experience of disinformation, appeared in the 16-22 February 2019 issue of the New Zealand Listener:

The link:

 

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” →