Category: Presentations

AN ADDRESS TO THE NELSON BRANCH OF THE NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 29 OCTOBER 2025

Misinformation and disinformation are often confused. So, to start, let’s be clear on what we are talking about. Misinformation is false or misleading information that has been created inadvertently and includes honest mistakes. Disinformation is false or misleading information deliberately spread to manipulate a person, social group, organisation – or, indeed, an entire country. It is sometimes called malinformation.

  We are not concerned here with honest mistakes or sloppy inaccuracies. We are talking about disinformation. There is another phrase to describe it: Weaponized lies.

This may be seen as a 21st century scourge, but disinformation goes back a very long way.

In fact, disinformation is as old as antiquity.

Julius Caesar was a fast and loose player with the truth, particularly in demonising the Gauls. His heir, Octavian, waged a concerted disinformation campaign against Mark Antony, characterizing him as a drunk and a womanizer who had been corrupted by the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. He didn’t have newspapers, so he used speeches, writings, graffiti and even meaningful symbols on coins. And if you think Nero fiddled while Rome burned, you are probably wrong. There are reports that he rushed back from his villa outside the city when he heard news of the fire. The fiddling stigma is what has endured.

That is because disinformation can be enduring. Continue reading →

Interview: The future of journalism

I recently did an interview with documentary maker Bryan Bruce for his Head 2 Head series.

Here is a link to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/head2head/id1761498531 

And the video version: https://bryanbruce.substack.com/p/episode-15-gavin-ellis

Raising the Bar: The Day the News Dies

“The Day the News Dies” was a presentation – given in my role as an honorary research fellow at Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures – at the Raising the Bar event organised by the University of Auckland on 27 August 2024. You can also listen to the talk here

There is a little book entitled The Piano Player in the Brothel by celebrated Spanish editor Juan Luis Cebrián. It takes its title from a popular saying: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist. She thinks I play piano in the whorehouse”.

It’s an association that goes back some way. The 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill – himself a sometime journalist – wrote: “Journalism is the vilest and most degrading of all trades because more affectation and hypocrisy, and more subservience to the baser feelings of others, are necessary for carrying it on than for any other trade from that of brothel-keeper upwards.” I’m not sure whether that is more an indictment of human beings than of journalists, but it’s journalism that sustains the reputational damage.

So, if it’s held in such low regard – apologies to any brothel-keepers present – why should we worry if it dies? I hope that by the end of this talk you will not only know the answer but be as worried by the prospect of its demise as I am. Continue reading “Raising the Bar: The Day the News Dies” →

Terrorism, the media, and an awful dilemma

While you read this, I will be enjoying my first holiday since Covid hit our shores. So I have cheated…just a little. In place of the Tuesday Commentary, here is a speech I gave last week to combined North Shore Rotary clubs.

No matter where you were, the horrendous attacks on innocent worshippers at two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 made the front page of newspapers and led television and radio bulletins.

Those acts and others like them have affected our journalism but, before I get into the detail of those events, I want to talk about motivation, and the awful dilemma that terrorism presents for journalists.

Horrifying though it may sound, the victims of acts of terrorism such as that carried out in Christchurch are no more than a means to an end. They are the currency used to pay for the world’s attention. Continue reading “Terrorism, the media, and an awful dilemma” →