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” →

News avoidance and lack of trust MUST send a message to media

More than two-thirds of New Zealanders actively avoid news coverage and more than one in ten do so regularly.

Findings released this morning by AUT’s JM&D journalism research centre make sober reading. Its latest Trust in News report shows Kiwis are avoiding the news because they think it is depressing and biased.

In its 2023 survey, which is based on an international study by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, JM&D asked for the first time about news avoidance and political influence. It used Horizon Research to conduct a nationwide online survey of 1120 adults in February.

Sixty nine per cent said they sometimes or often avoided the news. That is a statistic that sits well above the Reuters Institute’s multi-nation findings. That study found 54 per cent of Brazilians avoided news, followed by 46 per cent in the United Kingdom, 42 per cent in the United States and 41 per cent in Australia. At the bottom of the avoidance table were Japan (12 per cent) and Finland (20 per cent).

At the other end of spectrum, New Zealand’s international ranking of those ‘highly interested’ in news was equally alarming. Little more than a third expressed a strong focus, compared to more than two-thirds of Finland’s population. Continue reading “News avoidance and lack of trust MUST send a message to media” →

Super-injunctions make an unwelcome appearance

One could be excused for feeling utterly confused by a court story in the Weekend Herald the Saturday before last, but none of the blame lies with the publication or its reporter.

It was bewildering because it related to an attempt to apply a total ban on publication of any details of the case to which it related. And it extended to reporting that the injunction against publication had even been sought.

That, in my book, is called a super-injunction. That is also how the Herald described it.

A super-injunction is an interim injunction which not only restrains publication of information which concerns the applicant and is said to be confidential or private, but also stops publicising or informing others of the existence of the order and the proceedings. That is the ‘super’ element.

Such an injunction was sought after Herald senior journalist Kim Knight contacted “a New Zealand institution” in relation to a story she was pursuing. The Weekend Herald said the plaintiffs were “alleging it [the Herald] was about to publish potentially defamatory allegations” about an overseas individual.

The Herald did not reveal the name of that individual for two reasons: First because it was covered by the application for an injunction and, secondly, because the individual alleging potential defamation had not even been named in court documents made available to Herald publisher NZME. The paper says it does not know his name, calling him a “mystery man”. Continue reading “Super-injunctions make an unwelcome appearance” →

Media regulation: Time to shut up and get on with it.

A decade ago this month, the Law Commission produced a fit-for-purpose blueprint for  regulation of New Zealand news media by a single body. The News Media Standards Authority did not happen and today we are no closer to changing oversight that is well past its use-by date.

The commission’s recommendations were set out in a report titled The News Media Meets ‘New Media’: Rights, responsibilities, and regulation in the digital age, produced by a team led by eminent media law expert Professor John Burrows.

The foreword to the report stated it was about how the law should respond to a challenge that had been articulated by then Chief Government Scientist, Sir Peter Gluckman. In an address on the impact of technology on adolescents, Sir Peter had expressed the view that the internet and digital technology have brought about the most profound change in how humans communicate since our species first acquired speech.

One might have thought that his perspective, and the report’s call for fundamental changes to media regulation, would have been an urgent wake-up call. Continue reading “Media regulation: Time to shut up and get on with it.” →