Troll Hunting

This commentary was carried on the radionz.co.nz website on 3 May 2018 following the debunking by New Zealand Police of malicious online rumours relating to Clarke Gayford, partner of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

 

Police Commissioner Mike Bush gave a commendable performance as Big Billy Goat Gruff today. He head-butted a troll and knocked it off the bridge. Continue reading “Troll Hunting” →

No such thing as free speech

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” →

My last class

Last week I finished teaching my last course at the University of Auckland. It was a Summer School paper titled “Journalism in Practice” in which the theories of journalism and media were contrasted with the realities of producing journalism. Eight prominent journalists and an eminent media lawyer gave lectures in the course. What follows is my sign-off to the class…. Continue reading “My last class” →