Not Unexpected

Picking Through a Deceased Estate

The sanctimony and self-righteousness of the media never fail to surprise.  The media like to trumpet their standing as the Fourth Estate–a vital component in civil society to keep government and the powers honest.  What they often completely fail to comprehend is that standing as the Fourth Estate requires their behaving responsibly.

Sadly, the media is generally held in contempt by the wider population.  Their behaviour so often makes them complicit in unethical behaviour.  We have seen this on display in Murdoch’s News of the World in the UK.  In order to get “stories” phones were hacked.  Private conversations of important or newsworthy people were accessed.  Salacious and sensational headlines followed.  Revenue went up.  Media people have now gone to prison for this illegal behaviour.

The media in New Zealand have tut tutted.  How unprofessional.  How unethical.  How tawdry.  Now it appears that all of the head-shaking was little more than holier-than-thou, self-righteous, malodorous sanctimony.
  An unknown political or commercial opponent of blogger, Cameron Slater–owner and operator of the blog, Whaleoil–hacked not just the blog but an exhaustive archive of Slater’s e-mails.  There is no secret or doubt about this.  The anonymous hacker has publicly trumpeted it.

He has delivered his “trove” of stolen goods to a hackster-author, whose muck-racking conspiracy theories are well known.  Hager, our own equivalent of a one-member John Birch Society, has used the stolen property to attempt to bring down the right-of-centre government.  It is not yet apparent whether he has succeeded.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the hacker has set up an arrangement with the New Zealand Herald and has successively been dumping the stolen goods on the Herald‘s doorstep, which the Herald has dutifully printed.  The Herald thinks it is doing us all a public service, in precisely the same way the News of the World saw its hacking and eavesdropping and profiting from illegal phone hacking as being a “public service”.  Everyone wanted to know about what the Royal Family, and Princes Harry and Wills, and Kate were up to. Public interest required such illegal behaviour.  And being public figures, their claim to privacy was null-and-void–don’t you know.  The NZ Herald has entered the same unethical, illegal, and salacious world in its reception and use of stolen property.  The bottom line is that this once-proud newspaper has become a tawdry rag, profiting from a crime.  In the Herald‘s case, the Fourth Estate has come to resemble a deceased estate.

At the same time, and out of the other side of its mouth, the nauseatingly sanctimonious paper has tut-tutted about the decline in standards of political conduct in this country.  But because it is, or was, part of the Fourth Estate, it is complicit in that very decline.  It has become a willing participant in the tawdriness of politics and government it is self-righteously declaiming. It has no shame.

There is an apt phrase for that level of defalcation. Gross hypocrisy. 

Slater has warned the media, reporters, and the NZ Herald that he now considers all private correspondence and e-mails involving media people as being open season for disclosure.  He has sent thinly veiled warnings to all and sundry.  And that’s the problem in a nutshell.  The race to the bottom of the sewer has now started.  The NZ Herald ought to have known better.  It had a public duty and responsibility to do better.  It’s a sad day–and even more sadly, not unexpected.   

A Liberated Fourth Estate

Breaking Down the Established Commentariat

Back in the day, political pamphlets were a big deal.  One only has to think of the Federalist Papers to evoke a reminder of how significant the happy convergence of the printing press with short, sharp, pithy political argumentation became.  One could go further back and argue that the German reformation owed a great deal to a controversial pamphleteer, one Martin Luther, whose mass produced pamphlets did much to carry the Reformation into villages, hamlets, and city back alleys, thereby capturing the popular imagination.

It seems that blogs have become a modern form of pamphleteering–now an influential media in their own right.  Some newspapers have presciently caught the wave and surfed it well.

Blogs changed everything – if not in the way we expected

Daniel Hannan  
The Telegraph 
March 7, 2014

It’s a bit of a shock to realise that this blog has now been going for seven years. In the dog-year world of blogging, that makes it almost geriatric. A few are more venerable yet, standing like oaks among the crocuses: Guido, Cranmer, ConHome. But this is a frantic and ephemeral business, and it’s an unusual blog that lasts more than twelve months.

Back in the pioneering days, blogs were seen as a challenge to the established media. And, in one sense, they were. When Guido scalped his first minister, Peter Hain, in 2008, something changed, though the newspapers were slow to notice. When, the following year, he aimed his tomahawk at Derek Draper and Damien McBride, old-style pundits were still laboriously explaining to their readers what these blog thinggies were. By the time Tim Yeo became Guido’s latest victim, no one needed to ask any more.

One of the perverse characteristics of the incumbent establishment media (whether electronic or print) has been its conspiracy of silence. The establishment media, representing a vast semi-official Commentariat elite, had developed an “establishment view” of what constituted news and what did not.  It had become an organ of Groupthink, if not Newspeak.

When a dozen dead tree newspapers determined the agenda, the media’s chief power lay in not reporting a story – not through conspiracy, but from shared assumptions about what constituted news. Take the leak of the “hide the decline” emails from climatologists at the University of East Anglia in late 2009. At first, the astonishing trove was reported only by bloggers. It wasn’t that environment correspondents were meeting behind drawn blinds and vowing to repress the discovery; it was that, being uncomplicated believers in the AGW orthodoxy, they couldn’t see why the emails were a story. Only when repeatedly needled by online commentators were they were eventually forced to report perhaps the biggest event in its field of the century.

The key moment came when the story was picked up by James Delingpole, whose post attracted 1.6 million hits. Tellingly, that post appeared here, on Telegraph Blogs. Blogs were now part of the established media. 

We have entered the age of the citizen journalist.  Well, actually, we have seen instances of the same thing in the past–think again of the Federalist Papers and Luther’s pamphlets.  But, said the Commentariat, this would open the door to hucksters, rabble rousers, demagogues, and liars.  Irresponsibility, uncurbed by establishment guilds, would burst forth to the detriment of all. 

But freedom has its own in-built corrective.  It’s called competition.  Propaganda in fact flourishes where liberty of expression is curtailed and controlled.

. . . . The separate categorisation of columnists, reporters, bloggers and interested readers is becoming meaningless. Every citizen is now a potential journalist. News and opinion are a conversation. We still hear occasional complaints from Leftie pundits that online media “lack quality control”. In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before. Mistakes are ruthlessly exposed and, because of the sheer number of outlets, a plausible new theory can spread with previously unimagined speed.

Blogs have improved veracity, quality and diversity. They have not led to the segregation by opinion that many predicted: Leftists and Rightists argue online in a way that never happened when people took just one newspaper. It’s true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history.

Instead of fomenting and facilitating wacko conspiracy theories, for example, the new pamphleteers have been subjecting such inanities to more critical scrutiny than ever before.  Blogging has facilitated bringing opinions and arguments out into public view along with a consequent critical scrutiny.  Freedom of expression along with media which enable public dissemination will produce better, more accurate, and more informed public discourse over time.  As in any free market, the competition of ideas has increased their quality over time.  The crucible of criticism is a refining fire.

By contrast, unchallenged establishment views deteriorate to become progressively dumb, parroted by pavlovian minds.  “Everybody agrees. . . ” rapidly becomes elevated to the faux-status of a winning argument. 

Something Rotten in Denmark

The Boon of a Disinterested Free Press

A free, active, disinterested press has sometimes been called the Fourth Estate of government.  When it does its job properly the benefits of its constraint upon abuse of power are significant.  The corollary is also true: when the press abuses its position and tolerates conflicts between its own, commercial interests and the impartial truth it can do great damage to the body politic.  Regrettably, we have seen far too much of the latter: a self-interested Press sensationalising stories to generate headlines, gain attention, and increase subscriptions.  When this happens, truth is the first casualty.  Civic freedom is the next. 

Here is a prima facie example of the salutary power of the Fourth Estate–a free press–properly used.
   It concerns a Government department which appears to have misled its minister and the public.  The press report is from Phil Kitchin of Stuff:

A recording of a critical meeting between senior ACC managers and the whistleblower who exposed a massive privacy breach reveals the corporation misled its minister and the public. The corporation has alleged that client Bronwyn Pullar threatened at the meeting to go to the media unless she was given a guaranteed two-year benefit. It also alleged she said that she would withhold details of the breach involving private details of 6500 other clients – including sexual abuse victims – if her demands were not met.

Once details of the privacy breach were revealed by The Dominion Post, the ACC referred its extortion allegations against Ms Pullar to police. However, a recording of a key meeting in December between Ms Pullar, her support person Michelle Boag – a senior National Party figure – and two ACC managers is at odds with the corporation’s claims that were included in a report ordered by ACC Minister Judith Collins.

The ACC was given a transcript of the meeting more than three weeks ago, but has refused to correct its report. . . .

The Dominion Post has heard the recording and had obtained an accurate transcript of it. It contradicts several key elements in the ACC report.

The transcript shows:

Neither Ms Pullar nor Ms Boag threatened to go to the media or withhold the data if Ms Pullar was not given a guaranteed two years’ compensation. ACC’s statement that it was not given specific details of the breach is misleading. ACC was told the data was “highly sensitive information”, including names and details of 6500 claimants.

ACC was not told the data was sent by one of the managers. Ms Boag said an ACC staff member sent it.  After the meeting, ACC said it tried to find the breach by checking all emails from the managers to Ms Pullar but found nothing. After senior ACC staff, including chief executive Ralph Stewart, were given the opportunity to hear the recording, the corporation declined to withdraw its complaint to police.

Good work.  We now wait to see what actions will be taken by the Minister against her department staff as  the alleged defalcations and distortions and untruths continue to be proven up or otherwise.  

This is why we need a free press, able to lay aside its commercial conflicts of interest. 

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog.

>Letter From America

>Obama’s Third World Press Rant

Wesley Pruden

Throwing rotten eggs at “them lyin’ newspapers” has always been great sport in America, and sometimes even effective politics. But it has to be done with wit and humor, which may be above Barack Obama’s pay grade.

Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government.

Harry Truman threatened to demolish the manhood of a newspaper music critic who criticized his daughter’s singing. Richard Nixon compiled an enemies list, prominently including newspapermen. I made Bill Clinton’s enemies list and dined out on it for weeks. George W. Bush confessed, no doubt accurately, that he never read newspapers.

The president’s media environment is “target rich,” but as any bombardier could tell you, there’s more to scoring a bull’s-eye than opening the bomb-bay doors. In a fit of pique, John F. Kennedy canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald-Tribune (may it R.I.P.) because he thought it relished stories about Democratic zits and covered up Republican pimples. The ban didn’t last; the White House soon subscribed again, and JFK poked a little fun at his over-the-top pique.

Politicians who actually get their revenge on press tormentors do so with rapier thrusts of whimsy and clever insult. An early 20th-century governor and U.S. senator from Arkansas (from whom Mr. Clinton took pointers) delighted in sharp thrust-and-parry with the Arkansas Gazette (may it R.I.P.), the state’s leading newspaper.

“My wife and I have a little boy, and we have great ambitions for him,” he would tell audiences gathered on courthouse lawns at the foot of the monument to the Confederate soldier. “If it turns out that he’s as intelligent as we think he is, we hope to make a Baptist preacher of him. If he has just average intelligence, that’s all right, we’ll send him to law school. But if it turns out he’s the village idiot, we’ll just send him down to Little Rock to edit the morning newspaper.”

Good fun. But something more sinister is afoot in Mr. Obama’s carefully plotted campaign to destroy his perceived enemies in the press, television and even business. Rush Limbaugh is only the face of the opposition, and the ultimate target of the White House scheme is to marginalize and destroy the Republican Party first, and then everyone else unwilling to get in the lockstep parade toward the hazy dream of Utopia.

Mr. Obama and his White House can’t seem to get their brains around the fact that the election of ’08 is over, and he won. A candidate feeds on red meat, but a president is the president of everyone, and must set a different table. Mr. Obama campaigned with promises of a post-racial, post-partisan, post-rancor administration, and millions of Americans responded with enthusiasm. The candidate who said he took inspiration from Abraham Lincoln of Illinois now acts as if he takes inspiration from the distinguished statesmen of the Third World, where press opposition to the leader is usually a bloody no-no.

The remarkable White House attempt to define which news organization is legitimate and which is not began in August, as Mr. Obama’s poll numbers began a dramatic slide. Suddenly the man who yearns to be the permanent president of the Student Body, loved by all and adored by the co-eds and their mamas, is rendered human after all. Anita Dunn, the director of White House communications, says that when the administration began planning for autumn (with important gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia), the president “needed to be more aggressive in defining what the choices are, and in protecting and pushing forward our agenda.”

Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Fox News are big enough to take care of themselves, but the implications of what the Obamanauts are trying to do are scary, indeed. Brisk and even brutal opposition is something every president must endure; it’s a pity that Mr. Obama skipped school the day the class studied American history. The candidate insists that the critics who scoff that he isn’t really the messiah, but another Chicago politician, are just being cynical. This week Ms. Dunn insisted that the Obama image is intact. “He’s who he has always been.” So we are learning, to widespread sorrow.

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. This article was first published in the Times, here.

>The Malfeasance of an Estate of Government

>The Media is in Contempt of the Highest Court

In our day there is an almost universal disrespect for the media. This is true not just in a competitive medium such as the the blogosphere, but it is found everywhere.

Our population is so small, and our nation so intimate that almost everyone has had personal experience of an event which was subsequently reported or recorded in the media. When reading the media account most people realise that what had been reported was very different from their experience of the event. People express their views to their friends, and the account spreads (usually, we are told, to a circle of around thirty people).

Consequently, there is a general profound distrust—a deep and pervasive cognitive dissonance with respect to the media in this country. The respect in which the media is held is around about the same level as politicians: they are regarded as being unscrupulous, untrustworthy, self-serving, and manipulative.

But is this prevailing pejorative opinion fair? Unfortunately, we believe it is.

The term “fourth estate” was first used by Thomas Carlyle to refer to the press—in our modern world, mutatis mutandis, the media (both print and electronic). The reference in its turn goes back to the time of the French Revolution, where the old regime was seen to consist of three estates: the nobility, the church, and the commoners. These three estates were the groups that made up the government: each had a place, a part, and a role in governing the nation responsibly.

When Carlyle referred to the media as the fourth estate, he was overtly asserting that the media have a critical and important part to play in government—which, of course, carried with it enormous responsibility, and called for significant integrity. Carlyle was arguing that the media was a part of the government, although a separate and independent power (in the same way that the judiciary is independent of parliament). Traditionally, in modern democracies, the press has been regarded as performing the vital function of checking and balancing the other estates of government, of holding them to account before the people—who in a democracy are supposed to be the ultimate rulers and magistrates–the final and highest court of the land.

Just as a jury or a judge cannot make safe and just decisions unless the “whole truth” is placed before them, so the people cannot make the right decisions unless the whole truth on issues in the body politic is available. The media are supposed to be the vital estate of government which works to place the “whole truth” before the court of the public. To the extent that the media malfunction, a general malaise afflicts the body politic.

The theory of democratic government requires some some stretching and demanding presumptions. One of them is that governors will not conspire against the governed, using their power to deceive and manipulate the people. Yet Lord Lytton tells us that power tends to corrupt, so a realistic working presumption is that over time democratic leaders will become corrupt, and will use their influence destructively—for selfish ends, and not for the good of the people or the nation.

It is precisely at this point that the media has a decisive democratic role to play—the role of the fourth estate. It has a duty to hold the government of the day to account, by truthfully exposing what is really going on–good or bad. Unfortunately, original sin does not stop with politicians, it also has infected the media. The more powerful and influential media become, the more likely they are to become corrupted themselves, giving over their public service responsibilities to self-serving promotion of their own businesses.

They say that in war, truth is the first casualty. We would add that in modern democratic politics, truth likewise becomes the first casualty–unless the media perform their true fourth estate function. Unfortunately the media have become complicit in the assault upon truth: the fourth estate has also become corrupted. The media have lost the honour in which they should be held as an estate of government: they have prostituted themselves to the extent that many now hold the media in open contempt.

Can it be recovered? Unlikely. Not in the short term. Once precious unwritten constitutional conventions are trashed, the possibility of recovery becomes remote and exceedingly.

However, as the City of Jerusalem is built and becomes more and more influential, the demand and appetite for change and reformation will increase. We would like to see the following occur:

1. A demand for far more rigorous disclosures of interest. Media are not neutral. They are inevitably biased and prejudiced in their operations and foundations. The infantile world-view of secular materialistic humanism claims that totally objective, detached, “scientific” analysis is alone truthful and authoritative. Consequently, in the modern world, everyone wants to present themselves as being totally objective, detached, neutral. If they don’t, they will be pilloried as lacking integrity, credibility and verity.

However, this notion is a childish fantasy. The reverse is actually the case. Neutral, unbiased objectivity is a gigantic myth. To the extent society proceeds as if the fantasy were true, widespread miasma and confusion results. Truth dies.

Fortunately post-modernism has helpfully re-asserted what the Scriptures have always taught: that neutrality is impossible, that cant is inescapable, and that context is highly influential. (To this extent post-modernism is a far more mature philosophical development than puerile pseudo-scientific objectivism.) So, the media must give over the fantasy of absolute objectivity and neutrality. They need to identify and disclose their pre-commitments, their respective biases, and their respective prejudices. (Ironically, and thankfully, when this happens, actual objectivity increases exponentially. When people are epistemologically self-conscious, their reasoning becomes more self-critical and rigorous.)

Media companies need to disclose their ownership and any conflicts that arise out of their ownership with issues of the day. Such constant disclosure would likely be the death of state-owned media—which in our view represents an enormous conflict of interest, and ought not to be allowed continue. Responsible government media is an oxymoron, if one is thinking of the fourth estate. It is doubtful that Radio New Zealand or TVNZ could survive if they were forced to disclose constantly that they were owned and funded by, and responsible to, government ministers. The conflict made overt would strip away any remaining vestige of credibility, likely causing them to implode.

Incidentally, we find the attitude of the left wing towards media ownership to be spectacularly naive. The left wing generally takes the marxist view that private property is corrupting of morality and is exploitative. Therefore, public ownership of media is essential to provide a bulwark against capitalist media companies. For the left, corruption only exists in realms of private capital and ownership. Miraculously, corruption ceases when ownership becomes public or governmental.

Our view is that original sin is not selective: its pernicious influence is everywhere. State owned media outlets are potentially as corrupt as private owned media–probably more so. Given that potential corruption is endemic, the way forward is to require comprehensive disclosure that any corruption can be quickly identified by the public.

Media companies also need to disclose pre-commitments or positions inevitably held toward politicians, governments, policies, and public issues. For example, we have been poorly served in recent years by the overwhelming sensationalist media bias in an alarmist (self-serving) promotion of the theory of global warming. A simple disclosure of the “position” of editorial managements on the issue at the end of each story would go a long way towards cleaning such disservices up. (“Disclosure: editorial management believes that anthropogenic global warming is an established scientific fact. This is likely to affect our reporting on this issue.”) The positive impact upon reporting and editorial rigour would be both salutary and immediate.

One way to deal with this would be a legislatively mandated disclosure regime. Since the media is (or ought to be) a functioning estate of government within a sustainable and healthy democracy, that privileged position must be seen to carry fiduciary responsibilities. If a media company wishes to take up its proper fourth estate duties, mandatory disclosures should be required (in the same way that mandatory disclosures of conflicts of interest are required of directors of companies, or parliamentarians, or ministers of the crown.)

If a media company is unwilling to be classified as an organ of the fourth estate, and submit to the disclosure regime, that too ought to be disclosed: it is likely quickly to be regarded as a sensationalist rag, and not to be taken seriously. It would also likely have implications for admission to the parliamentary press gallery, and other prime news sources.

2. A requirement that media report, not seek to make themselves part of the main event. Over the years we have seen more and more public relations activity on the part of media—shameless self-promotion. “We are the biggest. We are the brightest. We got this exclusive. Our coverage of this event is the best.” Once a particular media company gets on that slippery slope it has lost its integrity; reporting has become a function subordinate to commercial self-promotion. Commercial self-interest is a leading conflict of interest in all modern media, and must be dealt with appropriately.

The attitude towards self-promotion should be a mandatory requirement of disclosure. Formal eschewing of self promotion ought to be part of the standard for being admitted to the fourth estate of government.

We believe there will always be media companies where laziness is the order of the day; where sensation is believed to be more commercially powerful than the truth; where revenue and sales are the ultimate corporate value; and where “being first” is regarded as more valuable than being ethical, truthful, or fair. They are welcome to it. Their lack of transparency will, in fact, be a loud disclosure in and of itself.

A far higher mandatory disclosure regime for the genuine organs of the fourth estate of government will go a long way toward dealing with such second-rate, irresponsible, unscrupulousness. The formal recognition in law of the fourth estate of government, and the consequent creation of mandatory standards of disclosure for fourth estate companies would be a significant step forward.

Where the sun shines, germs die.

>The Pseudo Objectivity of the News Media

>The Vulpine Dress of the No Spin Zone

In recent days there has been a thread over at Poneke’s Weblog on the purported objectivity of journalists and media. (q.v. “Should the News Media Endorse Political Parties”, May 11th, 2008) The initial question up for discussion was whether newspapers in New Zealand ought to endorse political parties or candidates as is done in other countries.

The case was made that, in fact, they ought not to do so. Poneke argued: “In New Zealand, as in other countries with an ‘objective journalism’ tradition such as the United States and Australia, the news pages have traditionally reported the news as factually as possible and without the newspaper’s or the reporter’s political opinions being in the story. The leader and op-ed pages have been the preserve of comment and any calls to support some issue or cause or party or another.”

He went on to state that. “Personally, I don’t believe a working news reporter should express party political views as part of their job. I never did, and never would, not even in this, my personal blog. I genuinely do not have party political views, and that comes from years of working as a journalist. Many journalists, I believe, are similar. Most New Zealand journalists see their job as reporting the news, not campaigning for a party or an ideology or a cause.

“I think it is pretentiously elitist of a journalist to think their view is so important that they would tell readers or audiences how to vote.”

He concludes: “Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that you should expect to find news, not opinion, on the news pages of a major daily newspaper. ”

Forgive us for reacting with a healthy dose of amused cynicism.

“Objective” or “just the facts” journalism that leaves it up to readers to decide is a farce. It always has been. It is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. How Poneke can write as he does with a straight face is almost beyond belief. The cognitive dissonance is extreme. Those who know that his blog is worth reading will also know that he regularly uses it as an opportunity to air his opinions on all kinds of political issues—corporal discipline of children, for one.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this—but please, let’s have some integrity about it.

How many of the journalists gravely endorsing Poneke’s post would be the first to “tut tut” at (Fox) Bill O’Reilly’s claim that when you listen to his programme you are entering the “No spin zone”. Everyone knows that there is spin at every turn in the “No spin zone”–and it will always be the case. Every news media, and every journalist, is no different. At best (and it is rare that we see examples of the best) we are only talking about relative objectivity–which, of course, means that every journalist and every news media is more or less subjective and biased.

Therefore the media and its journalists would do us all a great service is they would stop trying to maintain a patina of false professional pride and tell the truth. It will do wonders for the soul.

Every thinking person knows that objectivity in media is a farce. Let’s just quickly count some of the main ways that the medium itself provides the message, to borrow from McLuhan:

1. Space/time is limited, so the “facts” become a highly selected menu of the truth–which requires selection, ranking, discarding. Bias and pre-commitments intrude from the outset and through the whole process.

2. Placement/prominence. This requires ranking stories according to their perceived level of importance, which in turn draws upon one or more value systems.

3. Revenue and profitability. The need to make a buck is paramount–and rightly so. Don’t tell us, therefore, that news media do anything else than try to garner readers/listeners. In order to do that the medium has to have a view of who the readers are and what they want to read/hear. Bias, bias, and more bias. Brute objectivity in such a world is completely impossible. Why not be honest about it?

4. Career dynamics. Reporters and news media employees are as bound to their employers as anyone else. In order to get ahead they have to deliver what employers want and require. Don’t even suggest for a nano-second that this does not bring untrammelled bias into everything news reporters, sub-editors and editors do. Not to be upfront about such things is simply unbecoming–and somewhat embarrassing.

What’s the solution? Journalists and news media need to do what everyone else is required to do in the real world–engage in disclosure, disclosure, and more disclosure. It ought to be mandatory in every news media that regular disclosures are given of ownership, how the media makes its money, what its beliefs are about what its audience wants, what the world-view of the particular institution is, etc. Such disclosures ought to be audited regularly to ensure they meet a defined code of standards.

Imagine, for example, the integrity that would come into the process if Radio New Zealand and TVNZ had to disclose regularly to their audiences that they were owned by the government of New Zealand and were finally accountable to the Minister of Broadcasting. Having to make such disclosures would go a long way to helping the respective organisations prove their objectivity and independence as they covered stories.

Moreover, each news story should declare any conflicts of interest of any (named) journalist briefly at the end of each piece. For example, if the journalist happens to believe that privatisation of state assets is wrong, and he/she is writing a story on the State’s re-purchase of trains, he/she ought to be required to declare their belief at the foot of the story. Failure to declare ought to result in formal notification (and publication) of a breach of ethics.

Every journalist and every sub-editor should be required to draw up a Personal Disclosure Statement, covering all the major issues or themes their employer has determined the business will run with. That statement should be made available to readers or listeners. This sort of thing is done in financial journalism all the time. It is well past time that the rest of the profession caught up.

In the light of this, we have no problem whatsoever in a paper endorsing a political party or candidates–provided the paper declares overtly the basis of its endorsement and continues to publish its commitment and bias in this regard. It should also be required to give a health warning that its pre-commitments are likely to influence its selection and presentation of all news.

These are not hard concepts. Fiduciary obligations to one’s clients is a well-established, widely practised, and a universally required duty in common law. And the clients of the news media are its readers.

In fact, it would be a great deal better than our current Alice in Wonderland world where the media and journalists gravely intone noble ideals of objectivity, which everyone knows are completely untrue. It’s almost as bad as the kind of parody of the truth which plays out in regimes where official propaganda is the received truth. Everyone intones the official line, but no-one really believes it.

Poneke says that he regards it as “pretentiously elitist of a journalist to think their view is so important that they would tell readers or audiences how to vote.” We demur. The real pretentiously elitist position is for journalists to make out that they don’t have opinions or bias which reflects how they look at and assess the world, which in turn colours and shapes the way they massage the “facts”. To believe one is beyond or above bias is truly pretentious. On the other hand, to declare and disclose the inevitable bias that every human being has helps keeps it under scrutiny and check.

It is only when bias and pre-commitment is disclosed that truly objective discourse can occur, since bent and bias on the part of every human being is inescapable and inevitable. If everyone else in the real world has fiduciary requirement to disclose conflicts of interest, why should the media be exempt?

If the news media would be rightly indignant at a real-estate agent who did not declare a conflict of interest in a house sale, why should the media itself be excused such basic ethical behaviour when it comes to its own conflicts. If the real-estate agent were to claim some sort of professional objectivity which meant that he really did tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the client, despite not disclosing his conflicts, he would be laughed out of court. But why, then, a double standard for the media?

We suggest that this intrinsic duplicity, represented in all media in New Zealand, is one of the key reasons why the media is held in such low esteem almost everywhere.

However, no doubt media professionals would reply that disclosure of conflicts of interest when it comes to monetary gain or loss is in a different category from bias regarding news or concepts and ideas. Not so. It is because of the immensely influential position of the media, and its responsibilities as the Fourth Estate, that demand adequate disclosures. It is precisely because the media can abuse its privileges and position and consequently cause great harm to a democracy (particularly one as small as ours) that a higher standard of care is required. The media is capable of doing great damage, as well as much salutary good. It is too important to be allowed to escape the obligation to disclose.

We would expect that if such a comprehensive disclosure regime were to come into play, the professionalism and relative objectivity of reporters, newspapers, and other media would rise enormously. We would also predict that respect for the media would increase commensurately.

In fact, we predict that were any media business to enter such a regime of self-disclosure voluntarily it would prove so powerful, and resonate with such integrity, that within six months it would have to be emulated by its competitors. Otherwise their naked silence would beg all sorts of questions about their respective integrity and professional standards.

>The S-Files

>S-Award given to Poneke for exemplary Fourth Estate work exposing a supine BBC reporter.

Contra Celsum has given an S-Award to Poneke, to a professional Wellington based reporter who has exposed the standover tactics used by environmental activists against supine reporters who dare to report anything contrary to the official “truth”.

Citation:

Contra Celsum is delighted to give an S-Award to Poneke, professional Wellington based reporter and publisher of Poneke’s Weblog. Poneke has exposed:

1. The level of activist organisation amongst environmental groups to ensure that only stories supporting the official state propaganda with respect to climate change appear in main stream media outlets

2. The intimidation and standover tactics employed by an environmental activist to “force” a BBC reporter to capitulate and change a story.

3. The barrage of hostile traffic received in his own weblog attacking his coverage of the story and the expose.

4. The e-mail trail that exposes the environmentalist religious mania coursing through the veins of the body politic.

BBC journalist Roger Harrabin first published a story last week based on a statement from the General Secretary of the World Meterological Organisation, who confirmed that according to measurement and observation, global warming has not taken place for the past ten years. This statement is consistent with an increasing number of evidences based on actual measurements showing that global warming appears to have peaked, with the highest point being reached in 1998.

Later, Roger Harrabin changed the story. Poneke queried Harrabin as to whether he had been pressured to change. He denied any pressure. Then, subsequently an e-mail interchange between Harrabin and a UK environmental activist came to light in which Harrabin was challenged, but twice refused to change the story.

The e-mail interchange, subsequently published by the activist, demonstrates conclusively that in fact Harrabin was pressured, and that he did change his story as a result of that pressure. Harrabin lied to Poneke—but we can understand why. The true account shows him up to be a coward and a disgrace to his profession.

The activist, meanwhile, has celebrated it as a victory in the war. Despite in the earlier e-mail exchanges Harrabin refusing to change his story twice, when the activist began threatening to undermine his career along the lines of “we know how to deal with little creeps like you” Harrabin changed the story significantly. The new version leads readers away from the idea that global warming is not happening.

In one chilling note, the activist argues that we are dealing with an “emerging truth” with respect to Global Warming, and that gainsayers are stopping that truth emerging, and so must be silenced. The reporter apparently had a higher duty to mankind to ensure that the views of the gainsayers were not dignified by being given the light of day. For “emerging truth” read “selective suppression of the facts so that only one ‘truth’ emerges.” But he who trafficks in half truths is a liar.

You can read about the whole tawdry affair, together with corroborating sources, on Poneke’s Weblog.

Large parts of the Fourth Estate are a shame to a vitally imporant profession. No doubt Harrabin’s career is now finished or at least deeply compromised—as it should be. But our own local reporter, Poneke, demonstrates that there are exemplary instances of the Fourth Estate continuing to do their jobs, and do it with professional integrity.

Poneke: S-Award, Class I for actions in the course of duty that are Smart, Sound, and Salutary.