Media mendacity makes for mistrust

In the James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, Agent 007 battles the megalomaniacal media king, Elliot Carver, who is not content with reporting on the news and decides to manufacture it by committing terrorist acts in the hope of starting a war between China and the United States. It seems that the mainstream media, so desperate for ratings or readership in their fight for survival, is now following the Elliot Carver model. Sure, they are not yet sinking British warships in their attempts to make news, but they are committing serious criminal acts to boost their ratings and readership.

Two recent examples are the case of the Australian Channel Nine news team who were involved in the seizing of two children in Lebanon, and the New Zealand TV3 reporter, Heather du Plessis-Allan, who fraudulently purchased a rifle from a gun shop over the Internet.

In the Channel Nine case, the exact facts of the sordid affair are hard to determine but the children were with their father in Lebanon when the Australian mother, Sally Faulkner, decided to have the children snatched on a Beirut street. Channel Nine paid for four 'child recovery experts' from a UK organisation called Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) to grab the children. The operation was botched and the Channel Nine news crew along with the mother and the CARI team were arrested. Channel Nine has now paid a significant sum of compensation to the father to obtain the release of its new crew and the mother but has left the CARI team it employed to rot in the Beirut jail. The journalists even tweeted a photo of themselves drinking and grinning in an airport bar on the way home.

I don't know where the right or wrong is in the custody dispute between the parents in this case, but the actions of the Channel Nine news crew are contemptible on so many levels. They were foolish in the extreme, insulting to their viewers, and utter cowards in abandoning the men they had employed to carry out the operation.

In the New Zealand gun purchase case, Heather du Plessis-Allan set out to prove that anyone could buy a rifle online from a Christchurch gun shop without having a permit, and all she ended up proving is that you can't do that without committing fraud. She used a fictitious police ID number and signature to purchase the gun, which fooled an otherwise responsible gun shop owner to supply the firearm, and she and TV3 had the gall to present this as a failure of the firearms licensing system and misconduct on the part of the gun shop owner.

We all know the mainstream media have long since abandoned any pretence of neutrality and take sides in any controversial story they cover. They have become propagandists and political agitators for any cause they deem merits their support. In doing so they have utterly destroyed the public's trust in themselves, with a recent survey showing that only 9% of New Zealanders trust them.

The mainstream media have always claimed they deserve special status under the law. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects the freedom of the press and in most Common Law jurisdictions the press enjoys similar special rights. But the mainstream media risk losing these protections for everyone when they they consider they are completely above the law.

A Very Small Village

I woke up this morning to the news on Radio Live, a national radio news station here in New Zealand. Normally, an internet jazz station wakes me but this morning I wasn't in my own bed and had to make do with the station that was tuned on the clock radio. You see I make a point of avoiding the New Zealand mainstream news media and the early morning news report today reminded me why. 

There was the usual petty political bickering - we are in the midst of an election campaign after all - and an article about a fatal road accident somewhere down south, and a story about a kitten caught up a tree (or something similar - I forget the exact details), and then it was straight on to the sport.

You would never know, if you relied on the local New Zealand media, that the world was agog with stories of great achievements and great horrors. You wouldn't know there was a worsening Ebola epidemic in Africa or that the hideous thugs from the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had decapitated an American journalist the day before, or that the militarised police in Ferguson, Missouri thought the appropriate response to a protest march was to use Iraq War surplus tanks and M16s against their fellow townspeople. You also wouldn't hear of the wonderful achievement of the scientists behind the comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft, the fastest vehicle mankind has ever built, that set off in 2004 to fly beyond Jupiter so it could circle back and chase down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, finally arriving in the last few days and sending back spectacular close-up pictures of a strange and wonderful alien world.

New Zealand might as well be a very small village as far as its mainstream media are concerned. Our news is mostly 'village pump' stuff. I suppose that in a crazy world we should be grateful for the peaceful country we live in. It would be nice, however, to hear about what's going on in the world.

Who would want to be an MP anyway?

Aren't the media hypocrites having fun? These tossers for whom work consists of knocking out an article or two per day and who spend the rest of their time propping up the bar at their local watering hole, are pointing the finger at Ministers and MPs who use their entitlement to take partners on trips. And the blogosphere is just as bad with the lefties crowing about Rodney Hide and the righties crowing about Chris Carter.

To quote Rhett Butler, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

Let's get something straight here - Ministers and MPs are not well paid. Certainly I wouldn't do what they do for anything less than several times their salary and allowances. Most of them work seven days a week and, when Parliament is sitting, all hours of the night. They draw the odium and contempt of at least half the population even when they are doing a good job. Sure, there are some lazy fools amongst them who don't pull their weight and who would have trouble holding down a regular job at McDonald's, but most of them work damned hard for bugger all reward. And they are ENTITLED to take their wifes, partners and lovers with them on overseas trips. They are not stealing, they're simply claiming what their employment terms allow them to.

So I think it is time the media backed off and turned their tiny minds to the real issues facing this country - the economy, crime, government spending and bureaucracy.

Incidentally, I do think it is time to reform Parliament again - and we shouldn't have to wait to 2017 as John Key has proposed (god, will that guy ever commit to anything?). We should abolish MMP, return to first-past-the-post, and reduce the size of Parliament by a half. We would be left with a better standard of MP and the whole show would cost a lot less. Anyway, that's another blog...