Table of Contents
Summarised by Centrist
Political commentator Ani O’Brien argues New Zealand media are pretending to face a new ethical crisis over unverified allegations involving politicians, when in reality they have long published personal claims, rumours and insinuations whenever it suited them.
She argues that the press is now acting as if social media created this problem, when in fact “social media has not changed the underlying dynamics; it has simply removed the media’s monopoly on what gets discussed, when, and by whom.”
O’Brien calls the media’s current posture “complete nonsense” and says outlets that now refuse to publish “unsubstantiated” claims have repeatedly done exactly that in past scandals involving Len Brown, Iain Lees-Galloway, Jami-Lee Ross, Andrew Falloon, Sam Uffindell and others.
In her view, the evidentiary bar has never been fixed. It rises or falls depending on who is involved and who is being protected.
She also argues that the media’s complaint about social media is really a complaint about losing control. In her telling, journalists are not recoiling from gossip or personal scandal as such. They are reacting to the fact that they no longer get to decide what reaches the public and when. “The problem lies not in that social media created the behaviours, but in the fact that it has democratised them,” she writes. That, she says, has broken the old editorial monopoly and exposed how inconsistently legacy media apply their own supposed standards.
What has changed is that the old gatekeepers no longer control the flow.
