Wishing she had died in the gas chambers? What sort of putrid, venal, vitriol is that? It’s a statement that goes beyond misogyny: it’s hate speech, clearly alluding, as it does, to the forced extermination, the brutal genocide of millions by the most vile regime to blight Western Europe in the last 100 years. It speaks of wishing a woman had lost her life in the orchestrated, cold-blooded murder campaign; a disgusting slur deliberately pinned to the woman’s religious faith in order to execute both foul insult and utmost injury – and all for the crime of being mother of the New Zealand prime minister.
It was a comment that should have been immediately removed: it wasn’t. It should have seen the host immediately report the commenter to the site publisher – that wasn’t done. Instead the comment stayed up, collecting numerous ‘likes’ from equally unhinged sub-humans, along with scores and scores, over 100, of other barbaric slurs, which collectively attracted even more joyful endorsements from the unctuous community of developed apes: comments wishing the prime minister dead by vehicular manslaughter or outright murder by firearm. Assassination. Shoot ’im, run him over, or the less ambitious but equally brutal ‘give-’m-the-bash’ routine. What morals-bereft, ethically bankrupt organisation would allow those comments to stand? Why, your favourite public broadcaster of course: Radio New Zealand. The one that picks your pocket for $40M a year.
The excremental opinions mounted and mounted while RNZ fiddled and looked the other way. They certainly didn’t care. In fact it wasn’t until RNZ was called-out, stung, and embarrassed by a public-spirited outfit after days of inaction that any real action was taken to clean up their act:
NBR would later report:
Offensive statements about Prime Minister John Key and his late mother were posted on a video on RNZ’s Checkpoint with John Campbell Facebook page, attracting several OMSA complaints.
One complainant, ‘M L’, said the comments went “far beyond any legitimate criticism of John Key and into territory inciting his murder and comments about wishing his mother had died in the gas chamber”.
Multiple complainants expressed concern about their “seriously offensive” nature, as well as the time it took for them to be deleted.
Almost unbelievably, RNZ took to juvenile, truly juvenile reasoning in their ultimately failed defence to the allegation of breaching the requirement for “Responsible Content”:
OMSA ruled the online comments were “seriously offensive and extreme” in this case, and RNZ took too long to remove them. It said RNZ should have alerted staff to monitor its Facebook page after the first crop of offensive messages appeared and accordingly, RNZ failed to ensure this content was responsible.
Among the ludicrous arguments posited by RNZ to the Online Media Standards Authority (OMSA) were: “that media publishers shouldn’t be liable” for the content of comments, that “complaints considered should only be from a party directly affected by the content published” and, can you believe it? The weasel defence – “some of the worst ones [comments] are still there on whaleoil.co.nz. Yet the Whale Oil blog site is – just like RNZ – also a member of OMSA, and must hold to the same standard of responsible content”. The OMSA stopped laughing long enough to remind RNZ that WO’s presentation of the comments was evidence of RNZ’s appalling comment moderation, or lack thereof.
From “loving all this discussion” to, days later, after the slurs had well and truly stunk-up the conversation, RNZ posting a simple, but condescending: “sorry for any offence caused”:
And that’s why RNZ can’t be taken seriously:
They simply can’t, nor can the other New Zealand MSM outlets with their crocodile tears about “misogyny” and “unprecedented” vitriol towards Ardern, because it’s simply not true, and, more importantly – it doesn’t matter to them to see a prime minister threatened and abused: only when it’s ‘their’ prime minister do they put on their moral cloaks of sanctimony. It’s laughable.
