During Sean Plunket‘s “Working Group” segment of his afternoon talk-show, Friday before last (21st Feb), Martyn Bradbury described The BFD as a “far-right hate-speech” site. That’s fair enough I suppose as in Bradbury’s view anyone less extreme-left than Che Guevara is far-right and anything less effusive of socialism than Das Kapital is hate-speech. Bradbury’s comment is mere hyperbole.
Mine host, though, chose to personify the site, or its owners, or creators, or authors (he wasn’t specific) as “A-holes”: “these A-holes at The BFD, or these “dirty politics’ guys” lamenting a minute-or-so earlier that they “effectively ran a dirty politics hit-job on Guyon Espiner and Matt Shand“, yes, really.
What is it about The BFD and Xavier’s articles which has these ‘journalists’ so a-dither and ungracious? Could it be because he made two members of their ‘profession’ look so very amateur, so foolish, or that they made Shand, in particular, appear as a peddler of fantasy, of fiction, so very caught red-handed in high-fibbery?
I didn’t read Shand’s original article about coming into possession of the NZ First Foundation financials until Xavier’s pieces prompted an interest, but this is what Shand wants us to believe: that after several anonymous phone-calls, merry-go-round clues and red-herrings he travels far and wide in Hamilton until:
So; Shand implies he checked the ‘dumpster’ but ‘Winebox 2.0’ wasn’t there, so enquires at the “nearby” pre-school if they’ve seen “a box of papers” disgorged into said dumpster (how would they know what the box contained, you might ask) and Eureka! They have dumpster look-outs on duty that day who have not only seen the discarded box but have sent out a team of garbage-gleaners to retrieve it, intending to use the abandoned leaves therein as “scap paper” [sic] for the little kiddies, whereupon our hero negotiates possession of the treasure by “fast talking”, rescues it and contents from pre-school pitfall and at last, has his ‘exclusive’ story. Praise the Lord.
Whereas Xavier from The BFD implies Shand simply met with a malcontent ex-NZ First official who gave the (allegedly stolen) information to Shand. I’d normally refer to my bulldust meter to determine the truth in these opposing arguments, but it’s broken after feeding in Shand’s story – flew right off the scale and shattered, so I have to leave it to you, good people.
Who do you think is telling the truth here; the high-and-mighty ‘investigative reporter’ from Stuff, or the “A-hole” from The BFD?
(The smears and insults fly at around the halfway mark)
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