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Today’s comment was written by Rebecca Thank you Rebecca for taking the time to craft such an interesting comment.
Re media vs Winston Peters: interesting media pivot over the weekend. After months of legacy media insistence that Peters produced no evidence to back up his accusations of media corruption and bribery, Bryce Edwards broke the compact and actually quoted the PIJF terms.
Truthfully, Edwards identified these as Peters’ evidence meaning that media knew about, or should have known about his evidence the whole time they were gaslighting. Edwards limited his response to an allegation that Peters’ interpretation is “contested” but the publishing media then added a footnote, alleging that their PIJF contracts had clauses added so accepting $ with strings attached did not affect their editorial independence.
It’s good to see that this media disinformation campaign about Peters may be drawing to a close, but I suspect media entities do not realize what their antics reveal.
First, in finally quoting the evidence, Edwards and the media entity softened/paraphrased Peters’ interpretation and substituted their own. As the public is unlikely to see Peters’ views unless the BFD publishes an article or people are NZF members, here is what he said:
One of those conditions is based on a purely political view that is not supported by many New Zealanders or many political parties. It states that the media organisation must “actively promote the principles of partnership, participation and active protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Maori as a Te Tiriti partner”. And have a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Maori as a Te Tiriti partner”…
It is a preposterous state of self-denial when they cannot see that the contract they signed is a recipe for bias and corruption.
It has created a media environment where certain leftwing political narratives and agendas have seeped into much of what the media presents to the public – where any opposing views are shutdown, cancelled and labelled as “far right” or “fringe”.
Peters is eminently qualified to comment since the media contemplated censoring his “disinformation” on this topic before finally admitting and starting to report the truth.
Which is the next revelation: knowing that the public does not trust them, and after accusing Peters of having no evidence, media now produces a “take it from me” insistence that they included clauses to protect media independence.
As this is “without evidence”, it appears the media thinks rules are for thee but not for me. Why not show us the contract? Let me guess: commercial sensitivity… about taxpayer cash earmarked for Public Interest Journalism, with radical strings attached.
Even if they do produce evidence: Peters says this is a “recipe” for bias and corruption… which seems undeniable. Additional secret clauses do not rebut this. And NZoA has admitted that they received no applications for funding that deviated from the required PIJF stance, or they might have funded them. I’m not sure whether it’s worse if “editorial independence” translates to a 100% monotheme in favour of radical Labour policies, or whether it happened because they were bribed. But it’s appalling either way, and the public can see it.
One other thing revealed by the media footnote: if true, it means that the media saw the same risks identified by Peters, that $ with strings attached is an appalling look. So they secretly added clauses to prevent the resulting monotheme from being attributed to bribery. Apart from anything else, it means the media knew or should have known all along what Peters was referring to after they identified it themselves. And rather than trying to censor or gaslight, had they come clean from the start the public might have been more inclined to trust, rather than watching this delayed reluctant backdown with no evidence or apology or apparent insight into their own failings.
