Cutting out the middle man

The Herald reports that after questioning by the media,

‘Prime Minister Helen Clark says her criticisms of the New Zealand Herald bear no similarity to the ejection a newspaper publisher from Fiji by that country’s military regime.’

That the Herald believes this is in need of clarification, or is even worthy of publication in a respectable newspaper, shows just how much they’ve fallen for their own spin.

You have to wonder whether they’ve finally cut out the middle man and handed editorial control to the extremists at the Free Speech Coalition:

UPDATE: David Farrar has a cry over at his blog, taking literally our joke that perhaps the Herald is letting him decide their editorial line.

He also claims that because it was a story from the NZPA newswire the Herald isn’t to blame. Now let’s make this clear: the Herald has made an editorial decision to pick this story up when other media wisely ignored it. They have chosen to run it hard with front-page billing in a way that no other media outlet has. And they have chosen to file it in their ‘democracy under attack’ category and title it in a sensationalist manner to provoke a reaction. These are all deliberate editorial decisions that reveal the Herald’s bias.