Written By: - Date published: 10:01 am, February 26th, 2008 - 76 comments
Categories: john key, national, workers' rights -
Tags: john key, national, workers' rights
One of the more unsavoury aspects of Key’s “we would love wages to drop” saga is the unwarranted attacks by Key and his allies on the journalist who quoted him, Greg Robertson.
Key referred to Robertson as some “young guy who was taking notes“. Key said Robertson’s quote was wrong, or that he was joking, or that he was talking about Australia. All of Key’s excuses attack Robertson’s credibility as a journalist. For reasons known only to themselves, the senior political journalists seem happy to believe Key’s contradictory tales, rather than their colleague.
So, is Robertson just “some young guy”, an inexperienced country reporter? I did some digging:
Greg Robertson is 35 years old. He has been a journalist for 10 years, 5 years as editor of The New Zealand Hardware Journal. He has been published in the NZ Herald, Northern Advocate, as well as trade magazines in New Zealand and abroad.
“Some young guy”, indeed. This is an experienced journalist who knows how to transcribe a quote. No wonder both the Northern Advocate and the Bay Report are standing behind their man on this issue. One has to wonder why others haven’t.
Key needs to apologise for his shameful attack on an experienced journalist and come clean on his wages policy.
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MAtthew
All I’ve seen is our claim of that pressure. Got any verification? Given the standard is getting increasingly extreme in some of its claims you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t accept a blog post as evidence of such.
Insider, I suppose this could be all made up…
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0802/S00390.htm
MAtthew
That is a press release from Shane Jones. You might not realise but he is a government minister who is politically opposed to John Key. I see no evidence in there that “Key’s office put pressure on the reporter to withdraw the story and apologise.”
I saw this comment “numerous attempts by the National Party to force the journalist and the publication to retract the comments made by Mr Key, and having failed in that attempt, tried to discredit both the journalist and the publication.” but nothing to back the claim.
Similarly this week I saw a claim from a person called Gerry Brownlee, who is apparantly the opposition energy spokesman, claiming that “Labour’s emergency stand-by power generator at Whirinaki is running flat out burning up to one million litres of diesel every 24 hours.” again there was no substantiation.
So of these which am I to believe is true? DO you believe every media release that comes out of Parliament?
As said – it could all be made up. With things like that you have to judge for yourself, but remember that such press releases are for the Press – and are thus liable to recieve a fair bit of scrutiny. Blatant lying wouldn’t be too bright.
I didn’t realise those two press releases were mutually exclusive though
If I’ve got time I’ll dig around (saw a couple of other things a week or so back), but you gotta ask why the paper in question had to release a story backing up their reporter – that wouldn’t have happened without due cause, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened purely because Key said the reporter was young and a guy, don’t you think?
MAtthew
I listened to Key and Havoc on BfM. It appears National have been talking to the Northern Advocate. Unsurprising really if they were trying to find out what happened where and when. Moreso if they were concerned about what happened. One man’s complaint could be another’s political pressure.
PS I can tell you Brownlee didn’t necessarily lie but he did put out a release two days later saying it was actually burning 1m litres a month! No hint of a “i was wrong’ though
I thought that was a lot of diesel! Did he also mention that it wasn’t Labour’s plant? I know that Labour advocates State Ownership of infrastructure and all, but Party ownership – that’s a bit too USSR even for my liking