Written By: - Date published: 3:33 pm, March 13th, 2008 - 54 comments
Categories: Media, national, slippery -
Tags: Media, national, slippery
Yesterday in Parliament, Winston Peters tabled a letter of protest from the Herald journalists’ chapel to APN chief executive Martin Simons.
The letter related to Simons’ meeting with John Key to draft a ‘clarification’ for the Bay Report’s quote of Key saying he “would love to see wages drop.” The Bay Report was then forced to run this ‘clarification’ despite the paper’s staunch backing of the story at all levels. The Herald journalists’ letter reads:
Dear Mr Simons,
I am writing to express the concern of the Herald Journalists Chapel over the “clarification” published in yesterday’s Bay Report newspaper.
We understand that the item, regarding comments attributed to John Key in the December 20, 2007 edition of the paper, was inserted on your instructions.
It is not necessary here to traverse the facts of the original news article or the need or otherwise for the clarification.
Our concern arises from your management interference in an editorial decision of a newspaper. Our concern is heightened by the fact that your action was on behalf of a political party. We clearly have no objection to your conversing or corresponding with politicians. Our concern is that you have acted as the conduit for an approach which ought properly to have been made to the reporter and/or editor/s concerned. It might have seemed a small matter since the paper concerned is a local one. However, the potential effect is to portray all New Zealand newspapers owned by APN as subservient to political interference. The risk is that readers will perceive the Herald, which has previously carefully guarded its political independence, as open to National Party influence.
We would appreciate hearing your view on this matter and ask that in future you respect the tradition of editorial independence.
We are circulating this letter to other journalists at the Herald and within the union because of the widespread concern among journalists about the matter.
It’s one thing for a politician to contact a journalist or an editor if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly, but to get management to interfere in the editorial process is completely out of line. APN management have overstepped the mark too. It is a gross breach of media freedom for a proprietor to decide to kill a story because it upsets a political ally, and worse to gag journalists when they object.
The Herald’s journalists deserve to be congratulated for standing up to their management in support of media freedom.
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Scoopit!
Don’t you mean “rightie”? Or can I welcome you into the fold of the good and the great…?
Please uncle Tane, please tell us a story now. Pleeeaaase!
rOb,
I enjoyed our discussion on this topic last week, even though we disagreed. And, as I said at the time, if the Herald journos were concerned, this letter was necessary.
http://www.thestandard.org.nz/?p=1323#comment-22147
lol! Sod – was a “slippery mistake!”
Rightie absolutely!
Damn – I thought we’d converted one! Are you sure? You’re not just feeling a little bit lefter than before? Just a little?
What an astonishing coincidence. The EPMU releases a letter criticising the Herald, and the Standard are the first people to get hold of it!
Could it possibly be that the same people who wrote the letter, also wrote the Standard?
Could the journalist whose impartiality the Standard has championed be the same journalist who is a high profile Labour Party member, and whose father stood twice as a Labour Party candidate?
The letter was posted by Russell Brown on three days ago.
http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,991,hard_news_call_it_what_you_like.sm
It was also raised by Winston Peters in the house today.
You’re a conspiracist OO.
Oops this is the proper link.
http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,991,hard_news_call_it_what_you_like.sm?p=44324#post44324
I just had another read of your comment. Are you also saying the journalist chapel at the Herald writes the standard? What a strange accusation.
Observor. The EPMU didn’t release the letter criticising the Herald – it was written by the Herald journalists themselves and released by the chapel. Where do you get your facts from?
Wayne- OO is another National party troll. I don’t know why he’s still allowed to post here.
rOb, I enjoyed our discussion on this topic last week, even though we disagreed. And, as I said at the time, if the Herald journos were concerned, this letter was necessary.
Scribe – me too. It’s great to have someone who has identified themselves as a journalist commenting on these issues. I wonder if there are any other journos lurking who want to come out?
the truth is independent of ownership and management but I suppose in this post modern age the truth is either what you say it is or what you pay for it…
Now Wnston’s stealin’ ma material!
I just had another read of your comment. Are you also saying the journalist chapel at the Herald writes the standard? What a strange accusation.
Precisely. I write the Standard, usually after a few drinks. Didn’t everybody know?
[lprent: are you sure? I thought I had a list here somewhere.... Somewhere under this GUI code
]
Yeah – I do my best work after a couple too…
I love how you got the Key quote in there.
I think it’s time you got a different drum to beat, though. Unless you think it was more than Key being, as usual, tongue tied, in which case you need something a little stronger.
“I shouldn’t have to spell this out in extreme examples but I will, and no doubt you will say i’m being weird for comparing these extreme exmaples to the present case, which I’m clearly not doing. Anyway, i do not have the right to starve to death a dog I own, I do not have the right to produce nuclear devices in my factory if I choose. why? because my ownership of these assets is not a right to do whatsoever I please with them.”
Yeah, I don’t think you get property rights at all. Much the same as you didn’t get the chart you posted a few days ago about corporate tax rates.
This blog is by and large written by people of reasonable common sense, but I sense you have a long way to go to compare to their abilities.
Oh dear… Winston the great defender of a free press — unless they’ve got the utter gall to accurately report his own statements, in which case they’re liars and traitors. I’ve got to give kudos to Fran O’Sullivan for calling Winnie’s bluff, and it would be nice if the rest of the Press Gallery would actually do the same to Peters.
Dean: I don’t see how you come to that conclusion at all.
Property rights must be constrained by justice, because they can only be understood as resulting from it. Therefore no property right allows you to illegitimately undermine society or violate human rights.