Laws on the media

There's been lots of umbrage from a number of journalists over the last week over the release of phone records to the Henry inquiry. Let's not forget that the purpose of the Henry inquiry was to establish who leaked a confidential report on the performance of the GCSB to journalist Andrea Vance from Fairfax.

Michael Laws has weighed in to the debate. And oddly, he has little sympathy for the journalistic community; under the headline Journalists can't handle the truth Laws opines:

One of the great dichotomies of democracy is that we don't trust those that we elect to lead us. This does not stop us getting very passionate and involved every electoral cycle. We have one of the highest electoral turnouts in the Western world.
The same point might be made of the relationship between the New Zealand news media and the public. We are avid consumers of news - we just don't trust the people charged with managing that information.
There's good reason for this. Politicians have acquired an unenviable reputation for promising sunshine and delivering rain. Journalists, for reporting the rain as snow. Charged with delivering the truth, they deliver their own version. It's the final scene of Orwell's Animal Farm made post-modern.
The best example of this is the parliamentary press gallery - a gaggle of competing egos, and any number suffering a God complex. TV3's Patrick Gower was a perfect example last week, claiming that his job "is to hold the Government accountable . . . we're the eyes and ears of the public".
No, it isn't. And no, he's not. His job is not to act as judge and jury - it is to relay the facts and let us make up our own minds. That's the fatal misstep that so many journalists make: they really do believe that they're our moral arbiters and secular priests. 

We agree with Laws on that point. We've often argued that the primary role of journalists is to report the news rather than to create it or even to BE the news. However as the "old media" struggle to remain relevant, many journalists are also expanding their reach into the blogosphere, albeit through their media outlets. In the race to provide a sensational by-line, we wonder if some are losing their objectivity.

Laws has been on the receiving end of his share of journalistic attention, although that's hardly surprising when you seek the limelight as he has done over many years. But his comments on the "piranha mentality" of the media pack are interesting; he concludes thus:

In arguing that the Henry inquiry was snooping on one of its own, Andrea Vance, they forget that theirs is a vocation that regularly invades the privacy of New Zealanders. That regularly employs unethical practices to acquire information - that actively encourages the illegal leaking of confidential information. And yet habitually claims the moral high ground.
There's also something of a piranha mentality at play. If there's the faintest hint of blood in the water, the whole pack is at play. And there's an audacious hypocrisy at play. I'm told numerous Official Information Act requests came from journalists - many from the parliamentary press gallery - seeking exactly the same information as Parliamentary Services provided to the Henry inquiry. If the press had obtained it, they would all have published.
A couple of years ago, fellow Sunday Star-Times columnist Andrea Vance wrote a fascinating account of her time as a News of the World reporter. She described the high pressure tactics and threats that were routine in trying to prise information from reluctant members of the public. 
In the past five years, I've both witnessed and experienced similar tactics here. And they clearly win those practitioners media awards - such as the New Zealand Herald's David Fisher, the current Canon Media Awards reporter of the year.
So when the parliamentary press gallery tries to claim the moral high ground, it is never an easy climb. Especially when their latest mini-scandal has all the hallmarks of a cock-up.
After all, it's hardly Watergate. 

It is a bit difficult for Andrea Vance to claim the moral high ground here given, as we mentioned earlier in this post, that this whole messy business started with her publishing a confidential government report that has been leaked to her by a person or persons as yet unknown. 

That Ms Vance is now apparently saying that her details are sacrosanct but others' are not is just a little precious, especially given the column of hers of a couple of years ago described above.