These concerns have some merit, purely on the historical level. Mass murderers in other countries have used their court appearances to spew forth their awful rhetoric, and there is no absolute guarantee we'll be able to stop the same thing happening here.
But maybe we shouldn't worry too much, because the chances of the motherfucker's manifesto grabbing headlines are actually slim. Even if he drags out the whole process in an effort to get his word out there, that doesn't mean anybody has to use it. Nobody has to listen to this shit, or his idiotic justification for shooting 4-year-old girls, because there isn't any.
There are three clear reasons why we can avoid it - one is incredibly practical, another is a purely legal matter, and the third is a case of basic morality.
In the first case, something that it's always worth remembering about court coverage is that you can't cover everything that happens. Court proceedings might take up hours and hours of the day, and that has to be condensed into a 450-word article, or a three-minute piece to camera on the news. Court reporters are constantly ignoring the vast majority of it all, just to get down the biggest, most noteworthy facts. For a play by play description, you'd need the full court transcription, and reporters are not transcribers, they use knowledge, skill and experience to give everyone a fair picture of what is going down.
So even if the motherfucker gets a chance to get up on his pathetic little pulpit, nobody has to listen to it, except for the poor bastards in the room. He could rant for hours, and everyone can go home and just say 'he ranted for hours' without ever having to give any details.
After all, there will be more than enough to report in the case without throwing all that unnecessary detail into the mix.
Besides, the second reason is that there is already legal moves to stop the shit-memes contained within the killer's manifesto from spreading. Distributing the contents of the manifesto is now illegal, and saying it was used in court is no goddamn excuse.
The third reason - and the biggest one, even more so than any threat of legal action - is that reporters and editors are human beings too, and can make moral decision all on their own, and the vast majority would have no interest in spreading these odious and harmful ideas. Despite what your Uncle Fred says on the Facebook, journalists are actually trying to make the world a better place, and spreading white supremacist ideas is hardly going to help with that.
No reporter would ever want to be seen condoning these ideas, or even offering up the possibility that they're worth considering. Because they just aren't. There's no fucking two sides to this fucking story.
And we're all on board with this, and while preliminary discussion between the media companies on covering the case has already begun, the whole damn nation is already down with this. Anybody who did publish these would be rightfully slammed by society and absolutely shamed.
New Zealand, as a country, has already shown that it thoroughly and completely rejects this ideology. It's not acceptable, and everyone is happy to see it stamped out. (well, the straight-up racists aren't, but nobody gives a flying fuck what they think right now.)
We're all New Zealand journos on this blog, and we can't promise that overseas outlets won't hold up these standards. They don't give a fuck about what the average NZer thinks about their coverage, they're just after global reach. And as those asshats at Sky News Australia proved, there is almost nothing they won't throw up on screen.
But we're not going to do that. This motherfucker can get his day in court before he is shoved away in a hole somewhere and forgotten, where his notoriety can fade and piss away. But we're not going to give him a megaphone for his poisonous ideals.
We can't ignore this shit, and the thinking behind this attack must be properly studied and analysed. But there is no place for any courtroom grandstanding here, let's just get on with it and move the fuck on.
- Katherine Grant
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