In New Zealand, the King Arsehole in this respect remains deputy prime minister Winston Peters, who is bloody appalling to deal with and has some fucking weird ideas about how the media works. But last week it was MP Louisa Wall's turn to take a big bite of this particular shit sandwich, with this lovely social media post (via the brilliant @avancenz)
It was a statement of such breathtaking ignorance about how the modern media works, that it initially appeared that Ms Wall had just completely fucked up. And she had, mistaking the PM's moves to crack down on social media fuckery with regulation of the actual news media, but Ms Wall has doubled down on her comments ever since, which means she probably means it.
In that case, if Ms Wall is concerned about duty of care in the media, she can probably take a look at the entire fucking history of journalism, which has been grappling with that whole idea since the whole thing started. The news media doesn't exist in a void, it's a part of the ongoing societal conversation about these very issues, and while that sometimes leads us all down the wrong path for a while, we soon course-correct onto a road of increased fairness, openness and balance.
It certainly helped that there are formal and legal processes to ensure that the news media isn't doing any harm - there are watchdogs that consider any and all complaints about broadcasts and websites and publications, and can order corrections and retractions.
And yet, while there are tens of thousands of news stories, written, printed and broadcast every year in this tiny country, only the slightest fraction require this kind of attention. That's because even after years of cutbacks and redundancies, there are still some experienced editors who spend all fucking day thinking about the shit Ms Wall is suddenly musing about, and are trying to strike the right balance in their daily output.
They're always thinking about the standards they have to uphold, and are always very, very careful with what they put out under their banner. Anyone working in one of the big newsrooms for more than a week knows that anything legally dodgy is always, always immediately checked with the lawyers before going to print, and that's just one level of care.
The weird thing is, Ms Wall is actually making a good point about social media, which has all the editorial oversight of a graffiti scrawl wall in West Auckland - actually less, because the council are excellent at quickly covering up cocks and swear words, while Facebook misses straight-up murder videos because the overworked and underpaid moderators at a warehouse in Buttfuck Idaho are taking a smoke break.
Companies like Facebook are facing some massive issues, and one of the big problems is that it still thinks of itself as a tech company, not a media company, and seems clueless when it comes to stopping the encouragement and broadcast of massacres around the globe, and this is absolutely something that needs to be looked at closely. It's not a fucking free speech argument, it's a fucking public health issue.
It would be easy to give Ms Wall the benefit of the doubt - she's been on the right side of a lot of good arguments - and believe that she can see the difference between news media and social media, but she doesn't really seem to know what the fuck she is talking about.
Unless she really does, and 'formal recognition' comes with any kind of government oversight, in which case, she can go get fucked. That doesn't end well for anybody.
- Margaret Tempest
*Media Scrum would also like to note that the NZ Herald has finally pulled the pin on the paywall hand grenade and lobbed it into the public arena, and we would just like to say that good journalism is always worth paying for. We bitch about the editorial judgment on show at the Granny a lot, but really do wish them the very, very best. It's just a shame you can't mix populism with a paywall.
Posts
