National’s release of some Budget information before the big day last week was, to put it simply, fucking weird. The opposition didn’t get much actual mileage out of the actual data it scraped up from Treasury’s website, with all the talk soon degenerating into harsh questions about hacking and ethics and hurt feelings and all that bullshit. It was weird.The press coverage was weird, the various fuck-ups by political and civil service figures were weird, the way so many reporters demanded answers to questions nobody cared about on their Twitter feeds was weird, and the whole distraction from the business of balancing the fucking books was really fucking weird.
It was just weird enough to be infuriating for a lot of people involved, even if the actual public reaction to it all was fairly muted. But if there is one thing we can learn from the entire schmozzle, it's that the National party has no respect for the concept of an embargo, even if everyone else does.
In general, journalists fucking hate embargoes, but they stick by them, because they are an issue of trust and fairness. You might only get the information you need if you agree to only release it at a certain time, and if you promise somebody you'll hold off to an agreed time, than you stick by that promise, damn it.
Businesses and politicians and other organisations do use embargoes for their own purposes, and sometimes that use is dodgy as hell - there was an egregious example from the Crusaders recently, where the team management used the usual embargo behind the naming of the team to demand journalists hold off on reporting comments about recent drunken behaviour of certain players, even though those comments had nothing to do with the team naming.
But in general, journalists do their best to stick to them, and nobody want to be known as someone who can't be trusted with information before everybody else gets it. It’s a question of keeping your word, and nobody who proves to be untrustworthy with these kinds of things will ever convince sources to rely on their professional integrity.
And there are actual benefits from an embargo, they’re not just so that a newspaper can get first dibs on it in the morning, or a TV bulletin in the early evening. They also give everyone the same chance to get the story out at the same time, and that's important, because no one single voice or opinion or hot take dominates the coverage, and everyone is on the same footing, giving everybody a more balanced view of the information.
This is, of course, is what happened last week, where National splurged out a lot of information that may or may not have been accurate. While there wasn’t an official embargo on the Budget, everyone knew the information was out of bounds until 2pm Thursday, when everybody would have the same info at the same time. Except for National, who were only too happy to break that unwritten agreement, in the aim of scoring a few political points.
The Media Scrum team freely admit that we definitely skew left, but this was a baffling way to release information in any ideology. Simon Bridges and his party could have used the information they got to offer strong rebuttal to the Budget, but instead went off on in a desperate attempt to make the government look bad by highlighting an IT fuck-up, something anybody who has ever had to use computers is familiar with.
The attempts to highlight that issue ended in boring name-calling, and politicans taking offense at every fucking thing their counterparts said, and the information just didn’t matter anymore. When the Budget came out, it turned out some of it was right, and some of it was wrong, and it didn't make a fucking difference to anything when the right data all dropped two days later.
The National Party have certainly had their fair share of embargoes in place for their own events and unveilings, but why the hell should any newsroom respect that now, if they’re not going to? We might moan about the embargoes, but we stick by them, and don't trust anybody who doesn't.
- Katherine Grant
Posts
