Heather buys a 22

A lot of buzz today around last night’s story on Story, where we saw Heather du Plessis-Allan by a gun without a firearms licence.

In what was described as a ‘loophole’ on the show, Heather filled out a form with a fake name and firearms licence number, forged the signature of a (assumed fake) firearms officer, and after Gun City received payment, sure enough, a .22 calibre rifle appeared on Heather’s doorstep. She signed for it and received it herself.

The show did make an important point about the ease of getting firearms in  New Zealand, and you can’t disagree with them saying “we think the rules need tightening. Gun dealers should be able to and have to check licence numbers in a central database.” At the end of the segment we learn that police say they are going to make changes to how firearms are purchased by mail-order. Success!

But the question is – now what for Heather? What should the police do about the fact that a woman has admitted to forging a signature to obtain a firearm? That’s an extremely serious offence. In fact, that what she did is so very illegal is the reason the law is supposed to work – just like with all laws, there aren’t always systems that catch or prevent every offence. Instead they rely on harsh penalties as a deterrence.

Heather has, on prime-time telly, seriously broken the law just to prove a point. The ‘public interest’ element is often used as a defence for why something might be published or someone’s privacy breached when it otherwise wouldn’t have been appropriate or legal.  But that’s a different kettle of fish from doing something clearly very illegal like using deception to illegally purchase a firearm without a licence.

If Heather doesn’t get prosecuted for this, it’s tempting for a fellow legitimate news organisation like Taiaha Times to see how far we can push this. One of our esteemed journalists may purchase some heroin of the Deep Web, and know that it’s OK as long as we blog about it. Public interest.

Another complication is that we haven’t heard from anyone that this method of obtaining firearms is particularly problematic. Sure, the Police Association (who think no one should ever have guns except them, and they should always have guns), have said it’s an issue, but because of the digital footprint that such a purchase leaves (including credit card details) and the use of a home address, it’s very doubtful that any significant number of people have successfully bought weapons this way undetected.

This weakens the ‘public interest’ defence significantly. In fact, if the police (not the Police Association) really don’t think this is a problem (and by the lack of reform before this piece you might expect that is the case), then it was absolutely not in the public interest to advertise this easy way to illegally obtain firearms.

While our research department at Taiaha Times cannot confirm either way, we suspect that if any instance of firearm violence could be linked to mail-order purchases, we would have heard about this before last night.

As Heather’s co-host Duncan Garner said after the segment, they are now under police investigation (which they of course expected). The owner of Gun City, who thought the whole thing was a ‘made up problem’ (and there seems their could be some validity to that), will take a private prosecution against Heather if the police don’t lay charges.

Here at Taiaha Times, we think Heather and the Story crew took a big risk with this story and should rightfully face legal consequences. It will be up to a judge, not the police, to determine whether the ‘public interest’ element was great enough that no conviction is necessary. We however think that it wasn’t, and that the right course of action is to give Heather the maximum fine, and a conviction. Maximum fines are best served when there is a lot of publicity around and issue (as to deter others), and when the defendant can easily afford it (MediaWorks will pay the tab).

And we do not for one second think that Heather and Duncan took this risky move to expose something they truly thought was a huge danger to New Zealand. Be real – they have intentionally done something controversial for the popularity of their TV show. Which is fine, of course it is, but it does allow us here at Taiaha Times to take the mickey out of them for purporting as public interest crusaders.

The state of the news media in New Zealand

We’re losing our news media. People are not buying newspapers any more, choosing to read online instead. They’re turning off the TV as well, favouring the limitless range of video content available on the web. It might not be too long until the clunky old ways of disseminating information are not economically viable whatsoever.

The promblem is that journalism costs time and money. Lots of it. And sometimes the rewards are not immediate, sometimes they are even non-existent. A journalist can chase a story for years before anything comes of it, if it ever does.

The cost of investigative journalism, however, wasn’t always a big issue. Mainstream news media was a highly profitable business – physical sales and advertising revenue kept everything trucking along. Journalists could spend significant chunks of their work week on investigations that might not become stories for ages. The Washington Post employed Woodward and Bernstein for years as they dedicated thousands of hours investigating what became the Watergate scandal. Their work is considered one of the best pieces of investigative journalism of all time. It brought down a president, exposed the dirty underbelly of the US political system, and reignited a healthy suspicion about the assumed integrity of the establishment.

But as the profitability of news media rapidly declines, so does the quality of journalism. Media companies simply cannot afford to have journalists researching stories that might not become column inches soon (or ever), stories that require travel and other costs, or even worse, stories that might not be immediately interesting and understandable to the general public, no matter how important they are.

If Woodward and Bernstein were working for The New Zealand Herald in 2015, what would their editors say about their project idea? Would they ask them how many ‘likes’ the story would get on Facebook? Would they suggest the subject matter might be too complicated for their targeted advertising demographic? Would they propose this could be a native advertising opportunity?

Patrick Gower will be on the telly and the radio with some largely irrelevant story about internal processes in the Labour Party. Such a story cost no money and little time to put together, it simply required conversations with a source or two onsite at his workplace in parliament. The story is vaguely interesting to a ‘middle New Zealand’ audience who passively follow politics like a sport, interested in how their team is faring. It’s not hard to understand at all. And it pleases the National Government, which means Gower gets better access to John Key in the future.

This is poor journalism in the academic, Fourth Estate, public good sense of the word. But as a MediaWorks employee, isn’t Gower doing exactly what he should be doing? His hyperbole and sensationalism makes a non-issue ‘newsworthy’. It was cheap. It will spark vigorous debate on social media, driving page views (and therefore earning advertising dollars) online. It doesn’t matter to MediaWorks shareholders that New Zealand is not better off. That assassinating Labour in this way is harmful to democracy. That such news disengages minds drives people away from politics. Gower’s only job is to make as much money for MediaWorks as possible, and maintain the best access to the Government as possible, while keeping just enough of an illusion of ‘journalistic integrity’ necessary to stop the viewer catching on. Gower pulls this off. In a twisted, cynical way, you could say he’s brilliant at his job. He’s just not doing the job he pretends he is.

Before 2015, MediaWorks had the ultimate defence to accusations of being toxic in the media environment – Campbell Live. For ten years before he was axed, John Campbell would be there, 7 pm, five days a week, to bring us current affairs coverage that was interesting, educational, and you might say – actually mattered. They covered the Christchurch earthquake and rebuild extensively, from telling individual stories to uncovering government lies about school closures. They exposed the GCSB, clearly explaining the at best dysfunctional and at worst corrupt world of spying and political subterfuge in New Zealand. They crowd funded for countless causes, from family reunifications, to cosmetic surgery for a severely disfigured primary schooler, and collected millions of dollars for various charities. Here’s a must-watch interview during the good times.

It’s up for debate whether Campbell Live’s axing was purely a commercial decision in the face of falling ratings (as MediaWorks rather dubiously maintains), or whether the undue influence of pro-establishment figures in MediaWorks played a bigger part (MediaWorks heads Mark Weldon and Julie Christie have apparently long been vocal against Campbell Live’s style and subject matter). We do however know that when Campbell Live’s future became uncertain, viewers returned in the hundreds of thousands, which failed to save the show. It has been replaced by Story which, although often interesting, does nothing near the quality of investigating that Campbell Live was known for, nor does it hold the powerful to account in a meaningful way. It’s also rating poorly, and the loss of John Campbell from TV 3 seems to have hurt their ratings across the board. So, for the record, is their new breakfast show, with ex-National party candidate and host Paul Henry. We don’t yet know how their new venture Scout.co.nz is going (the ‘celebrity news and gossip’ website that called John Key’s son Max more influential than Lorde and Lydia Ko), but judging from their social media engagement it doesn’t look good.

It’s not just MediaWorks. New Zealand’s most highly rated breakfast radio show on Newstalk ZB and the most watched current affairs show Seven Sharp are both hosted by the most unapologetically right wing and almost universal praiser of John Key, Mike Hosking. This is the guy who will oppose raising the refugee quota because of a small associated cost, mumbling about the importance of “health and education” (which otherwise don’t usually feature in his rhetoric). The same guy however has no problem with spending public money when it is a post-negotiation gift to a casino to build a convention centre most Kiwis will never step foot in. As New Zealand’s most well-paid ‘journalist’ by a long shot, living in New Zealand’s most expensive suburb, people who don’t support National are pretty much only theoretical in his day-to-day life (‘Journalist’ is in quotation marks because he no longer identifies as such – after accusations of extreme bias in August 2015 Hosking denied any ethical responsibility to journalism and his bio on the Seven Sharp website was updated to show he is merely a broadcaster and commentator).

There are still bastions of real journalism in New Zealand, such as Radio New Zealand (Where John Campbell now continues his advocacy journalism), the state broadcaster that managed to avoid some of the pressure of commercial mainstream media objectives because they are (decreasingly) publicly funded. And of course, the great thing about the Internet has been the rise of truly independent, and widely varied sources for news and comment. Public Address is a noteworthy example. But these sources do not reach and engage a disinterested audience, they do not get held to even the weakening standards we still expect of the mainstream media. And of course they are usually hardly profitable enough to pay their own website running costs, let alone hire the best journalists to do in-depth investigations. If the result of the shift to online news and comment is people only following sources they agree with, which we already see on social media, then we lose our sense of community and togetherness. At least those lowest common denominator mainstream media outlets talk to us as a people, not a particular predetermined set of beliefs.

There is more positive stuff that can be said about the mainstream media in New Zealand, though. Shows like The Nation, a MediaWorks show that has NZ on Air funding, plays every weekend covering the week in politics, interviewing the important figures and occasionally asking the hard questions. It gives a platform to a variety of views from across the political spectrum on their panel. Yes, it dumbs down the issues, but not as the  new programs do. Yes, Patrick Gower will attempt to embarrass Andrew Little on irrelevant nonsense, but Little will be given a full and unedited ten minute section to properly express himself. Media Take on Maori TV (the show’s third home) sees discussion from not just commentators but real experts on their panels. Mediawatch on Radio NZ, as the title suggests, extensively covers the day to day successes and failings of the media, and critically assesses the future of journalism and the media.

But the overall story is complicated, frustrating, and generally bad. It’s bad around the world, and it’s bad in New Zealand. These are troubling times indeed, and the future is unclear. Perhaps the mainstream media will figure out a way to make online news dissemination profitable, and maybe those funds will once again be directed at least partially into investigating news which has value beyond the advertising dollar it drives. Or maybe news and information presentation will descend into an entertainment-focused scandal-driven cesspool where people’s self-selected media channels do nothing but confirm their world view through sets of incomplete, divisive and inaccurate news pieces dispassionately scrolled passed on Facebook news feeds.

Where does Taiaha Times fit in?

We’ll see.