Serial Complainer goes to High Court over $50 fine
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Don McDonald
Some of you will have seen the CloseUp item earlier in the month about Don McDonald, known as the serial complainer. He's the first person in history to have been fined by the BSA for making a complaint. Serve him right you say. Silly old fool, should mind his own business.
That's what they said about William Wilberforce and Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and dozens of movers and shakers who stuck their heads up above the crowd and protested against – well, in this case, against inaccuracy in the News.
Here's the thing that gets my goat about it all. McDonald deserves a medal, not derision and a penalty, for refusing like the rest of us to just put up with it, to put up with third rate news and current affairs coverage on television, to put up with sloppiness and inaccuracy in journalism. Of course the media hate him, and the BSA are in bed with the media anyway, but he refuses to give up, and good on him.
So he's taken his case to court. However it comes out, TVNZ deserve the condemnation of us all, for failing to recognize that by wheeling out their high priced silks funded by us taxpayers, to do in Donald, they are trying to stamp out free speech.
It's a pretty poor show when someone makes a complaint to a statutory body funded by our taxes to hear complaints, and gets a fine slapped on them. All these fine liberal luvvies at Television One, who think nothing about using sex, violence and bad language by the shovelful to attract people to their pathetic attempts at programme making, and justify themselves by saying they're standing up for free speech, while they are simultaneously stamping all over people's right to complain.
Media Matters in NZ has opened a 'Defence Fund' for Donald McDonald, and you can contribute by sending your donations to:
Court Case
Media Matters
PO Box 31618
Lower Hutt 5040
TVNZ CloseUp - 17 April 2012
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