Editorial: Politics
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Monday, 25 August 2014
You can't really credit the amount of I-told-you-so ing, He-said-she-said ing, and the big-time strikings of attitudes of moral outrage which have been around this week, in relation to the so called Dirty Tricks Campaign. Judith Collins has been forced to come out of her hidey hole, where she has been all week, and Male T Shirt Model of the Year, Cameron Slater, has suddenly departed for an overseas holiday of unstated duration.
Oh the breast-beating, the navel-baring, the unmitigated moral posturing which has filled the media in the last week, you would have to say that if it gets much worse, the Governor General would be quite justified in calling for a National Day of Mourning, so that we could all repent of our own particular roles in this particular moral cataclysm.
We certainly need to be clear that we have all had a hand in the Cameron Slater / Nicky Hager / Saga. Not because of anything we have done but perhaps more because of what we have, as a people and a country, not done. Internet trolls didn't just get invented in the last month after all. These rather unlovely manifestations of the Digital Universe have been at it for years. No-one pays them much attention because they are regarded for the most part as being certifiably looney and we figure that we may as well let them have their own little patch of the media universe where they can slosh around like pigs in muck, because its much less expensive that locking them up.
Certainly some of them, you have to say, look decidedly odd, if not actually certifiable.
So while we may have only just discovered (Shock! Horror!) that people have been slagging one another off without let or hindrance in the political segment of the Blogosphere since forever, it's actually been going on for a helluva long time. Except for the few who have been calling for a review of the way we regulate our media in the Internet Age, including Media Matters in NZ, who have been studiously ignored.
You see, dear Friends, while our TV and Radio broadcasters are subject to the oversight of the Broadcasting Standards Authority, and our print Media to the Press Tribunal, the reason that Cameron Slater is able to publicly slag off who he likes, when and where he likes, is that his particular medium has no rules, no restrictions, no complaints system or oversight, of any kind at all.
David Farrar
Indeed, it was David Farrar, one of the commentators implicated in all this kerfuffle about what's going on in the Blogosphere, who publicly suggested last week that his particular branch of the media should set up their own regulatory regime and code of practice.
Too late, David. Your own government, wedded to Freedom of Expression, have not been prepared to act to regulate our use of the Internet, even though the suggestion they should do so has been put to them many times in the past, by the likes of your Humble Servant, and the much more august Law Commission. This lack of action has up and bit them where it hurts really in the current election campaign, Prime Minister Key is on the rack over his alleged role in the Hager Sager, precisely because he has pretty much allowed certain media interests to do what they please throughout the term of his government.
There's a certain engaging irony in the way recent events pertaining to Internet regulation in this country have unfolded. The Law Commission produced a report last year called The News Media meets 'New Media': Rights, Responsibilities and Regulation in the Digital Age. This was a report requested by former Justice Minister Simon Power (irony on irony since the current Justice Minister The Hon. Judith Collins is heavily implicated in the present kerfuffle) in which he referred to some of our media being a sort of Wild West, without law and without restraint of any kind. His concern related to the Blogosphere, and also to activities such as cyber-stalking, and Internet pornography.
Hon. Judith Collins
Stay with me on this one. It was the spectacle of rape of under age girls being celebrated on the Internet by the so called "Roast Busters", which finally kicked the Government into gear, and they then introduced, in December last, under the name of Justice Minister Collins, the Harmful Digital Communications Bill, reported back to the House from the Justice and Electoral Law Select Committee in May this year, since when it has gone precisely nowhere.
And now the career of this same personage is apparently in the balance, in part because her friend Cameron Slater has been having his wicked way on the Blogosphere, without a skerrick of the legal oversight of the sort called for in the bill the government has introduced but taken no further.
As Connie Francis used to sing, Who's Sorry Now?
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
