Why the Maiki Sherman-Lloyd Burr incident is a matter of public interest

 A good and respected friend – like me, a former newspaper editor – takes the view that the furore over TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman’s alleged verbal abuse of Stuff press gallery journalist Lloyd Burr is not news; that at best, it would warrant a mention in a gossip column.

Fair enough, but I differ. If the high-profile journalists who provide the public with political news and comment are bitchy, entitled, childish, over-stimulated and perhaps inclined to run off at the mouth after a few drinks at the end of a long day, I think we deserve to know. That knowledge is potentially very helpful in judging how much notice we should take of them, or indeed whether we should take any notice of them at all.

You can be sure that if MPs behaved in the same scandalous way and the media learned about it, they’d be all over the story. Ah, people might say; MPs are different. They’re public figures, elected and accountable – which is true. But high-profile journalists like Sherman wield more power than many politicians, and certainly a whole lot more than your anonymous, run-of-the-mill list MP.

They effectively set the political agenda. They present themselves as people the public can trust and whose opinions we should respect. That being the case, any character flaws that become apparent – such as might be evident from the hurling of vicious personal insults over drinks in a senior minister’s office – become a matter of legitimate public interest; the more so when the alleged antagonist is employed by a taxpayer-funded broadcasting organisation and therefore has a special obligation to behave in a mature and responsible way.

It’s true that we may not yet know the full facts of the incident. It’s the nature of these things that the complete truth often emerges bit by bit over time. While it doesn’t seem to be in dispute that Sherman used the word alleged (to wit, “faggot”), it’s been reported that she was responding to a racial provocation. Either way, the incident presents an unflattering picture of the country’s supposed journalism elite and won’t do anything to lift public trust in the media from its woeful level. Again, that makes it a matter of public interest (and by that I don’t necessarily mean something the public is interested in, because for all I know the public isn’t, and probably regards the affair as akin to a school playground squabble).

Just to complicate things, some commentators are questioning blogger Ani O’Brien’s motives in breaking the story. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m assuming they were honourable. I even sent her an email congratulating her for exposing what had happened while the mainstream media resolutely looked the other way. But O’Brien does run a political consultancy and it’s undeniable that politics has never been murkier than now, with political agendas and connections that are not always out in the open.