Not a good week for free speech

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, July 5).

New Zealand has been stricken by the most serious outbreak yet of the highly contagious condition I call acute sensitivity disorder.

Not all women were blinded by fury at what Alasdair Thompson said about menstruation affecting women's productivity. Some thought the outcry was grossly disproportionate to the supposed insult. But few people of either sex were prepared to stick up for Mr Thompson - not because they thought that what he said was indefensible, but because they were intimidated into silence by the howling of the lynch mob.

A high-profile Auckland businesswoman - a solo mother - told me she wanted to support Mr Thompson because she thought he had been unfairly pilloried, but she wouldn't take the risk of saying anything publicly.

That illustrates how easily free speech and public debate can be stifled when the vengeful mob takes over. This was Hitler's technique: to frighten opponents into submission with such an overwhelming show of force that no-one dared dissent. Mr Thompson was abandoned even by his spineless board of directors.

Worse still, elements of the media were complicit in this, stoking the flames of outrage and orchestrating the vilification of a man whose worst sin seems to be that he sometimes shoots his mouth off.

Many female journalists couldn't see past their own indignation. The professional obligation to report the issue fairly and dispassionately was discarded.

TV3 in particular savaged and mocked Mr Thompson, jettisoning all pretence of neutrality and abandoning the once-sacrosanct principle of separating reportage from opinion. Not a pretty sight.

I wonder how many of Mr Thompson's attackers - including a former prime minister who apparently suffers from the delusion that she's still the Queen Bee - took the trouble to watch the unedited version of his 28-minute interview with Mihingarangi Forbes from Campbell Live, in which he attempted to clarify his views on the disparity between men's and women's pay rates. (You needed to watch the whole thing online because TV3 broadcast only four minutes that showed Mr Thompson reacting to provocation by a reporter whose interest was solely in what he had said about women's periods.)

Nothing Mr Thompson said was belittling to women. He didn't say men were better workers (quite the contrary, in fact), and there was nothing to suggest that he thought the 12 per cent pay disparity between the sexes was a desirable state of affairs.

Much of what he said simply reflected the reality of the employment market: for example, that women are more likely than men to take time off when children are sick, and that many women's careers are interrupted by motherhood, with a consequent impact on their earning potential.

The worst he can be accused of is that he made a careless generalisation in the initial radio discussion and didn't have facts to support it. But he was howled down so deafeningly that public figures in future will think very carefully before expressing a view on anything, and good people who might otherwise be tempted to enter public life may decide it's just not worth the grief.

All of which is good for the control freaks who want to dictate what we think and say, but bad for democracy.

* * *

THE irony is that by the end of the week, much of the heat had been taken off Mr Thompson and the Employers & Manufacturers Association (Northern) by another ugly display of bullying that frightened two book chains into declaring they won't stock Ian Wishart's book about Macsyna King and her part in the death of the Kahui twins.

This edges us even closer to Nazism, which was ruthlessly efficient at discouraging people from reading things that those in power didn't like.

There is some frighteningly muddled thinking going on here. Boycotting Wishart's book won't bring back the Kahui twins, and it won't remove the stain left on the soul of the country by their deaths. Neither will a boycott prevent any more abused children from dying.

But if there's even a remote chance that the book will shed a chink of light on the circumstances that led the Kahui babies to die, and therefore help us understand how these things happen, then society stands to gain from its publication.

It has been said in defence of Paper Plus and The Warehouse that booksellers make decisions every week about what books to stock and what not to stock. True - but in this case the decision not to sell the book has been made for fear of a consumer backlash, which makes it an act of moral cowardice. It can't be because the two chains disapprove of the content, because no-one has seen it yet.

This raises the interesting question of whether booksellers, as disseminators of information in a liberal democracy, have special obligations to society that don't apply to other retailers.

All things considered, not a good week for freedom of speech.

GREENPEACE DOES IT - WHY SHOULDN'T MONA KAHUI?

The Dom Post last Saturday published a photo of Mona Kahui, aunty of the dead twins Chris and Cru, kissing their headstone at Mangere Cemetery. Her partner Stuart King, half-brother of the twins’ mother Macsyna King, was with her.

What were we to make of this picture? My first thought was that here were two representatives of a disgraced and discredited whanau trying hard to rehabilitate themselves in the public eye by demonstrating some humanity. To be fair, an article in the Dom Post the previous day had portrayed the couple as possibly the least dysfunctional members of the extended family. Mona was attending a school for teenage mothers in an attempt to get an educational qualification and King was the only person in the King-Kahui household with a job.

My second thought, only milliseconds later, was that there might be a more specific motive behind the appearance at the cemetery. The couple’s daughter Cyene, born only a month before Chris and Cru, was taken into CYF custody after the twins’ death. Mona has been fighting since to regain custody of Cyene and has repeatedly travelled to Gisborne to visit her. I concluded (I don’t think cynically) that the performance at the cemetery was, at least in part, a public relations exercise aimed at showing that Mona and her partner were caring human beings and thus worthy of another chance at looking after their own child.

My third thought had less to do with Mona Kahui and Stuart King than with the media’s role. The photo at the cemetery was taken by John Selkirk, the Dom Post’s veteran Auckland photographer. I don’t think John just happened by chance to be at Mangere cemetery with his camera gear when the couple turned up. The paper had obviously been tipped off in advance. In fact the couple’s attendance at the cemetery may well have been dependent on the Dom Post turning up too.

Would Mona Kahui and Stuart King have gone to the cemetery and kissed the twins’ headstone if there was no newspaper photographer there to record the occasion? Of course I can’t say. But instinct and experience makes me sceptical.

If the couple were merely intent on expressing sincere grief and affection for the dead twins, there was no reason for a newspaper to be present. So the event was at least to some extent contaminated by a PR motive. I suspect the Dom Post was enlisted as an accomplice in the couple’s plan to get their child back.

If this was the case, Kahui and King were only doing what politicians, pressure groups and PR firms do all the time – staging what the British journalist Nick Davies calls “pseudo events”, manufactured to generate publicity and therefore advance an underlying agenda.

These are not genuine news events which happen spontaneously. They are publicity stunts, orchestrated to attract media attention.

Greenpeace is an acknowledged master in this field, scoring prime newspaper and TV coverage every time its activists unfurl a protest banner on a nuclear power station or abseil on to an oil rig. Would they do it if the media paid no attention? Of course not. They depend on what Margaret Thatcher once described as “the oxygen of publicity”.

Politicians do it all the time too. A hypothetical example is the Minister of Education choosing a kindergarten as the venue for the announcement of an early childhood learning policy (as if the kindy kids really want to know), then having his/her picture taken pretending to play with the kids in the sandpit. The media are complicit in these sorts of stunts every day. Contrived photo opportunities have become part of the daily news diet.

Harmless? Relatively. Dishonest? Well, yes.

Lest I be accused of being holier than thou, I confess that in seven years as a news editor I would have been party to similar deceptions myself. And I don’t mean to single the Dom Post out for criticism, because everyone in the media does it all the time, without thinking. That’s the problem – bad habits develop over time, to the point where no one questions them.

I can afford to be judgmental now that I’m safely removed from the pressures of the newsroom. But if I were a news editor wanting a strong news picture for page 3 and the picture desk offered me one of Mona Kahui kissing her dead twins’ headstone, in the very week when the country is trembling with outrage all over again at their violent deaths, would I turn it down? Hmmm.

Nick Davies’ recent book Flat Earth News, which I hope to review on this site shortly, takes a highly critical look at how the British media have been enlisted by the spin industry. His thesis is that the news agenda is no longer controlled by journalists, but is largely dictated by spin merchants pushing their own political, ideological or commercial interests.

It’s far worse in Britain than here, but clearly it’s prevalent enough in New Zealand for Mona Kahui and Stuart King to have cottoned on.