A peculiar trip down Memory Lane

Something curious popped up in my comments box recently.

It came from someone who chose to remain anonymous (now there’s a surprise) and asked, in a phony tone of mateyness, “I wonder if Karl remembers his writings on Yugoslavia and the Serbs".

This nameless troll went on to quote at length from a column I wrote in April 1999 that was subsequently the subject of a complaint to the Press Council, as it was then called. He (and I'm guessing it was a male) seemed to think I would be stung by the reference to it.

As a matter of fact I do remember the column and, perhaps contrary to my commenter’s assumption, am happy to revisit it. I suppose I should take it as a perverse compliment that it’s still weighing on some unfortunate soul’s mind after all this time.

The column was published in the Evening Post and the Nelson Mail and recorded my feelings about the civil war then raging in the Balkans.

In it, I pleaded guilty, “probably for the first time in my life,” to a feeling of antagonism toward a specific race – namely, the people of Serbia.

“I don’t take pride in this,” I wrote, “but neither do I apologise for it. Humanity demands that we are repelled by the vile acts carried out in recent years in the name of Serbian nationalism.”

I noted that since the death of the communist dictator Tito and the breakup of the old Yugoslavia, “the Serbs have embarked on one barbaric series of atrocities after another, reactivating ethnic feuds that go back centuries. They are a disgrace to 20th century civilisation.”

I reminded my readers that the Serbs had given us the chilling phrase "ethnic cleansing" and I referred to then-recent events in Kosovo, where people were butchered, raped and driven from their homes “in systematic depredations that spring direct from the Dark Ages”.

Readers of this blog may recall some of the other appalling events of that era, notably the Bosnian Serb army’s four-year siege of Sarajevo (nearly 14,000 killed, 40 percent of them civilians) and the massacre at Srebrenica, in which Serbian soldiers slaughtered more than 8000 defenceless Muslim boys and men. Some of the perpetrators – Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic – were eventually convicted of war crimes.

My column was a tirade against the hideous excesses of militant ethno-nationalism, but a reader of the Nelson Mail complained to the Press Council that it was offensive and racist. “By most normal criteria – objectivity, fairness, balance, accuracy – the piece falls abysmally below acceptable standards and represents a breach of the Race Relations Act,” the complainant wrote.

She held that the column was deeply offensive not only to Serbians but to anyone who was affronted by racism. The Mail’s editor, David Mitchell, rejected the complaint and wrote a robust and eloquent defence in which he pointed out that my column didn’t condone racism but in fact condemned it “in very strong terms”.

I followed up that column with another in which I partially (but only partially) repented. I can’t find a copy of that second column, but in it I acknowledged there were good people of Serbian ethnicity and apologised for having smeared them by association with the barbaric acts carried out in the name of Serbian nationalism. I particularly remember a phone call from a polite but reproachful woman of Serbian descent who persuaded me that I’d overstated my case.

The woman who had complained about my column regarded my partial retraction as inadequate and declined to withdraw her complaint, as was her right. She wanted an acknowledgment from the Mail that my column “fell below acceptable standards” – a concession the principled David Mitchell, to his great credit, wasn’t prepared to make.

It then fell to the Press Council, chaired by the retired High Court judge Sir John Jeffries, to adjudicate on the complaint. It was not upheld. In a decision which he wrote himself, Jeffries (who died in 2019) had this to say:

“There can be no question but that Mr du Fresne expressed his views in both columns in the strongest and most forceful terms. He used rhetoric and passion to convey to his readers his unqualified repugnance of the present Serbian government, its people and its leader Slobodan Milosevic. Part of the rhetoric was to charge himself with racism and to plead guilty. Is Mr du Fresne by using that device, and others, to attract attention and support for his views in truth indulging in racial hatred and impliedly agitating against Serbs everywhere?

“Selecting some sentences and phrases from the April column and branding those parts as fomenting racial hatred that calls for disapprobation by the Press Council does not provide the answer. The Council believes it should go past the rhetorical devices and strategies to shock and awaken people to the brutality of what is happening in this year, in the Balkans, and instead go to the substance of the column.

“The first piece is not for racial hatred, it is against it. It is not for violence, but against it. The central point of the second column is that recourse should not be had to history to explain but that the violence should be halted right now. The political message of the piece is that Nato bombing be supported for the sole purpose of stopping the killing of thousands of Kosovars and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. When ethnic cleansing is the issue, some columnists choose not to express themselves by detached analysis using language of cold objectivity but prefer to startle and shock.

“To accuse oneself of racism and to plead guilty is in truth a device for demonstrating how evil racism is because it is able to infiltrate and contaminate the columnist against his own better judgment. The illustration had sacrificial overtones.

“This was not writing of an irresponsible, reckless or promiscuous nature. It was a powerfully expressed argument laced with emotion and passion. The Council in the name of objectivity, balance and judgment should not interfere with the freedom to write and publish such material. This is highly emotive writing but it does not call for disapprobation by the Council.”

So there we are. I'm left to scratch my head in wonderment that some tragically obsessed individual has dredged up this episode nearly a quarter-century later.

It’s an example of what’s called offence archaeology: the popular woke practice of unearthing statements or actions from the distant past in the hope of embarrassing or discrediting someone. But what’s the point? Here’s a tip for my anonymous commenter: offence archaeology works only if it causes harm, and if I thought that publishing his comment was likely to hurt me or damage my reputation, I would have simply deleted it. Instead, here I am giving him the oxygen he presumably craved, for the good reason that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I will even give him the satisfaction of quoting from his closing paragraph, in which he resorted to a childish personal insult (which I won't dignify by repeating), called me a bigot and an “admitted racist” and concluded: “You should have been reported and prosecuted under the New Zealand Race Relations Act.”

Sorry, but it’s a bit late for that now, as attractive as the idea might be to the Human Rights Commission. But I hope he feels better for having got it off his chest.

For what it's worth, the Press Council decision can be read here.

A milestone for the Press Council - perhaps its last

The Press Council celebrated its 40^th birthday in Wellington last night by staging a public forum with the theme: Looking Forward, Looking Back and the Constant Immutable Truths. Council chairman Barry Paterson QC, a former High Court judge, explained that the council had decided to make the most of its 40^th birthday because there was no guarantee that it would make 50 – a reference to the fact that its days may be numbered, since the Law Commission has proposed a new single media regulator to replace the council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Paterson briefly canvassed the council’s origins, recalling that it was set up by newspaper publishers to forestall calls from the Labour Party for statutory control of the press. Its founders took the view (these are my words, not Paterson’s) that the best way of defending the press against political interference was by maintaining high standards through self-regulation – hence the council’s main function of hearing and ruling on complaints against newspapers.

Paterson pointed out that former Justice Minister Simon Power had asked the Law Commission to review the regulatory regime covering New Zealand media not because of the ethical scandals engulfing the British press, but because of the emergence of the unregulated, “new”, digital media. Paterson emphasised that whatever changes were made as a result of the review, it was vital that the press remained free of government regulation.

Judge Arthur Tompkins of the District Court presented an idiosyncratic but scholarly history of free speech that encompassed religious reformer Martin Luther, Picasso’s famous painting depicting the bombing of Guernica and the signing by Churchill and Roosevelt of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which spoke of a world free of want and fear. The linking theme was that ideas matter (Luther), words matter (the Atlantic Charter) and images matter (Picasso). Tompkins told the disappointingly small gathering that the new regulatory framework covering the media must not sweep away the good along with that which had outlived its usefulness.

APN (aka The New Zealand Herald) Digital editor-in-chief Jeremy Rees and former Stuff social media editor Greer McDonald (who confided that she had grown to hate the term “social media”) talked frankly and insightfully about the impact of online media. The overall message was that it was an exciting and satisfying field to be working in, but it was evolving at breakneck speed and sometimes in unexpected directions.

Rees said everything he had been told about digital media five years ago turned out to be completely untrue (“we thought citizen journalism would take over – it didn’t”) and he couldn’t hazard a guess as to where things would go from here, although he thought there would be much greater differentiation between the type of content provided on different online platforms.

He reinforced one of my concerns about a possible adverse consequence of the shift away from traditional print media. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially he said that online providers would increasingly tailor content according to the preferences – including political preferences – of the user. In other words, a consumer with a history of seeking right-wing content (or left-wing, or whatever) will be fed information that complies with that preference.

Of course this is happening already as a result of users exercising their own choice, but if Rees is correct the trend will accelerate. This has implications for civil society, because one of the great virtues of “broad church” mainstream print media such as we have in New Zealand is that it exposes readers to a wide range of material. In the process they may come to consider ideas and opinions that are contrary to their own, and possibly even concede that they have some validity – surely no bad thing. This isn’t going to happen if online readers see only content that reinforces their existing prejudices.

Greer McDonald, who has just taken up a new appointment as digital editor of the Manawatu Standard (a fine newspaper – they print my column), talked about the impact of social media during the Christchurch earthquakes but noted that people still turned to the traditional media for reliable information. At one point a rumour spread via Twitter that the Riccarton Mall had collapsed – a furphy* that Fairfax journalists were able to extinguish by using the traditional methods, in other words picking up the phone and asking the people who knew.

The sceptical Luddite in me silently cheered at a couple of points McDonald made. She noted that there were only about 70,000 Twitter users and said journalists shouldn’t get excited or distracted by what was being said among such a small minority. And she rightly scorned the “race mentality” – the obsession with being the first to report even trivial information online, which she described as a sideshow. Bravo. (I touched on the same phenomenon here a few months ago.)

The council’s executive director, Mary Major, presented a slide show covering the council’s history and touching on celebrated skirmishes from the past involving such notables as Robert Muldoon and morals crusader Patricia Bartlett. (The former case, which followed Muldoon’s decision to cut off the flow of information to The Dominion, was a rare case of a complaint being brought by journalists against a politician, rather than vice-versa).

The evening wound up with a spirited speech by Sir Geoffrey Palmer in which he ranged across Milton’s Areopagitica, John Stuart Mill, the pernicious sedition laws (getting rid of them was the law reform of which he was most proud, although he had to wait until he was president of the Law Commission to achieve it), climate change (Justice Venning’s analysis in his recent finding against climate change sceptics was “devastating”) and the failings of television news (“a disaster”).

Palmer - the son of a newspaper editor - said he was not impressed by arguments that there was a crisis in journalism. The crisis, if it existed, was in the way journalism was delivered, but he was confident the problems would be overcome with creativity, determination and innovation.

I hope he’s right.

* Furphy: a false report or rumour. Wagons made by an Australian company called Furphy carted water behind the front lines on the Western Front during World War One. They became synonymous with misleading gossip about what was happening on the battlefield. It's a term widely used by Australian journalists ("I checked it out, but it was a furphy").

Still crazy after all these years

It’s a strange old world and no mistake. In 1999, when the Balkan territory of Kosovo was being ethnically cleansed by Serbian nationalists (eventually triggering belated Nato retaliation in the form of bombing raids), I wrote a newspaper column expressing disgust at the inhuman acts perpetrated in the Balkans in the name of Serbian nationalism.

Though I admit it was a strongly worded column, provoking a number of angry letters and an official complaint to the New Zealand Press Council, I never imagined it would still be reverberating 12 years later. But a few days ago, on this blog, a comment appeared out of the blue – bizarrely, under an inconsequential and totally unrelated post I had written about cricket – that revives the controversy.

It came from someone writing under the name of Kelly Slater, and I now feel obliged to write this post simply to explain to mystified readers what it’s all about. Slater’s rant (assuming Slater is a genuine name, which is doubtful) obviously aroused some interest, because the post attracted an unusually high number of readers, and I can’t believe they were simply interested in my flippant comments about cricket. Hence this attempt to fill in the background.

My column was published in Wellington’s Evening Post and the Nelson Evening Mail, and though it was triggered by events in Kosovo, it was written when the memory of Serbian atrocities in Srebrenica and Sarajevo – some of the most appalling events in my lifetime – was still fresh.

Untangling exactly who was responsible for what in the ghastly charnel house that was the Balkans in the 1990s is notoriously difficult. No one – including Croatians, Muslims and Kosovars – was blameless. But there was no doubt about Serbian responsibility for the worst excesses, and that was the subject of my column. To convey the tone of it, here’s one paragraph:

“The events of the past few years in the Balkans have produced in me a deep detestation of all things Serbian. I don’t take any pride in this, but neither do I apologise for it. Humanity demands that we are repelled by the vile acts carried out in recent years in the name of Serbian nationalism.”

Chastened by some of the subsequent responses, including a conversation with an elderly Serbian woman from Levin, I partially recanted in a subsequent column in which I wrote:

“To treat all people of Serbian descent as sharing culpability for the barbaric behaviour of [Slobodan] Milosevic and his brutish gangs of murderers and rapists was quite plainly simplistic and wrong, and offensive to those Serbs who adhere to humanitarian values and are shamed by the frightful acts carried out in the name of Serbian nationalism.

“To the many good and decent Serbian people living in New Zealand, therefore, I apologise. It was quite wrong of me to visit upon them the sins of the vile people who dishonour the name of Yugoslavia. Does this mean I also retract the rest of my comments? Not for a moment.”

A reader of the Nelson Evening Mail decided I wasn't chastened enough and complained to the Press Council. The then editor of the Mail, the admirable David Mitchell, went to some lengths – far more than most editors in such circumstances – to argue in my defence, and the complaint was subsequently dismissed in a thoughtful decision written by the council's then chairman, former High Court judge Sir John Jeffries. The decision read, in part:

“The first [column] is not for racial hatred, it is against it. It is not for violence, but against it. The central point of the second column is that recourse should not be had to history to explain but that the violence should be halted right now. The political message of the piece is that Nato bombing be supported for the sole purpose of stopping the killing of thousands of Kosovars and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. When ethic cleansing is the issue some columnists choose not to express themselves by detached analysis using language of cold objectivity but prefer to startle and shock.

“This was not writing of an irresponsible, reckless or promiscuous nature. It was powerfully expressed argument laced with emotion and passion. The Council in the name of objectivity, balance and judgment should not interfere with the freedom to write and publish such material. This is highly emotive writing but it does not call for disapprobation by the Council.”

You might think the matter would have rested there, but no. In 2006 my columns were dredged up on an aggressively pro-Serbian website run by someone calling himself Jared Israel, who described me not only as racist (fair enough – I had confessed in my first column to racist sentiments toward Serbians) but as an anti-Semite as well, based on his particular interpretation of the language I used. This might come as a surprise to my Jewish friends, but there you go.

Now, another five years on, this “Kelly Slater” has weighed in. My column may be 12 years old, but that's a mere moment in time to people who still nurture bitter grudges and hatred arising from events that happened 600 years ago.

It’s pointless trying to engage in rational, coherent debate with such people; the manic-obsessive tone of his/her comments, with all their wild-eyed accusations and bizarre non-sequiturs (I don't like murderous Serbian nationalists so must love Croatians, Muslims and Kosovar organ harvesters), speaks for itself.

The crucifixion of Deborah Coddington

Last year, Deborah Coddington was crucified for an article she wrote in North & South magazine entitled Asian Angst: Is it time to send some back?, in which she examined Asian (well, Chinese really) immigration and involvement in crime.

The article caused an outcry and resulted in several complaints to the Press Council, which were upheld. One of the complaints concerned inflammatory language (such as “a flick through the crime files show the Asian menace has been steadily creeping up on us”), but the main complaint turned on Coddington’s use of statistics.

Several complainants argued that in calculating the Asian crime rate, Coddington had ignored or overlooked the fact that the Asian population had increased overall. They said, and the council agreed, that her flawed figures undermined the whole thrust of the article and rendered it unbalanced.

In her defence, Coddington said the purpose of the article was “to expose readers to the downside of Asian immigration, which I clearly stated has been overwhelmingly good for New Zealand”. She also pointed out that her article drew on information from experts such as the head of the Auckland drug squad. The reason she hadn’t measured the increase in Asian crime against the increase in the Asian population overall was that she didn’t want to insult her readers’ intelligence.

The Press Council accepted North & South’s right to investigate immigration policy and crime rates relating to a specific ethnic community – I don’t see how it could have done otherwise – but held that “the key issue was the absence of correlation between the Asian population and the crime rate”. It did not accept Coddington’s argument that she had mentioned the increase in the Asian population and that it would have insulted readers’ intelligence to link that with the crime figures. “The linkage was vital and should have been made explicit,” the council said. To talk of a gathering crime wave was wrong.

The council noted that there was an explicit statement in the third paragraph of Coddington’s article that the vast majority of Asians in New Zealand were hard-working and focused on getting their children educated and avoiding dependency on the state. But it held that this was negated by the subsequent use of phrases such as “The Asian menace has steadily been creeping up on us”. The failure to place Asian crime in context “could not but stigmatise a whole group”.

I was uncomfortable with the council’s finding in this case, though it appears to have been unanimous. I thought the council failed to strike a proper balance between freedom of expression, as set out in the Bill of Rights Act, and the prohibition on discrimination in the Human Rights Act, both of which it cited in its decision.

The Human Rights Act prohibition on discrimination is reflected in the council’s own principle that publications should not place “gratuitous emphasis” on minority groups, race, colour etc. But the Bill of Rights Act provides, crucially, that whenever a statute can be given a meaning consistent with the Bill of Rights Act, “that meaning shall be preferred to any other meaning”.

I’m no lawyer, but that suggests to me that where the right to freedom of expression comes into conflict with anti-discrimination provisions, or the right to feel offended, the law holds that freedom of expression should take precedence.

Besides, if Coddington's piece stigmatised all Chinese in New Zealand, does that mean the media should stop reporting the criminal activities of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob for fear it will stigmatise all Maori?

Perhaps the most distasteful aspect of the “Asian angst” controversy, however, was the way in which the left – including many journalists – savaged Coddington and pinned that obnoxious and simplistic epithet “racist” on her. I suspect this had a lot to do with the fact that she was a former ACT MP.

Coddington’s article examined a legitimate issue. No one reading newspapers over the past 10 years could fail to be aware of increased Chinese crime (let’s be specific here, and discard that vague euphemism “Asian”). Coddington’s critics seized on one central weakness in her story and argued that this negated the whole piece. I don’t agree that it did. We are still left with the fact that we have a Chinese crime problem – mostly manifested in drug dealing and kidnapping – that we didn’t have 20 years ago. The danger is that the uproar over Coddington’s story may have created the impression that the subject is now a no-go area, and any journalist foolhardy enough to venture there can expect to be pilloried as she was.

Why do I mention all this now? Because both The Dominion Post and The New Zealand Herald report today that five-year-old Cina Ma, aka Xin Xin, may have been kidnapped by a fellow Chinese. The Dom Post quoted a Chinese friend of Cina Ma’s family as saying it’s a common practice in China for children to be kidnapped and used as leverage when business deals go wrong. Cina’s grandparents and aunt were reported as believing that could explain her abduction. The Herald, meanwhile, said the fact that Cina Ma shouted at her masked kidnapper in Chinese suggested that she thought he would understand the language (Cina Ma evidently also speaks good English).

The Dom Post also ran a helpful side panel listing other high-profile crimes in recent years involving Chinese. Most are kidnappings, a crime virtually unheard of in New Zealand until relatively recently. The paper reports that in 2002, police recorded 22 cases of kidnapping or extortion involving “Asians”. But the Dom Post’s list is far from exhaustive; reports of Chinese involvement in high-level drug-smuggling and other crime are commonplace.

Does this reflect on the Chinese community generally? Of course not, any more than stories about Black Power and the Mongrel Mob reflect on all Maori. Most Chinese (as Coddington’s article acknowledged) are hard-working, honest citizens who make a welcome addition to New Zealand’s demographic mix. But no amount of politically correct sensitivity can disguise the fact that there is a hard-core criminal element in the Chinese community, which is what Coddington’s article tried to explain.

As Chris Trotter pointed out in his Dom Post column last week, Chinese community activist Peter Low has confirmed the existence of triad gangs in Auckland. Trotter suggested, rightly, that Coddington would be justified in standing up and demanding an apology from her tormentors.

Trotter went on to write that triads dominate the traffic in Class A drugs and are responsible for most human trafficking, money-laundering, loan-sharking, counterfeiting and prostitution. Who, I wonder, is going to take him to the Press Council? Or the Dom Post, for having the audacity to list Chinese involvement in kidnappings and extortion?

[Disclaimer: To forestall the inevitable accusation of mates defending mates, I am not a personal friend of Deborah Coddington. I have met her two or three times at functions and spoken to her on the phone maybe four or five times over a period of many years. But I believe she was unfairly targeted over her Asian angst story, and I suspect some of her critics were out to destroy her credibility and end her career as a journalist.]

Paranoia, or what?

BEING something of a technophobe, I was for many years sceptical toward the internet. Not any more, as this blog (ugly word, that, as my wife says) attests. There’s no denying that the worldwide web has empowered millions of people by allowing them to receive and share information and opinion that they might not otherwise have had access to. In the process, it has introduced a liberating new dynamic to political debate.

But as with many advances, the net is a double-edged sword. It provides a platform for anonymous ranters and semi-literate ideologues of all political colours whose infantile and toxic rhetoric makes the much-derided callers of talkbackland seem positively profound.

It’s also a wonderful toy for mischief-makers. As evidence of this, I cite something that directly affected me.

Until recently, anyone clicking on the Google search button to find information about Karl du Fresne (yes, I admit doing this from time to time) would have pulled up a reference to a 1999 decision by the Press Council relating to a complaint about a column I wrote on Serbian ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

What came up on screen were the following words: “By most normal criteria – objectivity, fairness, balance, accuracy – Karl du Fresne’s piece falls abysmally below acceptable standards ...”

Anyone seeing this, and noting that the source was a Press Council decision, would reasonably assume that these were the council’s own words - and very damning words at that. In fact they were the words of the complainant. The council did not uphold the complaint against me. But to discover this, you had to read the full decision, which I imagine few people would have taken the trouble to do.

Someone else – not the Press Council – was responsible for highlighting this misleading excerpt. Significantly, it appeared on the net at about the same time that I attracted the malevolent attention of a stridently pro-Serbian website which had stumbled across my 1999 column and the subsequent complaint against me. I suspect the two developments are not unrelated.

The attacks on me by the pro-Serbian website didn't concern me, since the perpetrator was clearly deranged. You can hardly take seriously someone who defends the vile extremes of Serbian nationalism. But the misuse of the Press Council decision, which was clearly aimed at damaging my reputation, suggested to me that someone was manipulating the net for their own purpose.

The reference always came up within the first 10 search results. Now I was under the impression that the order in which search results come up on screen is determined by the number of hits on each one (someone more net-savvy might be able to confirm or contradict this). But I can scarcely believe that there was such interest in a 1999 Press Council decision about an obscure newspaper column on Serbian atrocities that it showed up, month after month, as one of the most frequently read items about me on the net.

I finally tired of seeing the decision misrepresented in this way and when I drew it to the council’s attention, it took prompt action – for which I am grateful – to have the reference removed. Council secretary Mary Major told me their webmaster was unable to explain why the entry showed up the way it did. While it was acknowledged as odd, the webmaster thought it unlikely that someone had deliberately engineered it that way.

Hmmm. Call me paranoid if you like, but I still nurse the suspicion that this was a piece of malicious internet mischief.