My experience of censorship and what it tells us about the new culture of journalism

The Free Speech Union held its annual general meeting last weekend in Christchurch. I was part of a panel that discussed free speech and the media. The following were my introductory remarks, which refer to incidents previously covered on this blog. 

Two years ago I was invited to write a regular opinion column for the National Business Review, a paper for which I had once worked in the distant past. A contract was signed and I duly submitted my first column.

It was also my last. The co-editors of NBR disagreed with a couple of points I had made and wanted to delete two crucial paragraphs. I refused, the column never appeared, and the contract was torn up.

My column, ironically enough, was essentially about the culture wars and their chilling impact on public debate. In it I said, among other things, that a truly honest debate about race relations in New Zealand would acknowledge that while Maori had suffered damaging long-term consequences from colonisation, they had also benefited from the abolition of slavery, tribal warfare and cannibalism.

I also said that an honest debate would acknowledge that race relations in New Zealand had mostly been harmonious and respectful. 

One of the two co-editors proposed to delete those two paragraphs. I was told by email: “We want to avoid a hostile response for no real gain”. Now there’s editorial courage for you.

In fact it turned out that the real problem was that he disagreed with what I had said. It was his opinion that cannibalism, slavery and tribal warfare would have ended anyway regardless of colonisation, and he disputed my opinion that race relations had been mostly harmonious – this from a Scottish expatriate who had lived in New Zealand only a relatively short time, so had limited experience on which to base his opinion.

I invite you to consider the irony of my being contracted to write an opinion column, presumably because it was felt I had something worthwhile to say, and then being censored because my opinion was one the editor didn’t share.

In a past life as an editorial executive with a metropolitan daily newspaper, I spent more than 10 years dealing almost daily with columnists of every conceivable political stripe. In all that time, no column was censored because the paper disapproved of what was said. All that concerned us was that the columns shouldn’t be defamatory or factually incorrect.

It seems that on NBR, two other factors must be considered: the column must be one the editors agree with, and it mustn’t risk offending anyone.

My second example of censorship occurred last year. Some of you will be familiar with NZ Politics Daily, which is a collection of political news stories and opinion columns compiled by the respected political scientist Bryce Edwards and distributed every day by email. It’s an influential guide to what’s happening in politics.

A senior political journalist, a member of the parliamentary press gallery, objected to the fact that NZ Politics Daily sometimes included pieces that I had written and surreptitiously emailed Bryce Edwards urging him not to publish them.

This journalist described me as a racist and a misogynist. He concluded with the line: “I think your readers would do well not to be served up this trash.”

This was another first for me. It’s hardly unusual for journalists to disagree with each other or engage in bitchy personal rivalry, but to call for someone to be cancelled because you don’t approve of what they write crosses a very perilous threshold.

This journalist’s sneaky, would-be hatchet job – which Edwards rightly rebuffed – reinforced my suspicion that some journalists are more than merely ignorant of the importance of free speech in a liberal democracy. They are actively hostile to it.

To return to the NBR episode, I should say here that I absolutely defend the right of newspaper owners to decide what they will or will not publish. They must be free to say what they want, within the law, and even to suppress material they don’t like. That is part of the package of rights known as freedom of the press. But they must accept that it comes with a proviso.

Media owners need to understand their vital role in a liberal democracy as enablers of robust public debate. They also need to accept that if they abandon that role by taking it upon themselves to dictate and restrict the opinions the public is allowed to read and hear, they risk relinquishing whatever credibility and public respect they enjoy.

I’ve written two published works about press freedom in New Zealand, one in 1994 and another in 2005. When I wrote those, any threat to press freedom was seen principally as likely to come from the state.

But here we are in 2023, and press freedom is being steadily undermined from within, by people who seem not to value the traditions of openness and free speech that give the media their legitimacy and moral authority. They have repudiated a tradition of balance and fairness that has existed for the best part of one hundred years, and in the process they have fatally compromised their own standing. I don’t think anyone saw this coming.

The key problem here, as I see it, is that the media have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect society as it is. Instead they have positioned themselves as advocates for the sort of society they think we should be. This almost inevitably requires the exclusion of opinions that stand in the way of that vision.

Public opinion has become largely irrelevant. The media have set themselves above and apart from the communities they purport to serve, and in the process they have severed the vital connection that gives them their legitimacy. They have so compromised themselves that I think their future must be in doubt. Thank you.

The centrepiece of the Free Speech Union meeting was the keynote address by the distinguished British jurist and historian Lord Jonathan Sumption, which can be read here. It was a masterful and compelling summary of the attacks being made on freedom of speech and the reasons why they must be opposed.

The Family First advertisement you didn't see

Too hot to handle: the Family First ad that six papers refused to publish.

Last Wednesday, Family First launched a campaign of resistance against the pernicious spread of gender identity ideology. The “What is a Woman?” campaign invites people to sign a petition that defines a woman as an adult human female – a proposition so self-evident that the necessity of affirming it would have been considered laughable only a few years ago.

Family First’s campaign was to be kicked off on Wednesday morning with full-page advertisements in six daily papers: The New Zealand Herald, the Bay of Plenty Times, The Post, the Christchurch Press, the Otago Daily Times and the Southland Times. The ads were prepared, submitted and accepted for publication. But then something very peculiar happened.

After receiving chatty emails confirming that the ads were set to run in all six papers, Family First was told at 8.30 on Tuesday night that the ad had been pulled from the New Zealand Herald and the Bay of Plenty Times – both NZME titles – pending “reconsideration”.

The ad had been supplied to NZME on June 27, nearly a month earlier. By refusing to publish it, NZME not only reneged on its earlier acceptance but effectively sabotaged the launch of a carefully prepared campaign by leaving it till the last minute to disclose that the ad been pulled.

That was followed on Wednesday – the day the ad was supposed to appear – by an email from Stuff baldly stating that the ad wouldn’t be published in The Post or The Press either. The reason given was that “the campaign doesn’t align with the values of Stuff due to the sensitive nature of the content”.

The decision was made on Tuesday but Stuff didn’t have the courtesy to notify Family First until after midday on the day the ad was due to appear. Or perhaps it was courage rather than courtesy that Stuff lacked, because advising Family First after the event meant it was too late to argue.

In what was either a nauseating display of phony empathy or an appeal for forgiveness after an appalling act of bad faith, Stuff’s group sales manager signed off the email with the words “Thanks for understanding”. It would have been less insulting to say nothing.

That left the Otago Daily Times, which is nominally independent but on this occasion cravenly decided to play it safe by going with the crowd. The ODT advised Family First – again, on the day the ad was supposed to run – that its chief executive had decided to follow the lead of the two big media companies. “Sorry for the late notice”, the email said. In fact, since it was sent at 6.34 on Wednesday morning, it was no notice at all.

Both NZME and the ODT subsequently offered to run the ad on Friday – an offer understandably declined by Family First because it was too late to coincide with the campaign launch. Apparently nothing more has been heard from Stuff.

To summarise the story so far, New Zealand’s three major newspaper publishers refused an ad that asked the dangerously provocative question “What is a woman?” and invited readers to go to the Family First website, where they could sign a petition urging that the definition of a woman as an adult human female be written into law and public policies. (You can find it here.)

In other words, media organisations colluded in the suppression of a legitimate contribution to debate on a matter of compelling public interest. The rest of the media, meanwhile, obligingly helped to conceal the scandal by ignoring the Family First press statement that exposed it.

Was it a conspiracy, or just a cockup? An email released by Family First indicates the Herald panicked when it heard that the ODT “got grief” for running the ad, although it hadn’t even seen the light of day. According to this account, “Stuff got wind of it and pulled it as well”. The ODT then followed suit so the industry could be seen as presenting a united front. 

All this is alarming enough, but what makes it more disturbing is that the ODT staff member indicated that the pulling of the ad was an editorial decision. If that’s true, then the editors who made the call abrogated their responsibility to enable free and open debate of political issues. 

Newspaper advertising departments might be forgiven for getting cold feet over a possible backlash from the publication of an advertisement – even one as demonstrably inoffensive as the Family First ad – on a controversial issue, but that doesn’t appear to have been the case here. They accepted the ad.

In any case, editorial executives are bound by other imperatives. They may have acted legally, but they have a professional and ethical obligation to allow people the same right of free speech that they assert for themselves every day of their working lives.

That didn’t happen in this instance, and there can be only two possible explanations. One is timidity, which is bad enough. The other is that the ad was cancelled because the media decision-makers didn’t like what it stood for, which is even more reprehensible. Stuff’s weasel words – “the campaign doesn’t align with the values of Stuff” – clearly point to the latter explanation.

Small wonder that an increasing number of New Zealanders feel unable to trust the media, or that conspiracy theories flourish. When a legitimate ad from a legitimate pressure group is blocked at the 11^th hour without a valid explanation, people are bound to wonder what else is being censored.

 

That Garrick Tremain cartoon

Cartoons can be a tricky issue for editors. It’s not enough that they should simply be funny, and indeed some of the best are not. To be truly effective, cartoons need an edge. They should be provocative.

Accordingly, editors need to cut cartoonists a lot of slack. They will sometimes publish cartoons they know some readers will find offensive, and that they may even find offensive themselves.

The Media Council, formerly the Press Council, takes a liberal view of cartoons (by which I mean liberal in the classical rather than the lame, woke sense) and so do the courts. When Labour MP Louisa Wall took the Otago Daily Times to court over two Al Nisbet cartoons which she considered racist, Justice Matthew Muir agreed that they were insulting but held that they didn’t breach the Human Rights Act.

Whatever you thought of the cartoons, the decision could only be seen as a victory for free speech and a defence of the right to upset people. Regardless of their ideological persuasions, cartoonists would very soon be extinct as a species if they were denied that right.

Having said all that, sometimes a paper publishes a cartoon that seems to strike a sour note with almost everyone. The Garrick Tremain cartoon published this week by the aforementioned ODT was such a cartoon.

It lamely attempted to make humour of the measles epidemic in Samoa. But the deaths of 55 children are no one’s idea of a joke and the cartoonist couldn’t even claim to be making a point. Both the editor of the paper and Tremain himself admit it was a bad lapse of judgment. Tremain says it was a limp joke but he can’t wind the clock back.

Will that satisfy the vigilantes crying out for utu? Not a chance. They won’t rest until they have someone’s head on a platter.

The ODT’s apology, they say, is not enough. It never is. Among other things, they want the paper’s staff to undergo racism training. But where does race enter into it? The cartoon would have been offensive regardless of the ethnicity of the measles victims.

Auckland University of Technology journalism lecturer Richard Pamatatau has joined the pile-on, saying the ODT has a history of publishing racist cartoons and Tremain should be dumped. I wonder, am I the only one troubled by the irony of a journalism lecturer calling for someone to be silenced?

Pamatatau says Tremain’s cartoons are not what cartoons are supposed to be, but he’s no more entitled to present himself as the arbiter of what cartoons should say than I am.

Bottom line: being offended from time to time is the price we pay for freedom of speech, a quid-pro-quo that most people in a liberal democracy are happy to accept.

I would certainly far prefer to go on being offended – as I often am by cartoonists – than concede to people like Pamatatau the right to determine what views I may be exposed to. Given a choice between bad taste and puritanical censorship, I’ll take the bad taste every time.

If we start banning people of bad moral character, where do we stop?

CLARIFICATION: In the column published below, I said that Harvey Weinstein had been found guilty of sexual assault "by non-denial". In fact a spokesperson for Weinstein, quoted in the October 2017 New Yorker article that first revealed the accusations against him, said he "unequivocally denied" allegations of non-consensual sex. However it would be fair to say that subsequent statements on his behalf have been equivocal at best.  

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and stuff.co.nz, May 16.)

I have never heard the American R&B singer R. Kelly – not consciously, anyway – so it’s unlikely that I’ll lose any sleep over the announcement that the digital music streaming service Spotify has taken his records off its playlist. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued.

Spotify removed Kelly from its playlist as part of a new “Hate Content and Hateful Conduct” policy. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the implementation of this policy is probably related in some way to the uproar over Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent naming and shaming of countless alleged sexual predators in show business.

The virulent Me Too and Time’s Up movements, which have given a voice to women claiming to have been the victims of celebrity abusers, has achieved such power and momentum that companies in the entertainment business have been forced into damage control mode. There is a hint of panic in the way some of these corporations have hastened to protect their precious brands from stars whose sexual histories have become a liability.

The world has witnessed a veritable parade of the disgraced as previously respected entertainment names have been sacked or blacklisted, often on the basis of unproven allegations. 

Weinstein and Bill Cosby are the highest-profile casualties so far – found guilty by non-denial in Weinstein’s case and by a criminal trial in Cosby’s. But I didn’t realise how many more names had been implicated in this unedifying saga until I conducted a search on Google.

Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Dustin Hoffman, Ben Affleck, Steven Seagal, Garrison Keillor, the writer-director James Toback and the TV host Charlie Rose I knew about. But I was unaware of allegations against others including Richard Dreyfuss, celebrity chef Mario Batali, Larry King, Charlie Sheen, Oliver Stone, John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone, along with many more whose names were unfamiliar to me but are obviously prominent in the entertainment world.

In some of these cases, offending was acknowledged and apologised for; in others it was strenuously denied. Either way, reputations are tarnished, perhaps irreparably. The principle that people are innocent until proven guilty has been trampled underfoot in the media feeding frenzy.

But back to R. Kelly. Even cursory research into his background reveals allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, some of it too unpleasant to detail here. He has never been convicted of an offence (he was acquitted on child pornography charges over a sex video involving an under-age girl and separately paid $250,000 to settle a claim that he had sex with a 15-year-old), but a social media campaign called #MuteRKelly has had him in its sights for some time.

Spotify insists it doesn’t censor content because of the behaviour of the performer, but its own statements suggest otherwise. Its head of content told Billboard magazine, in tortuous management-speak: “We look at issues around hateful conduct, where you have an artist or another creator who has done something off-platform that is so particularly out of line with our values, egregious, in a way that it becomes something that we don't want to associate ourselves with.”

This is where it gets intriguing, because if R. Kelly has been censored because of bad behaviour, as seems obvious, it could set a fascinating precedent.

Consider this. One of my all-time favourite movies is Chinatown, from 1974. It was directed by Roman Polanski, who fled America in 1977 after being charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He remains a fugitive from the American courts today, although he lives as a free man in Europe.

Should I refuse to watch Chinatown because of the loathsome Polanski’s behaviour with young Samantha Gailey at Jack Nicholson’s place? There is a moral case for taking that stance, and Spotify’s action in respect of R. Kelly suggests that moral judgments can now be brought to bear in deciding what people should see and hear.

But this is tricky territory, because many of the artists, actors, musicians and writers we admire led less than exemplary lives.

Rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry served a prison term for having sex with a minor. Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin. Hollywood idol Errol Flynn’s reputation was permanently damaged by allegations of sex with under-age girls.

Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old and Mick Jagger wrote a song about enticing a 15-year-old upstairs. Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso had a penchant for girls young enough to be their granddaughters, and Picasso was sometimes abusive as well.

Woody Allen is seriously creepy, at the very least, and even Charles Dickens abandoned his wife and family for a teenager.

It’s a bit unrealistic to talk about boycotting these men’s artistic creations, no matter how much we might disapprove of their morals or behaviour. So as vile as R. Kelly might be, in the interests of consistency perhaps his work should be left alone too.

The snarling and hissing of the illiberal Left

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 9.)

It’s hard to imagine now, but censorship was a cause celebre in the 1960s and 70s.

The banning or restriction of movies, books and even records was never far from the headlines. Post-war liberalism was colliding head-on with traditional morality and the official censors were struggling to draw new boundaries between what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

The film censor featured in the New Zealand media so often in those days that he (it was always a “he”) became virtually a household name. Between 1957 and 1973, cuts were made to 37 per cent of films because of sex, violence or bad language.

Even without the film censor or Indecent Publications Tribunal standing over them, some government agencies took it on themselves to act as moral guardians – including the monopoly New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, which refused to play any record deemed subversive (for example, the pacifist protest song Eve of Destruction) or sexually suggestive (the Rolling Stones’ Let’s Spend the Night Together).

It was the era of the indomitable Patricia Bartlett, secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. The former Catholic nun became the scourge of movie distributors and book publishers, pouncing on smut – a word almost never heard these days – wherever it raised its lubricious head.

Why am I recalling all this? Because in the censorship battles of the 1960s and 70s, it was the liberal Left that led the push for freedom to choose what people could see, read and hear.

Ultimately they won the battle against the moral conservatives. But at some point in the intervening decades, something strange began to happen.

The New Zealand Left executed a gradual 180-degree turn. Now it’s the Left who are the self-appointed censors, mobilising to shut down any ideas and opinions that offend them.

The old term “liberal Left” has become a contradiction, because many of the strident voices on the Left are frighteningly illiberal – not on questions of sexual morality, where anything is now permissible, but on matters of politics, culture and ideology. Their antennae twitch constantly, acutely alert for imagined evidence of racism, misogyny and homophobia.

This is especially true of the social media generation, who block their ears, drum their feet on the floor and hum loudly to block out any idea or opinion that upsets them.

This is a generation of New Zealanders who never experienced a sharp smack when they misbehaved, were driven to school every day by over-indulgent parents and were taught by teachers and university lecturers who lean so far to the left that many need corrective spinal surgery.

The threat to freedom of speech and opinion no longer comes from bossy government agencies (although the Human Rights Commission makes a sterling effort to deter people from saying or thinking anything it disapproves of) but from platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where digital lynch mobs indulge in snarling, hissing gang-ups against anyone who challenges leftist orthodoxy.

An example was the hysterical outcry against Sir Bob Jones over a column written by him for the National Business Review, in which he suggested that Waitangi Day should be renamed Maori Gratitude Day and marked by Maori doing nice things for Pakeha, such as bringing them breakfast in bed and weeding their gardens.

It was obviously satirical – a classic piece of Jones mischief – but humour is lost on the prigs and bigots of the new Left. Someone launched a petition to have Jones stripped of his knighthood and NBR, to its shame, removed the column from its website, using the weasel-word justification that the column was “inappropriate”.

Public discourse has reached the point where almost any mildly right-of-centre opinion is liable to bring forth frenzied denunciations and calls for the offender to be silenced, fired or boycotted. The silly, melodramatic term “hate speech” has come to mean anything that upsets someone.

New Zealand has so far largely been spared the extremes of intolerance shown on overseas university campuses, where violent protests force the abandonment of lectures by anyone the Left doesn’t like.

Could it happen here? Of course it could. Only last year, University of Auckland students tried to exclude a pro-life group from campus activities, Yet 50 years ago, New Zealand student newspapers were at the cutting edge of demands for free speech.

I wonder what the old-school liberal Left make of all this. It took generations for New Zealand to mature into a tolerant, liberal democracy and now it sometimes looks as if we’ve not only slammed on the brakes, but engaged reverse gear.

A Wicked abuse of free speech

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 4.)

A good friend recently asked what I made of the fuss over Wicked campervans and their suggestive slogans.

He believes strongly in freedom of speech and knows that I do too. He thought the crackdown on the Australian-owned company looked disturbingly like a witch hunt.

Besides, he thought some of the slogans painted on Wicked’s vans were amusing. We need more irreverent humour, he argued.

I’m with him some of the way. But not far.

Where freedom of speech involves the right to express political opinions or to push literary and artistic boundaries, there is a legal presumption in its favour. It’s enshrined in our Bill of Rights Act.

But free speech has never been an absolute right. The American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, for example, that it didn’t entitle someone to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

Limitations on free speech vary across different societies and at different times, according to what the community finds acceptable. There will often be powerful countervailing arguments, and the challenge lies in getting the balance right.

By and large, I would suggest we have it about right in New Zealand. We are certainly an infinitely more liberal society than we were 40 or 50 years ago.

The great censorship battles of the 1960s and 70s are far behind us. That was the era when the prosecutor in the famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in Britain asked jurors whether D H Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel was one they would be happy for their wives or servants to read. His question was ridiculed as symptomatic of outdated paternalistic attitudes.

New Zealand had its own bizarre censorship controversies – none stranger than the film censor’s ruling in 1967 that a film adaptation of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had to be screened separately to male and female audiences.

These days it probably comes as a surprise to many people to learn that we still have a censor – which brings us back to Wicked.

A couple of weeks ago, chief censor Andrew Jack ruled that the slogans and images on three Wicked campervans were objectionable and banned those vehicles from New Zealand roads.

It’s unlikely to be the end of the matter. Further complaints may result in other vans from the company’s fleet being ordered off the road – in which case, good riddance.

The banned vehicles were decorated with eye-catching images showing well-known cartoon figures – Snow White, Scooby-Doo and Dr Seuss – appearing to use drugs.

Other Wicked vans display sexually suggestive slogans. One was turned away from Piha Domain Camp near Auckland because it was decorated with the words “Blow job better than no job”. Camping grounds at Kaiteriteri and Queenstown have also told Wicked van renters that they’re not welcome.

The censor’s decision was unusual for more reasons than one. For a start, it’s probably the first time a vehicle has been judged to be an objectionable publication.

The ruling was also notable because it’s relatively rare these days for the censor to use such a blunt instrument as a ban. But having found that the slogans and images were offensive, Jack had few options.

Wicked posed an unusual challenge because while people make a choice to watch a pornographic movie or read a sexually explicit book, Wicked campervans are in people’s faces whether they want to see them or not. An R16 restriction is hardly effective when the vehicles use public roads and are visible to everyone.

But the censor's job was made easier in the case of the allusions to drug use, because the images could be construed as encouraging criminal behaviour. Ruling on sexually suggestive slogans will be trickier because it calls for judgment on matters of taste.

A recurring concern is that curious children, seeing Wicked vans, are likely to ask their parents what the slogans mean. Even the most liberal parent would probably struggle to explain “If God was a woman, sperm would taste like chocolate” to an inquisitive eight-year-old. But fellatio, unlike drug use, is not a crime - so the issue becomes one of defining what's injurious to the public good or highly offensive to the public in general, to quote the relevant legislation.

I not only believe the censor got it right in the case of the drug-related imagery, but that he would be justified in ruling against Wicked's use of sexually explicit signage on the basis that it's highly offensive to most people (my friend excepted).

Freedom of speech is one of the defining characteristics of a liberal democracy, but this crass and arrogant Australian outfit (I say "arrogant" because it didn't even bother to defend itself when complaints were made against it to the Advertising Standards Authority) is unlikely to go down in history as a heroic standard-bearer for human rights.

If anything, the company debases free speech by nakedly taking advantage of it purely to be provocative and to attract attention for commercial gain. In this respect it’s strikingly similar to the Hell pizza chain.

Wicked’s lawyers were unable to advance any compelling defence of political or artistic freedom. Instead, they tried lamely to justify Wicked’s slogans and images as humorous parodies.

Admittedly humour is subjective, but Wicked’s misogynistic brand of wit is hardly worth dying on the barricades for. It’s a smart-arse, advertising-agency type of humour that appeals chiefly to sniggering schoolboys.

In fact one of the striking things about the Wicked controversy is that the company’s supposed humour has managed to offend almost everyone, liberals as well as conservatives.  

My one reservation is that it was the police who took the complaint against Wicked to the censor and who will have the responsibility of enforcing his ruling. There’s a potentially dangerous blurring of roles here.

The job of the police is to enforce criminal law, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling uneasy about the prospect of them exercising power over matters of judgment and morality. No doubt they would argue that their intervention in this instance was justified on the basis that the campervans appeared to condone criminal activity, but I hope their involvement ends there. We get enough finger-wagging lectures from them already.