Any book about the news media that gets rave reviews from journalists as ideologically opposed as John Pilger and Peter Oborne deserves our attention. Pilger is an impassioned leftist crusader, the scourge of supposedly imperialistic western powers and a trenchant critic of “mainstream” journalism; Oborne is a contributor to the right-wing Spectator and an uncompromising conservative.
It’s unlikely there are many issues on which these two agree, but if the blurb on the dust jacket for Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News is to be believed, Pilger described it as a “brilliant” book, “ruthless in its honesty” while Oborne said of it: “This is an exceptionally important book which should be read, re-read and inwardly digested by all reporters, editors and proprietors”.
Clearly, Davies is on to something.
Flat Earth News is a 400-page exposé of shonky practices by the British media – and not just the scurrilous London tabloids, which would surprise no one, but by some of the so-called “quality” broadsheets as well, including Davies’ own paper, The Guardian (though it must be said The Guardian emerges looking a little purer than some of its competitors).
Davies takes as his starting point the blizzard of misinformation disseminated by the media over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and the failure of journalists to dig beneath the propaganda. He says he started out trying to explain “how we had managed to do so badly in covering what is probably the single biggest story of our era”. He goes on: “The more I looked, the more I found falsehood, distortion and propaganda running through the outlets of an industry which is supposed to be dedicated to the very opposite, i.e. to telling the truth.”
He develops several themes, among them:
The increasing influence of PR firms, spin doctors and pressure groups in manipulating the news agenda, and the media’s complicity in the process;
The advent of what he calls “churnalism”, in which credulous and/or overworked journalists unquestioningly process wrong, misleading or second-hand information;
The steady reduction in the number of journalists reporting unglamorous but important local news such as court proceedings and council meetings (I loved Davies’ line that judges in London courts are as likely to see a zebra as a reporter);
The emergence of a new type of newspaper owner whose papers are run according to the “logic of pure commerce” rather than by any commitment to journalistic values, for which Davies largely blames (I believe unfairly) Rupert Murdoch;
The increasing pressure, in the digital era, to turn news around fast, without adequate checking and verification;
The willingness of the British press, including supposedly respectable titles such as The Sunday Times, to use a wide repertoire of sleazy, underhand and sometimes illegal means to get stories – including bribing police officers, paying private investigators for illegally obtained information and setting up elaborate traps in the hope of catching corrupt politicians, even where there is no evidence of misbehaviour.
It’s an assiduously researched book, jam-packed with detail and well-written, as you might expect of an award-winning Guardian journalist. Davies forcefully reminds us of one of the most important journalistic values: question everything and accept nothing at face value.
But he’s not entirely consistent. Davies tries hard to be fair – he’s tough on Greenpeace and its alarmist publicity stunts, and he acknowledges a bad error of his own that was based on an ideological assumption – but his own personal preoccupations and political leanings intrude from time to time. At times one senses the familiar anguished cry of the idealistic leftie who’s frustrated because the media are ignoring the stories he thinks are important.
He’s not fond of Christians, Margaret Thatcher or Israel, and it might or might not be significant that all the unreported scandals he uncovers, for which he excoriates the media, are ones that reflect unfavourably on what might loosely be called “the establishment”.
At one point he describes, without criticism, a disgraceful act of deception in 1988 by Roy Greenslade, then managing editor for news at the Sunday Times. Perhaps Greenslade escaped Davies’ censure because of the former’s sainted status as a media commentator for the Guardian.
Davies also suffers from an occupational disorder, common among British journalists, that I call Rupertaphobia. Like many Brits, he seems never to have adjusted to the idea that a colonial upstart could take over so much of the British media. Never mind that it was largely through Rupert Murdoch that the British newspaper industry, which had long had been held hostage by greedy unions, was eventually liberated from primitive 19th century technology and disgraceful union rorts.
Ironically, Davies is fashionably dismissive of the notion of journalistic objectivity. I say “ironically” because it seems to me that his entire book, with its scathing indictments of secret agendas, distortion and manipulation, is a powerful argument for fair, neutral reporting uncontaminated by covert interests and biases.
None of the book’s failings should detract from the fact that Flat Earth News is an important, cautionary tale, and one that will shake people’s faith in British journalism. But British journalism has always been about extremes of good and bad: the scurrilous tactics of the Sun and Daily Mail (for which Davies reserves special contempt) on one hand and bold, resourceful journalism uncovering corruption and abuse of power (such as the Sunday Times’ exposure of the cash-for-peerages scandal) on the other.
And how much of this, if any, is applicable to New Zealand? Certainly, New Zealand journalists will nod in recognition at some of the trends Davies describes: the baleful influence of PR and spin, the pressure on newspapers to do more with fewer staff, the gradual attenuation of the grassroots-level journalism (such as courts and council meetings) that was once the meat and drink of the daily press. Older New Zealand journalists probably also lament, as Davies does, the passing of an older generation of newspaper proprietors who, for all their stuffy conservatism, had a strong newspaper ethos, although we shouldn’t get too dewy-eyed over some mythical golden era.
On the really crucial stuff relating to ethics, however, the New Zealand media have kept their noses admirably clean. Ethical corners are most likely to be cut where multiple media outlets are competing toe-to-toe, as in the case of Fleet St (metaphorical home, at least, to 14 daily titles and 10 Sundays). In New Zealand, that sort of intense competition really exists only between the two major TV networks, the trashy women’s magazines and the Sunday papers. It’s in those branches of the media that journalists are most likely to be ethically compromised in the chase for the exclusive story, but even there it’s relatively rare. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Footnote: Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, is published by Chatto & Windus. I obtained my copy online from Amazon UK and paid $46.74.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Bottom line: the money was not his
My initial inclination was to like the New Zealand writer Martin Edmond, Kim Hill’s guest on the “Playing Favourites” segment of her radio programme this morning – admittedly for no better reason than that the first song he chose to play was Walk Away Renee, by the Four Tops, one of my favourite Tamla Motown acts. But then Edmond told an anecdote about one of his experiences as a Sydney cab driver, and my view of him changed.
He had picked up two men at a pub in Bondi Junction and taken them a short distance to another pub. He then picked up another fare and took her to, I think, Elizabeth Bay. After she had left the cab he turned the interior light on and found $1000 in rolled-up notes on the front passenger seat, which he assumed one of the men from Bondi Junction had left behind. (Presumably his woman passenger sat in the back.)
So what did he do with this find? He took it home. He said he still has it. He told Kim Hill he thought the men were going to buy cocaine – a rationalisation for his decision to keep the money, perhaps – but offered no evidence for that theory.
My first reaction was, why did he not go back to the Bondi Junction pub to see whether he could find the men? He could have ascertained whether the money was theirs – “Is it possible you left something in my taxi?” – and if it was, he surely could have negotiated some sort of emolument for the time and trouble he took to return it. This possibility doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
A woman listener subsequently emailed Kim Hill’s programme asking why Edmond didn’t take the money to the police. If no one claimed it, she said, it would eventually have been returned to him. At least an attempt would have been made to return it to its rightful owners.
Hill’s response to this suggestion was sneering and condescending, as if the emailer was a pathetically naïve goody-two-shoes. Edmond seemed to agree, noting that the New South Wales police were notoriously corrupt. Another self-serving rationalisation?
I found it interesting that Edmond blithely related this story without any hint that his conscience troubled him. Very telling. Equally telling was Hill’s response. She never hesitates to pounce on the peccadilloes of people she doesn’t approve of, but it doesn’t appear to have occurred to her to question Edmond’s honesty.
Bottom line: the money was not his. He has no right to it. Neither does he have any right to assume that the cash was somehow ill-gotten, and that therefore he had no obligation to return it. I’d be interested in what other people think.
He had picked up two men at a pub in Bondi Junction and taken them a short distance to another pub. He then picked up another fare and took her to, I think, Elizabeth Bay. After she had left the cab he turned the interior light on and found $1000 in rolled-up notes on the front passenger seat, which he assumed one of the men from Bondi Junction had left behind. (Presumably his woman passenger sat in the back.)
So what did he do with this find? He took it home. He said he still has it. He told Kim Hill he thought the men were going to buy cocaine – a rationalisation for his decision to keep the money, perhaps – but offered no evidence for that theory.
My first reaction was, why did he not go back to the Bondi Junction pub to see whether he could find the men? He could have ascertained whether the money was theirs – “Is it possible you left something in my taxi?” – and if it was, he surely could have negotiated some sort of emolument for the time and trouble he took to return it. This possibility doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
A woman listener subsequently emailed Kim Hill’s programme asking why Edmond didn’t take the money to the police. If no one claimed it, she said, it would eventually have been returned to him. At least an attempt would have been made to return it to its rightful owners.
Hill’s response to this suggestion was sneering and condescending, as if the emailer was a pathetically naïve goody-two-shoes. Edmond seemed to agree, noting that the New South Wales police were notoriously corrupt. Another self-serving rationalisation?
I found it interesting that Edmond blithely related this story without any hint that his conscience troubled him. Very telling. Equally telling was Hill’s response. She never hesitates to pounce on the peccadilloes of people she doesn’t approve of, but it doesn’t appear to have occurred to her to question Edmond’s honesty.
Bottom line: the money was not his. He has no right to it. Neither does he have any right to assume that the cash was somehow ill-gotten, and that therefore he had no obligation to return it. I’d be interested in what other people think.
Trust us - we play sport
(First published Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, June 25)
Readers Digest has just published the results of its annual “Most Trusted” survey, in which New Zealanders are questioned about the people they feel they can most rely on. The results were tragic but unsurprising.
The most trusted New Zealander, in the eyes of the 500 people polled, is Corporal Willie Apiata VC, who assumes the ranking previously held by the late Sir Ed Hillary.
I mean no disrespect when I say it’s tragic that Corporal Apiata should emerge as the New Zealander we most trust. He is an heroic soldier who has earned our respect and admiration. But his ranking underlines the point that this survey is really more of a popularity contest than a meaningful study of the role that trust plays in our society.
Thirteen of the 20 “most trusted” people are sporting figures, headed by Peter Snell, Colin Meads, the Evers-Swindell twins and Irene Van Dyk. There’s also an author (Margaret Mahy), a cook (Alison Holst), a mountaineer (Peter Hillary), a film director (Peter Jackson), a retired newsreader (Judy Bailey) and an opera singer (Dame Malvina Major).
What do you notice about these people? Most strikingly, only one of them (Cpl Apiata, as it happens) occupies a position of public trust, in the strictest sense. The rest are public figures only in the sense that they are well known. They are essentially private individuals, owing no particular duty or responsibility to the public.
Even Cpl Apiata is accountable to the public only in a rather indirect and theoretical sense, as a member of the armed forces. He is unlikely, as an individual, ever to make decisions that will impact heavily on the public good.
Along with the rest of the top 20, he seems to be on the list because he embodies the virtues that New Zealanders most admire: the qualities we like to think of, rather idealistically, as exemplifying us all. The factor common to virtually all the top names is that through talent or determination, or a combination thereof, they have achieved significant goals yet remain modest and down-to-earth.
With all due respect, they are not on the list because they have proved they can be trusted (although in most cases they probably can be). We don’t even need to trust them, since they’re not publicly accountable.
You have to get to the Queen, at No. 20, before you find anyone occupying a position in which public trust is a matter of the utmost importance. After her, there’s another leap – over names such as Richie McCaw, Alyson Gofton and Hayley Westenra – to the Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, at 28.
The next “public” figure, in the sense of being publicly accountable, is Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt at No. 41, and I suspect he’s there more because people like him rather than because they rely on him to carry out his duties conscientiously, honestly and fairly, which is what “trust” is all about. (They may indeed trust him too, but I bet it’s primarily his goofy charisma that won him his ranking.)
Further down the list, amid yet more sports people and entertainers, come Solicitor-General David Collins (50), Police Commissioner Howard Broad (59), Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard (60), and eventually – at 66 – Prime Minister Helen Clark, followed by National Party leader John Key at 68 and Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons at 69. Convicted murderer David Bain, incidentally, comes in at 67.
What are we to make of this? If we want to sleep easily at nights, we will dismiss it as a meaningless popularity poll. But if we are to take it as a serious indicator of who we trust, then the results are scary.
In a functioning democracy, the people we most need to trust are the people entrusted (note that word) with our wellbeing. By that yardstick the Prime Minister, the Commissioner of Police, the Governor-General and the Solicitor General should be in the top 10. So should the Chief Justice, the Auditor-General, the Chief Ombudsman (none of whom feature in the Readers Digest list) and other guardians of our prosperity, our constitutional rights and our justice system.
You could go further and argue that the heads of the armed forces, the major churches, the universities and some of our biggest companies should be there too, as representatives of institutions in which we have traditionally placed our trust. That they are not there, many would argue, is indicative of a general breakdown of public confidence in institutions which we once relied on to give society a sense of stability, solidity, cohesion and permanence.
Trust is a defining and greatly under-recognised feature of a civilised society. It underpins many of our dealings and relationships – personal, commercial and political.
Spouses trust each other not to be unfaithful or fritter away the mortgage money at the TAB. We trust politicians to do what they have said they will do. We trust the courts and the police to ensure that the law is enforced fairly and rigorously. We trust a mechanic to tell the truth when he says the brake disc pads have to be replaced for the car to get a warrant. When we buy a bottle of wine, we trust that it contains what the label says. When I as a journalist interview someone, he or she trusts me to report them fairly and accurately.
So trust is all-pervasive and all-important. Once it breaks down, society starts to unravel. For all these reasons, trust deserves better than to be debased and trivialised by opinion polls of the sort carried out by Readers Digest.
Perhaps the great irony of the Readers Digest poll is that politicians are second from the bottom (ahead only of telemarketers) among the occupational groups we feel we can trust. Given that politicians are the people we elect to represent us, the only conclusion to be drawn is that we no longer trust even ourselves.
Readers Digest has just published the results of its annual “Most Trusted” survey, in which New Zealanders are questioned about the people they feel they can most rely on. The results were tragic but unsurprising.
The most trusted New Zealander, in the eyes of the 500 people polled, is Corporal Willie Apiata VC, who assumes the ranking previously held by the late Sir Ed Hillary.
I mean no disrespect when I say it’s tragic that Corporal Apiata should emerge as the New Zealander we most trust. He is an heroic soldier who has earned our respect and admiration. But his ranking underlines the point that this survey is really more of a popularity contest than a meaningful study of the role that trust plays in our society.
Thirteen of the 20 “most trusted” people are sporting figures, headed by Peter Snell, Colin Meads, the Evers-Swindell twins and Irene Van Dyk. There’s also an author (Margaret Mahy), a cook (Alison Holst), a mountaineer (Peter Hillary), a film director (Peter Jackson), a retired newsreader (Judy Bailey) and an opera singer (Dame Malvina Major).
What do you notice about these people? Most strikingly, only one of them (Cpl Apiata, as it happens) occupies a position of public trust, in the strictest sense. The rest are public figures only in the sense that they are well known. They are essentially private individuals, owing no particular duty or responsibility to the public.
Even Cpl Apiata is accountable to the public only in a rather indirect and theoretical sense, as a member of the armed forces. He is unlikely, as an individual, ever to make decisions that will impact heavily on the public good.
Along with the rest of the top 20, he seems to be on the list because he embodies the virtues that New Zealanders most admire: the qualities we like to think of, rather idealistically, as exemplifying us all. The factor common to virtually all the top names is that through talent or determination, or a combination thereof, they have achieved significant goals yet remain modest and down-to-earth.
With all due respect, they are not on the list because they have proved they can be trusted (although in most cases they probably can be). We don’t even need to trust them, since they’re not publicly accountable.
You have to get to the Queen, at No. 20, before you find anyone occupying a position in which public trust is a matter of the utmost importance. After her, there’s another leap – over names such as Richie McCaw, Alyson Gofton and Hayley Westenra – to the Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, at 28.
The next “public” figure, in the sense of being publicly accountable, is Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt at No. 41, and I suspect he’s there more because people like him rather than because they rely on him to carry out his duties conscientiously, honestly and fairly, which is what “trust” is all about. (They may indeed trust him too, but I bet it’s primarily his goofy charisma that won him his ranking.)
Further down the list, amid yet more sports people and entertainers, come Solicitor-General David Collins (50), Police Commissioner Howard Broad (59), Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard (60), and eventually – at 66 – Prime Minister Helen Clark, followed by National Party leader John Key at 68 and Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons at 69. Convicted murderer David Bain, incidentally, comes in at 67.
What are we to make of this? If we want to sleep easily at nights, we will dismiss it as a meaningless popularity poll. But if we are to take it as a serious indicator of who we trust, then the results are scary.
In a functioning democracy, the people we most need to trust are the people entrusted (note that word) with our wellbeing. By that yardstick the Prime Minister, the Commissioner of Police, the Governor-General and the Solicitor General should be in the top 10. So should the Chief Justice, the Auditor-General, the Chief Ombudsman (none of whom feature in the Readers Digest list) and other guardians of our prosperity, our constitutional rights and our justice system.
You could go further and argue that the heads of the armed forces, the major churches, the universities and some of our biggest companies should be there too, as representatives of institutions in which we have traditionally placed our trust. That they are not there, many would argue, is indicative of a general breakdown of public confidence in institutions which we once relied on to give society a sense of stability, solidity, cohesion and permanence.
Trust is a defining and greatly under-recognised feature of a civilised society. It underpins many of our dealings and relationships – personal, commercial and political.
Spouses trust each other not to be unfaithful or fritter away the mortgage money at the TAB. We trust politicians to do what they have said they will do. We trust the courts and the police to ensure that the law is enforced fairly and rigorously. We trust a mechanic to tell the truth when he says the brake disc pads have to be replaced for the car to get a warrant. When we buy a bottle of wine, we trust that it contains what the label says. When I as a journalist interview someone, he or she trusts me to report them fairly and accurately.
So trust is all-pervasive and all-important. Once it breaks down, society starts to unravel. For all these reasons, trust deserves better than to be debased and trivialised by opinion polls of the sort carried out by Readers Digest.
Perhaps the great irony of the Readers Digest poll is that politicians are second from the bottom (ahead only of telemarketers) among the occupational groups we feel we can trust. Given that politicians are the people we elect to represent us, the only conclusion to be drawn is that we no longer trust even ourselves.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Rules to live by (first published Dominion Post and Press, June 24)
Twenty-five rules for a righteous and contented life:
Never be awed by people with impressive-sounding academic qualifications. The world is full of highly educated twerps.
Refuse to buy anything from a shop or café that insists on bombarding you with obnoxious noise.
Never allow yourself to be seen running for a bus. It’s undignified.
Don’t hesitate to walk out of a bad movie; life’s too short. You usually know within the first 10 minutes whether it’s going to be worth persevering.
Be courteous but firm with telemarketers. Tell them you’re sorry, but your mother-in-law is on fire and you don’t have time to talk.
Don’t trust journalists who boast of being cynics, as if this were a virtue. Sceptics demand to be convinced – an honourable attribute. But cynics believe the worst of human nature and assume ulterior motives for everything – a very bleak worldview.
Life is too short to keep up with new music. It’s more fun to rediscover the old.
Treat fashion as the absurdity it is, created primarily to exploit insecure people who lack confidence in their own taste and right to dress as they think fit.
Be tolerant toward habitual stirrers and activists, no matter how irritating they might be. They are the price we pay for living in a free society.
Don’t condemn religion out of hand. Better to be a kid growing up in a Destiny Church household where there’s a cooked dinner on the table every night and a father in work than one living in a P house where you might be lucky to get KFC on benefit day.
Never trust a man with a ponytail.
Don’t waste your precious time reading venomous opinions, such as some of those on Internet blogs, whose authors are too gutless to put their names to them.
Be suspicious of anyone with personalised number plates, unless it happens to be your brother-in-law.
Don’t be ashamed to be seen eating at McDonald’s. The sausage-and-egg McMuffin with a hash brown is a tastier and cheaper breakfast than you’ll get at most trendy cafes.
Remonstrate with people who drop litter in public or allow their dogs to foul parks and footpaths, even if you risk a bit of biffo. (This rule is probably safer for old ladies, but not necessarily.)
Accept that there are almost as many bigoted atheist zealots as there are religious ones.
Make a point of visiting Parliament at least once to observe the sheer concentration of vanity and infantilism on display there. No one ever said democracy’s perfect.
Keep at arm’s length men who dress up in strange clothes and indulge in odd, all-male rituals, such as freemasons, Ku Klux Klansmen, scoutmasters and clerics.
Relish the prospect of boasting on your deathbed that you never wasted a moment watching a reality TV programme.
Give thanks for the fact that they didn’t have closed-circuit TV that day you set fire to the Waipukurau Post Office fence.
Distrust ideology in any shape or form. No matter how perfect the idea, humans will always stuff it up.
Always read the birth and death notices. They remind us what an intimately connected society we are.
Never trust an academic who uses words like “paradigm”, “construct” (in its noun form), “narrative”, “discourse” or “post-structural”. These are terms that should activate even the most low-powered BS detector.
Disregard the lifelong propaganda that teaches us all discrimination is bad. Discrimination is just as often good – it’s what enables us to distinguish between good and bad. We need more of it.
Observe traditional male courtesies such as opening the door for a woman. Even some feminists appreciate such gestures, though they rarely admit it.
Never trust a newspaper columnist who pronounces 25 rules for a righteous and contented life, especially if he can’t count.
Never be awed by people with impressive-sounding academic qualifications. The world is full of highly educated twerps.
Refuse to buy anything from a shop or café that insists on bombarding you with obnoxious noise.
Never allow yourself to be seen running for a bus. It’s undignified.
Don’t hesitate to walk out of a bad movie; life’s too short. You usually know within the first 10 minutes whether it’s going to be worth persevering.
Be courteous but firm with telemarketers. Tell them you’re sorry, but your mother-in-law is on fire and you don’t have time to talk.
Don’t trust journalists who boast of being cynics, as if this were a virtue. Sceptics demand to be convinced – an honourable attribute. But cynics believe the worst of human nature and assume ulterior motives for everything – a very bleak worldview.
Life is too short to keep up with new music. It’s more fun to rediscover the old.
Treat fashion as the absurdity it is, created primarily to exploit insecure people who lack confidence in their own taste and right to dress as they think fit.
Be tolerant toward habitual stirrers and activists, no matter how irritating they might be. They are the price we pay for living in a free society.
Don’t condemn religion out of hand. Better to be a kid growing up in a Destiny Church household where there’s a cooked dinner on the table every night and a father in work than one living in a P house where you might be lucky to get KFC on benefit day.
Never trust a man with a ponytail.
Don’t waste your precious time reading venomous opinions, such as some of those on Internet blogs, whose authors are too gutless to put their names to them.
Be suspicious of anyone with personalised number plates, unless it happens to be your brother-in-law.
Don’t be ashamed to be seen eating at McDonald’s. The sausage-and-egg McMuffin with a hash brown is a tastier and cheaper breakfast than you’ll get at most trendy cafes.
Remonstrate with people who drop litter in public or allow their dogs to foul parks and footpaths, even if you risk a bit of biffo. (This rule is probably safer for old ladies, but not necessarily.)
Accept that there are almost as many bigoted atheist zealots as there are religious ones.
Make a point of visiting Parliament at least once to observe the sheer concentration of vanity and infantilism on display there. No one ever said democracy’s perfect.
Keep at arm’s length men who dress up in strange clothes and indulge in odd, all-male rituals, such as freemasons, Ku Klux Klansmen, scoutmasters and clerics.
Relish the prospect of boasting on your deathbed that you never wasted a moment watching a reality TV programme.
Give thanks for the fact that they didn’t have closed-circuit TV that day you set fire to the Waipukurau Post Office fence.
Distrust ideology in any shape or form. No matter how perfect the idea, humans will always stuff it up.
Always read the birth and death notices. They remind us what an intimately connected society we are.
Never trust an academic who uses words like “paradigm”, “construct” (in its noun form), “narrative”, “discourse” or “post-structural”. These are terms that should activate even the most low-powered BS detector.
Disregard the lifelong propaganda that teaches us all discrimination is bad. Discrimination is just as often good – it’s what enables us to distinguish between good and bad. We need more of it.
Observe traditional male courtesies such as opening the door for a woman. Even some feminists appreciate such gestures, though they rarely admit it.
Never trust a newspaper columnist who pronounces 25 rules for a righteous and contented life, especially if he can’t count.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Help yourself, but at your own risk
A caller who identified himself simply as “Joey” phoned NewstalkZB talkback host Bruce Russell in the early hours of this morning and related the following story.
He was driving somewhere near Auckland when he flashed his lights at an approaching car, either because its lights were on high beam or weren’t on at all. (I’m sorry I didn’t get the exact detail, but I wasn’t playing close attention at this point – it was only subsequently that the story got interesting.)
The other car turned and began chasing him with its lights on full. This went on for a couple of kilometres until Joey decided to force the issue. He did a U-turn and confronted his pursuers, at which point two men got out of the other car and walked towards him. One carried a baseball bat and the other a piece of wood. It seems unlikely that they were merely wanting to compliment Joey on his car’s paintwork.
Joey got out of his car armed with a golf club and whacked one of the men on the leg. Both men then backed off, got into their car and drove away.
According to Joey’s account, he subsequently received a visit from a police officer. It seems a complaint had been laid. The policeman told him he had no right to take the law into his own hands and could be prosecuted. Joey told Russell he was now waiting to hear whether action would be taken against him.
Now there’s a possibility that the entire story was a fabrication, but I don’t think so and apparently neither did Russell. Joey – who spoke with an accent and sounded as if he could be a Pacific Islander – was no self-aggrandising blowhard. He was calm and articulate and seemed resigned to the possibility that he might end up in court for defending himself, though he seemed puzzled that his would-be assailants had apparently gone to the police when they, after all, had caused the confrontation.
The disturbing thing is that his story is consistent with others about the police cracking down on people who have the audacity to defend themselves against thugs. There was the celebrated case of Greg Carvell, the Auckland gunshop owner who was prosecuted last year (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for illegal possession of a pistol after shooting and wounding a would-be robber who threatened to kill him with a machete.
(It’s worth noting here that police themselves have fatally shot people in far less threatening circumstances without any prosecution following, which suggests a very worrying double standard. The name of Christchurch man Stephen Bellingham, who was shot dead last September merely for smashing cars with a hammer and a golf club, comes to mind. But we won’t go into that here.)
In 2006 there was the case of Paul Espiner, the Inglewood man who grabbed a machete and confronted intruders who were threatening to kill a terrified female neighbour with a baseball bat. For his trouble, Espiner was convicted for possessing an offensive weapon. The principal offender who had threatened his neighbour, meanwhile, avoided a conviction and had his name suppressed. All he had to do was write a letter of apology.
More recently it was the so-called “Sheriff of Ngawi”, an isolated fishing village on the south Wairarapa coast, who was in the news. Garth Gadsby was fined $3000 and had his shotgun confiscated after trying to stop fleeing hoodlums in a stolen car who had been on a crime rampage in the tiny town. A jury found him guilty of recklessly discharging a firearm.
Admittedly there was something Wild West-ish about Gadsby’s actions, but no one was hurt and Gadsby, a gold medal-winning shooter (and hence unlikely to hit anyone unless he intended to) was a respected member of the community with no previous convictions. The judge said people mustn’t take the law into their own hands, but the problem in places like Ngawi is that the police are a long way away and people understandably get frustrated at the law’s failure to protect them.
I’m sure the Sensible Sentencing Trust has files on other cases like these. These are simply the ones I can recall off the top of my head.
There is a pattern here: police will take action against people who dare to take the law into their own hands. This is understandable up to a point. But surely discretion should be exercised in cases where (a) someone appears to be in imminent danger, as in the Carvell and Espiner cases (and perhaps Joey’s case as well); and (b) where the police are either unable or unwilling to tackle offenders themselves, as in the Ngawi incident. Where that discretion is exercised, it too often seems to be at the expense of the person who common sense tells us is in the right. Oddly enough, the discretion is invariably applied in favour of the person who pulled the trigger if that person happens to have been wearing a police uniform, but I promised not to go into that.
A related issue, referred to recently in this blog, is the rigid police adherence to procedures that discourage people from acting in their own defence, and that hold police back from situations where people’s lives may be at risk. An example of the former was the shocking Bentley case of 2005, when a woman phoned 111 from a Bay of Plenty farmhouse to report a brutal attack on her husband while it was still in progress. Not only did the police lie to her, telling her that help was on the way when it wasn’t, but they blocked her from phoning neighbours for help. And a recent example of the latter was the police insistence on remaining at a “safe assembly point” while Navtej Singh lay bleeding to death on the floor of his Manurewa liquor store.
I have known several police officers whom I regarded as dedicated and conscientious. I can’t believe they are happy with this state of affairs. And I sometimes feel sorry for Police Association president Greg O’Connor, an honourable and decent man who is fiercely loyal to his colleagues, who is constantly forced to defend the police when they are deservedly under attack.
Public confidence in a dependable, competent, non-corrupt and adequately resourced police force is a cornerstone of a civilised society. It is something New Zealanders have traditionally taken justifiable pride in, but it is insidiously slipping away from us.
As a footnote, it was intriguing to see the number of comments on left-leaning blogs over the past couple of weeks defending the police against criticism over their conduct following the Navtej Singh shooting. The general tenor of the comments was that it was only sensible of the police to follow prescribed procedures rather than rush in to save someone and possibly put themselves at risk in the process.
To see the New Zealand left rushing to support the police is a novel experience. After all, these people are the inheritors of a political tradition in which the police were invariably seen as brutal agents of an oppressive state acting in the interests of the ruling class. The thuggish rightwing cop, bashing protesters with his identity badge concealed, is part of leftist folklore.
I have wondered at length about possible explanations for this sudden change of heart. I’ve concluded that the left rather likes the thought of a police force that has been emasculated and enfeebled by protocols and procedures, rather than the more robust one New Zealanders have known in the past, and will do whatever it can to accelerate the process.
He was driving somewhere near Auckland when he flashed his lights at an approaching car, either because its lights were on high beam or weren’t on at all. (I’m sorry I didn’t get the exact detail, but I wasn’t playing close attention at this point – it was only subsequently that the story got interesting.)
The other car turned and began chasing him with its lights on full. This went on for a couple of kilometres until Joey decided to force the issue. He did a U-turn and confronted his pursuers, at which point two men got out of the other car and walked towards him. One carried a baseball bat and the other a piece of wood. It seems unlikely that they were merely wanting to compliment Joey on his car’s paintwork.
Joey got out of his car armed with a golf club and whacked one of the men on the leg. Both men then backed off, got into their car and drove away.
According to Joey’s account, he subsequently received a visit from a police officer. It seems a complaint had been laid. The policeman told him he had no right to take the law into his own hands and could be prosecuted. Joey told Russell he was now waiting to hear whether action would be taken against him.
Now there’s a possibility that the entire story was a fabrication, but I don’t think so and apparently neither did Russell. Joey – who spoke with an accent and sounded as if he could be a Pacific Islander – was no self-aggrandising blowhard. He was calm and articulate and seemed resigned to the possibility that he might end up in court for defending himself, though he seemed puzzled that his would-be assailants had apparently gone to the police when they, after all, had caused the confrontation.
The disturbing thing is that his story is consistent with others about the police cracking down on people who have the audacity to defend themselves against thugs. There was the celebrated case of Greg Carvell, the Auckland gunshop owner who was prosecuted last year (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for illegal possession of a pistol after shooting and wounding a would-be robber who threatened to kill him with a machete.
(It’s worth noting here that police themselves have fatally shot people in far less threatening circumstances without any prosecution following, which suggests a very worrying double standard. The name of Christchurch man Stephen Bellingham, who was shot dead last September merely for smashing cars with a hammer and a golf club, comes to mind. But we won’t go into that here.)
In 2006 there was the case of Paul Espiner, the Inglewood man who grabbed a machete and confronted intruders who were threatening to kill a terrified female neighbour with a baseball bat. For his trouble, Espiner was convicted for possessing an offensive weapon. The principal offender who had threatened his neighbour, meanwhile, avoided a conviction and had his name suppressed. All he had to do was write a letter of apology.
More recently it was the so-called “Sheriff of Ngawi”, an isolated fishing village on the south Wairarapa coast, who was in the news. Garth Gadsby was fined $3000 and had his shotgun confiscated after trying to stop fleeing hoodlums in a stolen car who had been on a crime rampage in the tiny town. A jury found him guilty of recklessly discharging a firearm.
Admittedly there was something Wild West-ish about Gadsby’s actions, but no one was hurt and Gadsby, a gold medal-winning shooter (and hence unlikely to hit anyone unless he intended to) was a respected member of the community with no previous convictions. The judge said people mustn’t take the law into their own hands, but the problem in places like Ngawi is that the police are a long way away and people understandably get frustrated at the law’s failure to protect them.
I’m sure the Sensible Sentencing Trust has files on other cases like these. These are simply the ones I can recall off the top of my head.
There is a pattern here: police will take action against people who dare to take the law into their own hands. This is understandable up to a point. But surely discretion should be exercised in cases where (a) someone appears to be in imminent danger, as in the Carvell and Espiner cases (and perhaps Joey’s case as well); and (b) where the police are either unable or unwilling to tackle offenders themselves, as in the Ngawi incident. Where that discretion is exercised, it too often seems to be at the expense of the person who common sense tells us is in the right. Oddly enough, the discretion is invariably applied in favour of the person who pulled the trigger if that person happens to have been wearing a police uniform, but I promised not to go into that.
A related issue, referred to recently in this blog, is the rigid police adherence to procedures that discourage people from acting in their own defence, and that hold police back from situations where people’s lives may be at risk. An example of the former was the shocking Bentley case of 2005, when a woman phoned 111 from a Bay of Plenty farmhouse to report a brutal attack on her husband while it was still in progress. Not only did the police lie to her, telling her that help was on the way when it wasn’t, but they blocked her from phoning neighbours for help. And a recent example of the latter was the police insistence on remaining at a “safe assembly point” while Navtej Singh lay bleeding to death on the floor of his Manurewa liquor store.
I have known several police officers whom I regarded as dedicated and conscientious. I can’t believe they are happy with this state of affairs. And I sometimes feel sorry for Police Association president Greg O’Connor, an honourable and decent man who is fiercely loyal to his colleagues, who is constantly forced to defend the police when they are deservedly under attack.
Public confidence in a dependable, competent, non-corrupt and adequately resourced police force is a cornerstone of a civilised society. It is something New Zealanders have traditionally taken justifiable pride in, but it is insidiously slipping away from us.
As a footnote, it was intriguing to see the number of comments on left-leaning blogs over the past couple of weeks defending the police against criticism over their conduct following the Navtej Singh shooting. The general tenor of the comments was that it was only sensible of the police to follow prescribed procedures rather than rush in to save someone and possibly put themselves at risk in the process.
To see the New Zealand left rushing to support the police is a novel experience. After all, these people are the inheritors of a political tradition in which the police were invariably seen as brutal agents of an oppressive state acting in the interests of the ruling class. The thuggish rightwing cop, bashing protesters with his identity badge concealed, is part of leftist folklore.
I have wondered at length about possible explanations for this sudden change of heart. I’ve concluded that the left rather likes the thought of a police force that has been emasculated and enfeebled by protocols and procedures, rather than the more robust one New Zealanders have known in the past, and will do whatever it can to accelerate the process.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
It's our time they're wasting
“More work, less coffee”, ran the headline on a letter in last Saturday’s Dom Post. The writer, Pete McMillen, made a point that I’ve raised a couple of times in columns. He pointed out that in Wellington, “taxpayers are forever footing the bill for coffees and muffins at myriad establishments, almost always bursting with smartly dressed business folk”.
Setting aside the curious fact that Wellington is now populated by people who seem incapable of doing a stroke of work without constant transfusions of caffeine, what’s irritating here is that, as the letter writer says, we’re the mugs who are picking up the tab, indirectly at least.
If private businesses are stupid enough to pay for their employees to idle away their working hours in cafés, that’s their concern. But many of the busiest cafés in Wellington are in parts of town where the dominant employer is the state. These are our employees, and they’re drinking and gossiping in our time.
Reading Pete McMillen's letter, my wife – who can usually be relied upon for clear-eyed common sense on issues like this – wondered whatever happened to tea ladies. In the only government job I ever had – working for The Listener in the Bowen State Building – we were served tea or coffee twice daily by a lugubrious woman named Mrs Nugent, whom I grew to know quite well. I guess the Mrs Nugents of the world have gone the same way as Humber 80s, 45 rpm records and Lamson tubes in department stores. But if the State Services Commission wanted to impress its political masters by boosting productivity and cutting costs, it would get the tea ladies – or refreshment facilitators as they’d have to be called now – back.
Setting aside the curious fact that Wellington is now populated by people who seem incapable of doing a stroke of work without constant transfusions of caffeine, what’s irritating here is that, as the letter writer says, we’re the mugs who are picking up the tab, indirectly at least.
If private businesses are stupid enough to pay for their employees to idle away their working hours in cafés, that’s their concern. But many of the busiest cafés in Wellington are in parts of town where the dominant employer is the state. These are our employees, and they’re drinking and gossiping in our time.
Reading Pete McMillen's letter, my wife – who can usually be relied upon for clear-eyed common sense on issues like this – wondered whatever happened to tea ladies. In the only government job I ever had – working for The Listener in the Bowen State Building – we were served tea or coffee twice daily by a lugubrious woman named Mrs Nugent, whom I grew to know quite well. I guess the Mrs Nugents of the world have gone the same way as Humber 80s, 45 rpm records and Lamson tubes in department stores. But if the State Services Commission wanted to impress its political masters by boosting productivity and cutting costs, it would get the tea ladies – or refreshment facilitators as they’d have to be called now – back.
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.
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.
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