LawFuel.co.nz - NZ Law News - LawFuel publisher John Bowie interviews National Press Club president Peter Isaac over issues relating to defamation law, journalism standards and training and related issues. See: www.lawfuel.co.nz

In www. NationalPressClub .org. nz you have sought to generate an enhanced industry-wide appreciation of the laws of defamation. Are there any discernible results?

As is so often the case the campaign has had the opposite effect of the one intended. After one of the finance company trials there was a front page piece in The Dominion Post which had a victim commenting about the sentence meted out by the judge. The understandably aggrieved investor blamed what they saw as the mildness of the sentence being due to the judge and the people in the dock being all from a similar exalted social circle.

You can criticise the judgement but not the judge?

Quite so. Under the Westminster system judges occupy a position in which they are beyond criticism as judges. They are in this context more powerful than the Monarch. You might say, for example, that Her Majesty did this or that because her ancestor George 111 was batty. But if you published the same thing about a trial judge the consequences would be severe if the matter was taken up.

In a broader context you are known to ascribe this and other failings to the now institutionalised tertiary journalist training?

We are pretty radical on this one. We believe that journalist training should now be subsumed into other fields and one of these should be law. Another would be accountancy.

There is a general belief, even in the trade itself, that journalism is antithetical to numbers in general?

There is. The only consolation here is that this is a world wide problem. Journalists cannot handle financial data and so are always being taken in by hidden qualifications such as “operating” profits etc. You can read any newspaper any day of the week and find the pseudo-slick phrase money on the balance sheet. It is designed to give a false impression of conversance with a complex subject. There is of course only one place to have money and that is in the bank. Because journalists have no insight they are dependent on what the late editor of The Dominion, Jack Kelleher, always described as “stenography,” i.e. just taking at face value what the operators are saying.

Still, even at the J-schools, there is some training?

True, but do people, especially ones who have self-selected themselves as journalists as they approach their 20s really need to learn how to write English? They should be able to do it by the time they finish secondary school. This is what we are talking about here. Indeed in law and accountancy the need for precision language is even more intense because so much more rests on the word in these disciplines.

Still, more and more people want to become journalists and more and more tertiary education capacity is being devoted to their training?

All this is against the macro-issue which is of course that as a standalone vocation, oh, alright, profession journalism is shrinking in terms of jobs available.

Isn’t the web creating opportunities all over the place?

We are now into taboo territory and one into which fearless journalists hesitate to tread. The web zone is the free zone. Few, if anyone, gets paid. When the web got going you could make quite a bit, especially if you wrote on technical topics. Now all this has gone too. You do it for the glory.

Can you be more specific on this?

I was asked to write for the Huffington Post. With the luck of the beginner, on my first try my mini pic was all over it, as was my scoop, as I liked to think of it. No pay of course. I was just so tickled to be up there with Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Arianna, and the rest. A month or so later I sent something else off. Not quite such a sharp angle. Not even an acknowledgement in terms of a rejection. The Huffpo can pick and choose in this age of the 15 minute celebrity. This is what they are doing.

Talking about scoops, you were in Britain when the Murdoch hacking story broke, and we notice that Scoop nz, our version of the Huffpo is still running your story of that time. Do you still stick with it?

Events are unrolling pretty much as I predicted in the story which is that the affair is being talked through and will continue to be talked through just as its previous manifestation of this purge genre, the Calcutt Commission, was talked through….and through.

Is their any organic reason for this around-the-houses approach?

The reason is that almost all the dramatis personae of this current catharsis are up to their necks in it. Much of the anti Rupert movement outside the judicial realm seems to centre on the former Formula 1 operations chief Max Mosley. Yet it was his uncle the immensely rich physicist Derek Jackson who sold the News of the World to Rupert in the first place.

Why do you think Murdoch was so hell-bent in acquiring all of Sky in the UK?

As in anything that impinges on themselves, you wont read or hear this in the media. The scheme was that the Murdoch print titles such The Times and The Sunday Times especially would be bundled into a Sky subscription offering. This only made sense if Rupert owned all of Sky. Otherwise he would have been paying out to the benefit also of Sky’s other non Murdoch shareholders.

Back home again now, it is interesting to note that the National Press Club is investigating the effect for good or evil that the media has on the New Zealand economy

Again, we are looking at this because nobody else is looking at it and the reason that nobody else is looking at it is because they dare not look at it for fear of antagonising the media. It is often overlooked now that nothing happens in web zone and the blogosphere in general until it is picked up by the mainstream media. As it diminishes there is an inverse ratio in which the influence grows of the remaining newspapers and channels which the bulk of the population has been brought up on.

Can you give us a preview?

Every other possible reason has been dissected to the nth degree for New Zealand’s sluggish performance economically. How can a nation considered to be the best endowed per head of population in energy resources and indeed natural resources in general, be so close to the bread-line, and getting closer. Even the most cynical of us must surely claim that New Zealanders set out to do the right thing and can’t be bribed. As we have touched upon, everyone seems to go to university. So where does the problem lie? Is it under our noses?

ENDS

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