Politics
Text Massaging
by Jane Clifton
Bloggers and activists make it hard to tell the accurate from the biased and the malicious.
Never did I think I’d be reflecting affectionately on the old days of the boilermakers’ dispute on the BNZ site, or the Cooks and Stewards’ endless demands over the pay and conditions necessary for serving curry and rice on the Cook Strait ferries, or the Kafkaesque progress of the Mangere Bridge project. What I find I miss is a word you hardly ever hear these days: demarcation. The sense that this was your job, that was someone else’s job, and woe betide anyone who tried to do anyone else’s work for them. Even if they were better at it.
Although I have no wish to conjure up the great, repressive union leaders of old, half the shemozzles that politicians and the media have found themselves mired in lately come down to lack of respect for demarcation.
Politicians now carry on like journalists – an investigative incursion pioneered by Winston Peters in the 1980s – and journalists are practically getting wedged five-abreast in doorways in their rush to complete politicians’ tax returns for them, double-check their electoral declarations and announce their policies, election dates and all but their choice of toast spread, usually on scant evidence.
In turn, political activists are doing journalists’ work for them by blogging and commentating as though they were professional journalists, and being taken increasingly seriously as such – including by professional journalists, who routinely cite them as authorities in news stories.
And, as we’ve found with Dead Fish-gate, some activists are even turning unwary journalists into political activists by selectively leaking them choice tidbits of covertly taped conversations. Unable to resist, journalists are effectively running party spin holus-bolus.
Peace activist Nicky Hager and religious activist Ian Wishart have set up covert rival versions of the mainstream media, because they fervently believe that only their networks of true believers are uncorrupted and can tell the truth. The Blogerati – Russell Brown, David Farrar et al – have set themselves up as the aristocracy haughtily removed from the hoi polloi of workaday grunts on newspapers and the telly – a mere plodding peasantry who can be trusted only to miss the point. And that’s not even to get started on the stealth-bombing activist activities of religious sects.
I can’t even decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, this job-poaching. First up, best dressed, let the market decide, and all that. But morally and practically, it’s now the Wild West out there, because we can no longer easily tell where journalism ends and politics begins. We used to be separate species, but now we’re hybridising.
Press Gallery chairman Vernon Small blogged recently about his inability to arbitrate between the various mutations. At the recent National Party conference, Labour activist Clinton Brown was refused accreditation – and the right even to enter the venue – but National activist David Farrar was happily installed at the official media bench. It was the National Party’s call, obviously, but some Gallery journalists were sniffy about Farrar being able to behave as though he was one of them – a discomfort compounded by the banning of Brown from doing likewise.
As Small pointed out, the Gallery and the media at large have been happy to coexist with the obviously biased likes of Chris Trotter, Lindsay Perigo and Deborah Coddington at media scrums. And from within the Gallery, there has always been advocacy journalism – Richard Long from the right, the Campbells Gordon and John from the left. A blog-only writer would be most unlikely to get accreditation to the Gallery. But as more and more working journalists are forced to blog for media branding reasons – including Small himself – how are we fairly to distinguish bloggers from journalists?
We’re in a new era where what’s generally taken as journalism has been democratised by the internet, and as with old-fashioned radio talkback, it’s hard to tell whether the information providers are accurate, biased or simply malicious. Bloggers and their correspondents don’t have to put in the hard yards of daily journalists, with their pedestrian notebooks and tapes and Official Information requests and stake-outs in draughty corridors. They don’t – yet – have company lawyers beetling over their work, or the threat of the Press Council or Broadcasting Standards Authority. Or, most terrible sanction of all, the editor’s wrath. Anyone can be a commentator, and that’s increasingly being substituted for news reporting.
This need not be the handcart to hell. It’s a web-surfer’s market these days, and many people get great pleasure out of reading the blogs they agree with and strafing the ones they don’t. But in the context of a white-knuckle election fight, the hybridisation is becoming riskily confusing to the voter.
In the old days, we told stories about politicians. What’s been happening in the past few weeks between Labour and National is that they, and their sympathisers and activists, have been telling stories about one another, and we’ve been playing piggy in the middle, trying futilely to sort truth from spin.
Page 1 2 
