Deny, deny, deny.
And lie through your teeth. That goes without saying I guess.
Wonder if aJenda feels like she's been had now her previous overlords have thrown her under the bus...
theplatform.kiwi/opinions/when-is-a-bribe-not-a-bribeWhen is a bribe not a bribe?
The legacy media is denying reality over the $55m fund.
Graham Adams
Contributing Writer & Writer for The Common Room
December 1st, 2023
When Newshub’s Jenna Lynch asserted this week that Winston Peters had made a “baseless accusation” about the mainstream media taking public money as a bribe, it was impossible not to think of Monty Python’s famous “Dead Parrot” sketch.
Michael Palin, playing a pet-shop owner, says to John Cleese, who complains that a parrot he had bought a mere 30 minutes earlier is dead: “No, no… he’s resting.”
The parrot (a “Norwegian blue”) is obviously dead — a sad fact Cleese confirms by whacking its lifeless body on the counter and throwing it onto the floor. But that makes no impression on the shopkeeper, who claims it’s merely "stunned" — and then, hilariously, “He’s probably pining for the fjords!”
Political editor Jenna Lynch is the media’s equivalent of that shopkeeper — busy denying an observable fact that many New Zealanders are very well-acquainted with. In fact, the truth that access to the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund depended on applicants being willing to take a knee for Te Tiriti is so widely understood that when NBR journalist Dita de Boni tweeted her support for Lynch on Monday, the comments were quickly sprinkled with screen grabs of the evidence outlined in NZ On Air documents.
There are few plausible ways to argue that the criteria the commissioning agency wanted successful applicants to fulfil were not a direct attempt to achieve a political result with taxpayers’ money. That is to say, the fund dispensed money to ensure the Treaty was presented as a “partnership”.
The first of the general eligibility criteria required all applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner” — alongside a commitment to te reo Māori.
The section describing the fund’s goals included “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner“.
That’s three mentions of “partner” or “partnership” in a couple of sentences. NZ On Air could hardly have made it clearer that it would only welcome applicants who were committed to that particular interpretation of the Treaty.
And viewing the Treaty as a partnership just happens to have formed the ideological underpinning of the relentless push by the Ardern-Hipkins government to insert co-governance into law and policy everywhere it could — including Three Waters, health, education, and the revised RMA, among others.
It should be clearly noted that no one is claiming individual journalists in newsrooms have been bribed. It was journalists’ employers who signed the agreements with NZ On Air that channelled money into their organisations.
And no one is using the word “bribe” in its strictly legal sense of corruption. Rather common usage is in play here — as in “Money or favour given, or promised, in order to influence judgment or conduct”, with shades of a secondary definition: “Something that serves to induce or influence (eg ‘I offered the kid a bribe to finish his homework’).”
The laziest way to dismiss such criticism of the fund is to label it a “conspiracy theory”, as some journalists have. It’s unlikely, however, that most of the public will be convinced that Winston Peters is concocting a case out of thin air — despite the legacy media’s recent efforts to convince voters they have clean hands and are entirely blameless.
It is certainly not going to be easy for them to hold that line if the Deputy Prime Minister produces the inflammatory evidence in the “Te Tiriti Framework for News Media”, commissioned by NZ On Air and published in March 2022. The supplement elaborated on the requirements in the original application documents with advice on what the commissioning agency considered successful applicants might want to heed in their stance towards the Treaty.
NZ On Air said the “framework” was offered only as “guidance”, but the report begins with a firm instruction: “Mass news media organisations need to consider, explore, build on and implement this framework in ways that show commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”
Examples of the “guidance” include:
· “Māori have never ceded sovereignty to Britain or any other state.”
· “…our society has a foundation of institutional racism.”
· “For news media, it is not simply a matter of reporting ‘fairly’, but of constructively contributing to Te Tiriti relations and social justice.”
· “Repeated references by the government to the English version [of the Treaty], in which Māori supposedly ceded sovereignty, have created systematic disinformation that protects the government’s assumption of sole parliamentary sovereignty.”
Act leader David Seymour found this appalling. He told The Platform in May last year: “It’s outrageous that a taxpayer-funded agency is telling government-funded journalists that it’s just as important for them to promote Te Tiriti relations and social justice as it is for them to report fairly.
“Journalists are being told: ‘Toe the government line on He Puapua and the Treaty or else you won’t get funding.’ Media executives should refuse to take any more of the $55 million because it’s destroying faith in important New Zealand institutions.”
What must be particularly worrying for Lynch and her mainstream media supporters is that those she might have expected to back her claim of Peters making “baseless accusations” are running for cover.
On Wednesday, former Broadcasting minister Willie Jackson made it clear to AM host Ryan Bridge that the Treaty criteria were inserted by “bureaucrats” — and they “might have gone a little bit far… I wouldn’t have gone that far.” He said he understood how the fund might have led to a perception that the government was influencing the media
Former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins also distanced his government from the Treaty criteria. He said he agreed with Jackson and the criteria were “not necessarily the criteria I would’ve used… Those criteria were introduced by NZ On Air, who made those decisions independently of government.”
Neither politician, however, mentioned the annual Letter of Expectations the Broadcasting minister sends to NZ On Air’s board that helps set the general direction the autonomous Crown entity takes.
On Wednesday, NZ On Air itself played down the importance of the Treaty requirements. It released a statement to 1News that said although the PIJF had a commitment to the Treaty ”those criteria weren’t absolute” and it “turned nobody down over the Treaty clause”.
The criteria might not have been “absolute” but it appears that most applications were assessed against that benchmark, at least to the extent of compliance, or lack of it, being noted.
Just how seriously PIJF applicants took the requirement to swear allegiance to the approved view of the Treaty was revealed when details of NZ On Air’s assessment process were released last year under the Official Information Act.
In a response to The Spinoff asking for $335,746 for its series IRL to examine “the real-world consequences of online life”, assessors wrote:
“The proposal spoke at length of The Spinoff’s commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, but the proposal has no concrete commitments apart from the line, ‘We will actively seek out people whose lives have been affected by technology with a particular focus on marginalised groups, notably Māori and Pasifika communities that are on the wrong side of the digital divide, while featuring rangatahi who are creative and heavy users of technology.’”
The Spinoff’s editorial managers obviously thought it was a good idea to write at length to establish their general loyalty to Te Tiriti as a partnership in order to be eligible for a grant, even for a project that had no particular connection with it.
Assessors recommended that The Spinoff “hire Māori and Pasifika staff” as a remedy for its “lack of concrete detail in terms of meeting Te Tiriti commitments”.
The grant was approved.
Critics say that the most insidious effect of the Treaty criteria was that they functioned as a “good behaviour” bond for any news organisation that wanted to access taxpayer cash — whether or not any particular application directly concerned Te Tiriti.
Tipping their hat towards a view of the Treaty as a partnership was considered a wise business move under a Labour government handing out tens of millions of dollars in exchange for a pledge of political obedience.
As for NZ On Air’s claim that it “turned nobody down over the Treaty clause”, it is seems likely that no one who wanted to dispute the interpretation of the Treaty as a partnership would have bothered going to the trouble of filling out extensive paperwork only to be rejected.
In May last year, NZ On Air’s Head of Journalism, Raewyn Rasch, argued that criticism of the Treaty was still possible in the projects it funds:
“Could you be critical of Te Tiriti? Of course you can… If someone came to us with a proposal to have a critical look at Te Tiriti, as long as it was fair, balanced, and accurate, then there would be no reason why we wouldn’t fund it, but no one has come to us with that proposal, so it’s all kind of hypothetical.”
It’s easy to imagine from Rasch’s guarded and less-than-enthusiastic response that the chances of receiving funds for presenting that case would not be very high.
In short, NZ On Air — whose board is appointed by the Broadcasting minister and whose general direction is overseen by that minister — paid out $55 million to strongly encourage media to adopt a view of the Treaty as a partnership that just happened to suit the government’s political agenda.
Most will undoubtedly conclude this could be fairly described as a bribe.
