Nothing To The Story? The same Defence Force, reinforced by the same ministerial authority, which denied the truth of Jon Stephenson's "Eyes Wide Shut", now denies the truth of Nicky Hager's revelation that the NZDF used American-gathered metadata to monitor the movements and contacts of Jon Stephenson in Afghanistan. Will Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman, and the former CDF, Lt-General Rhys Jones, (above) be forced to acknowledge, eventually, the accuracy of Hager's story - just as they were of Stephenson's?
GREG PALAST is one of the USA’s most ornery investigative
journalists. His well-researched articles regularly achieve everything that
good journalism should: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the
comfortable. Sometimes, the more than comfortable. With a good story, Palast
and his keyboard can bring the full weight of justice crashing down on the
heads of the mendacious, the deceitful, and the just plain dishonest.
But Palast only gets to beat the bad guys with the
cooperation of the mainstream media.
It’s fashionable nowadays for bloggers and tweeters to pour
scorn on what they sneeringly abbreviate to the “MSM”. But, the hard, cold
truth of the matter is that a great story that finds no space on the pages of
the major newspapers, or in the bulletins of the big television and radio
networks, is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.
If nobody reads it, or watches it, or hears it, then it
makes no impact at all.
This what happened to Palast shortly after the US
presidential election of 2000. That’s the one that came down to a few thousand
votes cast (or not cast) and counted (or not counted) in the Sunshine State of
Florida.
Palast’s research had revealed an alarming series of
political connections between the state administration of George W. Bush’s
little brother, Jeb, and the company commissioned to update the Florida
electoral roll. The story raised the alarming possibility that the roll had
been deliberately purged of the names of thousands of electors who were more
likely than not to vote for the Democratic Party candidate, Al Gore.
Palast pitched his explosive story to one of the big US
television networks – and, boy-oh-boy, were they interested! Confident of a
nationwide scoop, he waited for the six o’clock news-editor’s call. And waited.
And waited. And waited.
“What the hell!” Palast rang back his contact at the
network: “Are you guys running this story or not!”
“Oh, sorry Greg,” came his contact’s reply, “but, no, we’ve
decided to leave it.”
Palast could scarcely believe his ears. “What do you mean?
Why the hell not!”
“Well, we put your allegations to the Governor’s Office, and
they put them to the Governor, and he told us there was nothing to the story –
so we’re not running it.”
I WAS REMINDED of Palast’s cautionary tale earlier this
week.
Nicky Hager, one of New Zealand’s most tenacious
investigative journalists, had, with the help of the country’s largest
newspaper, broken a story claiming the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) had enlisted
the support of United States intelligence-gathering agencies in Afghanistan to identify
the contacts and sources of New Zealand’s leading war correspondent, Jon
Stephenson.
At the same time, Hager also released the contents of an
NZDF “security manual” in which “certain investigative journalists” were deemed
to be a “subversive” threat to both the operational effectiveness and the good
reputation of New Zealand’s armed forces.
Is it possible, asked Hager, that the latter might be
related to the former?
It took the NZDF and its Minister, Dr Jonathan Coleman, roughly
24 hours to nut out their response. Having spent the weekend “trawling through a decade’s worth of records
from the Afghan war”, the military’s top brass blandly reassured the nation
that they had “found no evidence NZDF
had ordered surveillance on the investigative journalist.”
The Defence Minister instantly firmed that statement up by
flatly denying there was any evidence of such surveillance. The clear
implication being that Hager had, at best, got the story badly wrong, or, at
worst, made the whole thing up.
Depressingly, a number of newspapers and broadcasters, treated
Coleman’s “no evidence” statement as definitive. Hager’s allegations, like
Palast’s, had been put to the Powers-That-Be and been told there was nothing to
them.
So, naturally, they immediately stopped believing them.
Did none of these “official sources say” journalists have a sufficiently
capacious professional memory to recall that the NZDF had come up with a
remarkably similar strategy in relation to an investigative article Stephenson
himself had written in 2011?
Bland denials, based upon “evidence” which no one else can
verify, should never be taken at face value. Simply asking the Governor’s
Office, or the NZDF’s top-brass, isn’t good enough.
When dealing with Greg Palast, Nicky Hager or Jon Stephenson
– the assumption should always be that there’s a case to answer.
This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 August 2013.
I guess that's why some bloggers are so snearing of the MSM - acceptance by major news outlets definitely helps a story reach the masses. It also vindicates it to a greater or lesser degree in the public eye (something to be taken seriously). If a story does get accepted by the MSM and then dies, that reduces the chances of the story being followed through, for better or worse. The MSM leads people's opinions but also reflects them. That's why the MSM has been soft on John Key. It doesn't want to alienate its readership.
ReplyDeleteI agree on what the role of the media should be -- to say the truth, without fear or favour. In the UK things get out because there are a bunch of leftist papers (Granuiad to People's Daily) and rightish (Telegraph to Spectator). And what one editor will spike because it does not fit her world view another editor will publish becaue it fits his.
ReplyDeleteMost inverstigative journalists I have rubbed up against are ornery and difficult customers. But we need these people. We need to hold those in power to account. Regardless of whom is in power.
What worries me, in NZ and the USA, is that we have a functional monoculture in the mass media, and it is quite Clarkist. The gNats are mistrusted, Helen was adored, and the difficult is spun away.
This means the Media act like that great Soviet paper of untruth, Pravda.(which, ironically, is now worth reading). And this means that political tragics like, you, me and Cam read blogs.