Lots Of Smoke But No Gun: Short of their very own Edward Snowden stepping forward with video, audio and written evidence of every word spoken by the main protagonists in the Kim Dotcom surveillance decision/s, Campbell Live’s investigation can progress no further.
WHILE IT IS ENTIRELY FITTING that we should congratulate TV3
and Campbell Live for the show they
broadcast last evening, it is important to also acknowledge that they have gone
about as far as they can go. John Campbell and his colleagues are now in the
same position as the makers of the 1990 TVNZ documentary, For The Public Good, and they face the same hard choices. The
evidence they have assembled is indisputably very suggestive, but it is not even remotely conclusive.
Back in 1990, the makers of For The Public Good went ahead and drew conclusions anyway – and it
cost TVNZ a great deal of money and most of them their jobs. To avoid a similar
fate, Campbell and his boss, TV3’s Head of News and Current Affairs, Mark
Jennings, had no option but to do exactly what they did last night – end their
investigation into John Key, Ian Fletcher and the GCSB inconclusively.
Short of their very own Edward Snowden stepping forward with
video, audio and written evidence of every word spoken by the main
protagonists, Campbell Live’s
investigation can progress no further. Yes, there are many questions that cry
out for answers, but those in a position to do so cannot be compelled to
testify. And if TV3 attempts to put their “best guess” answers in the mouths of
the “Intelligence Community” they will be sued – and they will lose.
That’s why so few in the mainstream news media are prepared
to take on these sort of stories. Every aspect of “National Security” stories
is so wrapped in secrecy, and that secrecy is so powerfully protected by the
Law, that making any kind of headway is extremely difficult. Nicky Hager or Jon
Stephenson, remarkably talented and tenacious free-lance investigative
journalists, might beg, borrow and steal the resources and time to track down and
marshal conclusive evidence, but TVNZ
and TV3 – networks with many competing claims on their time and resources – are
required to consider the commercial, legal, and, especially on stories like
this one, the political cost of
proceeding. It is a huge tribute to TV3’s journalistic values that it was
willing to let Campbell run with a story like this for so long.
Having led us this far, and having painstakingly constructed
the time-lines so essential to the process, Campbell
Live is leaving the business of speculation to us.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 21 May 2014.
