MEDIAWATCH: How bored are the spooks if they had to investigate Journalist Mick Hall?
For the love of Christ…
NZSIS inquiries into former RNZ journalist ‘appropriate’ – spy watchdog
The spy watchdog has found it was appropriate for the country’s Security Intelligence Service to investigate a former RNZ journalist for alleged foreign interference.
Mick Hall complained he had been unlawfully investigated by the spy agency, after he was publicly accused of ‘pushing a false Russian narrative’ when sub-editing a Reuters story, later published on RNZ in 2023.
SIS inquiries into Hall concluded “there were no concerns of foreign interference”.
The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Brendan Horsely looked into Hall’s complaint, and found the SIS’s enquiries were “both legal and proper and that NZSIS recognised the sensitive nature of making enquiries into a journalist.”
In a statement, Hall welcomed the report and accepted the SIS acted “out of necessity” but criticised RNZ for making “damaging mischaracterisations”.
An RNZ spokesperson said an independent review found Hall “breached editorial standards with inappropriate editing of overseas wire stories, including adding a pro-Russian perspective on the invasion of Ukraine.”
…how bored are the spooks if they had to investigate Journalist Mick Hall?
You can read Mick’s full account here.
Here’s my interpretation.
5 years ago when RNZ started their digital news department (without it being under the editorial control of the News Dpetament) it was met at the time with the exact criticisms that have been harvested now.
The criticism was that the Journalistic oversight required to run a digital arm wasn’t funded and would end up with copy being printed that hadn’t been given appropriate oversight.
All the journalist at the centre of this fiasco is guilty of is doing their job! He was adding context to news stories taken off overseas media wires, he wasn’t a Russian 5th columnist FFS.
He worked from home, doing a job no one was funded to oversee until an anonymous right wing blogger compared stories and the rest of the media picked it up and ran with it.
What this fiasco and attempt to paint RNZ out as some compromised media source utterly misses all the other pro-Israel, pro-American and pro-China propaganda that our mainstream media are awash with.
How many times has the NZ Herald been caught peddling Chinese propaganda?
How many times do American interests and Israeli interests get sold to us as our own by the mainstream media?
A work from home journalist subbing copy at a poorly over sighted and underfunded State Radio broadcaster with internal turf wars over who has editorial control is not the infiltration of bias that it’s being sold as, but it does conveniently eclipse the real bias in our wider media landscape.
The real question is how senior staff on $300 000 per year seemed to miss all of this and why the SIS wasn’t asking them questions rather than investigating Hall?
Funny isn’t it.
When it’s me, Nicky Hager, Mick Hall, the Greens, MANA, Māori activists and Unions, the State can’t move fast enough to breach our civil rights and spy on us, yet when it’s Brian Tamaki and his christofascist thugs or white supremacists plotting mayhem, they are no where to be found.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
the problem with these agencies is they always attract fascist narcissist wannabes who get their jollies going after people with mana, just to make their own lives seem more bearable. they never see the real problem people because they are too relatable to themselves. I do hope they have decent vetting systems, but who vets the vetters?
You had better get used to a state religion if the coming US theocracy happens any time soon. While you are an obvious exception most media has a traditional conservative bias that presents the news to best support the established traditions. It also has a follow the money rule as well so don’t expect any major advertisers to get any negative coverage unless they do something especially evil.
“Working from home” was not the issue.
Neither was “lack of oversight”.
Mick Hall did the job of providing balance and context exceptionally well. When I read the reports that he had edited (at a time when I had no idea who Mick Hall was) my reaction was to think that, for example, Reuters had a clear bias towards the Ukrainian side but at least had the decency to briefly acknowledge certain pertinent facts. As it turns out that grudging respect which I had for RNZ and its big brothers in the news business was entirely thanks to Mick Hall.
You could argue that Mick didn’t go far enough. However he went as far as any journalist could when trying to introduce balance and context into a media apparatus which has little regard for the truth and acts as though its primary purpose is to advance Anglo-American political hegemony.
The SIS investigated Mick in the same way that some of us might buy a Lotto ticket, knowing that the odds were stacked against them and that they would probably come up with nothing, but still hoping for a consolation prize in the sixth or seventh division. No such luck this time. Still, you have to be in to win.
That is the standard modus operandi for the SIS. Choose your target, then look for evidence. The logical next step is to find evidence where there was none, and the day may not be far off when the SIS will be blatantly publishing fabricated evidence against its political adversaries.