MEDIAWATCH: RNZ pro Russian misinformation meltdown exactly what TDB said it was

ByMartyn Bradbury

Wow, look at that, the TDB ‘I-Told-You-So-Express’ is on time, again!

The report into the so called RNZ pro Russian misinformation review is back and EXACTLY what TDB claimed was the issue has turned out to be the issue…

RNZ news division in for overhaul after report into inappropriate editing

RNZ board chair Jim Mather says he maintains confidence in the broadcaster’s chief executive after a report highlighted problems with the newsroom’s structure, editorial systems and culture.

An RNZ audit, set up in response to evidence news agency stories were inappropriately edited and published on its website, has concluded with corrections issued on 49 of the 1319 stories examined. 

The audit began after inappropriate editing of several wire service stories relating to the Ukraine war was first raised with RNZ on 9 June.  

The audit found no evidence that the issue involved more than one staff member, who has resigned. 

On Wednesday, an independent panel reported back with 22 recommendations, including merging the radio and digital news teams, a review of staffing levels and workloads, refresher training for journalists, and hiring a new senior editor responsible for editorial integrity and standards. RNZ has agreed to implement all of the panel’s recommendations.

The report stressed that only one journalist was responsible for the more than 49 story edits, but said he would not have got away with it if RNZ’s systems and oversights had been up to scratch. However, the independent panel said it felt not all the edits identified by RNZ were inappropriate.

…now, I was banned for life from RNZ after I supposedly ‘defamed’ John Key, so I may be a tad jaded about the State Broadcaster, but here’s the point I made when this all erupted.

The fiasco at RNZ over their supposed biased re-edits misses what has actually happened here.

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.

 

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.

If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media

Similar Posts

- Advertisement -

11 Comments

  1. Fortunately RNZ have become an irrelevance in the last few years so probably little damage done. Pity though, I had high hopes under Labour as a properly funded objective media source but all they morphed into was a mouthpiece for this governments ideology!

    1. None of them would have happened if not for the existence of the zionist entity. Funny how you don’t advocate for any real way to achieve world peace, huh?

  3. Don’t worry Martyn, almost nobody under 80 listens to RNZ anyway.

    Maybe the incoming National government will shut down the whole sad edifice and tell Classical Radio listeners that they can get exactly the same content from YouTube, and I look forward to the day when Kim Hill is reduced to serving at MacDonalds. 🙂

    1. Only because R.N.Z. live sports coverage was inexplicably dumped, and every local R.N.Z. station shut down, and then every music station closed except one, and no announcers of gravitas hired in the past 30 years, and the licence fee scrapped without replacement. Gee, I wonder why it’s “failing”?

      Not to mention the Triple J knock-off station that is “still in development”. Only twenty years behind schedule!

  4. I guess balance is not part of the remit of a state broadcaster during war time.

  5. To much spent on supplying Life Rafts to certain over paid over rated presenters and middle management.

    Meant know budget was left for Compliance.

  6. NZ seems to be awash with people who arent doing their jobs many of them earning very good money. And whenever the shit comes down, it never touches the powers that be.

    The guy who does this gets the boot but his boss gets told to reorganise so we go back to a tried and tested method that should never have been abandoned in the first place. Why is the Boss not accountable for allowing ongoing issues over a period of years?

  7. What I understand it all to mean is that RNZ has to officially tow the line and dish up,verbatim, the twisted CIA approved US worldview doled out to it by BBC, AP, ABC and Reuters etc.
    I am extremely disappointed by RNZ.

    Meanwhile, look to Ukraine for what USA is cooking up for Taiwan.

Comments are closed.