Under the Radar – Police interview techniques, Alex Jones gets his comeuppance & is NZ on Air taking the piss?

We here at TDB like to be first at pointing shit out, but in this never ending 24-7 news clusterfuck of a media environment we all live in, even we can slip up and miss something that should get more focus, so from time to time we’ll run Under the Radar News, things of note that escaped attention.

This week, Police interview techniques, Alex Jones gets his comeuppance & is NZ on Air taking the piss?

Police interview techniques:

Once again we get this…

Lois Tolley murder case: Crown and police lose legal fight over interviewing technique

Crown lawyers and the police have lost a legal fight to keep secret the contentious interviewing technique used in the failed prosecution of the Lois Tolley murder case.

The method, likened by the High Court judge to “a fireside chat”, was used in extracting a confession from one of three men charged over the shooting of Tolley in her Upper Hutt home in December 2016.

All charges were withdrawn after the cases against the trio unravelled separately late last year. Many details of the case against the men remain suppressed.

…How many times do we get told by the cops after a deplorable interview process that borders on bullying a confession out of desperate and simple people that they promise to change procedure? We had it after Police planted evidence in the Arthur Allan Thomas case, we had it after the Christchurch Creche satanic case, we had it after Teina Pora, we had it with taking photos and taking statements from Māori teenagers on the street.

Now we have it with a new entrapment interview process that has seen very little attention in the NZ Media…

Top cop intimately involved in interviews that led to false murder confession

The architect of a controversial interviewing method had intimate oversight of its use in a case where a false confession was extracted from a murder suspect.

A High Court judge said detectives trained in the Complex Investigation Phased Engagement Model (CIPEM) misled the man, and “manipulated” him to make a confession that was “very flawed” and “not credible”.

Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald, who is the officer in charge of the police’s national crime group, and who created CIPEM, previously said any issues were the result of mistakes by the detectives who questioned the suspect, not a flawed model.

He wouldn’t discuss the extent to which he was involved in the interviews, which were conducted as part of Operation Archer – the investigation into the 2016 murder of Upper Hutt woman Lois Tolley.

Stuff can now reveal that Fitzgerald helped plan the suspect’s interviews and watched them unfold from an adjacent room – offering advice and direction to the two detectives as required.

…look, if you want to have cosy fireside chats with criminals and that helps get information and prosecutions, hey, that’s smart Policing, but what we have here is a process that has clear breaches of good faith law, is in fact illegal and allows for huge periods of time where the fucking camera or recording devices are switched off.

How the Christ can we have any certitude that there isn’t something untoward occurring when the cameras and audio get switched off? The fact that Fitzgerald originally claimed his interview process wasn’t correctly followed by the Detectives and that was the reason the case fell over simply isn’t fucking true! Fitzgerald was there coaching the fucking Detectives the whole fucking time!

Look, you can’t have a Police interview process that generates false or illegal confessions! If all we are trying to do is set people up and convict them of crimes we force them to confess to, that’s not a fucking legal process, that’s a gulag! How have the NZ Police managed to get away with this with so little media attention and how often is this interview process now being used? Are we going to see a sudden spike of mistrials because the Police have adopted a rigged interview process?

What the fuck is going here?

Alex Jones gets his comeuppance:

Alex Jones ordered to pay $45.2m in punitive damages to Sandy Hook family

Combined amount of $49.3m is still below the $150m Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis sought after his Sandy Hook shooting lies

The pure joy of watching this grifter maggot destroyed in Court because his lawyer is a clown was so majestic. Jones has done more to damage the mental sanity of this planet than most individuals, his hate drenched rhetoric plays to the worst aspects of masculinity and robs everyone of rational thought once they get sucked into his InfoWar cult.

He was Q Anon before Q Anon. I’m glad he is being humiliated for his slander.

Remember, the greatest red flag in the world is an InfoWar bumper sticker.

Is NZ on Air taking the piss:

Hilariously, NZ on Air are patting themselves on the back…

Public Interest Journalism Fund exceeds expectations, reaching 36 million pages views in first year of funding 

New Zealanders have embraced public interest journalism, with 36 million page views of funded stories since NZ On Air‘s Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) began one year ago. 

In that time, NZ On Air data shows that PIJF content has been viewed across 37 tracked websites with readers, viewers and listeners consistently spending between one to two minutes engaging with the content and, since January, weekly unique browser numbers exceeding 400,000. 

“This data, for websites alone, shows us that the fund has achieved what it was set up to do, which was to support New Zealand news media to fill a public interest need,” said Raewyn Rasch (Ngāi Tahu/Kai Tahu),  Head of Journalism, NZ On Air. 

“We are now seeing, on average, around 800-1,000 funded articles each week,” says Rasch. “The impact has far exceeded what we originally expected. And with page views exceeding 36 million in that time, it tells us that people are most definitely engaging with that content.” 

There have so far been four funding rounds, allocating close to $44m, withthree more to go till the fund wraps up in June next year.  

Since it was launched, the PIJF has processed more than 300 applications requesting around $137.5m. These have been across public interest journalism projects, new journalism roles, and training and development programmes – with 149 roles*, 15 training programmes and 51 projects funded for 57 media entities. 

…ummmm, well.

Sure.

That’s one interpretation of the fund, another interpretation is that there are serious issues with the Public Interest Journalism Fund that demand genuine scrutiny.

Graham Adams critique is devastating…

The Government giving money for journalism with strings attached is creating big problems for the organisations which accepted it. Some now regret taking the handouts.

 …the questionable ‘journalism’ this funds is one thing, the requirement for an editorial agreement before you could ever apply is completely unacceptable in terms of fourth estate journalism…

As it happens, no serious critic is suggesting that the fund, which is administered by NZ On Air, obliges successful applicants to not criticise the Government (or that government officials contact journalists to tell them what to say).

What critics have focused on are the criteria that prescribe how the Treaty of Waitangi should be presented — a point that Forbes, Jennings and Russell conveniently never mentioned.

The section describing the fund’s goals recommends “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner“.

And the first of the general eligibility criteria requires all applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”.

Critics allege that the media fund has a very particular focus and an overriding purpose: to discourage criticism of the government’s push for co-governance with Māori even as it is being inserted into a broad swathe of the nation’s life — from legislation governing the RMA and health to the conservation estate and Three Waters, among many others.

In short, anyone wanting to argue that the Treaty doesn’t imply a “partnership” is very unlikely to get any money. Yet, the question of a “partnership” is exactly what critics of the Government’s co-governance plans — who are alarmed at the prospect of 16 per cent of the population being granted equal say with the other 84 per cent in many spheres of New Zealand life — are contesting.

I have quit jobs because of editorial interference and have been blacklisted by most  corporate media because I refuse point blank not to speak my mind.

I’m never going to apply for Government funding that demands an editorial line.

Journalistic standards – yes, 100%. Anyone taking taxpayer money including our public broadcasters have an obligation to uphold the very best journalistic values, but that’s not the NZ on Air funding demands, it demands an editorial position!

Here’s Graham’s latest criticism that actually highlights the editorial guidelines…

Here are examples of the “guidance”:

• 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.

• How does the [media] organisation cover the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and efforts to enact it such as He Puapua?… For publicly funded news media, He Puapua recommends ‘increasing the number of Māori governors, te reo and Māori cultural content.’

• 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.

In short, NZ On Air is handing out millions of taxpayers’ money with the strong recommendation that journalists not only accept but promote the view that Māori never ceded sovereignty to the Crown; that Parliament’s “sole sovereignty” is an “assumption”; that New Zealand’s institutions are inherently racist; and that concepts of “fairness” should not get in the way of promoting the prescribed interpretation of the Treaty.

…this isn’t journalism!

This isn’t about the. values of journalism!

This isn’t about the training, supporting and building of journalism!

This is a social engineering editorial line and it is inappropriate in the extreme to tie public funding of money for journalism to any editorial line!

Now, the crazy thing is I absolutely agree with the aims of their editorial position on Maori, but I sure as Christ won’t be told what to fucking write!

This is not journalism, it’s social engineering for agreed woke Wellington middle class virtue signals.

By playing to middle class virtue signals, the Government avoid the heavy lifting to rebuild the shattered free market monstrosity they have now!

What the Government should be doing is reforming the market by hitting Facebook and Google up for a Journalism tax which is funded to accredited media for them to decide the journalistic focus, not targeted niche woke knee jerks or local journalism which should be their existing obligation.

Pretending there aren’t any issues with the Fund and the way that it has become perceived as Government propaganda suggests a self awareness bordering on an inanimate object.

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