Last Straw

The NZ Her­ald has pub­lished a remark­able edit­or­ial today which offers rare insight into just how well our “free” media sys­tem serves to under­mine demo­cracy, while the back­ground story offers great insight into how much National Party politi­cians deplore demo­cracy and how deplor­ably dis­hon­est they can be in the lead up to an election.

As an aside: the only politi­cians I know of that don’t deplore demo­cracy are the Greens.

The back­ground story, if you haven’t heard, is that National Party politi­cians have been secretly taped admit­ting that they need to say whatever it takes to get elec­ted, then, once in power, they can get their real agenda through of redis­trib­ut­ing the New Zea­l­and people’s wealth to a tiny minor­ity of rich. Here’s Bill English’s and here’s Lock­wood Smith’s.

What’s remark­able about the Herald’s edit­or­ial isn’t simply that it tries to spin the story by pre­tend­ing National is simply “com­prom­ising on its desired policies,” rather than that National is actu­ally lying about its policies so it can drive them through once it’s in power:

The coun­try now knows, if it did not before, that National has com­prom­ised some of its policy desires for the sake of its elect­oral prospects.

It isn’t simply that uncov­er­ing a party’s real agenda — some­thing of vital pub­lic interest in the run up to an elec­tion — is dis­missed as “par­tisan politics”:

First, it is not fair to release a reporter’s tape or tran­script unless … the record­ing could serve a pub­lic interest some­what more com­pel­ling than par­tisan politics.

It isn’t simply that it admits the means of report­ing on politi­cians is broken:

Second, the pub­lic­a­tion would dam­age the gath­er­ing of fur­ther inform­a­tion. Once bit­ten, a pub­lic fig­ure is twice shy.

It isn’t simply that it admits to keep­ing secrets:

Noth­ing revealed from National’s con­fer­ence sneak so far offers insights to its inten­tions that could not have been obtained by a journ­al­ist trus­ted to use a private con­ver­sa­tion responsibly.

No, what I find remark­able about this edit­or­ial is that by put­ting for­ward this argu­ment it is openly admit­ting that it can be trus­ted by politi­cians but can’t be trus­ted by its read­ers and that it is com­pletely inef­fec­tual in doing the job of report­ing politics.

External links:

Gotcha! | 4 August, 2008
Choos­ing words | 5 August, 2008
Whoops, they did it again | 6 August, 2008
The Her­ald sup­ports secrecy | 7 August, 2008