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.
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