John Bowie, LawFuel publisher
It takes a certain perverted genius for the state broadcaster to threaten to sue a commercial rival over what it primly calls an “employment matter”. But here we are with the Maiki Sherman affair, something Maiki herself might term ‘Faggotgate’ should she be on the right side of the debacle. It’s a glorious little storm in what one might call a sustainably created pottery teacup given TVNZ’s constant sermonising and its ability to embrace any and all soupy, on-trend messaging.
Unfortunately, the boot is now on the other foot for the Rainbow-ticked broadcaster as its shouty parliamentary reporter has become the woke-de-jour for the suits at Victoria Street. CEO Jodi McDonnell and her sisterhood in top management at the network will have been choking on their quinoa when Maiki got pinged, not once but now twice for poor behaviour.
The crime scene was in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s parliamentary office last May and gay and good humoured Lloyd Burr was the recipient of the homophobic comment, although the circumstances do not disclose whether the comment was somehow passed in a jokey, back-slapping manner or was simply a homophobic piece of particularly nasty face slapping.
Witnesses say it was loud, ugly and disruptive enough for Willis to shut the night down. Sherman’s defence, we’re told, is that Burr started it with a racial slur. Either way, the entire press gallery knew about it for nearly a year and kept their collective mouths shut, unsurprisingly.
As former editor Karl du Fresne wrote, the truth in these matters tend to emerge piecemeal over time, but it reflects poorly on TVNZ and its leading lady marquee poster child, particularly given the emergence of legal threats by two of the country’s leading media groups – TVNZ against NZME and Stuff against the blogger who broke the story, Ani O’Brien.
And it is that inter-media scrapping that is more interesting that the social catnip of a pissy party brouhaha.
The Ultimate Hypocrisy
When Newstalk ZB’s producer started asking awkward questions recently, TVNZ didn’t do anything so vulgar as answer them but reached for the lawyers, a nice fat belts-and-braces legal letter, from Russell McVeagh threatening to sue their commercial rival into silence, evidently rejecting their usual go-to firm of Salmon Smith Long on this occasion and reaching for the legal top shelf, as they would see it.
The State broadcaster, publicly funded, self-appointed guardian of journalistic standards and woke rectitude, sent legal threats to rival media outlets to suppress a story about one of its own journalists. The irony is so thick you could serve it at a Wellington media awards dinner, which is presumably where they’d wet themselves with self-congratulatory excitement.
To add to the farce, Sherman then received her five day ban from Parliament from Speaker Gerry Brownlee following she and her team apparently chasing the previously invisible National whip Stuart Smith, who no-one other than his wife and family knew existed, and allegedly aggressively knocking on his door like bailiffs to seek answers to their question.
When you’re the state broadcaster’s star Māori female voice, a bit of door-thumping is just “doing the mahi”. Until it isn’t.
The whole saga is pure comedy on one level but reflects a sourness in the thin-skinned reaction of week-kneed media organisations who themselves display a relentless, infantile leftism and should-saggingly tedious ‘Gotcha’ culture.
Maybe the unspectacular,steady-as-she-goes Simon Mercep, reporting everything from weather events to action in the Strait of Hormuz, should be sent to warm Maiki’s chair.
TVNZ and its poor sister RNZ is the tireless trumpet of left-wing piety, woke sermonising and every shade of rainbow flag.
TVNZ occupies the moral high ground on everything: skin tones, gender, colonialism, sustainability, pronouns. Its output suggests an organisation that has never encountered a cause it didn’t wish to champion, or a viewer it didn’t wish to lecture.
Through the Maiki episode has suddenly discovered the virtues of corporate lawyers when one of its own lets slip with language that would have seen any parliamentary or other victim cancelled into next week.
Intersectionality scores another victory.
In the days of Richard Harman and Linda Clark, political editors broke governments. Now they break into ministerial corridors at midnight, and engage in bad taste party spats apparently.
The real victim in all of this, naturally, is journalism itself. And the use of lawyers to keep from the public what TVNZ and Stuff see variously as ’employment matters’ and anything else that keeps their brands from further rust.
And apart from the lawyers, paid to toss around threatening letters, the journalists sitting in the press gallery, have become a shrinking, ever-more-politically-correct media class, constitutionally incapable of holding its own to account, driving the rest of us into the ratsnest of social media in despair.
