On Wednesday 31 October, Nicky Hager delivered the 2012 Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture to a packed and attentive Maidment Theatre audience. Entitled ‘Investigative journalism in the age of media meltdown: from National Party Headquarters to Afghanistan‘, the lecture described the key political, commercial and economic influences Nicky identifies as degrading public and democratic discourse. He particularly noted the impact of PR machines, but drew on material from his books to illustrate the impact of other interests.
Even after comparing the state of the democratic sphere to a polluted river, much abused by dairy farming, Nicky struck an upbeat tone, providing a series of ideas for democratic renewal. He also note that investigative journalism is an ‘inherently optimistic activity’ and paid tribute to journalists in all NZ media who do more that could be expected of them while under relentless pressure.
The lecture is a must read! You can view it online here or download a PDF here.
Isn’t the game Hagar and the left keep playing over serect emails , etc, all somewhate tiresome and tedious.Isn’t it all turning out to be quite a bore, from Liarbore?They are only jelous that they don’t employ Crosby Textor.Oh well, I am sure they can find someone else to muckrake for them, not that I’m accusing the Australians of muckraking for National.But Dear Leader and Liarbore certainly played dirty themselves.They are capable of doing and have done the very same things they accuse Crossby Textor of doing.pdq
You may have missed Chris’s and my muatul apologies.You may also have misread my piece as defending the objections to coalitions of runners-up rather than trying to recognise and understand those objections to enable parties likely to want to form such coalitions to be able to do so without arousing a public backlash. Trevor Mallard figured that one out, Bomber.And you may have missed the point of my above comment.I am letting you and everyone who reads this blog know that the Government simply does not have the power to do this in secret. Every select committing, including the Security and Intelligence Committee is prohibited from holding secret hearings unless every MP on the Committee agrees. If there are secret hearings on the SIS bill, it will be because Kennedy Graham wanted there to be secret hearings. Tell him not to agree.