The background to all this has been well reported but for those who came in late, last year a frustrated listener to Sean Plunket on internet site The Platform went casting around for someone, anyone, to complain about what he was hearing.
The NZ Media Council (more on them shortly) deals with print and website complaints, which didn’t quite fit with The Platform’s live-streaming.
However, the BSA was at least prepared to consider the idea that its legislation could be interpreted as giving it jurisdiction over outlets like The Platform, and issued an interlocutory decision saying that it was going to go away and have a think about the question.
Predictably, all hell immediately broke loose. Sean Plunket, a man not known for being a shrinking violet, went ballistic at what he termed the BSA’s attempt to regulate the internet, a sentiment which his fellow Platform host, Otago Regional Council councillor Michael Laws, echoed.
Many politicians, mostly from the right of the spectrum, also weighed in to condemn the BSA.
Some were no doubt doing it for political expediency, but Stephenson’s call for the BSA to be abolished had more credibility than most.
Whatever else you might say about Act New Zealand — and I’m sure you could say plenty — one thing the party is dogmatic about is the importance of freedom of speech.
As an example, at a public meeting in Wanaka during the last election campaign, party leader David Seymour was asked a question which invited him, essentially, to scrap the Public Interest Journalism Fund and then regulate the way the media operates.
While Seymour was all in favour of scrapping the PIJF, he resisted the temptation to take a crowd-pleasing swing at the media, saying that the party of free speech was not going to impose rules on what journalists could and could not say.
Stephenson, an interested watcher in the aisles that day, swung immediately into action when The Platform issue broke, saying on October 15 that he would draft a Member’s Bill to scrap the BSA.
All well and good but, like most other MPs who are not ministers, Stephenson already had a Bill in the ballot, and it was an important one — the End of Life Choice Amendment Bill, legislation which would tinker with the assisted dying regime introduced by Seymour to, to both men’s minds, improve the system and eliminate some anomalies.
Stephenson has already done considerable work in this Bill should he ever have the luck — like Seymour did — of having it drawn from the ballot, so he would not have been keen to replace the one Bill he is allowed in the ballot with a BSA-busting effort.
However fate, as it so often does, then lent a helping hand.
In the Members Bill ballot of October 23, Stephenson’s Act colleague Laura McClure had her Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill (which was featured in Southern Say last week) drawn from the biscuit tin.
That meant that she was free to enter another Bill in the ballot, so for the last two draws the Broadcasting (Disestablishment of Broadcasting Standards Authority) Amendment Bill has been sitting there waiting for its number to come up.
It hasn’t but following Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith’s announcement on Wednesday that the government had agreed to progress with disestablishing the BSA and investigate ‘‘self-regulation options’’, the Act Bill sits there ready and waiting to be adopted by the government for just that purpose.
The ‘‘self-regulation options’’ possibility is where the NZ Media Council — which the Otago Daily Times and all Allied Media community titles are a member of — comes in.
The Council decides complaints based upon whether a potentially errant media outlet has breached one of its 12 principles — which are clearly set out on its website.
Critics of the system argue that the Council lacks teeth, and that upholding of a complaint against them troubles the relevant media outlet not at all.
Now I can’t speak for every media outlet but I can tell you that this one takes Media Council complaints very seriously.
When not writing about politics one of my responsibilities is dealing with Media Council complaints.
Responses — both to complainants and to the Council — can be several thousand words long. We take our high ranking in the annual media trustworthiness survey seriously, and a rigorous response to any Media Council matters is an integral part of that.
It is a good system. It forces the ODT to look critically at our work and assess whether we have met the high ethical standards that the Media Council, let alone our readers, expect of us.
And that process does not just kick into gear when a complaint is lodged. When assessing whether or not to run a potentially controversial story, how the ODT would respond to a Media Council complaint is one of the factors that we consider.
The Media Council is not a handbrake on freedom of speech: it is a guide rail intended to encourage responsible speech.
And that is the irony of the situation that The Platform, and others, may soon find themselves in.
They may have the BSA’s head on a pike, but in the not too distant future they might well find themselves subject to a body which will rigorously scrutinise their work, rather than having no regulator at all.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
