Point of Order: How Fire and Fury sparked a journalism teacher’s call for old-fashioned notions of fairness and balance to be abandoned

Point of Order too often has drawn attention to issues the mainstream media have overlooked or partially reported. But we apply old-fashioned values and – perhaps – should go back to school.

More specifically, we should think about taking lessons from Dr Greg Treadwell, head of journalism at Auckland University of Technology, who (we understand) will impress on us the case for dumping our quaint ideas about fairness and balance.

Writing for Newsroom, Treadwell has called for a rewriting of those rules in response to the Media Council’s receipt of complaints against Fire and Fury, an hour-long Stuff Circuit documentary on disinformation and far-right political agitation which was released six months after thousands of people camped on Parliament’s lawn.

Treadwell expects many complaints to result from the documentary makers’ decision to offer no right of reply to the subjects of their film.

The reasons why the right of reply was denied can be found at The Spinoff, after Stewart Sowman-Lund interviewed one of the documentary’s producers, journalist Paula Penfold.

The article says the documentary

“… centred on those widely held responsible for inciting the violence on the final day of the protest – the fringe online influencers and far right figures that, in the Covid era, have seen their following grow significantly”.

But the key subjects were not interviewed specifically for the film. Rather, the documentary makers used material gleaned from social media posts, videos and news archives “to provide an accurate portrait of the disinformation milieu over the course of 60 minutes”.

Penfold explained:

“We didn’t approach them. That’s a really unusual editorial decision and I don’t know that we’ve ever taken that decision before, I think it is unprecedented for us. But it was obviously a very considered decision because in this instance we wanted our documentary to be the right of reply to what they’ve already said in the public domain.”

She said this was the recommended approach for publishing on a subject matter like this.

“When you’re reporting on far right dangerous speech you do not give them a right of reply because that elevates them.”

The Spinoff noted that some of the film’s more prominent subjects had responded via Sean Plunket’s online radio station, The Platform.

Penfold disapproved:

“I think he’s trying to build an audience, I think he’s trying to be provocative and get people to talk about him. If he wants his platform to have any ounce of journalistic credibility, well, he’s lost that this week,” she said.

“I started to watch a bit of something that he said about our piece and I found it quite personally disgusting some of what he was alleging about us. He’s becoming guilty, himself, of inciting hatred against journalists and that makes me annoyed.”

In his article for Newsroom, Greg Treadwell supports Penfold.

He expects many of the complaints to the Media Council will allege the principle of journalism which requires ‘accuracy, fairness and balance’ in reporting has been breached.

“Complainants are likely to ask the council to rule a piece of journalism cannot be accurate, fair and balanced if it silences those who are the subject of its allegations.

“Such a finding, despite any immediate logic to it, would be simply unthinkable.

“It would allow purveyors of disinformation to cast themselves even further as victims of the “mainstream media” and perhaps even force Stuff to provide a platform for their mistruths and conspiracies.

“It would open the gate wider to proto-fascist movements seeking to pollute our public sphere and thereby wound our democracy.”

Insisting this must not be allowed to happen, Treadwell argues:

“Balance in journalism is no longer what it was – an equal opportunity for those in news coverage of almost any sort to speak and put their case on the given issue. It was once even counted in column inches to make sure it was fair.

“Such an approach was idealistic at best and exposed as inadequate by the influence oil companies have had on the debate about climate change, holding us back from meaningful action on fossil-fuel use for decades.

“Now disinformation merchants, who use falsehoods to increase fear and misunderstanding as they build their libertarian armies of the ignorant, want ‘fair’ access to the public sphere.”

And:

“If we’re to protect our precious, albeit flawed, public sphere from those who would destroy it, we need to redefine the rights of journalists.

“We need to stop those cracks in the ice from worsening, exclude dangerous falsehoods from the national conversation.

“To do this, we could need to rewrite the rules about fairness and balance and the Media Council may well be about to make a start.”

Treadwell drew one critical response from the Daily Blog’s Martyn Bradbury, who wrote:

“… while I agree with part of his argument at Newsroom that the makers of Stuff’s middle class docudrama ‘Fire + Fury’, didn’t have an obligation to interview the various fear grifters and bad faith extremists to give ‘balance’, but where the objectors to the Media Council do have a legitimate claim of bias is the utter refusal by Fire + Fury to be balanced in terms of a blinkered coverage of the protest itself!”

The focus of the documentary (Bradbury complains) is only on those voices on the right who whipped up the trouble at Parliament, but NOT on Trevor Mallard (Speaker of the House at the time) who had escalated it – for example, by turning on the sprinklers and playing loud music.

“We wound those people up for 3 weeks and then screamed ‘Nazi’ when they finally react?”

“This is why Fire + Fury should be sanctioned by the Media Council, not because they didn’t interview these fringe fear grifters, but because they refused to balance the docudrama with any focus of accountability on Mallard’s response and tactical failures!”

And:

“If middle class virtue signalling is journalism now, we are in real trouble.”

An article on The Platform fired a shot from the right under the heading First we tweak democracy – now we tweak journalism.

Ben Espiner, a producer and writer at The Platform, huffed:

“That’s convenient, isn’t it? The pre-existing rules around fairness and balance in journalism that have worked for decades are suddenly in need of some tweaking, right as Stuff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ documentary is due to come before the Media Council for voiding its bowels all over a group of very disillusioned Kiwis and not bothering to speak to them.

“Our very own Doctor of Journalism, Greg Treadwell, took leave of his senses this week for just long enough to publish an astonishing piece of writing in Newsroom, which lent itself almost entirely to being a literary back massage for Paula Penfold and her propaganda riddled documentary.”

Espiner seized on Treadwell’s demand that ‘purveyors of disinformation’ mustn’t be allowed to ‘cast themselves even further as victims of the mainstream media’ lest the door be left ajar for ‘proto-fascist movements seeking to pollute our public sphere and wound our democracy’.

“That, according to Treadwell, is reason enough for presenting a ludicrously one-sided account of one the biggest stories in the country and leaving its subjects out of the conversation entirely.

“He goes on to say a Media Council ruling that a piece of journalism must be fair and balanced would be ‘unthinkable – despite any immediate logic to it’.

“I would just take a moment here to remind the reader that this individual is the head of journalism school at AUT.

“Perhaps the most tantalising nugget of irony in this whole misguided affair is that he goes on to condemn ‘disinformation merchants’ – presumably referring to the subjects of the documentary – for ‘using falsehoods to increase fear and misunderstanding’ for their own social and political purposes. Now that sounds familiar…”

Espiner muses it might be unthinkable for the Media Council to rule that ‘Fire and Fury’ was unfair because journalists aren’t used to scrutiny.

“Hate messages and trolls – sure. Just not professional scrutiny. They much prefer being the purveyors of that.

“That’s why suddenly, according to one of our top journalism academics, holding journalists like Penfold accountable for their content and its potential bias is analogous to fascist apologisim.”

Espiner proceeds to express concern about what young journalists are learning about their role in a democracy “from people like Treadwell”.

“People who are supposed to be raising our next generation of reporters, yet appear increasingly to be abandoning their duty to convey the principles of balance and fairness in favour of drilling fear into their students over the entirely imagined danger of ‘platforming’ views they don’t like.”

Point of Order’s veteran writers have digested all this and decided not to go back to school. Something to do with old dogs and new tricks. But giving up our afternoon naps to listen to Treadwell comes into considerations, too.

Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton