HoS on Manukia
October 30th, 2005 at 11:47 am by David FarrarThe HoS has said it is auditing all stories by former reporter John Manukia.
At this stage three other stories appear to have had fake interviews. A big difference though is the other three interviews involved a fabricated person. The one which caught him out is when he fabricated an interview with an actual person.
I wonder how long stories with made-up people interviewed may have gone on undetected, if he had not made upo the Solomona interview which was bound to be revealed as a fake. Do newsrooms check that people interviewed actually exist?
Again US newspapers employ fact checkers. Is such a role needed here to prevent journalists simply inventing people and interviewing them?
Related posts:
- Agenda on John Manukia
- Agenda Downloads
- BBC organises hecklers to disrupt Tory Leader
- Police racist for interviewing in English
October 30th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Editorial failure in the NZ Herald goes far deeper than this. The engineer’s union runs the thing and the engineers union openly supports the Labour Party. But if proprietors allow trades hall to set the news agenda when half the country at least is CR then they deserve all they get when those readers piss off.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Who cares??? The Herald is full of, ahem, ‘reporters’, who think they are big fish in a big pond.
Most of them are a bunch of fucking morons who couldn’t dig up a story if their life depended on it.
They’re all too quick to try to come up with a witty line rather than simply reporting breaking news, so the fact that Manukia got caught with his pants down and his hand around his dick doesn’t surprise me for one moment.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
Fact checkers are a vanishing breed on American newspapers, David. Budgets. Shrinking circulations.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
David, why single the media out?
Should newspapers need fact checkers any more than bloggers? Why should newspapers be singled out for facts when MPs lie all the time, and accountants and lawyers diddle people. We dont check hte work of the police, we have a police complaints aluthority for that, just like we have the Press Assn and the BSA for broadcasters.
If some journalists need their facts checked, such people do not deserve to be employed as journalists.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
I studied journalism myself and have done free lance work. I can assure that the media is filled with fabricated interviews with non existent people. The media insists (and rightfully so) on being able to keep sources secret. But that means that fabricated sources can be created to say what the journalist thinks needs to be said.
And the difference between bloggers and journalists is that journalists pretend to be unbiased and objective and claim a higher standard for themselves than I ever seen claimed by any blogger. I have had journalists take comments out of context (and I knew the context) or to change the order of statements thus changing drastically the meaning. Now personally I think we should see newspapers as nothing but expensive blogs with biased frauds running them. But people still believe the illusion that the press is objective and honest. It is neither.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Bloggers are the fact checkers of the 21st century.
Media organisations in this country don’t seem to have, or want to have enough staff to sub-edit material properly.
Dave: “why single the media out?” – precisely because they are the mechanism that the public and other institutions rely on to, and are supposed to, investigate accurately without fear or favour and get the facts straight.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
“David, why single the media out?”
Vote:Because the bloody media enjoy access to politicians which no blog enjoys. Granted, the lazy lying bastards mostly recycle government press handouts but they operate from a position of trust as far as most readers are concerned.
A blog author who makes an untrue statement is likely to get his ass comprehensively kicked within hours–complaints about bias or inaccuracy to newspapers tend to disappear into a black hole. Same for television.
In other words, bloggers are accountable.
October 30th, 2005 at 8:56 pm
In this instance the ‘fact checking’ mechanism is already in place – our countries libel laws, the fact that Manukias dishonesty is going to cost his newspaper a great deal of money and destroy his career doesn’t seem to have entered into peoples heads here. The massive legal and professional damage that a journalist suffers when they get caught lying is the disincentive to do so.
These drawbacks don’t really apply to blogs – if they get something wrong, or make something up, no one really cares, because blogs aren’t terribly important.
At best they work as a commentary on the media – DPF and Russell Brown are two great examples of how this can work. But mostly blogs are simply the modern equivilent of those lunatics that used to stand on street corners screaming about alien abductions and poison in the water supply.
The notion that blogs are EVER going to challenge the ‘mainstream media’ is absurd.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 10:26 pm
>A blog author who makes an untrue statement is likely to get his ass comprehensively kicked within hours
>At best they work as a commentary on the media – DPF and Russell Brown are two great examples of how this can work.
Both of you make valid points. I wonder if the trend toward greater media interactivity, and the increasing bandwidth available in BOTH directions (ie it has become almost as easy for the individual to communicate as it is for the corporate), that these two trends will over time merge to transform both “blogs” and “media” into a new form we have yet to recognise?
The MSM’s credibility continues to be eroded (Manukia being just one small instance), and the blogs struggle for critical mass. Given that they both need each other, is not some form of convergence inevitable?
Vote:October 31st, 2005 at 12:22 am
I think you’ll find it’s big rich monthly magazines like Vanity Fair where a feature might be two or three months in the making that employ fact checkers, not newspapers. And even the number of magazines that employ fact checkers in the entire world could be counted on the fingers of your hands.
Vote:I can’t see how a fact checker could work on a daily paper – the daily deadlines just wouldn’t work to have all the material double-checked. Go and sit in a newsroom at deadline time and ask yourself how it could work.
And remember any paper that does employ them is going to employ one less reporter to actually gather news. Our newsrooms are thin enough of reporters as it is.
So far we have one reporter making stuff up. That’s bad. But he’s hardly representative of all journalists in New Zealand. If you disagree, let’s expose the other liars. No-one benefits from having liars among journalists, least of all other journalists.
October 31st, 2005 at 6:18 am
Dean – the HoS is a weekly newspaper.
And of course he is not representative of all journalists, but that is not the question. The issue is what steps, if any, do media take to verify accuracy in their stories?
Are there any internal checks and balances?
Vote:October 31st, 2005 at 8:29 am
I suppose the responsibility for this doesn’t go all the way to the top. The buck stops right at this journo while his bosses keep patting themselves on the back. “Checks and balances”, my [beep].
dim, as a journo I’m sure you’re upset, but even you must see that the MSM is doing a fine job of killing themselves. How many still believe that 10,000 were killed in Katrina, that there was loting, raping and killing, etc. etc.?
And on replacing the media, bloggers are doing a fine job. Only bloggers do original reporting in Iraq, the journos just stay in their hotel. Sir Humphrey does a lot of original reporting about Sweden, a country that was cited as an example by our very own PM, but none of the media here has ever investigated what that possibly could mean.
Vote:October 31st, 2005 at 10:13 am
The sad fact is that newsrooms cannot afford to employ factcheckers – and the accuracy situation is going to get worse.
Vote:As Craig Ranapia has often commented, papers exist simply to make money.
And working for Fairfax, I know how this is true.
John Manukia is one small example of pre-meditated journalistic fabrication. I am not aware of others like him.
The problem with journalism in New Zealand is that
we are such a small country populationwise, more akin to a British county, yet we produce a national range of titles.
It means cutting corners, doing everything on a shoestring, etc. The smallness of our market means we cannot do things properly and we try and do more than we should.
What is also harmful is the influence of accountants and their rampant cost-cutting. Sacking journalists means standards drop, there is more pressure to do more with less, so they will rely ever more on government and other media releases. There is no resources available for proper investigation, so the powerful can get away with whatever.
But does costcutting work. Does it restore profitability? In the short-term, maybe. In the long-run, it just fuels the decline of a publication as people decide there is nothing worth reading.
This is what happened in the UK ten years ago, a long-run 2% annual decline, suddenly became 10% in one year, as the accountants did their damage across much of the provincial press.
Technology is helping papers produce stories faster and cheaper but yes, technology is creating alternative media like blogs.
The blogs too are fact checkers, but as noted above , journos are bound by libel laws, press complaints commission, etc.
The blogsite NZBC offers some perspective on media costcutting and the problems it causes. A timely selection of articles, just as Fairfax in Australia seeks to weild the axe.
October 31st, 2005 at 11:33 am
The press could always descend into tabloidism (is that a real word?).
Vote:I remember arriving in London and reading a paper called the Sunday Sport. There was no sport, only topless girls on every 4th page and a headline that stated Adolf Hitler was really a woman and a feature article about a truck driver seeing a mermaid.
So it kind of amuses me when I see media sources here quoting British papers, I always wonder which ones.