Hon James Meager

You didn't mention Epstein, by the way, the king. There was some expectation, some pressure on him to do something around the Epstein thing, but I don't know why they did that, because the monarchy doesn't deal in that sort of business, and they're above all of that. rightly or wrongly anyway so here's the here's the problem with what happened so anyway sam did all the digging and he got all the information together and we had what we thought was was was a story i mean the the political editor of the state broadcaster allegedly saying what she did is unacceptable I think in most people's minds you can debate among yourselves whether you think that's a sackable offence or not at that particular point we went to TVNZ TVNZ threatened to sue us so we got the big broad base fat letter from the lawyers going and it was one of those very wide ranging letters you get from corporate lawyers basically encompassing everything so it doesn't matter what you say when you say why you say how you say it they're going to go go you for something so it was one of those letters I personally don't worry about letters like that too much but corporate lawyers do and the corporate lawyers at this place what was that what's the term they use in legal circles it had a chilling effect So perhaps some of the enthusiasm for the story, and I make no passing judgment on this other than to say I was disappointed, but the enthusiasm waned somewhat for the story upon the receipt of the legal letter. Now another aspect of the story you can ask yourself is is it wise of the state broadcaster to use lawyers to threaten other broadcasting entities that have what, as it turns out, is a perfectly legitimate story? So should we have gone a bit cold on it ourselves? Personally, no, but we did, and you can ask NZME about that another time if you want to. So anyway, that's where it was at. The good news is that in this modern day and age, it was always going to come out in some way, shape or form. Now, to the actual incident itself, is it sackable? That's for TVNZ. TVNZ is still saying they don't comment on... employment matters, be that as it may. But the problem they face is several-fold at the moment, one of which came in the form of a complaint. that involved the TVNZ gallery in dealing with Stuart Smith last week, one of which has come about maybe tied in, maybe not, with the Prime Minister no longer appearing on their breakfast programme on a weekly basis, and of course the general reputational damage. And I would, from a personal point of view, and this is just my opinion, nobody else's, the real problem that they have these days, and the gallery in general, is with their performance, not what goes on in offices, things like this.