A commentary exposing a year-long silence around a homophobic slur incident involving a senior TVNZ journalist at a parliamentary press event, highlighting systemic failures in media accountability and ethical standards within the press gallery.
How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.
How the news corpus has covered this same topic over the last 12 weeks. 5 articles from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT, 1News, Newsroom and The Spinoff. Click through to the press view for the full panel.
Verbatim segments from politicians speaking on podcasts and radio shows about this topic. Sourced via the voice-reference library — each speaker has been confirmed manually from their voice clip. Click play to stream the original audio from the publisher, pre-seeked to the moment the quote starts.
Okay, from the commentary I'm seeing online, it's clear that there is a perception out there that no one reported on the Mikey Sherman revelation because the media were protecting one of their own. I can tell you that that is true. It is not imagined. It is true. It is not true for Newstalk ZB and I'm not saying that because I'm employed by Newstalk ZB. I'm saying that because I was involved in some of the phone calls around this particular, shall we loosely call it, investigation. And I know that we tried to publish this, but we ran into a couple of obstacles, which look, happens with investigation. Like don't get too dramatic about it. I can't tell you the number of things I've wanted to report on and try to report on that I've never been able to report. To report on. There is a long list. I don't think the press gallery members who were at the party in Nicola Willis' office last May can be judged for not reporting on what happened, right? As I said yesterday on the show, I worked in the press gallery too. I know there is a lot of boozing in the press gallery. I did it. And sometimes there's bad behaviour that happens because that's what happens with booze. It doesn't get reported because do you nark on all of your mates if you're out boozing with them and they do something stupid every time they do something stupid? Nothing stupid? No, you don't. But what was not okay was that when it became known in Wellington that News Talk ZB was trying to run a story on it, members of the press gallery got in touch to raise concerns. Now my recollection is that they were worried that if we went public at News Talk ZB with what Mikey Sherman had said to Lloyd Burr, we would be breaking a long-held convention of not reporting on whatever happens during drinky poos in Parliament. And that ministers... Would then freak out about the breaching of Chatham House rules and would no longer invite the press gallery up to their offices for drinks. That crossed the line, in my opinion. That, in my opinion, was actively trying to stop media outside of Wellington reporting on what happened in Wellington involving one of their own. In the end, it didn't influence us at all. Now, I'm not telling you, I'm not doing myself, telling you this is not me doing myself any favours with my friends in the press. in the press gallery, because I think I will be ostracized the next time they see me for telling you this, but I think it is worth telling you this so that we are all reminded in the media that our jobs are to report the facts, not to try to suppress them, even if it involves our mates.
Up to 12 framings spread across orientations. Each framing is a short phrase the topic extractor generated to characterise the piece's stance — not a quote from the source. Click through to read the original.
a failure to uphold journalistic integrity in high-pressure settings
Democracy Briefing: Maiki Sherman and the media that ate itselfSocial-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →
Spotted something wrong on this page? Report a correction.
