The Radio NZ scandal grows

The Herald reports:

Radio New Zealand (RNZ) staff are expected to meet with members of the New Zealand-Ukrainian community this week as calls for a Government inquiry into the state broadcaster mount.

One independent think tank says the edits, which appeared sympathetic towards authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and the Middle East, gave “legitimacy to terror”.

That is the one things they all have in common. Every single edit was done in a way that is more favourable to an authoritarian regime and less favourable to Western-style democracies.

Often bias is hard to prove, as you can always argue about how a story can be framed. But here we see the explicit edits made by a Radio NZ staffer.

A panel to head an independent review and its terms of reference were announced earlier today.

It looks to be a pretty good panel, but I hope they don’t try to make this all about one staffer. The focus has to be on the fact this happened for years with no-one detecting it. Who was in charge of the processes for digital news?

Radio NZ is hugely privileged. Almost every other media company in New Zealand has declining revenue from advertising etc. They have had their funding not just stay stable but increase by over 20%. Other media organisations have had to lay off sub-editors because of declining revenue. Radio NZ has made a decision, unaffected by falling revenue, not to have anyone checking the work of their digital team.

The problem for Radio NZ is that what happened lines up perfectly with the narrative amongst many on the right that Radio New Zealand is “Red Radio”. To have it revealed that RNZ has been changing international wire stories so they are more pro-Kremlin just feeds the narrative perfectly.