New e-media programme - Manning and Hager on NZ's Pacific spy 'arrogance'

LIVE NOW on Evening Report .... journalist and ER founder Selwyn Manning talks to investigative journalist Nicky Hager about New Zealand "full-take collection" spying on New Zealand's Pacific neighbours.

EveningReport.nz was launched tonight with the Hager interview on the Snowden Revelations.

Earlier Café Pacific blog posting today - From a coconet spy tempest to TPPA secrecy
Pacific Media Watch/The Intercept report - NZ spies on Pacific neighbours

NZ Defence Force’s paranoia about journalism 'subversives'

Cartoon source: Bryce Edwards blog

By Gordon Campbell on Scoop

IF THE thousands of people who marched on the weekend against New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bill (GCSB Bill) wanted further justification for their concerns, the Defence Force has just provided it with bells on.

The mindset that treats journalists as being threats to security on a par with foreign hostiles, activist groups, criminal hackers and dishonest staff is an excellent illustration of why the surveillance powers bestowed by the Bill are so dangerous.

A Defence Force that treats the normal querying of the status quo by the Fourth Estate as being essentially treasonous in nature, has gone off the reservation, and is out of control.

Give it the power to do so, and such an organisation will readily use the surveillance powers in the GCSB Bill to substantiate its persecution complex.

It is already doing so. This isn’t just a theoretical danger, glimmering somewhere off in the future.

New models of funding needed, say NZ investigative journalists

Pacific Media Centre's David Robie ... “We need to educate the universities."
Photo: Jamie Small/Te Waha Nui

INVESTIGATIVE journalists are calling for new models of funding to fill a gap in the industry where the private sector has failed.  

By Jamie Small of Te Waha Nui

Nicky Hager, author of The Hollow Men and Other People’s Wars, says there is not enough support for investigative journalists in countries like New Zealand.

“I hope that one day there will be a return to serious public funding for investigative journalism,” he says.

Hager says most investigative journalists do not have much industry training or support. They are often citizens who begin investigating a crime or wrongdoing and do not realise they have become a journalist.

Professor David Robie, director of AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre, believes he has an answer.

“As the mainstream media reduces its reporting skills, universities should be picking up the slack,” he says.