Not Unexpected

Picking Through a Deceased Estate

The sanctimony and self-righteousness of the media never fail to surprise.  The media like to trumpet their standing as the Fourth Estate--a vital component in civil society to keep government and the powers honest.  What they often completely fail to comprehend is that standing as the Fourth Estate requires their behaving responsibly.

Sadly, the media is generally held in contempt by the wider population.  Their behaviour so often makes them complicit in unethical behaviour.  We have seen this on display in Murdoch's News of the World in the UK.  In order to get "stories" phones were hacked.  Private conversations of important or newsworthy people were accessed.  Salacious and sensational headlines followed.  Revenue went up.  Media people have now gone to prison for this illegal behaviour.

The media in New Zealand have tut tutted.  How unprofessional.  How unethical.  How tawdry.  Now it appears that all of the head-shaking was little more than holier-than-thou, self-righteous, malodorous sanctimony.
  An unknown political or commercial opponent of blogger, Cameron Slater--owner and operator of the blog, Whaleoil--hacked not just the blog but an exhaustive archive of Slater's e-mails.  There is no secret or doubt about this.  The anonymous hacker has publicly trumpeted it.

He has delivered his "trove" of stolen goods to a hackster-author, whose muck-racking conspiracy theories are well known.  Hager, our own equivalent of a one-member John Birch Society, has used the stolen property to attempt to bring down the right-of-centre government.  It is not yet apparent whether he has succeeded.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the hacker has set up an arrangement with the New Zealand Herald and has successively been dumping the stolen goods on the Herald's doorstep, which the Herald has dutifully printed.  The Herald thinks it is doing us all a public service, in precisely the same way the News of the World saw its hacking and eavesdropping and profiting from illegal phone hacking as being a "public service".  Everyone wanted to know about what the Royal Family, and Princes Harry and Wills, and Kate were up to. Public interest required such illegal behaviour.  And being public figures, their claim to privacy was null-and-void--don't you know.  The NZ Herald has entered the same unethical, illegal, and salacious world in its reception and use of stolen property.  The bottom line is that this once-proud newspaper has become a tawdry rag, profiting from a crime.  In the Herald's case, the Fourth Estate has come to resemble a deceased estate.

At the same time, and out of the other side of its mouth, the nauseatingly sanctimonious paper has tut-tutted about the decline in standards of political conduct in this country.  But because it is, or was, part of the Fourth Estate, it is complicit in that very decline.  It has become a willing participant in the tawdriness of politics and government it is self-righteously declaiming. It has no shame.

There is an apt phrase for that level of defalcation. Gross hypocrisy. 

Slater has warned the media, reporters, and the NZ Herald that he now considers all private correspondence and e-mails involving media people as being open season for disclosure.  He has sent thinly veiled warnings to all and sundry.  And that's the problem in a nutshell.  The race to the bottom of the sewer has now started.  The NZ Herald ought to have known better.  It had a public duty and responsibility to do better.  It's a sad day--and even more sadly, not unexpected.