The announcement by New Zealand’s Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith that the government was abolishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) came as no real surprise.

But it leaves a big question hanging: will the news media still be held accountable to basic standards which protect the public interest and the core functions of the Fourth Estate?

Dr Goldsmith has said the Media Council, the industry body dealing with news and online content, “will become the primary regulator for journalism”.

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That only raises more questions. The council primarily oversees standards in print and digital journalism. But unlike the BSA, it has no legal powers of enforcement, and its rulings cannot be appealed through the courts.

Goldsmith rightly points out the digital media environment has “changed dramatically, but our regulatory settings have not kept up”. But that is not the BSA’s fault.

Governments over the past two decades have proposed regulatory updates, but delivered nothing concrete.

Indeed, the Broadcasting Act dates back to 1989. Its definition of “broadcasting” excludes on-demand services but includes “any transmission of programmes […] by radio waves or other means of telecommunication”.

This became the focus of a heated dispute when the BSA signalled it was prepared to hear a complaint about online comments made on independent digital media site The Platform.

Reactions from the political right included accusations of bureaucratic overreach by the BSA, which allegedly was acting “like some Soviet-era Stasi” and making a “secret power grab”.

This significantly misrepresented the complexity of the issues at stake. For some years the BSA has openly advanced the case for regulatory reform — including whether that meant retaining the BSA itself in its current form.

No public consultation
The more fundamental question is whether any standards regime should apply to online media. That was a key issue raised in the media reform proposals put out for public consultation by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in 2025.

These included a proposal to:

modernise the broadcasting standards regime to cover all professional media operating in New Zealand, not just broadcasters. The role of the regulator […] would be revised, with more of a focus on ensuring positive system-level outcomes and less of a role in resolving audience complaints about media content.

This would have entailed a two-tier model: an industry regulator responsible for handling day-to-day complaints about breaches of content standards; and a statutory regulator to oversee systemic issues, with powers to ensure the overall standards regime remained robust.

Even if the BSA were restructured, there was no proposal to simply dispense with it and replace it with an industry self-regulator.

There were a range of responses to the proposal, but policy development certainly appeared to be progressing on the basis that some form of statutory regulator would be retained.

The decision to scrap the BSA may be a politically populist tactic to leverage the case of The Platform in an election year. But it is also democratically indefensible because it has not been subject to any meaningful form of public consultation.

Can the industry self-regulate?
There is no disputing that the regulatory frameworks need to be updated, given the current patchwork quilt of regulations that is full of digital holes. But applying basic standards such as accuracy, balance and fairness on a platform-neutral basis should not be contentious.

These principles are not, as some have claimed, an affront to free speech. They are the basis for upholding freedom of expression in a democracy.

Goldsmith explained the decision to abolish the BSA on the grounds that:

Greater industry self-regulation is the most practical way to level the playing field across platforms, and can provide an appropriate level of oversight to maintain ethical journalistic standards and audience trust.

But eschewing enforceable standards that apply to all media places too much faith in deregulated markets and the industry’s willingness to police itself in the public interest.

It is a regulatory model based on best-case scenarios, where all media players can be trusted to behave professionally, ethically and take their public obligations seriously.

The media system in general is facing unprecedented pressures from audience fragmentation, failing business models, lost advertising revenues and declining public trust.

The opportunity costs of adhering to standards are starting to collide with commercial shareholder imperatives.

That is probably an argument in favour of government funding to support public interest media. But it also demands a regulatory model fit for the digital age, with sufficient power to encourage compliance with basic standards.

Without that, any media operator deciding its commercial interests outweigh the cost of complying could choose to ignore the standards with impunity.

In a media environment where disinformation, fake news and polarising propaganda are already permitted to proliferate, this represents a real risk to democratic processes.

Dr Peter Thompson is an associate professor in media and communication at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article was originally published on The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

A documentary from Stuff Circuit this week delved into Aotearoa New Zealand’s growing extreme far-right and anti-vax movement.

Why did the makers of Fire and Fury decide to platform a group of conspiracy-minded idealogues, and what did it get right that others got wrong?

In February, Newsroom’s Melanie Reid travelled to what was then called “freedom village” to interview some of the people behind the occupation taking place on Parliament grounds, Voices for Freedom leaders Alia Bland, Claire Deeks, and Libby Jonson.

“You guys started it yeah? The three of you?” Reid asked. “Three mums.”

“Three mums,” they agreed in unison.

The video feature was part of a wave of press that Voices For Freedom and its allies attracted in recent months.

Altruistic posture
Nurses For Freedom, a group founded by Voices For Freedom local coordinator Deborah Cunliffe, featured recently on Three’s The Project.

“Healthcare clearly matters to New Zealand. Our nurses want to help,” she said.

Cunliffe’s altruistic posture in the interview jarred a little with calls in the Nurses For Freedom Telegram group for Nuremberg 2.0 to be carried out on public figures who backed vaccination and covid-19 health measures.

At the end of that interview, presenter and former Black Cap Mark Richardson pointed out that the healthcare workers in question could get their jobs back with one simple step.

“Get the jab and go back,” he said. “I don’t care what your rationale is.

“Your country needs you. It’s like me fielding under the helmet. I didn’t want to do it but I did it for the good of the country.”

Other coverage was more sympathetic to the anti-vax cause.

Fire and Fury – the documentary.                    Video: Stuff Circuit

An uncritical eye
A story by Evan Harding in Stuff’s Southland Times cast an uncritical eye over Nurses For Freedom’s claim to represent 700 nurses just waiting to return to work.

But according to figures from the Ministry of Health, only about 500 nurses have been suspended for failing to meet covid-19 vaccine requirements.

Stuff’s article has since been removed, replaced by a message saying it failed to meet the company’s editorial standards, and another article by Harding on vaccinations has received the same treatment.

Stuff wasn’t the only news organisation to pull a story after giving an uncritical platform to an anti-vaxxer.

Last month, The New Zealand Herald carried an article by the Northern Advocate about Brad Flutey, who was protesting against the closure of the Marsden Point refinery.

The story didn’t mention that Flutey is an anti-vaxxer who called for the Parliament protesters to shift their focus to Marsden Point as a way of retaining momentum after their occupation was broken up, nor that he had repeatedly called to overthrow the government, and had faced charges for refusing to comply with covid restrictions and wear a mask while shopping.

After receiving criticism, The Herald took the article down and later replaced it with a rewritten version headlined “Marsden Point Oil Refinery protest passes 100-day milestone in Northland – take two”.

The Platform platforming
While some organisations seem to have elevated these figures either by accident, or in contravention of their own editorial standards, broadcaster Sean Plunket’s platform The Platform has platformed a succession of anti-vaxxers and extremists on purpose.

This week, presenter Michael Laws talked to Counterspin Media host Kelvyn Alp, who once told Act leader David Seymour he was lucky protesters at the Parliament occupation hadn’t strung him up from the nearest lamppost.

An extrajudicial execution would seem like the most extreme possible form of deplatforming, but an association with intolerance does not appear to be a deal-breaker for The Platform, which has the tagline “Open. Tolerant. Free”.

The station had also aired long interviews with leaders of groups like Voices For Freedom and NZ Doctors Speak Out With Science in recent months, some of them not exactly neutral.

The Platform host Rodney Hide put his cards on the table before an interview with Alia Bland, revealing himself to be a member of her group:

“I am a very very very proud member of Voices For Freedom. This is my disclosure. I’m not having someone along that I’m neutral about. I am a fan of Voices For Freedom.”

After his interview with the well-known Facebook anti-vaxxer Chantelle Baker, Plunket was so moved that he even offered her a show.

“Do you want a weekly show on The Platform?” he asked. “I would be happy to have you on board on the strength of the open conversation we’ve had today.”

Personal platform clipped
But today The Herald reported Baker’s personal platform had been somewhat clipped, with her own Facebook page newly deactivated. Though the report said she was operating another page, just not under her own name.

The reason Plunket was making that offer, and interviewing Baker in the first place, was because she had just been featured in a documentary which painted her and other leading anti-vax figures in a less than flattering light.

Fire and Fury by Stuff Circuit came out last Sunday, and features clips taken from conspiracy and anti-vax groups on platforms like Telegram, which show the violent elements of the movement.

“You gotta love that sound of execution. It’s gonna happen,” one clip begins.

“The media in this country need burning. They really seriously need burning,” another voice continues.

The doco also showed a darker side to Voices For Freedom.

Far from just being — in the words of that Newsroom video — the project of “three mums”, Fire and Fury portrays a group which puts up an approachable, folksy front to draw people into a more radical, potentially violent agenda.

‘Fascistic’ ideas lurking
In an interview with host Paula Penfold, The Disinformation Project director Kate Hannah points out potential fascistic ideas lurking beneath some of the group’s messages on vaccines and health.

“The role of women and wellness in fascist and proto-fascist movements has always been really significant. Even in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, a lot of proto-fascist ideas came from or were augmented by ideas around health, well-being, rejection of modern medicine, because obviously if you are an uber-race, you don’t need modern medicine,” she said.

“All of the different groups that we see in New Zealand at the moment have features of fascistic ideas around power and control.”

The documentary also homes in on chat transcripts from former National Front leader Kyle Chapman identifying the “dark-haired” lady from Voices For Freedom as a potential political leader.

Penfold told Mediawatch the Stuff Circuit team decided to do the documentary after watching the Wellington protests and seeing talk on associated social media channels about making the country “ungovernable”.

They wrestled with how to to shine a light on what goes on in the shadier corners of the internet without giving further oxygen to dangerous figures.

“There were many many, many editorial conversations about how we should do that,” she said.

Guided by researchers
Those conversations were guided by groups who had studied the New Zealand far right.

They helped convince the team not to interview some of the people at the centre of their documentary, including Kelvyn Alp, former AUT law lecturer and conspiracist Amy Benjamin, and fellow conspiracy theorist Damien De Ment.

Penfold also cited a 2017 report called The Oxygen of Amplification by US-based independent nonprofit organisation Data & Society.

“We drew most of our guidelines from that on what we should and shouldn’t do,” she told Mediawatch.

That approach was criticised by some journalists, including Plunket, but Penfold said it was necessary.

“They’ve had their say. They have so many hundreds, thousands of hours of material on the internet already, and also the guidelines we were reading said it was dangerous to give them a platform that’s equal to the hate they’re already disseminating. And so this is not your ordinary right of reply situation. In a way it’s like we were giving our audience the right of reply to what’s already been said.”

Different approach
Stuff Circuit took a different approach in an earlier documentary on the conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika, where Penfold sat down with him for a long-form interview.

Penfold said the team was also careful then not to platform “dangerous” content.

“We didn’t let him platform any of his conspiracy theory views. That was an important distinction. We were challenging him on things he had said and things he had done and misrepresented in his career,” she said.

“In this instance we just didn’t want to give them an opportunity to revoice the conspiracies they already had voiced. Sitting them down and giving them that right of reply risked re-platforming their dangerous speech and we just didn’t want to do that.”

The question of whether to cover the extreme right, and how to do it, has been a vexed one in the media as conspiracy movements have grown noisier and more influential.

In a recent column for The Herald, Matthew Hooton warned of a “monstrosity” emerging on the right, and concluded with this conundrum for the media:

“Is it best to ignore these extremist movements for fear of giving them a platform? Or is it more important than ever to bring to public attention the true nature of their agenda?” he wrote.

Pacific Journalism Review paper
Disinformation researcher Byron C Clark has looked at that issue in a paper on the media’s coverage of the Parliament occupation for the Pacific Journalism Review.

#PacificJournalismReview #FRONTLINE3: The #NZ #media and the occupation of #Parliament by @byroncclark #altright #antivaxxers #citizensarrest #conspiracytheorists, #Counterspin #disinformation #harassment #mediacoverage #Parliament #qanoncult #Violence https://t.co/vW3VauXZgn pic.twitter.com/mVy6sBjBCR

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) August 21, 2022

Clark said Fire and Fury succeeded where some other attempts to cover the anti-vax extreme right had fallen down.

Though some far-right figures were hoping the publicity they received from the documentary would help grow their movement’s numbers, the documentary’s framing and editorial decision-making should make that unlikely, he said.

“They’re hoping they can use this to bring more people into the fold with their beliefs, but I think that’s going to be difficult to do because it’s put some of the more violent aspects of their beliefs out there and that’s probably for a lot of people going to be the first thing they know about something like Counterspin — that they’re calling for the violent overthrow of the government.”

Clark said the documentary’s approach could help dissuade some vulnerable people from joining conspiracy movements by inoculating them against some of the more pervasive forms of false information being peddled.

He backed Stuff Circuit’s decision not to interview the conspiracist figures they were covering.

“I think rather than giving them more oxygen by covering them in news articles or a documentary like this, it’s providing some of that balance that’s lacking in their own channels.

“It’s really more restoring balance to some of these ideas rather than giving these ideas oxygen.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.