Earlier today Winston Peters gave his “State of the Nation” speech. This was billed as stating how things really are going in New Zealand. Sadly the only thing from the speech that is going to be talked about is Winston’s comments about Huka Lodge. Winston claimed that it had been sold to the Chinese. He has also claimed that the PM said to the owners he would help smooth its progress through the OIO. However all is not as is claimed by Winston Peters.
All of this is background to the main point, which is alluded to by the posts title. The interesting element of this is not the possibility that Winston has been caught lying, again, but the reaction of journalists on twitter. Lets start with Andrea Vance:
So, fellow journos, is it not about time we stop reporting what Winston Peters says as fact? Huka Lodge denying it has been sold.
— Andrea Vance (@avancenz) February 21, 2014
It will be interesting to see if she carries on with this in an opinion article. She has been very vocal on twitter about this. As you can see if you click on the tweet above, someone suggested not reporting anything he says, which Andrea clearly points out would be undemocratic. But It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable change in the way Andrea reports on what Winston says and claims.
We now have members of the media expressing openly their view that it is not surprising that Winston has been found to be telling porkies.
Winston is still claiming to be right and questioning the sources of the answers the media are getting.
It will be interesting to see how the media respond to this. It looks like it could be a repeat of last week with Winston denying he had ever visited the Dot Com Mansion until he was thrown under the bus by Dot Com. In that case he took the approach of saying he had never been there, as opposed just saying he wouldn’t answer the question. At the time, he also took to attacking members of the press gallery.
Social media is now giving us a more open, and immediate, insight into what journalists are thinking about the people they are reporting on. This helps to make it easier to read between the lines of what they report in the mainstream media they work for.
