Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Re the Urewera 18, I think the issue is that the couple dozen people in the national media - morning report producers, political editors, news editors at the dom-post or the press - who would realise the significance of the decision and run stories on it, are all away on holiday. If they'd been around and run the story then the Herald et al would realise it had significance and match it, but in the absence of editorial direction the news is basically just celebrities, weather and car crashes.
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This cable which details the US embassy involvement in the campaign to force Pharmac into wasting money on expensive drugs, should be the subject of considerable scrutiny
The tactics described in that cable sound awful similar to the pro-Herceptin campaign a couple years later.
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I gather Nicky Hager had some interesting discussions with the Star Times about what was a good story from the cables. He didn’t think the “International Visitor” cable was a big deal, but the newspaper really wanted it.
Of course. It had celebrities in it.
I'm kind of glad the SST is taking the tabloid approach. Hager self-censored Don Brash's emails to exclude any information about the private lives of the subjects, which is very virtuous but, y'know, not much fun.
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I can't wait for some future cable to reveal that New Zealand and the US have trade links ('Why was this not declared?????') or that Air New Zealand planes actually fly from New Zealand to the US ('And what is on board those planes??? And who do these so-called pilots and stewardesses really work for?????')
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With due respect to your wife and other journos that have been on the scheme, the State Dept wan's to expose only a favourable view to those influential people.
Well obviously, that's why they do it. But these are journalists, not, say, Herald columnists, so they're not mindless sheep. And they're not driven around theme parks in windowless vans, they're basically let loose to do and see what they want.
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Why does the State Department even offer? What's in it for them?
Mostly they send our MPs, not our journalists. I think it's partly a relic of the cold war, partly a realisation that the US isn't too popular around the world and that a good way to spread sympathy for their country and systems is to expose influential people to it.
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There are also journalists who happen to think it taints the process - Consumer Magazine, amongst others, even though it limits what they do in that they can only compare products that they can afford to purchase.
There would be a pretty obvious conflict of interest for Consumer to accept free stuff, and I don't have much time for journalists who write features gushing about their recent holiday in the Gold Coast, sponsored by the Queensland Tourist Office. But if the State Dept sends a journalist to the US to cover one of their elections is there really a massive conflict of interest?
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@Public Servant, this is pretty common practise in journalism. Companies pay business/economics reporters to attend product launches around NZ and overseas. Other companies embassies (mostly Germany and China) sponsor similar trips, as do their tourism organisations.
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In the “Sunday Star-Times” article yesterday, a number of journalists were listed who were considered by the US to be “open-minded” and received free trips to the States, where I assume they were made more “open-minded”.Would you want to run a story about your own reporters being subverted?
That's pretty silly. My wife went on one of those trips earlier this year: the only 'subversion' is that she attributed the State Dept ('This trip was made possible . . .') at the bottom of all the stories she filed.
We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance...
The NZ Wikileaks cables released so far (9/1490) aren't mind-blowing, but you can't pretend they're not of historic value in documenting the changing relationship between NZ and the US.
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Some of this stuff just rubbish, frankly.
Well, intelligence gathering is all about sources:
Former Wellington Chamber of Commerce chief executive, diplomat and Government adviser Charles Finny has been named by WikiLeaks as the United States’ top Kiwi contact.
But Mr Finny denied being a spy and said the “key contact” mentions were flattering. He is quoted often in the US diplomatic cables controversially made public by website WikiLeaks, and in a cable from May 19, 2006, was singled out as a “close [US] embassy contact”.
An example of Finny’s analysis here, on his old blog the Wellington Hive.
My prediction was that Fran OSullivan would be the Embassy’s main Wellington source but she’s close friends with Finny, so maybe that’ll come out later. I’m also picking Tim Groser to be another informant for the US.