Midweek Mediawatch: Anger over MP's mental health smokescreen

In this week's Midweek Mediawatch, Hayden Donnell talked to Robert Kelly about the outcry over mental health used as a smokescreen for an MP's bad behaviour, complaints about the editorial decisions of Stuff's climate change section - and a potential missed opportunity at TVNZ

New Zealand has rarely borne witness to such a torrid flow of political scandal and disgrace as in the last few weeks.

Journalists have been presented with what would have been an election campaign-defining scandal roughly every twenty minutes since Simon Bridges lost the National Party leadership.

They’ve covered the patient data leak involving Hamish Walker and Michelle Boag. It metastasized into the resignations of Todd Muller, Nikki Kaye, and Amy Adams. Now in the last couple of days, they’ve dealt with the sackings of both Rangitata MP Andrew Falloon and immigration minister Iain Lees-Galloway.

The relentless surge of scandals left the Herald’s Claire Trevett in despair this afternoon. 

In a column headlined with the plaintive cry ‘Where will the political sackings and scandals end?’, she said “at the moment, all the voters see of Parliament is a pigsty”.

The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire cast an eye over this morning’s chaos and wrote an article headlined “Breaking: there is one new case of a disgraced politician in New Zealand”.

“Hopes of curbing community transmission of political disgrace in New Zealand are fading, with a succession of new reported cases raising fears that the so-called “Bowen cluster” is out of control,” it began.

The sheer pace of news has meant that some news angles have either fallen from public view, or not been given the same depth of coverage they normally would.

One of those dates back to the distant shadowlands of Monday afternoon, when both Falloon and National leader Judith Collins appeared to use mental health as a kind of smokescreen for his actions. 

Though Falloon’s original statement announcing his decision to step down at September’s election admitted to some missteps, it gave the impression the move was primarily related to his mental wellbeing. 

It noted that three of his friends had committed suicide when he was younger.

“Unfortunately, recently, another friend took their own life, which has brought back much unresolved grief," the statement said. 

"Recent events have compounded that situation and reminded me of the need to maintain my own health and wellbeing… I have again been receiving counselling."

Collins’ own statement added to the impression mental health concerns was behind Falloon's resignation.

“Andrew is suffering from significant mental health issues and his privacy, and that of his family, must be respected,” it said.

It was tenuous at best for Falloon to connect his friends’ suicides to his decision to send pornographic material to young women, and it was arguably misleading for Collins to sign off on statements blaming mental health, rather than bad behaviour, for her MP’s resignation when she knew of at least one complaint against him.

Newstalk ZB’s Marcus Lush was one of the commentators appalled at the pair's media releases. 

“The first thing they should’ve said is - own it - ‘I sent shots to a woman, she is the victim’, and just gone away  instead of making themselves the story. That’s the entire story.

“But when the perpetrator tries to garner sympathy for themself, I’m speechless about that,” he said on Monday night.

Newshub’s Jenna Lynch put together a story focusing on this issue, based around an interview with The Mental Health Foundation’s Shaun Robinson.

Using mental health as an excuse for bad behaviour can end up creating more stigma, by implying people with those issues shouldn’t be held to the same standards as everyone else, she said.

“Mental health shouldn’t be referred to as a weakness, nor should it be used as a shield. It shouldn't be used to score political points, nor to avoid political consequences.”

RNZ’s Checkpoint, and Lately also interviewed Robinson on the topic.

Stuff’s Alison Mau wrote a column criticising Falloon for, among other things “weaponising mental health – one of this country’s most pressing crises – to excuse his appalling behaviour”.

Readers could be forgiven for missing those stories though, due to the sheer volume of other minor and major scandals erupting on an almost hourly basis.

The tsunami of terrible news prompted Stuff’s Henry Cooke to write a defence of Parliament on Tuesday evening.

“For every horrid incident you can usually find some backbench MP plugging away on a worthy issue a constituent has raised, with little media attention,” he said.

“The grubby stuff is what people remember, but there’s a lot more to the circus.”

Gallery reporters will be praying the flow of news dries up enough for them to cover those other parts of the circus in at least some depth in the coming weeks.

Climate change section criticised for sticking to science

Stuff’s dedicated climate change section The Forever Project has been in trouble since it launched over its steadfast refusal to publish scientifically inaccurate information.

Commentators including Magic Talk’s Sean Plunket have complained that the section is slanted because it doesn’t cover arguments against the existence of human-caused climate change.

The section drew the ire of climate change deniers again recently, following the publication of an op-ed article in The Australian by the environmentalist Michael Shellenberger.

In the article headlined ‘On behalf of environmentalists, I apologise for the climate scare’, Shellenberger argued climate change isn’t making natural disasters worse or bringing about a sixth mass extinction. 

He claimed the huge recent bushfires in Australia and California were caused by a buildup of wood fuel and an increase in the number of houses near forests, not climate change. 

Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking asked why Shellenberger didn’t warrant a mention in The Forever Project.

“[Shellenberger’s] finally woken up and said the whole thing’s a scam, and he’s out of there,” he said.

“If you’ve got an entire section, was there not room in there anywhere at all for it, or are we just running an agenda?”

The Forever Project's editor Eloise Gibson cited the lack of evidence for climate denial to explain her decision not to cover it, in an interview with Mediawatch last month. 

“If you’re asking me should 100 trustworthy, peer-reviewed papers suddenly appear positing some alternative explanation for the climate change that we’re seeing, should the consensus start to shift, should there be genuine good-faith issues here, would I cover that story? Of course I would. It would give me great pleasure and no end of relief to be able to report that. I think the chances are very low. And I don’t think we would be serving our readers to proceed on reporting that miniscule chance as if it was going to happen,” she said.

Those standards came into play in the section’s coverage of the Shellenberger article.

It was reviewed by seven climate scientists at climatefeedback.org recently. Those authors found many of its central claims were inaccurate or distorted. 

The claim climate change isn’t making natural disasters worse is contradicted by reports from the IPCC and other scientific studies, which link it to temperature extremes, drought, precipitation patterns, and wildfires, the review said.

It also cited an abundance of evidence linking human activities to global species extinctions, and said these extinctions are expected to accelerate with continued global warming.

As Gibson said, she would be happy to cover good news on climate change. However, that news would have to be credible and peer reviewed.

Those standards don’t appear to have been met in this case.

A missed opportunity at TVNZ?

Last week, TVNZ announced that 1News presenter Wendy Petrie is leaving the station.

Duncan Greive noted that it was a missed opportunity for TVNZ, first and foremost because Petrie is a great presenter. 

But she’s also one of very few women over 40 who have fulltime on-screen jobs on New Zealand TV.

In an interview with Greive when she was 47, Hilary Barry noted that she was the oldest woman with a regular presenting gig at a major network.

Barry’s still presenting on Seven Sharp but the stats remain stark.

Grieve also pointed out the move didn’t help with TVNZ’s efforts to more fully embrace New Zealand’s multicultural identity.

RNZ’s chief executive Paul Thompson also spoke to Mediawatch on that topic on Sunday, noting that his organisation still has work to do to promote diverse voices. 

TVNZ doesn’t have quite the same obligations as RNZ. It doesn’t have a charter, and it’s predominantly funded from commercial revenue rather than the public purse.

But it’s still a public organisation that’s meant to be serving all New Zealanders.