Michael Laws: Welcome to the dark side

DESPITE DERIVING an income as both a broadcaster and columnist, I am an accidental recruit to the Dark Side that is the New Zealand news media. I know I should be more grateful. If not for my public and deserved fall from political grace a decade ago, I would never have had the notoriety or life experience to excite any of their offers or interest.

But then New Zealand has a history of bad boys and mad girls making good in the media that combination of licentiousness and lunacy is so often entertaining, if not enlightening.

Of course, I now accept that to enter any form of public life political or press is to invite public scrutiny. But once you have been their quarry, you do tend to have a different perspective about the elastic principles that the media profess.

In truth, the media exist for one purpose, and one purpose only. To make money. If they can parlay their sense, sensation and sensibility into a consumable product and pretend to also be upholding defined democratic freedoms then so much the better.

But whether newspaper or magazine, television or radio, the fact remains that the bottom line is the bottom line. News delivers content to the commercial, or readers/listeners/viewers to advertisers. That is its primary purpose.

In other words, the media assumes the moral high ground despite itself.

When tested, though, that moral ground starts to quiver and shake. And so it has proven this past week, with the outing of TV One and Radio Sport presenter Tony Veitch as a domestic thug. That it was the media eating its own only added to the spectacle.

I should first confess that I am not unsympathetic to Veitch's predicament.

As mentioned before, I know what it is like to be pursued by a press pack, especially when you're not squeaky clean. I know that awful inevitability of being found out, and the experience of public humiliation. And all the sleepless nights and the interminable angsting, that accompanies such exposure.

But I also recognise, from that same experience, the staged retreat. The manufactured, strategic apology. The devices that avoid any true atonement. So I recognise Tony Veitch's creepy confession for what it truly was: a crafty effort to avoid drastic repercussion. Crafted with the connivance of his media employers.

It was designed to achieve three ends: first, to put press speculation to bed; second, to achieve public sympathy for the devoted husband; and third, to give both TVNZ and The Radio Network an excuse to retain his sullied services.

Of all three ends, that latter may still be achievable. If not in the short-term then definitely in the long. Particularly because both TV One News and Radio Sport/Newstalk ZB played along with Veitch's ruse. They had an input into his statement. And they were both aware that the Dominion Post had ferreted damaging revelations about the 2006 assault. They then made conscious and determined attempts to avoid any acknowledgement even after they were published.

Which is the problem with Auckland's media mafia.

They are a closed shop, with loyalties only to themselves. They collectively decided that Veitch should, and could, tough it out. They made the immoral choice to suspend their moral judgement.

All their later actions including suspension were forced upon TVNZ and The Radio Network.

Insincere attempts to counter mounting public criticism.

So much so that TVNZ not only had Veitch host his usual Monday sports segment, but ignored the entire story. In marked contrast to past controversies, when Judy Bailey was required to present her $800,000 salary details and when Bill Ralston was shown the door. Or when TV3 and Radio Live booted Clint Brown for a boozy, non-criminal altercation in Taupo.

TVNZ News then studiously avoided the story until the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald picked up the Dominion Post's lead. You could almost see them thinking: if it hasn't been reported in Auckland, then it hasn't really happened.

Meanwhile, Newstalk ZB/Radio Sport ignored the story completely. They even had talkback producers dissuading callers from comment and one producer actually blaming yours truly for this "non story". Any attempt at impartiality or objectivity had vapourised.

Veitch's public confession on Wednesday afternoon was duly covered by both broadcasters but sympathetically portrayed. TV One's Close Up gathered a hand-picked, sympathetic panel of pro-Veitch commentators to declare him exonerated. His co-workers in both TV and radio publicly extolled his character.

If the media conference had been a true "mea culpa" observing the three standards of acceptance, apology and atonement I would have been charitable.

But it was not. It was specifically designed to avoid any mention of, reference to, the violent assault. Nowhere in his prepared statement did Veitch admit to striking, punching or kicking his former partner. All he did apparently was "break, and lash out". I'm trying to remember the last time when four broken vertebrae and head injuries resulted from an exasperated "lash".

There was also a dreadful attempt at self-exoneration. He was "under stress" and "medication" because he was earning $400,000 a year presenting a 10-minute segment on the news and performing a three-hour radio show. But, wait, there's more. He was working gasp, horror seven days a week. Although I'd love to know which "medication" you take for exhaustion but still end up working seven days a week.

Solo parents with kids work seven days a week. They are under genuine pressure. So too truckies trying to make ends meet; farmers facing drought; mums and dads earning the average wage, paying a mortgage and trying to raise a family. Or parents with chronically sick children or partners coping with a dying spouse. That is the real stuff. Seven days a week. And none of it is self-inflicted.

No, let's call this past week what it was. Sections of the moral media exposed as both amoral and immoral. Protecting their own. Suspending rational or real judgement.

And yet come Monday morning they will be still trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. Jeez, and they say politicians can't be trusted.

Michael Laws is a Radio Live host.

m.laws@radiolive.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News