Fake News - New Zealand Edition

Apparently they had a "process" that allowed anyone to edit any story. New Zealand broadcaster apologises and suspends journalist over 'pro-Russian propaganda' - Rebel News

I'm honestly shocked the RNZ^‡ has not been the continuous target of ransomware attacks, if this indicates the level at which the safeguard data.

New Zealand’s public broadcaster has been forced to apologise to the public and stand down one of its journalists after pro-Russian propaganda was found in its articles.

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson said a sub-editor had re-written news stories to include “pro-Kremlin garbage” on the broadcaster’s website.

The person responsible for the edits said they had been doing it for years, since joining the news agency, and no one had ever said, "That's wrong."

So this is one employee inserting their personal bias into stories. How many other employees have been doing the same thing, but haven't been caught? Or who share the bias of the editorial board, so no one cares if they were caught or not?

As for that "process"...

[CEO Paul] Thompson said there wasn’t any evidence more than one person was involved in adding incorrect information to the stories, but the "editing systems are not as robust as they need to be."

Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. This is the same kind of weasel-wording companies use when there is a ransomware attack. "There is no evidence" that data was stolen, until there is evidence later.

A week ago Paul Thompson had "no evidence" that this was going on, and if he had been asked a question by "journalist" he could have done his best "indignant denial" speech. And he probably would have talked about "process." Notice he hasn't said that there is no process, just that the process in place isn't as robust as he wants it to be. So what is the process? ("That would be telling!")

So how many letters to the editor were written calling out pro-Russia bias, before anyone even looked into this? It isn't that RNZ discovered this either, Reuters apparently noticed that one of their stories had been edited before being posted to the RNZ website. So where is that process I keep reading about?

‡ RNZ stands for Radio New Zealand. It was established in 1995, and is a Crown entity. That means it is part of the government, not nominally independent with funding coming from the government, as is the case with NPR.