What Happened to Journalism

I don’t know what’s worse, the sensationalist drivel that’s been dominating the media lately or the fact that there’s a demand for it. I touched on it in my last post when I called out CBS sports for referencing an old photo of an intoxicated Ben Rothlisburger in a story about how he was cleared of sexual assault. They added it on the end of the story as if to say, he has been cleared, but he likes to drink so he’s still a bad guy. The reference was out of context and irrelevant, it served no purpose other than to further vilify Big Ben and permeate the scandal. It’s also no different to way that the New Zealand media handled the now infamous “Andrew Williams pee’s on a tree” story.

I challenge you to find a New Zealand man who has not at some point in his life pee’d on a tree. For me it’s an almost ritualistic occurrence whenever I’m out on the drink. It’s a way of life for the vast majority of Kiwi men. Yet when the North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams pees on a tree it headlines TV3 News. If he got naked and ran down the road squirting away like the sprinklers at the cricket then OK, I can understand all of the media attention. But he was behind a tree, behind a building, in an area where he would have been safe to assume no one was looking. Unfortunately of course someone was looking. What’s even more unfortunate is that they worked for The Sunday Star Times, a paper who apparently cares more about scandal and allegations than they do about facts and news.

The Times broke the story with the headline “Call for mayor to quit after night on town”. A headline that was hardly fitting given the allegations were he was drinking during the day. They went on to publish; “Call for North Shore mayor to quit after night on the town”, a story that due to lacking factual evidence relied heavily on past instances of William’s questionable behavior. Since this original story in the Sunday Star Times there have been numerous conflicting accounts of the events that occurred.
On John Campbell’s show Campbell Live, an interview with GPK bar staff revealed that the mayor had not been drinking all day like the Star Times claimed. And that he had in fact been in a meeting from 4-5 and that while at GPK he had shared two bottles of wine with three people and did not look intoxicated when he left. The Sunday Star Times then refuted this saying that they had an interview of the GPK bar staff saying he had 2 bottles all by himself. As if this wasn’t cloudy enough a waitress at neighboring restaurant Portofino said in an interview with Campbell live that Andrew Williams was there with a group of people from 12pm until 6pm. However there was no mention of him drinking. This account also conflicts with the story of how he was in a meeting from 4-5. A story that has since been supported by a document claiming Williams defiantly attended the meeting.

What I’m trying to get at here is that no one knows what happened. The Sunday Star Times original story was based solely on allegations and the events that followed in the media illustrated that they did very little research. Their sensationalist story’s soul objective was to attack the North Shore Mayor’s character. The fact that this was acceptable to a legitimate New Zealand newspaper is deeply concerning. When did scandal become headline news? When did sensationalism become an acceptable replacement to journalism? I thought that the popularity of the E! Channel and the droves of gossip magazines were bad enough. But now these pathetic scandals are dominating the newspapers and the 6 o’clock news.

What does it say about our society?