Flat Earth News and the Veitch allegations

This weekend's spate of newspaper stories about the Tony Veitch affair illustrate how the trends British journalist Nick Davis writes of in his book Flat Earth News are alive and kicking in New Zealand.

Davis hit the headlines earlier this year with his assertion that more than half the news in Britain’s top five newspapers was generated by public relations companies or taken from wire services.

I haven't the opportunity to read the book yet (it's at the top of my reading list) but from this story in The Australian newspaper written by Miriam Cosic I understand he says news organisations have had their budgets slashed to the point where today's journalists no longer have the time or resources to carefully gather, check and analyse their stories and are instead reduced to "churnalism". Part of this process is an increased dependence on stories fed to them by PR professionals.

While PR has long played a major role in business journalism as well as sport and technology coverage, it's now also having a major impact on harder news areas including politics and crime.

Which brings us neatly to the Tony Veitch affair which has dominated New Zealand's Sunday newspapers for the past three weeks. For non-New Zealand readers, Veitch is a high profile TV sports announcer who was recently sacked after publicly admitting he had 'lashed out' and seriously injured a former girlfriend after the story first surfaced in The Dominion Post newspaper. There was an out-of-court payment of $150,000. Since the stories were printed the New Zealand police have investigated the case and Veitch now faces a number of charges.

This incident is smack in the middle in Flat Earth News territory because the accused Veitch has a public relations firm fighting his corner in the court of public opinion and someone is busily leaking nicely airbrushed versions of his story to New Zealand's news media. The victim has also come in for  some nasty character assassination.  In addition, Veitch's wife has been sympathetically interviewed and her reported words carry more than a whiff of  media-training. No doubt this whole campaign is aimed at winning over public opinion in the run-up to the court case and may even hope to influence the court.  There's also some evidence of public relations activity on the victim's side.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, what's clear is that New Zealand's news media is being carefully manipulated here by PR professionals.

You can read another take on this issue  at SST – dancing to Zoe’s beat? « Ethical Martini.

Incidentally, Tony Veitch now has his own Wikipedia page which appears to be updated on a regular basis.

This is the story about the police investigation that was 'leaked' to the Sunday Star-Times The Veitch saga: what Kristin told police.