SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING

The documentary Fire and Fury received $190,000 from the Public Interest Journalism Fund. The money has not been well spent. 

SOME FIVE MONTHS on from the three week occupation of Parliament grounds, there is certainly a space for a well informed account of what led to the occupation and how it played out during those turbulent times. But the hour long documentary Fire and Fury isn't it. The lucky recipient of reportedly $190,000 worth of public money via the Public Interest Journalism Fund, it does little to aid our understanding of those times and instead doubles down on the rhetoric we heard from the opponents of the protest at the time. That this documentary largely reinforces the view of the Government and its supporters will only serve to reinforce suspicions that mainstream journalism, the so-called 'Fourth Estate', has become a willing member of the political establishment. The gaggle of journalists hobnobbing with the Speaker of House, Trevor Mallard, as they watched the protest high up from a Parliament balcony, remains a troubling image. 

The documentary, co-written by Stuff journalists Paula Penfold and Louisa Cleave, betrays its obvious antipathy for the occupation by caricaturing it as a vehicle for dark and malevolent forces bent on the destruction of New Zealand's representative democracy. There is no recognition that this protest had diverse and complex motivations and it was not a simplistic and  cartoon-like 'fight' between 'good and evil'. But this documentary is all dark narrative and grim and foreboding images of the protest and protesters accompanied by a sinister music soundtrack. Sound a bit tabloid? You bet.

But misrepresenting the occupation like this can only be done by rearranging the facts to fit the predetermined narrative - or just omitting them altogether.

Penfold and Cleave want us to believe that the protest was the work of fringe elements unrepresentative of New Zealand society as whole. But that means ignoring polls that said that about a third of the country supported the occupation. And the documentary can only get away with framing the occupation as racist and xenophobic by ignoring the fact that about a quarter of the protesters were either Maori or Pasifika. Did neither Penfold or Cleave see the tino rangatiratanga flags flying in the wind? But, probably upsetting the  comfortable middle class sensibilities of Penfold and Cleave, many working class Maori and Pasifika people joined their Pakeha brothers and sisters to protest their economic impoverishment. 

Indeed it was Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt who said at the time of the occupation that many of the protesters had been left impoverished and disenfranchised by a political system that they felt ignored them. He commented that 'Government should be willing to listen – critically listen – to the respectful concerns of the protesters.'

None of those concerns get an airing in Fire and Fury. When a protester does feature its only to patronisingly frame them as well-meaning but still hopeless dupes of individuals and groups they have little understanding of. 

Fire and Fury encapsulates a journalism that rather than giving truth to power  and upsetting the political establishment along the way, is instead a journalism dictated by a self-appointed journalistic 'priesthood' extending from the likes of RNZ and TVNZ to Stuff  and to Spin Off  and that wants to tell us what to think. Its an elitist and conservative view of journalism and its on display in Fire and Fury. It ignores information not because it isn't true but because it isn't politically acceptable.