HAVING BEEN FRAMED by management as a Putin sympathiser, suspended journalist Michael Hall has resigned from Radio New Zealand. Even though Hall says he has been sub-editing stories for some five years and he was never instructed to stop doing so, RNZ requires a scapegoat and Hall is it.
Without public support from any of his RNZ colleagues or from his union, E tu, Hall has decided to walk before he was pushed.
RNZ's hypocrisy is obvious. CEO Paul Thompson has smeared alternative views on Ukraine as 'pro-Kremlin garbage' and warns of a campaign of Russian 'disinformation'. But RNZ is not even pretending that it is not supporting the US-driven narrative on Ukraine.
But this is war and both sides continue to select their own facts while censoring counter-claims. Yet RNZ has decided that only the US version of events in Ukraine bears any relationship to the truth.
While the Russian media has no choice but to report whatever Putin wants it to report, the western media does have choices available to it. Instead, it has chosen to accept the reports coming out of Washington and from Nato. We deserve better from a public broadcaster like RNZ but we're not going to get it. Instead, the 'independent' investigation will ensure that dissenting views get filtered out.
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