You can imagine the headlines across every news outlet, the lead items on both television channels and the demands for his resignation if a National Party MP had been busted following a “twink” Instagram account.

Photoshopped image. *Not a real headline

Only it wasn’t a National MP; it was a Government minister, Grant Robertson, who was following the Instagram account @cuteboyphilippines which is essentially a collection of “twink” photos of young boys from the Philippines.

I posted it on Twitter and carnage ensued:

That tweet was picked up by Rebel News:

And it has been viewed more than 120,000 times. I posted a subsequent tweet with a video proving that, contrary to Twitter trolls accusing me of faking the screenshots, it was in fact real, and the verified account of Finance Minister Grant Robertson:

Imagine if this had been a National MP who followed that site. Imagine the howls of outrage about “exploitation” and the calls for boycotts and resignations. Yet, strangely our media are utterly silent on this.

In fact, it is worse than that. One Stuff employee, the Stuff Digital News Producer, Samuel Smith suggested that I was defaming someone by presenting facts:

This shows us precisely why New Zealand mainstream media haven’t covered this. They are a lock for the Government courtesy of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, which has corrupted our media. They no longer are the media and are in fact part of the political process, the Media Party, which is a branch of the Labour Party.

Their rank hypocrisy in pursuing attacks against National MPs and candidates like Andrew Falloon and others, hounding them from their positions, while sitting silent or actively opposing and/or suppressing bad news about their own team is appalling.

The funny thing is my single tweet has more views in one day than Stuff has subscribers to their crappy little state-subsidised rag.

As for Grant Robertson, he is trapped now in an invidious position. If he says anything he invokes the “explaining is losing” rule, and if he ignores it and says nothing he looks as guilty as sin. This is great. Even better is if he does somehow try to explain it away or blame it on a staffer, as he runs the risk of some wag asking if he only meant to “like” a post on the Instagram account rather than “Follow”. Or perhaps he could have blamed his husband, Alf, for using his Instagram account.

The point remains: if this had been a National or Act MP it would have been the lead item across every news outlet.

This case just shows how utterly contemptible the mainstream media have become, and why it is important that we have more members, and more donors and are powered up to fight these mongrels.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...