What the Media Keep From You Pt.1

As if our readers needed more reasons to support The BFD, here’s another: we’ll bring you the news that the PIJF-bought-and-paid-for NZ mainstream media won’t. These things matter: I’m sure you’ve all had the confounding experience of trying to argue with someone who literally does not know key information on the topic, simply because the mainstream media, their only source of information, have kept it from them.

Such lies by omission have consequence. Polling of American voters has shown that, had they known about Hunter Biden’s laptop — which the mainstream media and Silicon Valley colluded to keep under wraps — enough of them would have switched their vote to likely flip the election result.

Three years later, and New Zealand voters are likewise going into an election with the mainstream media conspiring to keep a candidate’s scandal a secret.

Shaw’s university qualifications came under the spotlight this week via a series of Tweets by investigative journalist Ian Wishart.

Shaw’s LinkedIn profile said he had graduated from Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) with a B.A. degree. He did not finish the degree, but later went on to graduate MSc from the University of Bath School of Management in 2005 […]

Internet sleuths also discovered Shaw’s profile at AISEC International listed him as graduating with a B.A. from VUW.

Shaw’s qualifications were one of the issues brought up by Wishart, who also accused the Greens co-leader of filing false pecuniary interest returns.

In a Tweet this evening Wishart confirmed Shaw had dropped ‘the false B.A. claim from his LinkedIn page.’

Daily Telegraph NZ

If you only read Stuff, you would be completely ignorant of this. Likewise, the NZ Herald has stayed completely silent on the scandal. Just a week after Wishart broke the scandal, Newshub ran a lengthy profile on the Greens’ co-leader. Despite referring to his attending Victoria University, it made no mention of Shaw allegedly peddling false credentials.

Newsroom pontificates that, We stay with a story — and explore as many angles as we can. If need be, we will return to it multiple times and see it through to the end. Yet, a month after Wishart’s revelations, Newsroom also ran a long “Q & A” with Shaw: his alleged false qualifications were not mentioned once.

As Wishart asked on X:

How do you reconcile failing to ask James Shaw about his credentials, with your public commitment to facts, objectivity and truth? How about truth in advertising? […]

I mean, if you guys were making these hyperbolic boasts about the quality of a used car, you’d be up before the Commerce Commission before lunchtime, pursued by a gaggle of camera crews from Fair Go and Target.

X

The mainstream media may claim that the scandal is just a minor matter of a little slip, but lying about one’s professional qualifications is a serious matter, under New Zealand’s Summary Offences Act. Just how seriously the law regards such false claims of qualifications can be judged from cases such as Prajna Singh’s:

A student engineer who misrepresented her qualifications has been sentenced on dozens of fraud charges […]

She was sentenced in April to six months’ community detention, 80 hours’ community service and $25,000 in reparations.

Now Singh has also been fined $5000 by the Engineering New Zealand Disciplinary Committee for breaching her obligations under the industry’s code of ethics […]

Singh did not have an engineering degree when making the misrepresentations, although she had attended several years of university courses.

Stuff

As the Engineering New Zealand Disciplinary Committee noted: claiming a qualification that she did not have, has the very real potential to damage public trust.

What is true of engineers is every bit as true of politicians. Several candidates in the US who lied about their qualifications and experience have discovered this in the worst possible way.

A Republican candidate for a northwest Ohio congressional seat has seen his support vanish overnight, following an investigation that revealed he’d lied about deploying to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Huffington Post

U.S. Rep.-elect George Santos of New York was under investigation by Long Island prosecutors on Wednesday, after revelations surfaced that the now-embattled Republican lied about his heritage, education and professional pedigree as he campaigned for office […]

He admitted to lying about […] having earned a degree in finance and economics from Baruch College in New York.

NPR

An apocryphal saying is that if you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

If you read the NZ mainstream media, you’re both.

Be thankful for independent media like The BFD.