Ethics

Despite making up most of the workforce, female journalists in New Zealand are being paid significantly less than their male colleagues, according to a new study.

The survey, part of the 2016 Worlds of Journalism Study, shows the median after-tax salary of female journalists was 26 per cent lower than that of men of equal rank and experience.

The research, made up of interviews of 539 Kiwi journalists, found women were also disadvantaged in terms of promotion, with only half of men working in non-management roles, while two-thirds of women hold non-management roles.

The survey also found journalists in New Zealand feel they are working longer hours, and are under more pressure, both ethically and resource-wise, than two years ago.

“It is concerning that journalists feel these changes have affected news quality, with a perception that the credibility of journalism, ethical standards and freedom to make editorial decisions have all fallen,” study lead and Massey University head of journalism James Hollings said.

So if journalists themselves feel the news quality has dropped, that their credibility is lower, that their ethics are eroding and that they are just cogs in the machine, who is really responsible for this? Read more »

Cameron Slater

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, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I have a deep moral and ethical conundrum for you all to ponder but first I have a confession. I have picked fruit from God’s garden. I’m not talking about the garden of Eden and the snake and that whole being thrown out of Paradise thing.  I am talking about going on a walk and picking up fruit that has fallen on the grass verge near the footpath, or picking fruit from branches hanging over the fence.

I’m not talking about stripping a tree or being greedy. I am talking about going on a walk and returning home with my pockets full of fruit. I learned this habit from my mother and my auntie. My auntie’s favourite sayings is, ” Let’s go for a walk in God’s garden.” She and mum often come home with a plastic shopping bag full of goodies that they found on their walk.

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

Before I get to explain why, let me introduce someone. Meet Deborah. Deborah is a politician. She is a Labour party candidate. This isn’t a secret. A quick Google search delivers it all, like the following:

Read more »

Cameron Slater

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, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

British researchers have been given permission to genetically modify human embryos, which has some people excited and others concerned. Those who support genetic editing admit that it is allowing scientists to play God. Its opponents point out that it is a slippery slope that can lead to designer babies. Abortion, when it was first made legal, was tightly controlled and difficult to obtain. Now we have abortion on demand, and an abortion can be performed even at the time of birth (as long as part of the baby is still inside the mother when the doctor kills it). Genetic editing is currently intended for fixing nature’s errors, but will it only be used for that? The contraceptive pill was only invented after scientists looked into how to improve a woman’s fertility. Once scientists have this power over our DNA where will it lead?

The new genetic editing technique, known as Crispr or Crispr-Cas9, lets researchers perform cut-and-paste operations on DNA, the hereditary material, with unprecedented ease and precision. Unlike most types of gene therapy, a longstanding approach that aims to alter only adult human tissues that die with the patient, the Crispr technique could be used to change human eggs, sperm and early embryos, and such alterations would be inherited by the patient’s children. Because changing the human germ line is perceived to hold far-reaching consequences, the leading scientific academies of the United States, Britain and China issued a joint statement in December asking researchers around the world to hold off on altering human inheritance.

-thenytimes.com

So, what are the arguments for and against this new God like power?

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

A newspaper during Dirty Politics liked to use diagrams.

Well here at Whaleoil we like diagrams as well…we especially like this one.

Read more »

Cameron Slater

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, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Before and after elevator girl

Today’s face of the day is the face captured by a technology called BriefCam which helped catch the Boston Marathon bombers.Thanks to this video search engine technology hours of footage can be condensed into minutes, enabling the good guys to catch the bad guys faster. People like Nicky Hager after a hard day pawing through other people’s hacked correspondence, will no doubt decry this technology as being controversial and ‘ shocking ‘ because it is taking away people’s privacy. I say, if you are in a public place expect to be under surveillance for both your protection and the protection of others. The crime solving capacity of this technology is exciting.

Films like “Minority Report” are no longer considered futuristic: video surveillance methods portrayed in this 2003 film are already in use. In fact, such methods have already helped in catching criminals and terrorists, albeit being controversial.

One of the most innovative technologies in this field was developed by Israeli company BriefCam, which helped in catching the Boston Marathon bombers. Using tracking algorithms, BriefCam enables users to track events caught on tape much more quickly, thus maximizing the potential of video surveillance.

A search engine for videos.

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

The by election in Northland highlights to the public that there is something dodgy going on in John Key’s National Party.

If suppression orders are lifted on the prominent New Zealander’s case there will be a very uncomfortable few days for some politicians.

A half decent opposition leader will pledge that his administration would never allow an MP to stay if they faced charges of the nature Sabin is facing, or wife beating or losing pots of investors money while taking a massive annual management fee. Of course a half decent opposition leader would actually know about this, and perhaps who Winston reckons owes creditors.    Read more »

Cameron Slater

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, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

# I am Charlie

Truth can hurt but Truth must not be silenced.

My ongoing collections of images under the # I am Charlie headline will upset some people. They will include graphic photos of actual events, political cartoons and Internet memes / posters. They all have one thing in common. They are an attempt to influence your thinking about Islam. Yes you can call them propaganda or offensive. Propaganda can be about telling lies or putting a slant on the truth or just be provocative in order to get you to think about an issue. You decide what these are, individual image by individual image. That is what is wonderful about living in a free, democratic society here in New Zealand. We can do that without fear of violent reprisals ( at least for now )

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

Nicky Hager

Today’s face of the day is the author / journalist who used material stolen from a blogger/ journalist to write a book then was outraged when his ‘ journalistic ‘ privacy was ignored when the Police used a legally obtained warrant to search his home. They were looking for evidence of the identity of the Hacker that he did business with in order to illegally obtain a blogger/journalist’s private correspondence with confidential sources as well as his personal correspondence in order to sell a book and make money.

This is a guy with more cheek than a fat man’s bottom.

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

Anyone who thinks the so-called “Uber City” for the Wellington region is going to deliver anything like that which it is hyped to needs a good crack across the bonce with a length of 4×2.

Same goes got he Hawkes Bay.

The name Uber City is a joke too…even if you combined them all they still won’t have the population of South Auckland.

Stephen Franks highlights a problem with the promotors of the Uber City…they are proven liars .

According to Ms Wilde her Council not being allowed to lie in official advertising “could drastically restrict how local bodies operate”. She believes it “poses a real risk to robust political debate”. Putting aside the inconvenient fact that Council advertising should be informative, not political propaganda, it is incredible that there is no media furore over her further defence that seeking the Advertising Standards Authority ruling was “legal nitpicking”.

The DomPost has reported the matter under the heading “Advertising Standards Authority calls GWRC super-city ad ‘misleading’”. Note the implied warnings to ignore – “calls’ instead of “finds” and the word ‘misleading’ in quotes to distance the DomPost from the dreadfully unwelcome judgmentalism implicit in ‘misleading’.

Take a look at the ASA report, ( 15/004) which attaches my firm’s letter setting out the facts. Someone in the GWRC was either too stupid or too reckless to merit staying employed, or set out to deceive. See also the submission on behalf of the GWRC which says essentially that councils should be free from ASA supervision of their advertising, because being constrained to the truth would be problematic.

How do the honest members of the Council feel about this? Will they seek an inquiry into it. Will anyone be held accountable?

Businesses, remember that indifference to honesty, when you next want to shade the truth to GWRC. Its leader thinks that “misleading advertising” which was “not prepared with a due sense of social responsibility” is just robust debate.

In 2008 I blogged on journalistic blind eyes to lies by politicians, compared to their frothing pursuit of easily made mistaken business claims.

“As a commercial lawyer I’m sickened by the left’s sanctimony toward business. Labour love passing laws they could never satisfy in their own conduct. They lie happily, yet business people (properly) face prison or huge fines for faulty prospectus statements.”

I’ve had some journalists and politicians claim that it is because business can lose people so much money. We saw that claim in full lynch mob glory in the media’s repeated whipping of two former Ministers of Justice. They were found by a court to have been honest though mistaken. They’d failed to add enough emphasis to their written warnings of the risks facing Lombard Finance.

The company’s failure (like most mezzanine development finance lenders) had nothing to do with the misleadingly mild warnings. Many commentators wanted them in jail for years, nonetheless.

Read more »

Cameron Slater

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, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

http://whaleoil.co.nz