Is a blog a news medium? Is a blogger a journalist? Are they sometimes? If so, when? The District Court judge had held, rather peremptorily, that Mr Slater’s blog was not disseminating news, and that was the end of the story. What’s a news medium? A medium for the dissemination to the public, or a section of the public, of news and observations on news. What’s a journalist? Someone who, in the normal course of work, receives information from informants in the expectation that it will be published in a news medium. A judge has to decide whether the public interest in knowing the source’s identity outweighs the harm to the source together with the public interest in the flow of information from confidential sources. But it also allows judges to override that promise and compel them to disclose their sources. The Evidence Act allows journalists to protect the identity of their sources, if they have promised them confidentiality. He got his injunction against the hacker, but not against the media.īoth cases revealed interesting things about the state of our media law.įirst, the source protection case. He was found to be a journalist, but the court ordered him to disclose his sources anyway. The decisions were released within a week of each other shortly before the election. In the second, he sought an injunction against several media defendants and a hacker to prevent the further publication of the leaked emails about him that formed the basis of Dirty Politics. In the first, he argued that he was a journalist, and should not be required to turn over his sources in a defamation suit against him. In recent months, he has been at the forefront of two significant High Court cases. (I should disclose that I act for Nicky Hager).īut Mr Slater has also been making life busy for the courts. The Whale – controversial right-wing blogger Cameron Slater and his Whale Oil blog, whose emails were leaked to Mr Hager – copped most of the spray. More accurately, it was investigative journalist Nicky Hager and his book Dirty Politics that created the splash. The Whale certainly created a splash in the last election. Budget leak: Nats’ behaviour “entirely appropriate”?.
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When free speech creates disorder or hate.NZME admits it misled listeners by buying into Trump’s ridiculous election fraud claims – but BSA somehow finds broadcasting standards not breached.