SCOOP!! NOPE...POOP

Scoop (noun/journalism): news item reported by one news organization before others, of exceptional originality, importance, surprise, excitement, or secrecy

The Sunday 11 May edition of The Post included an article headed Inside the murky evolution of Dirty Politics 2.0.

“Sunday Star Times National Affairs Editor” Andrea Vance and “investigative reporter” Charlie Mitchell combined to concoct their hallucinatory Dirty Politics 2.0 dish.

It’s as if – for energy and inspiration - Vance had snorted up fresh white Charlie. Because Angry Andrea also put out another “special” over the weekend, a misogynistic polemic in which she called Government Ministers Brooke van Velden and Nicola Willis “c***s” for tweaking New Zealand’s pay equity laws.

Dirty Politics 2.0 purported to be a journalistic scoop exposing a sinister “network/alliance/ecosystem” designed to silence critics of the New Zealand First political party . But verily I say unto you, Dirty Politics 2.0 aint no scoop. It’s vacuous vitriol spat at people Vance wants lanced; error-ridden defamatory invective.

You can ingest Dirty Politics 2.0 here:

Inside the murky evolution of Dirty Politics 2.0 | The Post

The smattering of facts

For those insufficiently addicted to take a full hit of Dirty Politics 2.0, here’s my potted summary the few facts to be sieved from Andrea & Charlie’s Poop.

• A Taranaki businessman named Rhys Williams phoned a journalist and told him that an online snipe and critic of Williams had upload explicit videos of the Snipe onto a pornography site. Snipe had earlier publicly maligned Williams i.e., Snipe “started it”.

• An X account linked to a group known as “Inflection Point” published screen shots from Snipe’s personal pornographic videos.

• Williams has publicly criticized Greens list Member of Parliament Benjamin Doyle for some of Doyle’s dubious social media posts.

• Williams spoke at a conference named “Unsilenced” that was held at Wellington’s Tākina conference centre in May 2024.

• The original (deferred) Tākina booking that resulted in the Unsilenced conference was made by a man named Glenn Inwood.

• The Unsilenced conference mainly covered perceived deleterious effects of puberty blocking hormones and of surgery on young people to remove or alter sex organs and secondary sex characteristics.

• NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich spoke at the Unsilenced conference.

• Sean Plunket, broadcaster on media outlet The Platform (which he runs and party owns), commented unfavorably to Snipe on social media X. So did Inwood and an acquaintance of Inwood, Vlad Barbalich.

• After those comments, Williams publicly named Snipe as Samuel (“Sam”) Hudson. Sam maintains a website, thisquality.com, which contains content critical of Williams and Plunket.

• Williams, Inwood and Barbalich shared social media posts critical of Sam Snipe, as did former “WhaleOil” blogger Cameron Slater.

• Inwood once hosted a party, at this Wellington home, that NZ First MP Shane Jones attended.

• Slater has interviewed NZ First leader Winston Peters on numerous occasions.

The defamations

In essence, defamation is telling reputation-damaging lies about others.

Based on germane truths regarding the Vance/Mitchell piece, below is content of Dirty Politics 2.0 that I consider defamatory:

… “the tip [Williams telling the “small-town journalist” about the Snipe’s pornographic postings] was linked to a loosely coordinated, fiercely partisan network of online accounts that had formed in the orbit of NZ First”.

Exposé: The secret funders behind controversial businessman Rhys Williams

“What initially appeared to be an ugly online feud was, in fact, a window into something larger: an informal but potent alliance of influencers clustered around NZ First.”

“The result is a loose ecosystem that promotes the party’s [NZ First’s] message and targets its enemies, all distant from NZ First, which in exchange receives a volunteer army of online combatants.”

“The Unsilenced conference was the product of money and coordination between political actors who, while not officially part of NZ First, had found a home in its orbit.”

Sean Plunket “join in” with what is characterised as a co-ordinated social media attack on the Snipe.

“It was, in many ways, a revival of an older form of politics — one that Peters himself had once condemned.”

“In 2014, journalist Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics revealed how politicians and PR operatives used Cameron Slater’s WhaleOil blog to carry out hit-jobs on rivals and critics.”

Integral to defamation is the overall impression created by the relevant publication. Objectively viewed, the distinct impression that Dirty Politics 2.0 deliberately gives is that New Zealand First, through Winston Peters and Shane Jones, is working in concert with a “loose ecosystem” of “political actors” to promote NZ First and besmirch NZ First’s opponents.

According to Dirty Politics 2.0, this alleged promotion, including through the UnSilenced conference, “…was, in many ways, a revival of an older form of politics…. Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics revealed how politicians and PR operatives used Cameron Slater’s WhaleOil blog to carry out hit-jobs on rivals and critics.”

What’s false, then, about this impression? First, there’s nothing to indicate orchestrated political activity against Sam Snipe, nothing remotely like what Dirty Politics 2.0 alleges. Put simply, Sam Snipe started fights with Williams and Plunket, and couldn’t cope with the pushback, with Angrier Vance choosing to side with Sam Snipe. Sam can give it, but can’t take it.

Inwood is unashamedly a NZ First supporter. Williams is a social conservative aligned with NZ First. Barbalich is a political centrist/pragmatist. None of them are working with NZ First MPs or operatives to attack opponents of NZ First. Snipe is a world away from being a serious enough critic of NZ First to spur NZ First into orchestrated action.

Inwood is a neighbour and acquaintance of mine - an unpretentious, free-thinking dude who clearly doesn’t curate his Wikipedia entry, which includes this hogwash “Inwood is also the founder of Better Wellington a conspiracy-aligned rightwing political campaign group...”

The suggestion in Dirty Politics 2.0 that Sean Plunket “joined in” a concerted attack on Snipe is fully fallacious. In response to Snipe Sam relentlessly trolling him online, Plunket did “taunt [Snipe] with a [single] cryptic jab on X”, and that was all.

Vance attempts to equate the criticism of Sam Snipe with the conduct that Nicky Hager covered in his book Dirty Politics: How attack politics is poisoning New Zealand’s political environment. Her effort abjectly fails. For Vance to try and characterize criticisms of Sam Snipe as an “evolution” of Hager’s “Dirty Politics” is absurd and disingenuous.

In essence, Hager’s “Dirty Politics” involved the National Party (mainly Judith Collins) covertly engaging blogger Cameron Slater (in his WhaleOil incarnation) to undermine the Labour Party. There’s no equivalence whatsoever with the Sam Snipe sideshow, which simply involves a few individuals pushing back against Sam Snipe’s lowbrow pot-shots.

The better characterization of what’s been going on is that New Zealand’s political opposition parties (Labour/Greens/Maori Party) have found ideological allies and advocates in mainstream media journalists like Vainglorious Vance. It’s a sad fall from grace for Vance. In the poetic words of Lord Byron:

Condemned to drudge, the meanest of the mean,
And furbish falsehoods for a magazine

Let us end with advice for aspiring Byrons like young Sam Snipe...it’s best to keep your sexual perversions private and off camera. Otherwise, you’ll come across as mad, sad and dangerous to yourself.