We know better than you

The NZ Herald - old medium - states the problem of new media that the Government fancies it is currently wrestling with like this: "Media are regulated by standards of ethical reporting ... bloggers, tweeters and other internet users are not ... the Government is concerned about the adverse effect this could have on the justice system" (Herald print edition, this morning).

Let's just take a look at that. "Bloggers, tweeters and other internet users are not (regulated by standards of ethical reporting)..." Well, it depends on the blog, doesn't it? I think Russell Brown and the others on Public Address display spectacularly ethical standards compared to say Michael Laws on talkback radio. "The Government is concerned about the adverse effect this could have on the justice system." Really? Just let me get this right. The Government is concerned at the adverse effect freedom of speech could have on the justice system?

It really is getting tricky in New Zealand these days, isn't it. In the US they are currently wrangling over whether the First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) protects the rights of people who protest at the funerals of soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. The protestors are Christians saying the soldiers' deaths are evidence God is punishing Americans for approving of homosexuality. Well at least they're wrangling over something fundamental - some people are stopping other people from burying their dead with dignity. Here in New Zealand the Government is thinking about changing the law because it can't quite handle the fact that people are talking to one another in an unregulated environment. Spare me. Any day now we'll have to have a twitter licence.

All of this might make a tiny bit of sense if it weren't for the fact that a blogger was recently convicted in Auckland of breaching name suppression orders. So the law seems to have no trouble, as currently written, in prosecuting use of the internet which is deemed to be trespassing against something that our legislature has decided is not to be trespassed against. So what is the problem?

As David Farrar is quoted as saying: "... the law (applies) to all forms of publishing". It seems to me that what we're seeing in this notion from the Justice Minister that ethics on-line need to be regulated, is the basic twitch we always see from right-wing (even centrist right-wing) governments: we know better than you.