The Lynching Takes Forty Eight Hours: Whiteness, the New Zealand press, and the destruction of wāhine Māori candidates
The Lynching Takes Forty Eight Hours
Whiteness, the New Zealand press, and the destruction of wāhine Māori candidates
Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs. The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it. On Wednesday Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it.
Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it making a decision they would describe as political. A clip surfaces. A second outlet obtains it. A third finds the still that works better than the clip, because a photograph of men making hand signs needs no context and cannot be argued with. A fourth adds a detail about money that turns a family gathering into a transaction. A fifth books a Labour MP and asks her to account for a colleague. Somewhere in the middle of that chain the thing stops being a story about an event and becomes the event itself, and the party reads the coverage, calculates the damage, and acts on the coverage rather than on anything that happened in that room.
Not one outlet in that chain appears to have asked the question that any reporter who had read the last decade of this country's own inquiries would ask first. Where did the men in the photograph come from. Who put them in the institutions that produced them. What does the Crown owe them. The story was reported instead as a question of candidate conduct, which is the safest possible framing and the one that requires the least work, because it needs no history, no interviews outside Parliament, and no contact with anybody in Tāmaki Makaurau who was actually at the gathering.
The video and the photograph were taken at the same gathering and they carry opposite cargo. In the video a patched man argues that the gangs should stop fighting each other and put their attention on the government, and a candidate tells a room that people who are not enrolled hold the power to change who governs. That is footage of political organising, and any newsroom that wanted a story about democratic participation among the most excluded citizens in the country had it handed over free. The still photograph carries none of that. It shows bodies, patches and hand signs, and it travelled furthest, because an image requires no reading and permits no reply.
The caption vocabulary gives the game away. Regalia. Hand gestures associated with the gang. Those are the words of a police file transposed into news copy, and they work by telling the reader that what they are looking at is evidence. Parliament has already made the patch an offence to wear in public, so the photograph functions as a charge sheet while the outlet that published it makes no accusation at all and takes no responsibility for one. The men in that frame are not named, not interviewed, not asked why they were there, and not treated as people who might have a view about the government they were discussing. They appear as a visual condition attaching to the woman standing near them.
Think about what never happens. A candidate photographed at a Federated Farmers breakfast is not asked to account for the nitrate in the Manawatū. A candidate at a corporate box is not asked whether he endorses the firm's tax structure. A minister photographed with a property developer is covered as a diary item. Proximity becomes contamination only when the bodies in the frame are Māori and poor, and the newsroom knows this without ever having to say it, which is precisely how a shared set of assumptions does its work. Nobody had to instruct anybody. The picture editor simply knew which image would run.
Oriini Kaipara is in this story, which makes it almost too neat. A few years ago she was the first person to read primetime news in this country with a moko kauae, and viewers wrote in to tell the newsroom her face was offensive. She is now Te Pāti Māori's candidate in Tāmaki Makaurau, and the same industry that once relayed complaints about her chin has spent this week staging a contest between two Māori women over which of them stood nearer to a gang pad. Leoni attacked Kaipara over it at the debate on Wednesday. Kaipara put it straight back. The coverage carried the exchange as a lively moment in a tight race, and the structure that made two wāhine Māori prosecute each other on camera went unexamined by every outlet that profited from it.
The record here is long and consistent. A Māori MP's tie became a national story. A Māori foreign minister's face was discussed as a diplomatic variable. Every Māori politician in this country gets asked, sooner or later, to account for a relationship no Pākehā politician is ever asked about, and the question is always framed as a reasonable one about standards. The reason it is always framed that way is that the people framing it have never had to explain their own cousins to a camera. Senior editorial judgement in New Zealand newsrooms sits overwhelmingly in Pākehā hands, and the judgement in question is not malice. It is the plain inability to see that a room full of Māori men might contain anything other than a threat, combined with an institutional certainty that this inability is neutrality.
Whakaata Māori reported the footage first, and that fact deserves to be stated rather than stepped around. A Māori broadcaster is still a broadcaster, working under the same commercial logic, the same political pressure and considerably more funding risk than the outlets that picked the story up. What happened afterwards is where the whiteness lives. One report became a saturation event because the rest of the industry recognised the material instantly as the kind of thing that performs, and pushed it until a party leader had no room to move. The first report is journalism. The forty eight hours that followed is a removal mechanism, and no individual inside it has to intend the outcome for the outcome to arrive on schedule.
The figure that would have reframed the entire story has been sitting in the public record for years. The Waitangi Tribunal estimates that eighty to ninety percent of Mongrel Mob and Black Power members were once wards of the state, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care carried that estimate into its own findings after sitting with gang members who described what was done to them as children in Crown institutions. Every newsroom in the chain has covered that inquiry. Not one of them reached for it this week. The men in the photograph are the state's own product, documented at enormous public expense, and the press that reported the inquiry found no reason to connect the two stories when a connection would have cost a political party something.
The press in this country was built into the land taking from the beginning. The settler papers of Auckland and Taranaki spent the early 1860s telling their readers that Waikato Māori were arming, that the Kīngitanga was a standing threat to settler life, and that the government had to move. The invasion came, the confiscations followed, and the papers had supplied the public reasoning that made both appear defensive. Newspapers were as much a part of that apparatus as the survey chain and the militia, and the people who ran them understood themselves throughout as reporting the facts.
The technology changed and the function held. The dawn raids were covered as a crime wave. Bastion Point was covered as an occupation to be cleared. In 2007 newsrooms ran police allegations about training camps in Te Urewera for months, in detail, and the case against almost everyone arrested collapsed, after which the coverage simply stopped rather than reckoning with what it had helped do to a community that is still living with it. In each of these the press produced the Māori body as a question of public order first, which is the step that makes everything the state does next look like a measured response to a situation it did not create.
What happened to Kerrin Leoni belongs in that sequence. No outlet in the chain published anything false. The video was real, the photograph was real, the advertisement for the event existed. The violence is in the selection, the sequencing and the frame, in which still ran and which three seconds of footage did not, in the decision to make candidate conduct the story and state care no part of it, and none of that is actionable before any media standards body in this country. A complaint can test accuracy. There is no complaint available against an industry's shared sense of what is obviously a scandal, which is the thing that actually ended her candidacy.
Set out the week's ledger. Labour lost a candidate and kept its standard. The newsrooms had a running story through a slow stretch of the campaign and will have forgotten it by the time the votes are counted. The men in the photograph, who were abused by the Crown as children and have since been told that the clothing they wear is itself an offence, watched a woman be publicly destroyed for standing in a room with them and telling them that their vote could change the government. They were the only people in this whole affair with nothing to gain and they paid for it anyway. Any newsroom could have written that story this week. The material was in their own archives. They ran the hand signs instead.