No Big Deal, but it was interesting to see how Patrick Gower described his own actions:
Click to read at Storify.com
Paddy Gower: “I was being mischievous.” ORLY?
The TV3 political journo seems to excite tremendous personal criticism every now and then — from various sides — for his attempts to ‘beat up’ or (as his critics allege) to create a story. (Quelle horreur!)
Left-wingers who whinge about him (see what I did there?) should, I think, recall how he has at times been a thorn in the side of the right.
Who can forget the ‘deceitful bastard‘ label Don Brash plastered on him? (With good cause? Dr Brash would say so.) But that was hardly a badge of shame for a journalist, it seems to me. Almost the opposite, in fact. Journalists — along with politicians — remain stubbornly at the bottom of lists of professions (cough) people trust.
Patrick Gower, along with his equally dodgem-like amigo Duncan Garner, has been part of the political education of many a naive and aspiring member of parliament. It was Michael Hastings (RIP) the journalist who exposed General Stanley McChrystal’s gung-ho attitude to pesky things like the chain of command who said, famously, in the aftermath of his Rolling Stone article:
Having a journalist around is like having a pet bear. Most of the time it’s really cool, but once in a while it’ll bite your hand off.
Political operator: The NZ Prime Minister’s chief of staff Wayne Eagleson defending himself and his staff from allegations they improperly influenced the Parliamentary Service and invaded a journalist’s privacy.
It may not be popular for me to say this, but I think a little bit of instability and unpredictability can be A Very Good Thing in political journalism. It can be good to keep the over-resourced, taxpayer-funded spin doctors, media manipulataors, political operators, advisors and ‘activists’ (paid or unpaid) — especially those of the government of the day — off-balance now and then.
Yes, Patrick is a loose cannon. Sure. (Remember this entertaining spiel? Wonderful!) In my view, he’s driven by ambitions and appetites of the sort that have always been part of the journalistic psyche. If he was, as some seem to wish, subdued into docile stenography, I think our political landscape would be the poorer for it. God knows we need ‘characters’ like him. Warts and all. That said, Patrick operates on a knife’s edge. He’s on a high-wire. Especially approaching an election where the stakes are high. Never forget it. Dicking around such as recorded in the trivial twitter banter above (“I was being mischievous”) to my mind, erodes a viewer’s confidence. Am I wrong?
