Media regulation system breaking down?
By Steven | December 16, 2025
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Complaints are being made to both the Media Council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority about basically the same stories. And they’re reaching different conclusions.
How can this happen? Easily. Let’s say Radio NZ broadcasts a story or interview, then posts a text version of it, as it often does. The broadcast is subject to the BSA. The text story is subject to the MC.
So if you’re Ian Wishart, and you’re annoyed that RNZ has aired a story about how Hamilton’s run of hot weather “shattered the previous record” because there’s a newspaper story from 1935 suggesting a longer run of hotter weather back then… you can complain to the BSA that it’s inaccurate. And if RNZ posts a text version, you can complain that’s inaccurate too, this time to the MC.
Of course, that’s what happened. The MC upheld the complaint. The BSA rejected it.
This has happened three times that I’m aware of. The MC has upheld them all and the BSA rejected them.
In the Wishart case, the difference between the two isn’t as large as it sounds. Both the MC and the BSA said the stories were hedged enough – the expert being quoted said he was looking at a dataset that went back to the early 1990s. It was pretty clear he was giving an opinion. RNZ was entitled to rely on that and had used words like “probably” and “likely” to indicate uncertainty. The BSA agreed. But where RNZ had fallen down was the headline (“Hamilton’s run of hot days shattered previous record”), which was stated as fact. RNZ had changed it to “breaks previous record” after receiving Wishart’s complaint, but that wasn’t good enough.
Incidentally, the data collection in 1934-5 was at different locations and with different methodologies, so it’s not at all clear that RNZ’s source was wrong. And the MC has previously held that it’s fine for headlines to contain a degree of exaggeration. So I’m not sure this was the right call. But reasonable people can disagree. Anyway, the BSA didn’t have to deal with a headline, and the introduction to the segment contained the word “likely”.
But the other two decisions really do show a difference in approach to accuracy, I think.
In one, the Brewers Association complained about an RNZ story called “Outdated alcohol guidelines understate health risks, Ministry documents reveal”. It said that the UK, Australia and Canada had all updated their drinking advice, “resulting in much lower recommended drinking limits” according to a Health NZ document. NZ’s guidelines say that low-risk drinking behaviour is up to 15 drinks a week for men, 10 for women. The article said the equivalent guidance is set, for men and women, at 2 in Canada, 10 in Australia and 14 in the UK.
HNZ started reviewing our guidance last year, RNZ reported, but then stopped after contact from the Brewers Association.
The problem is complicated and I won’t go into details. But it seems that a Canadian government advisory body had come up with, and published, the 2-drink recommendation, but it hadn’t been adopted as the official Canadian position, which was, like ours, 15 and 10 drinks. Treating the 2-drink recommendation as official advice was an error that was also made by the BBC and the NY Times, as well as our own health officials. The MC found it was a significant inaccuracy. The BSA found that it wasn’t material given that the story was really about whether the guidelines reflected modern scientific evidence about the risks. The BSA tends to ask, in cases like this, “does the mistake significantly affect listeners’ understanding of the programme?”. They said it didn’t.
Reasonable minds etc.
It’s worth pondering whether the fact that the BSA always engages with the right to freedom of expression in the Bill of Rights might be having some effect on line calls like this one. It’s striking that the BSA only upholds 5-6% of complaints, while the MC upholds at least twice that, and often more.
The third case was about video games and gambling habits. RNZ aired an expert from the Problem Gambing Foundation saying that “a lot of countries have banned loot boxes” in video games – objects that allow players to receive a random item, such as a weapon, sometimes after paying for them with real money. The problem, she said, was the intermittent reward – you only get what you want sometimes, so you keep trying. It’s powerfully addictive.
In fact, according to the complainant, only one country (Belgium) has banned loot boxes. Other countries have regulated them to some degree, but not banned them.
The MC found this to be inaccurate, and said (as with the other two complaints) that RNZ didn’t fix it fast enough. It said RNZ is generally entitled to rely on experts and this “won’t necessarily breach Council principles”. But it meant RNZ “took a risk”. (Uh, this is a risk it takes every time it interviews someone with specialist knowledge, which is basically all the time). It said someone writing up a story after an interview has an opportunity to check these things.
All of them? Maybe not. “While it might be reasonable for RNZ to have relied on expert comment in the first instance, once challenged, RNZ had an obligation to promptly investigate and publish any necessary corrections or clarifications.” (My italics).
This is not a model of clarity. So RNZ can sometimes rely on experts, but other times it will breach Council principles. It will sometimes have to check out what the expert said before writing it up, but other times, maybe not. But it will be a breach if RNZ doesn’t respond sufficiently promptly to a complaint that alerts it to a potential error.
For what it’s worth, that last point seems bang on to me. But this is a breach of the Corrections principle, not the Accuracy principle. But the MC upheld both. Why was it inaccurate, given that RNZ relied on an expert? Maybe it was breach from the outset because RNZ didn’t check it out before writing up the interview. Maybe it was only a breach after the complainant raised it. Dunno. But the former seems a bit unfair on Radio NZ given that the error was neither obvious nor all that significant. And the second seems a breach of the Corrections principle not the Accuracy one. Or… did it start off as not-inaccurate, and become inaccurate after RNZ was warned about it? That seems a bit weird, but perhaps justifiable – the circumstances for upholding an accuracy complaint did not come together until RNZ had reason to check it out, and then left it up.
What about the BSA? Not upheld. The mistake wasn’t material. It didn’t significantly affect listeners’ understanding of the story. The story was about a school programme to tackle problem gambling, not about banning loot boxes. The bit about loot boxes was peripheral and fleeting.
RNZ had tried to make the same argument to the MC – the mistake wasn’t “central to the story.” The MC said this is not relevant because publications have to be accurate “at all times.” I’m not sure that’s right. The MC has previously held that it’s only “material” errors that warrant upholding the complaint. The MC has often dismissed minor errors “that may not go to the heart of the story”. But you can still argue about whether the error was in fact material.
When I first read these decisions, I was inclined to applaud the robustness of the MC approach. But as I write them up I find I’m more convinced by the BSA’s decisions. (Though in general, I’m still inclined to think the BSA finds too many ways around upholding complaints relating to Accuracy and Balance).
Bottom line, though: it’s fairly clear that the MC and BSA take slightly different approaches to what are effectively identical stories. Both apply standards requiring accuracy but the MC is more likely to uphold complaints that the BSA sees as minor. This does not seem ideal in a regulatory system where complaints against exactly the same stories can go to both bodies.
The government’s latest recommendation about regulating a converging media (essentially self-regulation with a statutory appeal body, for “professional media” including things like Netflix and The Platform but excluding social media) seems like a pretty sensible reform to me.
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