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Should the Media Council issue a retraction?
By Steven | December 17, 2025
Well, this is interesting.
After writing the post below, I was contacted by Andrew Galloway, the Executive Director of Alcohol Healthwatch. Guess what? He says the 2-drink guideline is in fact official Canadian policy. He refers to an email from a WHO-affiliated official who says the alcohol industry has been trying, unsuccessfully, to get the New York Times and other media outlets to change their stories for the same (wrong) reason. (I’m a NY Times subscriber, and my quick search suggests that the NY Times has reported as fact that the 2-drink guideline has been formally issued in a way that seems to represent the government’s position).
This was kind of the thrust of RNZ’s reporting in the first place, which was about alcohol industry lobbying tactics.
Mr Galloway says he managed to get Stuff to correct this, and also wrote to the Media Council. But the MC refused to revise its decision.
If Mr Galloway is right about this, it presents something of a problem for the MC, I think. On the one hand, Mr Galloway isn’t a party to the complaint. RNZ was entitled to put forward what evidence it liked. There’s no process that I’m aware of in the MC rules for revising a decision once it has been issued. And while Mr Galloway and his source seem authoritative, it’s possible I suppose that they’re wrong.
But.
Equally, I’m not aware of anything in the MC’s rules that would stop it reissuing its decision. Or taking steps to check this out. And what if the letter pointing out the new evidence came from Radio NZ? Would that have made any difference?
More problematic: RNZ is required to post a summary of the MC’s decision and link to it in its original story. It now looks like that might be … inaccurate. Well, it’s accurate to say the MC upheld the breach and explain why it did. But the MC is concerned with how readers will understand any particular story. And readers will understand it to mean that the 2-drink guideline isn’t official. In fact, that’s now what the RNZ story says:
The official guidance in Canada remains a maximum of 15 standard Canadian drinks per week for men and 10 for women.
Still, if someone were to complain to the MC about the RNZ story, or the correction of it, then the MC would be in a pickle. Likewise if someone mischievously complained about the Stuff article, which supposedly gets it right, on the basis that it must be wrong since the MC said so.
Luckily for the MC, the deadline for those complaints has passed. But if I were Alcohol Healthwatch, I’d be on the lookout for the next NZ media mention of the Canadian guidelines, and I’d bring a complaint whether that story got it right or not. (If it’s wrong, complain again based on the new evidence. If it’s right, complain that it’s inconsistent with the MC’s finding of fact.) If that happened, I’d buy some popcorn.
And if I were RNZ I might just be tempted to run another story, or update the earlier one, to provide an opportunity for such a complaint…
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