Sunday, December 09, 2007

It is not known if any of the defendents were from Jupiter

I've decided to publish some of the drafts, even though I didn't have the energy to finish them at the time. I'll be catching up for a while I think

One of the things that astonished me about the media coverage was the utter banality of it, and the inability for the media to have any information not handed to them in a press release. One of the government's lines was that most of those arrested on October 15 weren't even Maori. The minister of Maori affairs claimed that just four were Maori, and two were Ngai TÅ«hoe.

This is ridiculous nonsense. There were 17 people arrested on 15 October; 12 of them are Maori.

At the end of the first week, newspaper articles on the government's claims would still say, 'the ethnicity of those arrested is not known'. By that stage everyone had appeared in court. While that might not have informed journalists of the whakapapa of each of the defendants, it'd give them a fair idea of the possibility that more than four of the defendants were Maori.

This was supposed to be the biggest story of the year, and they couldn't even be bothered doing the most basic research.

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