Case Studies in News Media Bias
By Mark Freeman, Updated 17 June, 2025
Journalists in New Zealand are supposed to follow certain journalistic principles. But arguably the mainstream media have been failing to live up to their own standards, and, partly as a result of that, have increasingly lost the trust of the general public. I’m going to examine some case studies from the last few years to see where the media is falling short of the mark.
But first, a bit of background. There are two main organisations in this country tasked with upholding journalistic standards. One is the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), which covers broadcasters. Its standards for news include balance, accuracy and fairness.
The other organisation upholding standards is the New Zealand Media Council, an independent self-regulatory body whose main aim is to resolve complaints about newspapers, magazines and digital news content. It has 12 principles of journalism. Like the BSA, it identifies balance, accuracy and fairness as very important, although it groups them together as one principle (and lists them in a different order). Let’s look at the principle in a bit more detail.
Accuracy, fairness and balance
Publications should be bound at all times by accuracy, fairness and balance and should not deliberately mislead or misinform readers by commission or omission. In articles of controversy or disagreement, a fair voice must be given to the opposition view. Exceptions may apply for long-running issues where every side of an issue or argument cannot reasonably be repeated on every occasion and in reportage of proceedings where balance is to be judged on a number of stories, rather than a single report.
– NZ Media Council (emphasis added)
In terms of accuracy, the media will usually report the basic facts and information from their sources accurately although that can depend on the complexity of the information. Reporting facts accurately is the foundation of reporting, and getting facts wrong is easily spotted, leading to a potentially embarrassing slap on the hand by an oversight body, so journalists try to get the basics right.
But reporting facts accurately isn’t enough by itself to uphold the principle: news stories are also supposed to be fair and balanced. This is achieved in a number of ways, by, for example:
1) including all important, relevant facts on an issue, including background information;
2) presenting all sides of an issue;
3) giving the right of reply to individuals or groups that have had allegations made against them
Omitting one or more of these elements makes a story one-sided—and unethical. This is illustrated in the following two case studies of home-grown journalism.
Case Studies
Case study #1: Fire and fury and covid mandates
During the covid era—just as now—it was almost impossible to find balanced mainstream reporting on covid, vaccines and the mandates in New Zealand. Voices articulating a view different from the government narrative were routinely excluded, and people opposing the vaccines were demonised as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and threats to the social order.
An egregious example of this type of “journalism” was Stuff’s Fire and fury documentary on covid so-called misinformation, released in 2022. It focused on the messages of a number of anti-mandate online influencers who were active at the occupation of Parliament ground in February and March 2022. These included Kelvyn Alp of Counterspin Media, Claire Deeks of Voices for Freedom, Carlene Hereora and Chantelle Baker.
In an article titled Beyond the fringe: how the mainstreaming of extreme politics has democracy on edge, the makers of Fire and fury, Paula Penfold and Louise Cleave, lamented the “often venomous” way the influencers spoke. The influencers posed a “very fundamental risk” to democracy: “… consistent across their messaging is a plan to deconstruct our political structure from the bottom up, to achieve an ‘ungovernable’ country.”
In what was a low point for mainstream journalism in New Zealand, the influencers were not given an opportunity to respond to the strong allegations made against them in Fire and fury. This move broke the cardinal journalistic rule of the right of reply.
Six complaints to the Media Council alleged that the documentary breached the principle of accuracy, fairness and balance. All complaints were rejected by the council.
In its response to one complaint, Stuff said the risk of “both sides-ism” is that it gives respectability to “unsupported, dubious, or dangerous positions”. In another response, Stuff said: “The decision to not interview the documentary subjects was taken after extensive research and consultation from which we concluded it would have been irresponsible to do so; that our responsibility was to provide the public with the balance and context to what was already extensively in the public domain…”
The Media Council accepted Stuff’s one-sided position, saying “there are certain circumstances where to seek the other side’s views is to just give a platform to inflammatory and harmful material. In certain circumstances we are sympathetic to this argument. As we have indicated, we would not expect holocaust deniers to be contacted for their views in an article about the holocaust. For the same reason, we would not expect 9/11 and Christchurch massacre false flag theorists, and those who say there is no Covid pandemic, or that vaccines cannot work, to be contacted about articles wherein their views are criticised. We accept Stuff’s point that to do so would be irresponsible.”
The Media Council’s response is enlightening. By condoning the denial of the right of reply to people with certain perspectives on controversial subjects such as vaccines and 9/11, it has articulated the acceptable limits of public discourse in New Zealand society. No matter how strong your evidence on these issues is, going outside the limits of the official mainstream narrative is taboo, and qualifies you as “beyond the fringe” and a “risk to democracy.” Freedom of speech is available only to those who refrain from “inflammatory and harmful” speech—as judged by the gate-keepers of democracy!
One-eyed documentary
Writer Graham Adams, in his excellent review, calls Fire and fury a “one-eyed documentary” which will “only reinforce the view that journalists are committed to relaying government viewpoints.”
To make her case, Penfold avoided examining the screamingly obvious reasons why so many people have subscribed to what she sees as fringe beliefs about vaccines as well as the deep dishonesty of the government.
Perhaps if Penfold had shown the clip of Jacinda Ardern telling voters in September 2020 — shortly before the election — that there would be no penalty for refusing a vaccine, alongside her infamous interview in which she grinned as she agreed that she intended to create two classes of citizens, the vaxxed and the unvaxxed, the whole protest might have been put into better perspective.
In other words, the documentary lacked fairness and balance.
Case study #2: The Ukraine war
Someone once said that the first casualty of war is the truth. That’s certainly true of the reporting of the Russia-Ukraine war, where the New Zealand media’s bias is on display.
The implied mainstream media narrative in New Zealand and the rest of the West is that the power-hungry evil dictator Putin invaded his innocent neighbour Ukraine in an entirely unprovoked land grab. But how true is that?
Let’s examine part of a news article on the Ukraine war and assess it against the Media Council’s principle of accuracy, fairness and balance. This article in the New Zealand Herald gives a brief backgrounder on the war. According to the article, the key events before the invasion were:
- Once part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine moves closer to Western influence in the 2010s.
- By 2014, Russian forces enter Ukraine and succeed in annexing Crimea.
- By September 2021, Zelenskyy raises the issue of Ukraine’s membership in Nato, seeking greater security in the face of Russian pressure.
- Putin declares that Ukraine’s inclusion in Nato would be a ‘red line’ issue for Russia.
- Dec 2021: A huge Russian military force is observed on the border of Ukraine.
Source: New Zealand Herald
While the information provided is accurate, it’s selective and insufficient. Key events which provide more historical context have been left out. These include:
- In 1990, the Reagan administration gave assurances to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards.
- From the 1990s, Ukraine aimed to eventually join NATO.
- The United States backed a coup against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014 which installed a US-friendly government. As a result, Russia felt threatened by the potential expansion of NATO.
- Russia claims that the 2014 annexation was a reunification with Crimea which protected the majority ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking populations in Crimea.
In the article, the war narrative is slanted through one-sided reporting, including the omission of key background information. In other words, fairness and balance have been sidelined.
This one-sidedness is likely driven by the Herald’s lack of independence from the influence of New Zealand’s bipartisan government system, which supports Ukraine—largely because our country is politically and militarily aligned with the United States and the United Kingdom, two key members of NATO. (This lack of independence arguably contravenes another Media Council principle: avoiding conflicts of interest). In effect, this political bias means that any complaint about mainstream media bias on reporting of the war to the Media Council would probably not be upheld, no matter how clear the lack of balance is.
As with Fire and fury, the establishment media only seeks viewpoints on the war that are within the limits of a pre-determined framework. If you’re pro-Putin, a far-right anti-vaxxer or a climate-change denier, your perspective is unwelcome: you’re outside the bounds of respectable society and don’t deserve to have a voice in “our” democracy!
Too much balance
A related and comical example of lack of balance in reporting of the Ukraine war is the case of a RNZ staffer who in 2022 was discovered to have been adding pro-Russia perspectives to international wire stories on the war. In an overblown episode of hand-wringing, RNZ set up a three-person independent review panel of its editorial processes, vowing that “no stone would be left unturned.”
The panel found dozens of examples of the staffer’s misdemeanours. One example was in an RNZ article from May 2022 about a Russian missile strike in Ukraine. In the article, a Ukrainian civilian, the Ukrainian defence minister and President Zelenskiy were cited, but no one from Russia was. A sentence that the former staffer added, which was later removed, was “Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year, claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted.”
In this case, the sentence the journalist added was obviously deemed as providing too much balance! (Amusingly, the journalist said he’d been editing reports in that way for five years before anyone queried his activities!)