Once again yesterday the NZ Herald, and in particular one of its long serving senior journalists, David Fisher, thought it wise to run a click bait story on convicted ex Green Party thief, Golriz Ghahraman. The story had a tone about it that it was attempting to ‘jawbone’ the NZ Police into doing something.
The Herald to date has run about 68 stories on her shoplifting, and more recently David Fisher has produced 5 stories – all click bait, as Fisher knows that for whatever reason GG gets the hits. We presume clicks keep you employed.
The recent stories though are not about the her being a disgraced MP, a convicted criminal, a lawyer, or her remorse, her road to redemption, they are about ‘poor GG’. In fact there appears to still be no apologies, nor a denial that she was not going to steal anything from Pak N Save.
We can end on everything that sums up old GG – the day before she was to have her appeal heard in the High Court, she was back shoplifting. Yep, her filings no doubt to try and dupe a HIgh Court Judge will have been writings of remorse, it’s a hard life on an MPs salary, racism, Gaza, blah blah … you can just imagine the contrived nonsense she would have put forward. Luckily the presiding Judge was having none of it.
This crux of the Herald’s story was this site was contacted by someone with information about an incident at Pak N Save in Royal Oak, which as it turned out the NZ Police had already wanted to use this information to present to the Judge when opposing the appeal application. So in a way the story and footage was already in the public domain. We simply chose to publish it.
Let’s not forget until this site exposed the Green Thief in January last year, the Police had sat idle for 3 months, despite already having a complaint laid by a retailer.
Late on Thursday this week David Fisher decided to run a story saying that once again Ghahraman was hard done by when a “little blog site” (this one) had published one of the images for Pak N save. If we are so little, then you’d guess its safe to say that not many people knew about the image that Ghahraman didn’t want anyone to see. But no, Fisher, via his employer the NZ Herald, decided to run another story, this time exposing the image to pretty much all of NZ.
The ’Streisand Effect’ as they say was in full swing – as were the clicks to this blog, and also with a few threats of violence on Facebook messenger directed at Spring, and looking at the profiles they are at the low rent end of town in terms of the voter pool. Very ‘Green Party’ types. The ‘great unwashed’ as they say.
Sadly though Fisher now finds himself on the receiving end, as will his editorial team, as Spring was brought into the story – in a very false, malicious and defamatory way. It’s likely a defamation proceeding will be filed very soon. Newstalk ZB will also be a defendant as they ran this content on the 7am news yesterday during the Mike Hosking show.
Fisher claimed he had approached Spring for comment – NOT TRUE.
Fisher has Spring’s mobile number and email, as he has done for years. It’s not the first time Spring has been on the receiving end of this type of behaviour from the NZ Herald. Spring has also had CEO Michael Boggs call someone close to him asking if they are OK. Highly unusual – we will cover off Boggs soon enough.
Fisher then went on to make what are deeply malicious insinuations, and statements in the story that the reader can only be left thinking that Spring is the person who was behind such actions.
We won’t repeat all the defamatory statements for obvious reasons.
Had Fisher followed the professional standards and bothered to actually investigate the story properly, rather than run a ‘hit job’ as part of the story on Spring, the NZ Herald might have had a very different outcome.
The NZ Herald has already had to make changes to the story due to its false and defamatory content. But the damage to reputation is already done as the story has been read, and any changes after the fact are of little consequence.
Spring says “Fisher just never learns does he? In an environment where my inside source tells me Fishers job could be on the block because of the never ending restructures, you’d think getting a story right with checked and verified facts. Its not a great look running an agenda and being incompetent when doing it”
Will the stupidity of this story with its false narrative define Fisher’s career at the Herald and send him to the queue at WINZ to sign up for the Job Seeker benefit?
More to come…
