Herald shamed into publishing Brash response

On Thurs­day morn­ing The NZ Her­ald pub­lished an ill informed tirade from Garth George about the 2025 Task­force and its report. Don Brash dashed off a response to that tirade and sub­mit­ted it to the Edi­tor at the Her­ald Tim Mur­phy before lunchtime on Thurs­day. The response wasn’t pub­lished on either Fri­day or on Sat­ur­day and so Don Brash released his response to the blogs. I imme­di­ately posted it as did Home Pad­dock. Far­rar finally got around to pub­lish­ing it today after the Her­ald has pub­lished. A reader of mine emailed Tim Mur­phy on Sat­ur­day, who to his credit replied.

From: Tim Mur­phy <Tim.Murphy@nzherald.co.nz>

Date: Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 12:31 PM
Sub­ject: Brash
To:

Dear reader,

The post is wrong. Don Brash was encour­aged to sub­mit a let­ter and he did but three times the let­ters page length. Con­sid­er­a­tion was being given to  edit­ing the let­ter dras­ti­cally for Mon­day use or find­ing some other home for it – we run no oped con­tri­bu­tions page on Sat­ur­days – but it seems Don has opted to pub­lish it else­where and that in itself may argue against it going in the paper as our let­ters and oped rules are clear on that.  We ran the shorter Lind­say Mitchell crit­i­cism of Garth George’s col­umn in the mean­time. There has been no refusal, and Don’s note about it not going in the paper, which he cour­te­ously copied to me, does not sug­gest there has been.
Regards
Tim Mur­phy
Editor

Tim of course obfus­cates as repeaters are want to do. They asked for a response fron Don Brash, he sup­plied it, they then decide to apply their dra­con­ian “let­ters” pol­icy to it and say it is too long. Then he says that The Her­ald has no oped con­tri­bu­tions on Sat­ur­day, except of course he left out Fri­day which does. Fur­ther its his paper, he could have put an oped piece in on Sat­ur­day if he really wanted to. he like to quote all the rules and regs but he is the fricken edi­tor, he could have made an excep­tion in order to put a timely response to Garth Georges egre­gios errors, but as you can see from his expla­na­tion decided instead to do nothing.

Now don’t get me wrong here, Don Brash doesn’t say that the Her­ald refused to pub­lish it, I did, and I stand by that accu­sa­tion. Tim Mur­phy him­self says they were going to dras­ti­cally edit it for Mon­day. Except lo and behold today they pub­lish the let­ter unedited con­trary to Tim Murphy’s email.

I con­tend that Home Pad­dock and I shamed the Her­ald into pub­lish­ing it. The evi­dence is right there in Tim Murphy’s email.

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Tagged as: 2025 Taskforce • Don Brash • NZ Herald