POA Press Statement - Provisional Experimental Results

Last week Political Organisation Aotearoa released a press statement. Like all of our current activities, this had a somewhat experimental nature: we wanted to see what would happen.

As we anticipated, what happened was largely nothing. Although we emailed the statement to a very large number of news organisations, we only got one response, and the only publication or mention that we are aware of in the media was through news websites with a policy of open access.

We anticipated that few if any journalists would be interested in an anonymous statement (this was in fact the point made by the one email response). Why? No doubt there is a general belief that people want to know who is speaking. The point of anonymity, however, is precisely that it does not matter who is speaking: you do not need to ‘be’ anyone in order to speak. All voices are equal, and should not be pre-screened according to the name or identity attached to them.

There are no doubt also other reasons why our statement wasn’t picked up. What it announced - the need for alternatives - may not have been considered newsworthy. In a time when newspapers regularly feature headlines such as ‘House prices continue to rise’ (i.e ‘nothing new has happened’) it is time to think about what is and what is not capable of being talked about publicly.

That we should worry about these things is not to say that journalists were wrong not to pick up our statement. They were only doing their jobs, and the statement was also intended to be something of a provocation and a parody of the press statement genre itself. It was always unclear whether such a statement could be published - and so we are grateful for the open access news sites (which at least allow it to be read) as well as for the response of our single correspondent.

- POA

ENDS

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