The top five investigations of 2020. So good that there are actually seven

Thursday, 17 December 2020

From racist reckonings and historic abuse to heart-warming reunions and a man with a lot of illegal fish, Stuff Circuit journalist Paula Penfold picks the best investigations of the year.

1. Tā Mātou Pono

“This is big stuff”, Breakfast host Jenny-May Clarkson said tearfully in an interview with Pou Tiaki editor Carmen Parahi, who led Stuff’s Tā Mātou Pono investigation.

It sure is. It’s one of the most significant pieces of work ever undertaken at Stuff, or, actually, at any media company in Aotearoa New Zealand - not only because of the amount of work required to trawl back through the history of Stuff and its newspapers, but because of the stake in the ground it represents: our journalism has not been good enough, and we commit to doing better.

**READ MORE:

* A documentary three years in the making: How Stuff Circuit's Emma was created

* Why holding ourselves to account matters

* False Profit: Full and unedited video with Advance NZ co-leader Billy Te Kahika

**

As Carmen Parahi wrote in her editorial, “the superiority of European, mainly British, migrants, and the inferiority of Māori was repeated over and over by our editors and newspapers. It was racist”.

That racism existed through the decades and centuries, up and down the country, and one of the aspects of the investigation I found most illuminating was the region-by-region examination of our reporting.

The Taranaki Daily News, Stuff’s oldest newspaper, said it needed to “account for the legacy of our journalism forefathers”, which, in the case of Parihaka, involved reporting which “was complicit in the calculated attack by the Crown. We purposefully sided with the Government to protect the economic aspirations of settlers in Taranaki to the detriment of the rights of Māori”.

The Press said there have been some egregious examples of racism. One that stuck out was a 2003 story with the headline: “7 Maori a day sign up for DPB”.

The Waikato Times acknowledged inadequate reporting in relatively recent times, including around the 1995 signing of the Waikato-Tainui Deed of Settlement between Tainui and the Crown, and that in the more distant past it had “depicted Māori as an oddity, uncivilised, as if from another world”.

Tā Mātou Pono also examined how our reporting has amplified child abuse among whānau Māori and minimised violence in Pākehā families, looked at how statistics were used to stereotype Māori drivers, and how in our sports pages Māori have been “overlooked or marginalised in a monocultural media environment”.

The self-scrutiny led to an apology from Stuff’s editorial director Mark Stevens, and a commitment to “continue to hold ourselves to account” - engari, ka mau tono mātou ki te whakatika i a mātou anō.

As journalist Glenn McConnell wrote, apologies are the first step towards mending a broken relationship, “with the intention of fixing it for the future”.

Tā Mātou Pono attracted a fair bit of slagging from predictable critics who wore out the letters w-o-k-e on their keyboards, but Jenny-May Clarkson was right: it is big stuff. And it was the right thing to do.

2. Floating Foundation

I don’t know (or care) whether feeling vindicated is, at worst, undignified, or at best, a waste of energy, but I did feel a sense of vindication on behalf of my colleagues on #metoonz when the former head of the charity mission the Floating Foundation, Craig Koning, was found guilty of raping his girlfriend.

Let me take you back to early 2018 when journalist Alison Mau launched the #metoonz investigation. There had been Harvey Weinstein in the US, of course, and there’d been excellent reporting about law firm Russell McVeagh, but Mau was concerned there hadn’t been a co-ordinated journalistic response to growing concerns about sexual harassment. She felt there needed to be an outlet for people who wanted to have a voice but didn’t know where to go.

Back then, I was a consultant to the #metoonz investigation and I well remember the reaction from numerous male commentators with platforms, one of whom wrote, “This is tabloid news at its worst - masquerading under the blanket of a good cause”.

He went on, “A lot of the ‘MeToo’ campaign is not about illegal activity such as serious sexual assault - the things you end up in court for.

“It’s about alleged pinched bums, wolf whistles, and tacky one-liners.”

He then questioned the quality of the journalism: “These days too many journalists aren’t up to much. Not only are they not cops, they’re not even good at detail.”

As well as it being ironic that the lash at the quality of the reporting came from someone paid to voice opinion monologues, it was also offensive, as I witnessed Mau and the team spend endless hours receiving, investigating, counselling, supporting - it’s not the kind of journalism that can be practised at a distance by wading through documents or lodging OIAs (although those things were necessary as well).

I also well remember one of those early editorial meetings when the team was discussing how to navigate the Floating Foundation investigation: the rigour and fairness of their approach, the attention to, yes, detail, to accuracy, and balance: the fundamental tenets of good journalism.

That first story in 2018 led to Amy Coronakes coming forward to the #metoonz investigation, wanting to tell the story of how Koning had raped her when she was 18. She waived her statutory right to name suppression.

And late last year, a jury in the Auckland District Court returned guilty verdicts against Craig Koning.

Most importantly, of course, that’s vindication for Coranakes, and for the other victims who’d spoken out.

It’s also a win for the validity of the #metoonz campaign, which has uncovered a string of other cases that had either not come to the attention of authorities or workplaces, or if they had, had not been properly dealt with.

For me, Mike Hosking, that’s not tacky or tasteless. It’s journalism.

3. False Profit

This is one of my favourites simply because the nature of the story meant it required good old-fashioned shoe leather journalism, and it’s fulfilling to get your teeth into something.

It was six weeks out from the election and Advance NZ co-leader Billy Te Kahika was gaining massive traction online and at rallies around the country, but rumours about his reputation in the music industry were surfacing on social media.

It seemed like the sort of information the voting public should be entitled to have verified - or not - so at Stuff Circuit, we began to look. And once we started digging, we also uncovered concerns about what Te Kahika had said about his military and police backgrounds, his business dealings, his thoughts on Jews, the way he treated women.

The problem was, it was difficult to get people to front: Te Kahika had a playbook for those who criticised him on social media: he would name them on Facebook, and then his dedicated followers would go after them. He also seemed to have a propensity for litigiousness, having sent multiple legal letters to his detractors.

It meant we needed to talk to dozens and dozens of people across multiple industries to establish and corroborate facts, supported by documents and paper trails.

And, importantly, a collection of courageous people who knew Te Kahika well, agreed to be interviewed on camera.

Once we’d gathered the evidence, we invited Te Kahika for an interview, and to his credit, he fronted - but grew more and more uncomfortable as the interview progressed, as we laid out the concerns one by one. Eventually, just as we were about to get to a crucial moment, he stormed out.

Te Kahika subsequently claimed the interview was offensive because we had questioned him over his faith, so we released the full, unedited video.

We’ll let you judge for yourself.

4. Abuse in gymnastics

Zoe George’s investigation into allegations of psychological and physical abuse in New Zealand gymnastics was alarming and upsetting reading, uncovering a culture that normalised emotional manipulation, fat-shaming and athletes being forced to compete on serious injuries, in a “win at any cost” mentality to ensure the sport received ongoing funding.

Again, as is often the case with investigative journalism, it took courage and tenacity for the athletes to tell their stories. But it was George’s ongoing, expert handling of the concerns that led to an independent investigation into abusive coaching practices in the sport.

As late as December, with that investigation making slow progress, George was keeping up the pressure.

It’s an old journalism cliche that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but it’s also true: opening up these worrying practices to public scrutiny will, eventually, lead to change.

5. Emma

Please indulge me with one which is not strictly an investigation, but is one of our all-time most special pieces of work at Stuff Circuit.

Emma Barrett is a colleague of ours in the Stuff Auckland offices. She has fetal alcohol syndrome and is employed under the Creative Spirit initiative: regular jobs for people with intellectual disabilities.

In 2017, knowing we were journalists, Emma asked if we could help her write an entry for a website that helps connect adopted people with their birth families: she wanted to find hers, in Russia.

We had just come off a really difficult, gruelling investigation into New Zealand's war in Afghanistan, and we were looking for a story which might be a bit more, I don’t know… uplifting? And then we realised it was right in front of us. It took three years, but with the help of NZ On Air, we made Emma’s story into an interactive documentary (also available as a straight documentary).

One of the nicest pieces of feedback we received was that the story brought connection in a world that’s become fragmented. And it did indeed prove uplifting - not just to work on, but hopefully, to watch.

If you didn’t have the time when it was published in November, it’s the perfect summer viewing.

6. Unwarranted

Okay, so I was only asked for my top five investigations of 2020, but hey, I’m a long-form journalist and I find it hard to stick to a word limit, so let me just sneak in a sixth.

Another little-understood aspect of investigative journalism is how much time it can take to get answers, and also, how particular the questions sometimes need to be in order to elicit those answers.

The exposē, Unwarranted, by Stuff special projects journalist Eugene Bingham, with data journalist Felippe Rodrigues and senior visual journalist Chris McKeen, is a masterclass in perseverance, but, most importantly, a hugely significant piece of work exposing data that even the Police Commissioner admitted was “appalling”.

7. The Liberator

I’m being greedy now I know, but it’s summer, you have time!

I’m a huge admirer of the writing of Stuff national correspondent Charlie Mitchell, and his piece on the complicated legacy of an aging communist and his bizarre crime spree that forever changed our waterways, is a brilliant example of how clever wordsmithing can give life to official documents and hundreds of pages of personal notes. It really is a magical, masterful piece.