Old rules, new media: BSA move triggers calls for reform
Friday, 24 October 2025
ANALYSIS: The news last week that the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) was contemplating considering a complaint against an online media network, namely The Platform, opened a Pandora’s box that seems unlikely to close again anytime soon.
An interim decision shared by The Platform’s founder, Sean Plunket, on his own show revealed that, pending further consultation, the media watchdog felt it was able to consider the complaint.
Within 24 hours the issue had exploded, being picked apart by all sides of the political divide, from free speech advocates to MPs.
For some, it was a sign that the BSA should be abolished entirely. For others, it was proof that wider reform was long overdue. The debate is now bigger than Plunket, and certainly bigger than the original complaint.
Plunket has managed to sit outside the regulatory framework since The Platform launched in 2022 - a position he clearly wishes to retain. Nevertheless, he’s reaping the reward and claims listenership has been up by about 20% since last week.
An out-of-date system
The consensus on both sides of the debate is that the system as it stands is no longer fit for purpose. As media commentator Gavin Ellis explains, the current regulatory landscape is entirely medium-based.
“In other words, the way that information is disseminated determines who has jurisdiction over it in terms of oversight, and that's anachronistic, and is increasingly proven to be so,” he says.
On one side, there is the Broadcasting Standards Authority which adjudicates traditional broadcasting - essentially free-to-air television and radio. On the other side, we have the New Zealand Media Council, a non-governmental group to which media outlets can voluntarily ascribe to. It initially regulated newspapers, but has since broadened to include digital outlets (including thepost.co.nz).
Some outlets are captured by both; Stuff, for example, abides by Media Council guidelines for its website and yet its televised news bulletin ThreeNews falls under the BSA.
“For a long, long time, we have had a situation where the structure of regulation does not reflect the reality of delivery,” Ellis said.
“Frankly, the days of regulating media rather than content are gone. Simply because our traditional media now engage in all forms of of delivery - text, sound and vision - and they do it in different ways. Because of that, the thought of having two bodies that are predicated, at least in their genesis, on the form of communication, it's just completely out of date.”
A messy debate
Ellis thinks it’s probably a bit of a stretch to call the response to the BSA’s decision an outcry. It’s more an “incry” he thinks, mainly of interest to those in the know.
Victoria University’s Peter Thompson, an associate professor in media and communications, agrees. He thinks the recent debate has generated “more heat than light”. In other words, we’re still no closer to knowing who is correct.
“There's a huge amount of disinformation about what's really going on here, and I don't think it's produced a very healthy public debate so far,” he said.
“However, what we do know is that from 2019 the Broadcasting Standards Authority did actually go and consult industry on how it might apply the the BSA code of broadcasting standards to online media, and it published a position on that.”
More recently, the Government has released through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage a set of media proposals, Thompson said.
“And that included a proposal to modernise media regulation. As part of that, there would have been a review of the broadcasting Standards Authority regime.”
What’s on the table?
That proposal, titled “Modernising regulation and content funding arrangements for New Zealand”, was released in February. Part of the document proposed revising the broadcasting standards regime - including the Broadcasting Standards Authority - with a “platform-neutral and system-level regulation of professional media”.
It received 197 submissions, with 103 of these representing organisations.
The minister with oversight, Paul Goldsmith, would not speak to The Post this week and it’s not yet clear when any decisions on that document may be made. Goldsmith told RNZ’s Mediawatch that the Government was yet to make final decisions on the reform proposal.
“But in the meantime the BSA is out there with what it considers is within its current ability to do,' Goldsmith told RNZ.
'There's a lot of noise about it at the moment. Of course if you're in the sector you want to draw attention to yourself and so a lot has been said. I don't think our democracy is under threat, but it's an interesting little exercise.'
Janet Wilson, a former journalist and columnist for The Post, says the “fractionalisation” of media regulation demonstrates why broader reform is necessary.
“So there is a thing called convergence that's happened, and has been happening for the last 20-odd years. The Media Council and the BSA should be actually working together across all mediums, and they should be probably joined together,” she believes.
While Wilson says she would “defend until the end” Sean Plunket’s right to say what he deems necessary on The Platform, the current situation presented an issue around what may or not be within the bounds of the BSA’s jurisdiction.
“Where do we stop with this? Do we go, ‘’yeah, TikTok. And suddenly say, ‘Oh, that is offensive to us’. Who becomes the judge and jury here? And how do we judge this?”
But while she believed the BSA was due for the scrap heap, her belief was that media oversight was necessary. The media outlets themselves should be pushing for change.
“People need to have faith and trust in what they're reading, and a regulatory body would provide that. We're back in about 1997 when it comes to regulation of media, we're not in 2025. It is no longer fit for purpose.
“And it's time that the the media as a whole stepped up and started discussing and actively going to the government and saying, ‘This is what this looks like’.”
‘Nothing very much has happened’
Lawyer Peter Radich, a former chair of the Broadcasting Standards Authority between 2010 and 2018, says that the issues of the last week were simmering away even when he was in the role.
“There's long been a question of just how far regulation of broadcasting, or whatever you call broadcasting, should go,” he tells The Post.
“When I was there, which is a long time ago now, we were very conscious of the fact that we were operating under 1989 legislation. And I think in that year, David Lange was probably the prime minister, and I think there were perhaps a couple of television channels and nothing much else. And by the time I was there, even years ago, the whole landscape had changed.”
Radich says, even then, the authority would regularly push for updated legislation “so that we had some idea of what the extent of our obligations was”.
But little ever changed.
In a chair’s report from 2018, Radich wrote: “We were expecting that there would be reviews and reforms which would move the structures of media regulation into the converged environment in which they are now required to operate. But nothing very much has happened and we are still driving about in the 1989 statutory vehicle.”
Radich says he thinks of the BSA as a farm; one that kept its own paddock reasonably clean and tidy while the surrounding area started to get disorderly.
“All around us, the fences were down and people were roaming, and we didn't know whether that was our area of responsibility or not, and we couldn't really get any direction from any any government as to the extent of what we're expected to do.
“So I can well understand that the BSA would in the current environment be saying, ‘Well, are we meant to be doing anything? Should we be doing anything?’”
‘I think there is a way to sensibly regulate’
In 2019, under Radich’s successor Bill Hastings, the BSA wrote to broadcasters and determined that “in light of the increasing use of internet platforms for distribution of content”, programmes that are transmitted online in a linear form met the definition of broadcasting, as did programmes that are livestreamed by a company over the internet for reception by the general public in New Zealand.
Yet it took until 2025 for this to be put to the test. The furore over The Platform was only triggered because someone actually complained. After that, the authority is obliged to consider it.
“If it looks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, probably it's a duck. And I tend to be sympathetic to that argument,” says Victoria University’s Peter Thompson.
“But I don't know what the court might decide if there's a legal decision about this. I think the Broadcasting Act is ambiguous.”
But current BSA chief Stacey Wood is confident the authority is correct.
'Our view is that online broadcasters that resemble traditional TV or radio stations clearly fall within the scope of the act,” she told The Post in the days after the controversy.
Speaking on Thursday, Wood adds that “despite what some might think” the BSA had not made its decision without serious consideration.
“[We] spent a lot of time, over many years, looking at our Act and looking at our jurisdiction, and knowing that eventually a complaint would be made to us about an online broadcaster and would be obliged to look at the act and decide if it applied,” she says.
The reaction was anticipated. Goldsmith was alerted to it under the “no surprises” policy, but has not been in touch with Wood in the past week.
Both the deputy prime minister David Seymour and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters released public statements condemning the BSA, but neither MP - nor any other - has directly approached the BSA to discuss the issue.
“I think some people have kind of had to almost create a hypothetical scenario to get angry at … either that we're trying to shut down certain media that we don't like, or that we're trying to regulate the entire internet,” Wood said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given her role, she believes it would be a mistake to move to a “totally unregulated space”, but acknowledges that any reform would need to have a tight remit.
“I think there is a way to sensibly regulate professional media in New Zealand without having to boil the ocean and go do everything all at once, with social media and user-generated content and deep fakes,” she says.
“There's different regulatory mechanisms available for different kinds of content, and I think you can do one without biting off more than you can chew. And I think there's good reasons for having regulation of professional media.”
Wood adds: “In some cases, the system that we have now provides an avenue for people to get an answer or a decision on something - like something harmful or something that's grossly inaccurate or has breached their privacy - without having to go through a full court process, which is very time consuming and inaccessible for a lot of people.”
How online networks would respond to being supervised by a regulator is another question. Plunket told The Post last week that he did not recognise the BSA’s authority. Legal action was a possibility.
Wood says she had “no problem” with any party using “whatever avenues they'd like to test the process”.
But it’s not just Plunket that could potentially be pulled into this debate, with a wave of new media outlets now providing content over the internet.
“As my mother said, there's enough love to go around,” Wilson said.
“We should be holding them to the same standards that they claim we don't have. Why should they be allowed to not be held to the standards that we are being held to?”
That question being answered now feels inevitable.