Sunday News story “outing” a long-ago unknown porn actor is the most disgraceful piece of NZ “journalism” in years, and maybe ever

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Will your wife, husband, son or daughter be next?

The most disgraceful piece of New Zealand journalism I have seen in many a year was published today in the pathetic, circulation-losing Sunday News. It was an allegation that an ordinary citizen – someone whose name is far from well-known – who had a week ago taken a new professional job as a manager, was five years ago an actor in one of Steve Crow’s pornographic videos as well as being featured pictorially in two adult magazines.

From reading the story, which I feel shame in linking to, but need to so readers can follow what I am saying, it appears that this ordinary citizen lost his new job following an approach to his employer by the sleazy rag’s reporter tittle-tattling about their new employee’s past life.

Pathetically (and I use that word in its melancholy sense) the man was quoted by the rag as saying to the reporter: “I have nothing to say about this. You have ruined my life.”

Which it obviously has. By even printing that, the reporter, and the paper, are showing they are proud of what they have done.

Even worse, the reporter made it clear in the story that he had phoned the man’s wife, whom the man reportedly married in March last year, to tell the wife her new husband’s alleged porn past, and from the story it seems that she had known nothing of it.

This appalling story of no journalistic value or public interest whatsoever not only named the man but also his wife and his existing and previous employer (whom the reporter also contacted to disclose his sick gossip). The details it gave about his wife (including about her Facebook page) are completely unjustifiable under any possible journalistic circumstances and likely to cause her massive embarrassment and problems at her work.

Such stories are normally written about “celebrities” or public figures such as politicians and especially in the latter instance, some “scandalous” part of a politician’s life is worthy of publication if the politician is hiding a past or does or says something that invokes a double standard. “Celebrities,” who court media exposure for fat chequebook journalism rewards, are fair game in my opinion though the front-page treatment they get is a sad reflection on the media today.

But this story was about a complete nobody, about someone who could be your bus driver or your workmate or your boss in your anonymous workplace. There are no allegations of illegality. It is about the private life of someone you have never heard of. It could be about your neighbour, or even your son or daughter. Or mine. There is no ethical journalistic justification for publishing such a story.

I am writing about this because the story has a number of disturbing features that I hope will not lead to despicable garbage like this becoming a new sewage norm in our media:

• It is not illegal to star in a porn movie. The obnoxious Steve Crow (he of the Boobs on Bikes parade) is New Zealand’s most prominent maker of pornographic films. His products are legal, they are passed by our official censor, and the actors in them take part legally.
• It is not in any public interest at all to reveal in a newspaper that somebody who is today engaged in a nondescript job, who is not any kind of elected or other public figure, was many years ago an actor in a porn film. Given the number of porn films Crow makes, scores, probably hundreds of decent New Zealanders who for reasons known maybe only to themselves took part in a Crow film years ago, could be outed in this way if journalism continues on this appalling path. As I said, there is nothing illegal about being in a Steve Crow porn film. Yet publishing the story today caused an ordinary, unknown person to lose his job.
• Unsurprisingly, the reporter who co-wrote this disgusting article is none other than Jonathan Marshall, who, in a former career with TVNZ’s Queer Nation gay current affairs show, was sacked for stalking another TVNZ presenter, Mike Hosking, hoping to get photos of Hosking in some kind of compromising position. Marshall went on to set up a website that purported to expose celebrities doing whatever celebrities do but in recent times he has been hired as a “journalist” by the desperate Sunday News.

Sunday News is entitled to hire who it likes to write the pathetic stories it publishes every week (its circulation is a monument to the standard of its journalism).

But surely even the Sunday News must see the hypocrisy of employing Jonathan Marshall to destroy the life and career of someone whose only apparent “wrong” was to take part in porn movies years ago, when its own Jonathan Marshall was rightly sacked for his disgraceful activities while employed by the company that made Queer Nation for TVNZ. Marshall’s entire career has been about sleaze, especially his own. Under the “standards” the paper used to rage against this ordinary, unknown citizen, its own reporter would not be entitled to a job.

If this is the future of journalism, I am glad to be out of it.

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Filed under Journalism, Justice and Law, Orwell lives

Tags: Jonathan Marshall, Sunday News