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“We risked using a hammer to smash a flea,” Hosking warned in his editorial ‘Mike’s Minute’ on April 6, which is no longer available on the ZB website or Facebook page after the Broadcasting Standards confirmed the complaint this week.
He echoed the University of Auckland epidemiologist Dr Simon Thornley, a member of the Plan B group who believed the government’s containment measures were doing more harm than good.
Dr. Thornley wrote those words in an op-ed for Stuff on March 31 in which he also said that the deaths have been wrongly attributed to Covid-19 in Italy.
Overall, he calculated, the deaths were about the same as during flu season two years earlier, and he again insisted as a guest at Mike Hosking’s breakfast the next morning.
In his Mike’s Minute of April 6, Hosking claimed that almost everyone in Italy who said they died from Covid-19 had in fact died “with the virus”, but not “from it.”
But no one was reporting this, Hosking complained.
“The coverage they are getting is, to some extent, bogus,” he told his listeners.
The BSA discovered this week that Hosking combined the Covid-19 figures with the figure of 1,600 deaths per day in Italy, ignoring the possibility that Italians had died much earlier than they could have.
The BSA noted that around the time of the broadcast on April 6, “Italy was experiencing a 58 percent deviation from its expected death rate” according to an online source that it deemed credible.
Having investigated where Hosking obtained his information online, the BSA said that NZME (owner of Newstalk ZB) did not make reasonable efforts to ensure the program was accurate, and supports what it called his “relatively strong views critical of the measures. government to manage the impact of Covid-19 “.
Instead of admitting that this was the case, NZME contested the complaint and insisted that listeners know that Mike’s Minute is based on its own opinion and analysis.
But the BSA said audiences “rely heavily on the mainstream media to provide authoritative and reliable information on matters of public importance.”
Keeping this complaint accurate “does not unreasonably prevent Mr. Hosking from expressing his views,” the Authority said.
“Reasonably require Mr. Hosking to express his views in a way that does not propagate a selective or misleading interpretation of the factual sources on which he relies, or omits important contextual information that may alter listeners’ understanding of the points of views presented on a topic of great public interest ”, he added.
In other words, Hosking has carte blanche to issue statistically-based opinions on life and death issues, but the broadcaster should at least try to make sure that he doesn’t mislead listeners when he does so.
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It wasn’t the only time lately that Hosking has dropped misleading numbers from overseas that he claims cast doubt on Covid’s containment strategy here.
Ten days later, on April 16, he said that the results of the massive tests in Iceland showed that “our lockdown may be a complete waste of time.”
He said that 10 percent of Iceland’s population had been tested and “about half of the population at any given time has the virus and does not know it.”
But it was by no means true that half of Icelanders were unintentional carriers of Covid-19.
Half of those who tested positive for Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses were asymptomatic and did not know it, but they accounted for less than 1 percent of people tested in the largest test, and possibly as little as 0.3 percent in the other main test. in Iceland.
After another accuracy complaint against him was upheld in 2017, Hosking mocked the BSA in another Mike’s Minute as a bunch of “humorless clipboarders. Let them sit” pontificating. “
It concluded that there was no need for a standards body to which the public could complain.
Just two weeks before Hosking’s misleading comments about Italy, NZME CEO Michael Boggs published a serious letter to New Zealand.
“Our commitment to all New Zealanders is that we will maintain the highest journalistic standards while focusing on providing Kiwis with the news and information they need, when they need it,” he wrote.
He said that NZME’s daily newspapers, including The New Zealand Herald, its digital platforms and NewstalkZB together reach more than a million kiwis a day.
“We take all of these roles and responsibilities incredibly seriously and are fully committed to keeping New Zealand informed and connected,” said Boggs.
Presenting its annual results earlier this month, Boggs said that NZME was an essential service during the Covid crisis.
“In times of crisis, New Zealanders turned to NZME to keep them informed on major news and journalism,” he said.
It’s hard to reconcile that with their willingness to defend inaccurate claims on their most popular news and information platforms from a broadcaster that has also used them to poke fun at the regulator accused of holding media companies to basic standards that they themselves They helped establish and committed. raise, support, sustain.
