In the shadows of the Maiki Sherman story

I hope there is a moment, somewhere around 3am on any morning this week, when Christopher Luxon, Gerry Brownlee and Simeon Brown wake – as men of a certain age are wont to do (well maybe not the younger Brown) – and feel the weight of what they have done. I hope it keeps them awake, though I doubt it will. Each man's ego is sufficiently large for it to not even occur to him this is something he should lose sleep over.

"If your wife has locked you out," says writer Anne Lamott, "your problem isn't the door." I like this quote. It explains a lot about the current state of political commentary in this country. Lots of focus on the door, not enough on what’s behind it.

The Maiki Sherman story is not about what happened in Finance Minister Nicola Willis's office at a drinks function last May. That story – who said what to whom, and what happened or didn’t happen subsequently – is the door. Does anyone really believe that Sherman is the first press gallery reporter to ever call another reporter a name at a party in which alcohol was consumed, and for that she had to walk the plank?

No, the Willis event may have been the door, but the problem is deeper than that.

Three weeks ago, Sherman was pursuing the most important political story of the parliamentary year. Stuart Smith, National's chief whip, was absent from caucus on the day Christopher Luxon called a confidence vote in his own leadership. It was a vote that could have changed the course of this government's history. Smith had no credible reason to be absent. He was hiding in the parliamentary complex, seemingly kept away by a party leadership that understood what Smith’s caucus presence might set in motion. Sherman went after him and in doing so she crossed into a part of the parliamentary precinct where gallery journalists are not permitted to go.

Speaker Gerry Brownlee controls gallery accreditation. He used that power to suspend the journalist who had come closest to the truth of what the governing leadership was hiding, while acknowledging that other journalists had broken the same rules on the same day. He said he could not identify them, but he could Sherman.

Step back from the immediate story and think about some of the great breaks in journalism's history. Watergate, the Pentagon Papers. Even 2011’s ‘Teagate’ scandal in New Zealand. The act of going somewhere a reporter was not supposed to go, or receiving something they weren't supposed to receive, served the public interest in ways that following the rules could never have done.

In Sherman's case, following the rules would have protected Luxon from public scrutiny of the most precarious moment of his leadership. She was instead made a scapegoat. Punished by the second most constitutionally powerful man in the land – the supposedly independent Speaker – who was more than willing to deploy his institutional authority to protect Luxon from further scrutiny and send a message to the press gallery not to proceed with the story. That National campaign chair Simeon Brown followed up with an official complaint to TVNZ about Sherman’s spatial transgression suggests the sequence of events was a coordinated political beat-up for her coming too close to the truth.

In the United States, the press is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Adopted in 1791, it prohibits Congress from restricting the freedom of speech of the press and ensures that journalists can report on government actions without censorship or retaliation. The protection isn’t perfect, but it exists.

Our news media enjoy no such protection. They have no formal constitutional status. They operate on convention, professional norms, and the goodwill of the powerful. There is no independent officer of parliament with the standing to say that a Speaker who suspends a journalist has abused his powers.

Democracy depends on an informed citizenry. An informed citizenry depends on journalists who can pursue power without having their careers destroyed when they get too close to the truth. The daylight between abuse of power and a confidential HR settlement is vanishingly thin in this country. The sad lesson of this affair for all students of media and journalism is that if they pursue a story that embarrasses the National party’s leadership aggressively enough, no one in the political media system will hold the line for them when the powerful fire back.

This is a real problem for democracy in New Zealand. When power can reach into the conditions under which journalism is practiced – who gets suspended, who gets legally threatened, who gets pulled from the prime minister's travel list, whose continued employment becomes untenable – then the media is no longer free and the price is paid by voters who will never know what their government did in the shadows to make sure they never found out.