The head of New Zealand’s public radio station apologized on Monday after it was found that a journalist had been inserting “pro-Kremlin garbage” into news stories about Russia and Ukraine which were published on the broadcaster’s website.
Paul Thompson, the chief executive of the publicly-funded Radio New Zealand (RNZ), said around 250 stories had already been forensically checked for Russian propaganda since they became aware of the issue on Friday and that 16 had been found that required corrections and editor’s notes. The digital reporter allegedly responsible for the embarrassing incident has been placed on leave, and Thompson said thousands more articles would need to be reviewed for problems.
The majority of the altered stories were based on reports from the Reuters news agency. Speaking to RNZ’s Checkpoint program, the accused unnamed journalist said: “I subbed several stories that way over the past number of years.”
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“In fact since I started RNZ and… I have done that for five years and nobody has tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I was doing anything wrong,” they added.
The claim that the employee’s edits went unchallenged for years has yet to be verified with the journalist’s managers. But serious concerns had been raised about their work as far back as May 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thompson said at the time, a story was reviewed and updated in line with editorial standards.
Some of the propagandistic alterations may have been subtle enough to escape the attention of casual readers in that they were only a few words long, but they dramatically changed the context of a story. Amendments adding Kremlin talking points to stories included sentences that “neo-Nazis had created a threat” to Russian borders and that “Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin initially cited an intention to “denazify Ukraine” as among his justifications for the invasion, and Russia has accused Ukraine’s leadership of nazism ever since the country’s pro-Moscow government was toppled in 2014. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, has repeatedly rebuffed the allegations and has vowed to defeat Russia “just as Nazism was defeated” in Ukraine during World War 2.
The comment about Russia annexing Crimea after a referendum also failed to include the context that the vote was considered a sham and not recognized internationally, with the United Nations General Assembly adopting a resolution calling the referendum invalid.
“It is so disappointing,” Thompson told RNZ’s Nine to Noon show. “I’m gutted. It’s painful. It’s shocking. We have to get to the bottom of how it happened.” He added that an external review of the organization’s editorial process had been commissioned.
“The job of a sub-editor is to improve stories, add context, improve the journalism,” he told Checkpoint. “What we’re talking about here is a very small proportion of stories where something quite different happened, where incorrect and misleading information was inserted into wire copy. So it’s important to make that distinction.”
“Extraordinary that there is so little editorial oversight at Radio New Zealand that someone employed by/contracted to them was able to rewrite online content to reflect pro-Russia stance without senior staff noticing,” Helen Clark, who served as New Zealand’s prime minister between 1998 and 2008, tweeted on Saturday. “Accountability? Expect better from public broadcaster.”
