An employee at New Zealand’s national broadcaster, RNZ, has been placed on leave amid an investigation into how wire service news reports on the Ukraine war were rewritten to insert a pro-Russia slant.
Evidence emerged on Friday and Saturday that a number of articles attributed to the Reuters wire service or the BBC had been edited by RNZ to insert new sentences and paragraphs. In a radio interview on Monday, RNZ’s chief executive, Paul Thompson, described the edits as “pro-Kremlin garbage”, and said the news services would search thousands of articles “with a fine-tooth comb”.
About 250 had already been reviewed, he said. Sixteen articles that had been “inappropriately edited” had been corrected and had an editorial note appended.
“It is so disappointing, I’m gutted, it’s painful,” he said. “We have to get to the bottom of how it happened.”
New Zealand’s minister for broadcasting, Willie Jackson, was briefed on the matter over the weekend and said it was a “major issue” and “unprecedented for RNZ”.
Dating back to April 2022, the articles in question had made a range of changes to Reuters’ journalism, with a consistent pattern of adding Russian government talking points to news reports without additional attribution. Changes included adding the word “coup” to describe the Maidan revolution; changing a description of Ukraine’s former “pro-Russian president” to read “pro-Russian elected government”; adding references to a “pro-western government” that had “suppressed ethnic Russians”; and adding references to Russian concerns about “neo-Nazi elements” in Ukraine.
Some stories added whole paragraphs, saying that Russia had launched its invasion “claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted”.
One piece inaccurately claimed that “Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum, as the new pro-western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine”.
Ukraine says those claims are discredited Kremlin propaganda. Street demonstrations began in late 2013 in Kyiv after the then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, dumped an association agreement with the EU and accepted a bailout from Moscow. The anti-corruption movement was peaceful and had widespread public support.
Yanukovych fled to Russia months later after his security forces shot dead more than 100 unarmed protesters. Putin responded by annexing Crimea and kickstarting a war in the east, using undercover agents. There is no evidence Russian speakers are “persecuted” in Ukraine, a bilingual country.
RNZ encompasses a national broadcast radio station and news website. The organisation is government funded but has editorial independence. It is highly influential in New Zealand’s news landscape – as well as being among the country’s largest newsrooms, it holds republishing deals with all of New Zealand’s large commercial media organisations, meaning that RNZ reports are regularly republished by websites and newspapers around the country.
David Seymour, leader of the libertarian Act party, said the discovery was “deeply concerning”.
“The Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence against a brutal dictatorship,” he said. “If our state broadcaster has published material that has included Russian propaganda, it would be appalling.”
On Friday, RNZ announced an external review of its processes for the editing of online stories and said the outcome of the review would be made public.
The outlet said in a statement: “An investigation is under way into the alleged conduct of one employee relating to this matter. That employee is on leave and does not have access to RNZ computer systems.”
Additional reporting by Luke Harding
