BSA PS
By Steven | May 7, 2026
Just a reminder of what’s at stake here. As I wrote earlier this year:
If The Platform and any other internet-based TV or radio platform are not subject to the Broadcasting Act, then they are not subject to broadcasting standards, and could do the following things:
- Wax falsely about the benefits of a new product’s ability to cure cancer
- Phone up someone and put them on air without telling them they’re on air
- Call for gay people to be executed
- Broadcast a music festival live, and set up a screen crawl displaying viewers’ texts, then drunkenly fail to monitor those texts so that named people’s private parts are unflatteringly discussed
- Criticise someone, then interview them and edit the interview so that it leaves out the important parts of their response.
- Broadcast a dispute between a couple about whether the guy is the father of their six year-old daughter, then reveal the results of a paternity test, in the presence of that daughter, live and before a studio audience.
These are all based on real cases. In most of these situations, those harmed couldn’t simply use other laws instead, even if they could afford them. I’m not saying The Platform would do all these things. But I am saying that broadcasters have done them, and been held accountable through broadcasting standards which would not apply to internet broadcasters, on the theory that they’re not covered by the Act.
Oh, and when you hear people crowing about what a massive victory for free speech this is, bear this in mind too. Although there was a technical argument about whether the BSA had jurisdiction over live-streaming internet broadcasters, which stemmed in part from some antiquated language in the 1989 statute, there was no doubt at all that subjecting The Platform to standards regulation like other broadcasters would not have been regarded as a breach of the right to freedom of expression in the Bill of Rights Act.
Here’s Paul Goldsmith in Stuff from October last year:
Online radio stations and video news shows could soon be regulated in the same way as terrestrial broadcasters currently are.
Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith said the likes of The Platform, Reality Check Radio, and Herald Now are currently not covered by the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), even though some competitors are.
“It’s not obvious to me why one group of people who are broadcasting in a very similar way should be subject to the BSA and another group shouldn’t be,” he said.
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