Public health researchers apologised to after Dirty Politics attacks – In the News

Another chapter of Dirty Politics has closed this week, years after Nicky Hager’s original 2014 investigation into political attack blogging.

Public relations consultant Carrick Graham apologised to three public health researchers, The Spinoff’s Alex Braee reported from a socially-distanced Auckland High Court yesterday.

His apology says that a “number of statements” he made under pseudonyms on blogs published on the now-defunct Whale Oil website about the plaintiffs were “untrue, unfair, offensive, insulting and defamatory.”

The proceedings were brought by Doug Sellman of the University of Otago, Boyd Swinburn of the University of Auckland, and Shane Bradbrook, formerly of the Māori Smokefree Coalition, and currently a senior adviser in Te Arawhiti the Office for Māori Crown Relations.

NZ Doctor reporter Martin Johnston wrote the case was settled less than four hours after the trial started, and included an undisclosed financial sum to the plaintiffs. Several outlets cited both Graham’s apology, and the plaintiffs’ joint statement in response to the case settlement.

Sellman told Susie Ferguson the day after that the way the trial ended came as a surprise.

“Although we were aware of concerns in the defendants, but we certainly didn’t think it was going to be ended in the way that it did, in such a dramatic way with this apology.”

The New Zealand Herald’s David Fisher reports Swinburn alleged the man that wrote that the defamatory online attacks was funded by money from ‘Big Sugar and Big Tobacco’.