Or should that be Thomson and Thompson?
The Sunday Star Times had an amusing story yesterday about the private detective agency Thompson and Clarke, who produce ‘intelligence reports’ for government agencies and state owned enterprises. The reports cost $1000 per month and the article - written by Hollow Men author Nicky Hagar - describes them as:
unreferenced material from the internet and rough summaries of open sources, interspersed with sarcastic comments about the community groups.
Thompson and Clarke were last seen trying to pay members of various community groups (such as Save Happy Valley) to act as informants within their organisations and supply information of interest to government owned company Solid Energy. The informants took the money and then went to the media.
My big problem with this story (and the other stories that Hagar has written for the SST, including the fraudulent ‘Operation Leaf’ article in which Hagar and co-writer Anthony Hubbard incorrectly alleged that the SIS were spying on the Maori Party) is that Hagar is not an objective journalist - he’s a political activist. The SST story is important and he should be interviewed as a primary source but having him write the whole piece is no different from having a lobbyist like Roger Kerr (from the Business Round Table) writing their political news.
“unreferenced material from the internet and rough summaries of open sources, interspersed with sarcastic comments”
Doesn’t that sound much like Hagar’s own writing?
Comment by AW — June 16, 2008 @ 9:39 am
I laughed when I read Hager’s report, as the editor tried to make one of this “main points” that this agency had basically summarised a whole lot of information available via Google and charged some-one for it. Outrageous!!
Except that Hager probably just made a grand summarising a whole lot of information I had already read in various reports and blogs and presented it in one article, with some degree of bias showing.
And hundreds of Government Policy Analysts go around researching readily available information and summarising it into reports for others to use to help assist in their decision making process.
It’s not actually a bad idea.
Sure, question the quality of the report, but not the service. Especially if one is a journalist.
And Hager tried a technique he honed in the Hollow Men - present some facts and then try to make it sound like a lie. So the cost of the report was a focus point, as part of his strategy of making out is was not value for money. He included information from the Agency where they said “the report costs are actually part of an overall package, rather than seen as a stand-alone product”, and tried to imply that was only said to deflect his questions. It probably was said to deflect his questions, but equally, was probably not a lie.
Given that their activities extended beyond the monthly “Boys Own Cloak And Dagger Adventure Mag” and included inserting highly trained, torture and interrogation resistant sleeper agents (with clueless students needing some part time work designed to provide a diversion) into potential chicken-freeing and snail-baiting terrorist organisations, you gotta be thinking they may well have invested in a whole lot of cool gear that came in camo colour and optionally glowed in the dark.
Oh well, if their business dries up, Tame Iti might buy them out.
Comment by ZenTiger — June 16, 2008 @ 10:12 pm