95bFM Concerns over scrapping the Broadcasting Standards Authority
20 May, 2026
Interview by Caeden Tipler, adapted by Marlo Schorr-Kon
The Media and Communications Minister, Paul Goldsmith, has announced that the Broadcasting Standards Authority will be scrapped with media to self-regulate instead.
Goldsmith says this is due to the regulatory framework not keeping up with industry changes, describing the Broadcasting Act as no longer fit for purpose.
Associate Professor in Media and Communications at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University and Trustee at Better Public Media, Dr Peter Thompson, told 95bFM's The Wire that the government's decision to scrap the BSA stemmed from “a series of discussion papers under the set of media reforms that were developed by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.”
“Part of that consultation involved a proposal to modernise media regulation, and that suggested a number of different permutations to reform the BSA, specifically by having industry bodies deal with frontline day-to-day complaints about individual broadcasting items, where, for example, someone had breached privacy or fairness or accuracy standards.”
The Broadcasting Standards Authority is the statutory regulator, which means it has powers to oversee broadcasting standards. Dr Thompson says those broadcasting standards “primarily apply to radio and television, and they can also apply to content online that has also been broadcast.”
One of the key reasons for the BSA being scrapped is that some of its rules have become outdated in the modern digital age, Dr Thompson explains.
“Because the Broadcasting Act 1989 is a bit ambiguous about what it means by broadcasting in the digital era, there's, of course, been a huge debate about whether the Broadcasting Standards Authority's jurisdiction extends to other kinds of media service online that have broadcasting-like qualities. And that's one of the issues of debate.”
The New Zealand Media Council, which is the industry counterpart of the BSA, mainly oversees news and online media, and has no powers of enforcement
“I don't think there's any evidence to say that the New Zealand Media Council is necessarily going to uphold these standards better than a statutory regulator,” Dr Thompson says.
The current proposal suggests that New Zealand will abandon any statutory body altogether, a move which Dr Thompson says leaves the door open for a “media actor.”
“It's an ideological response to the recent furore over the BSA's decision to officially hear a complaint about comments Sean Plunkett made on his The Platform platform, and those comments seemed to be disparaging to Māori, and that there was a complaint that went through the process.”
“And the BSA said, well, because it's a service that appears to have the characteristics of broadcasting, and it was on a live stream, we're going to treat it as a broadcast and therefore we think it's within our jurisdiction.”
“The 1989 Broadcasting Act talks about content that's delivered through telecommunications, and you could say the internet is a form of telecommunication, but he doesn't specifically say the internet or mention online streaming, because we really didn't have those back in 1989.”
Dr Thompson says the BSA has been accused by the political right of overstepping its jurisdiction.
“Some people have even said it's like a Soviet-era Stasi, or an Orwellian bureaucracy, none of which are really fair assessments of what the BSA is trying to do, but the political heat over this issue has possibly created an opportunity whereby the current government sees a chance to appeal to a constituency of voters who vehemently oppose any kind of media regulation.”
