Matt Nippert: It's vital we open secrets to keep everyone honest

Student magazines mired in controversy? Hardly a new look. But the controversial article in Salient, Victoria University's student magazine, was not about how to spike a drink or top yourself. It was a story based on leaked documents that showed the university was considering increasing student fees by up to 10 per cent.

Not sensationalist, just good, hard journalism. Normally, such a story might cause a small stir on campus but would die a quick, lonely death.

Instead, Victoria - after being given the opportunity to explain itself for the article - decided to use the forewarning to seek a court injunction and seize all 6000 copies of the offending weekly magazine. They were released on Wednesday only after staff and supporters mounted a feisty campaign.

In New Zealand, those who have a beef with the press normally resolve it in one of two ways: a letter to the editor, or a complaint to the Press Council. Other regimes use prison cells and bullets.

Victoria University's actions fell somewhere in the middle. Inevitably, such heavy-handedness garnered calls of overkill, and immediate sympathy for the underdog. What was essentially a student issue became a national one. A story about university management operating in secrecy became a story about press freedom.

A hypothetical example should suffice in illustrating how worrying a precedent this case may have set.

Imagine if Michael Cullen, beavering away in Cabinet, produced a document proposing that all tax rates be raised by a uniform 10 per cent. Imagine if these papers were leaked to the Herald, and a justifiably outraged front page was drawn up.

Then imagine Government agents arriving at the printers and locking all 230,000 copies of the paper away in a mysterious vault (that presumably also houses the surplus).

A hyperbolical example to be sure, but a great many important stories, both here and overseas, have relied on leaks to reach the public domain.

The transcript of Iraena Asher's final 111 call was leaked to TV3, starkly illustrating deep flaws in our emergency response system.

The Winebox case, illustrating widespread corporate fraud, was named after the box containing leaked documents that was delivered to Winston Peters.

In the United States in 1971, leaked Pentagon Papers exposed the fact that even the military hierarchy believed the war in Vietnam to be unwinnable.

And you can hardly go past that little case called Watergate.

The stakes over whether leaked information can be made public are clearly rather high.

This made the scuffle in Wellington all the more memorable, given that Salient beat off the injunction and is now in the hands of students and interested readers.

While occasionally there may be good reason for information not to be used by journalists, (significant issues of national security, privacy, commercial sensitivity), the weighting in these cases should always be in favour of the public interest.

Otherwise institutions and individuals with something to hide can evade prompt and proper scrutiny. As former NBC news president Rubin Frank said, "News is what somebody wants to suppress; everything else is advertising."

The grand irony of this case is that the information Victoria University wanted to suppress found its way to a much wider audience than it arguably deserved.

Victoria's proposed fee increase made appearances in political press releases, radio bulletins, television broadcasts and newspapers. On the internet, copies of the article sprouted like mushrooms. The university's attempts to enforce the injunction fuelled outrage and many new postings.

The university's defence of confidentiality quickly collapsed under the weight of its own ham-fisted tactics.

While name suppression was bent in the case of the over-hyped "celebrity drug ring", the case of Salient versus Victoria seems a more principled and worthy case of skirting suppression.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here: everyone wants to know a secret, so perhaps it's best to keep things in the open unless absolutely necessary.

We should, therefore, give a backhanded compliment to Victoria, and thanks to Salient for reminding us of this.

* Matt Nippert is a former deputy editor of Salient. He is now a Listener journalist studying at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York on a Fulbright scholarship.