KEY POINTS:
Prime Minister Helen Clark says her criticisms of the New Zealand Herald bear no similarity to the ejection a newspaper publisher from Fiji by that country's military regime.
Miss Clark this week condemned the expulsion of the Australian citizen over a series of articles accusing the country's Finance Minister Mahendra Chaudhry of tax evasion.
"It's inconceivable that you can hold open, free and fair elections if you have media intimidation," Miss Clark said.
However Miss Clark today faced questions about her own swipes at the media.
Miss Clark this week said the New Zealand Herald had run a silly campaign against the Electoral Finance Act, and was a Tory paper which had shown no charity to Labour in the party's 91 years of existence.
Miss Clark appeared to suggest commercial issues, relating to advertising, were a factor in the Herald's campaign against the bill.
However, Herald editor Tim Murphy emphatically rejected the claim.
He said the paper's campaign was solely motivated by the law's restriction on free speech and its anti-democratic nature.
Miss Clark's husband Peter Davis also wrote a letter to the editor accusing the Herald of mischief-making.
However Miss Clark today said her own "observation" regarding the Herald were quite different from the Fiji regimes treatment of the Fiji Sun.
"I really think there is no comparison," she said on Radio New Zealand.
"Quite frankly day in day out people make observations about the media and we are just as entitled to do that, as politicians, as anyone else.
"No one's talking about deporting the editor of the New Zealand Herald for goodness sake."
Miss Clark said her husband did not consult her when he wrote letters to the editor and she did not want to restrict his freedom of speech.
- NZPA
