Ani O’Brien on the media silence over Maiki Sherman story

Ani O’Brien was not in the press gallery. She was not backed by a newsroom. She was not even in New Zealand. But she broke the story the media had sat on for nearly a year.

Ani O’Brien was not sitting in the press gallery when the Maiki Sherman story happened.

She was not in the room.

She was not working inside one of the big newsrooms.

She was not backed by a major media company, a legal department, or a team of editors.

She was in Washington DC, thousands of kilometres away, when she did what the New Zealand media had failed to do for almost a year.

She followed the story.

She checked it.

She published it.

And now, speaking exclusively to me, she says the real issue was never just the word allegedly used. It was the silence that followed.

“I got it as gossip and I was like, oh, that’s a bit off,” O’Brien told me.

Then more information came.

“A second person came to me more recently and gave me more details than I’d received before,” she said. “And I thought, well, maybe it’s not just gossip.”

So she did what reporters are supposed to do.

She asked questions.

She checked the timing.

She looked at the minister’s diary.

“I just went and asked a few more people and looked at the minister’s diary and realised, oh, this all kind of lines up.”

That is when the story changed.

This was not just a bit of loose talk. It was not just gallery gossip. It was not something floating around the Wellington rumour mill with no shape or substance.

It lined up.

There had been a ministerial event. There were witnesses. The incident had allegedly happened in the middle of the political media world.

And yet, somehow, the political media world had not reported it.

For O’Brien, that became the story.

“It’s not what she said,” she told me. “To be honest, most of us probably aren’t offended. I’m gay. I’m not really offended. Maybe if she was screaming it at me.”

But then came the point.

“For me, the story was in the fact that the media are just so hypocritical,” she said. “They’re so moralising and so ideological in how they approach everyone else and everyone else’s behaviour.”

And then, when it was one of their own?

“They really kind of came together to decide that no, they weren’t going to report on this at all.”

That is the line that matters.

Not one newsroom could say they did not know. Not one gallery journalist could seriously claim this was impossible to verify. O’Brien says this was not some second hand whisper passed around by people with an axe to grind.

“We are not talking about allegations that all these media outfits had heard second hand,” she said. “It was a press gallery event, so presumably every media outlet probably had one person there.”

There it is.

People were there.

Newsrooms had eyes and ears in the room.

The event was linked to the ministerial calendar.

And still, nothing.

O’Brien says the idea this was all just banter does not stack up.

“The minister is not going to come into a room full of political journalists and staffers, see people bantering and hear a throwaway word and go, right, shut this down,” she said.

Exactly.

Ministers do not shut down rooms full of journalists because someone said something harmless.

Something happened.

People knew something happened.

And the people who usually demand accountability from everyone else stayed quiet.

That is why O’Brien published.

She says the silence exposed something far bigger than one person’s alleged behaviour.

“The media are captured, they’re ideological, but also they’re handicapping each other,” she said. “They’re sending legal letters to each other.”

That last part matters.

Because once the story emerged, the talk turned to legal threats, legal letters, risk, caution, employment processes and all the usual fog that gets pumped into a room when powerful institutions want things slowed down.

O’Brien does not buy it.

She says media companies should expect legal pressure. That is part of the job.

“If it’s a story worth talking about, it upsets someone or questions someone’s authority,” she said. “It’s always going to be getting up someone’s nose. So that’s why you call the lawyers in.”

And she is right.

Journalism is not supposed to be comfortable. It is not supposed to be a cosy club. It is not supposed to protect the people who share your workplace, your politics, your drinks table, or your WhatsApp group.

But that, O’Brien says, is what the press gallery has become.

She believes the structure itself is part of the problem.

“I think fundamentally we’ve been served wrong by having them all living on top of each other in that press gallery situation,” she said. “The offices are all so combined, they’ve got the shared spaces, and they operate as a pack rather than having different voices and perspectives.”

That is a brutal assessment.

But is it wrong?

Look at what happened here.

A story known inside the gallery did not come out through the gallery.

It came from outside it.

It came from someone the gallery does not control.

And once O’Brien published, the rest of them followed.

She noticed that too.

“Once I kind of cleared the landmines, they plowed in,” she said.

That is exactly what happened.

She took the risk. She stepped first. She wore the heat. Then the brave ones arrived later, once the path was safer.

And now, of course, some of them want to make her the story.

Who told her? Why did she write it? Who does she know? What politics does she have?

O’Brien says she has already seen that playbook.

She said Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis and David Seymour were all asked about their connections to her, as if the story was some grand political operation.

“They were questioned as if there was some kind of conspiracy or collusion,” she told me.

But O’Brien says the explanation is much simpler.

She talks to people. She hears things. She checks them. If there is something there, she writes.

“I work in a political space. I exist in a political space. I talk to people all the time,” she said. “People I talk to every day kind of send me down rabbit holes where I’m like, oh, okay, I’ll have a look. But that doesn’t mean that there’s this conspiracy.”

That should be obvious.

That is how stories happen.

Someone hears something. Someone asks another question. Someone checks a document. Someone joins the dots.

The trouble for the media is not that Ani O’Brien had an agenda.

The trouble is that she had a spine.

And she has little sympathy for an industry that keeps complaining about its decline while refusing to change.

“I know that the industry has been gutted,” she said. “But I also don’t have sympathy when they have seen themselves be gutted. They have seen their revenue and their audiences disappear, their public trust, and then instead of going, okay, how do we adjust, how do we try new things, there’s no self reflection.”

That is the heart of it.

No self reflection.

No accountability.

No willingness to ask why people no longer believe them.

Instead, they circle the wagons. They dismiss outsiders. They call Substack unserious. They sneer at podcasts. They act as if trust is still owed to them by right.

It is not.

Trust is earned.

And if the public sees journalists prosecuting everyone else while protecting their own, that trust disappears.

O’Brien says the next chapter of this story is not just about Maiki Sherman or TVNZ.

The employment side will play out however TVNZ decides to play it out.

But the bigger question is now unavoidable.

What does this tell us about the state of the New Zealand media?

O’Brien is clear.

“The other story is the state of our media and what this has kind of all shown,” she said.

She is right.

This story has shown a press gallery too close to itself.

It has shown newsrooms too cautious when the target is one of their own.

It has shown a media culture that still thinks it can decide what the public is allowed to know.

And it has shown that the most interesting journalism in New Zealand is increasingly being done outside the old institutions.

Ani O’Brien is not pretending to be the polished gallery insider.

She calls herself “a nosy, grumpy bird with a Substack.”

Fine.

New Zealand could use a few more of them.

Because on this story, the nosy, grumpy bird did the job.

The rest of them just watched.