Correction and apology, 13 July 2026.
On 5 July 2026 Newswire published an article on this page headlined “Government revives its plan to make Google and Meta pay for New Zealand news”. That article was wrong and we have removed it.
The article reported that the Government had confirmed it would press ahead with the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, legislation that would require Google and Meta to negotiate payment deals with New Zealand news publishers. No such announcement was made in July 2026. Our article presented a Government announcement from July 2024 as though it had just happened.
The correct position is this. The Government said in July 2024 that it would proceed with an amended version of the bill. The bill was later removed from Parliament’s order paper and was officially put on hold in December 2024. It has not been revived, and no announcement of the kind our article described has been made.
Asked for the Government’s current position, a spokesperson for the Minister for Media and Communications, Paul Goldsmith, gave Newswire the following statement on 13 July 2026.
No decisions have been made. When we have something to announce, we will. It is important we’re cautious in how we proceed. The global political climate is just one of the factors we have to consider.
The error happened because our editorial process failed to check the publication dates of the source material the article drew on. We have since changed that process so the date of every source, and of the event it describes, is verified before an article is written.
We apologise unreservedly to the Minister for Media and Communications, Paul Goldsmith, and his office, and to our readers. Accuracy matters to us and on this occasion we fell well short. We thank the Minister’s office for bringing the error to our attention so the record could be corrected.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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