Dangerous trend in copycat cybercrime laws in the Pacific [video]

             Video by Pacific Media Watch editor Anna Majavu.

COPYCAT cybercrime laws designed to curb freedom of expression on social media and independent blog news sites are becoming a major threat to the Asia-Pacific region.

Café Pacific today publishes a video from the book launch of David Robie's new book Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, which raises these issues.

Speakers at the event included the AUT Dean of Creative Technologies, Professor Desna Jury; Wiremu Tipuna, Takawaenga Māori at AUT (Ngati Kahungunu); Dr Steven Ratuva, president of the Pacific Islands Political Studies Association (PIPSA); publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press; and Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA) chair Sandra Kailahi.

TV New Zealand's Pacific correspondent, Barbara Dreaver, sent a "launch" message which was read out by Kailahi.

Lies, media integrity and the new digital environment

Review by David Robie

Stop Press: The Last Days of Newspapers, by Rachel Buchanan (Melbourne: Scribe, 2013)
The New Front Page: New Media and The Rise of the Audience, by Tim Dunlop (Melbourne: Scribe, 2013)

WHEN Rachel Buchanan penned a commissioned article entitled “From the classroom to the scrap heap” for The Age last September, she railed against Australian journalism schools, in particular, over an alleged “lie” and “little integrity” of journalism education.

“Between 2002 and 2012, enrolments in journalism degrees almost doubled,” she noted about what was troubling her across the Tasman. “We now have the bizarre situation where there are more people studying journalism than there are working journalists.”

She concluded that journalism schools were creating false career hopes; Australia didn’t need any more journalists, but needed nurses and doctors, engineers and actuaries and so on.

“Poets, screenwriters, novelists, scribblers – we writers all need a day job now. You can’t eat integrity.”

Read draft media law first, East Timor's print adviser tells critics

Otelio Ote, former Timor Post editorial director and now government print media adviser,
is upbeat over the Timorese media future. Photo: David Rbie/PMC

By DAVID ROBIE in Dili

TIMOR-LESTE'S national print adviser has one piece of advice for critics of the controversial planned media law - read the draft document first before jumping to conclusions.

Otelio Ote, who until his state media office appointment in mid-July was editorial director of the Timor Post daily newspaper and is still a part-time editor there, is optimistic about the proposed legislation.

"The law isn't about control of the media, it's about shoring up the status of the media and making journalism more professional in this country," he says.

Ote revealed that the government plans to set up a national news agency in Timor-Leste next year, the first time the country has had one since Australian freelance journalist Roger East was commissioned to do the job immediately before the Indonesian invasion in December 1975.

East was murdered by invading soldiers after investigating the deaths of the so-called Balibo Five in a human rights atrocity - five Australians, Britons and a New Zealander who were reporting for two televison channels from the border town on pre-invasion Indonesian incursions.

Café Pacific now on YouTube

A NEW VIDEO channel has been opened by Café Pacific on YouTube with a variety of Pasifika media, human rights and environmental resources. Find it here.

Turkey's ‘woman in red’, global protest and the Pacific media

An interview with David Robie on the Pacific at the Protest and Media conference in London. Video report by Sumy Sadurni

'The woman in red'. Photo: Clip from vimeo.com video

THE SO-CALLED “woman in red” became a reluctant icon of a people’s revolt in Turkey this month.

Ceyola Sungur, an academic at Istanbul’s Technical University, was projected into instant global fame because of media images of her being blasted at point blank-range with pepper spray by security police. 

Dressed in a red summer dress, the unarmed and defenceless woman’s defiance in the face of state assaults on protesters demonstrating over plans to remove the city’s central Gezi Park adjoining Taksim Square to make way for mega property development has become an iconic symbol of resistance.

Violence against journalists has been mounting and Turkish police have arrested dozens in a series of nation-wide raids in the latest crackdown.

“There are a lot of people who were at the park and they were also tear-gassed,” the uncomfortable heroine told Turkey’s TV24. “There’s no difference between them and me.”

While the protests raged on amid concerns among many Turkish women that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans a major roll back of women’s rights, Turkish issues were among the many being explored at an international “protest and media” conference in London, jointly organised by the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and the British Journalism Review.

Pearson speaks out on press freedom, social media and the citizen

FINALLY, we have the full video of Mark Pearson's inspiring UNESCO World Press Freedom day lecture available on YouTube.

This was the inaugural such lecture with the theme "Press freedom, social media and the citizen," delivered by Professor Pearson on May 3 at AUT University's impressive communications "heart" at the Sir Paul Reeves Building.

In his opening words, he said: "Firstly I wish to acknowledge the tangata whenua of Tamaki Makaurau and to thank UNESCO and my hosts here at AUT's Pacific Media Centre and the School of Communication Studies for your hospitality this week.

"The Pacific region can lay claim to several 'press freedom warriors' over recent decades. It would be a mistake to try to name such individuals in a forum like this because you inevitably leave someone off the list -- and they are usually sitting in the very room where you are giving your address!" 

And from then on, he spoke on a wide-ranging series of media freedom issues and touched on his new ethical approach to media in a bid to regain our public trust, which he has dubbed "mindful journalism".

Enterprising student journalists scoop the Pacific politics forum

Tiaré le Goff of New Caledonia speaking to a motion on climate change
in the Pacific Forum today. Image: Kennedy Graham/PMC #Pacleaders

ONCE again a major Pacific event on New Zealand shores has received scant media attention. Gender equality, climate change and freedom of expression and media issues all scored points on the first full day of the Pacific Parliamentary and Political Leaders Forum in Wellington this week.

Samoan Justice Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa says achieving gender equality is essential to the achievement of successful social, economic, and political development in countries. Yet there was just a sprinkling of Pacific women from the region actually among the 70 delegates to hear her message.

Ironically, it took a live blog from two AUT University student journalists to provide the only real coverage. Six of the only seven stories to register online in a Google news search 24 hours after the start of the forum were filed by them, or via their blog piggybacked on Pacific Scoop and Pacific Media Centre Online.

Awesome Michael Sergel and Finian Scott! They organising their reporting stint this week, assigning themselves to Wellington from their Auckland campus with none of the resources sported by bigger media organisations, not much more than their mobile phones.

#pacleaders

PACMAS media report dodges the aid elephant in the room

Members of an executive meeting of the Media Association of the
Solomon Islands (MASI) discuss issues. Photo: PACMAS

A RECENT PACMAS report is a constructive diagnosis for the ailing state of the region’s media associations, and a prescription for how things can get better. But it manages to dodge the elephant in the room – accountability.

For months, social media outlets and journalists have been asking about the fate of the Media Council of PNG, once one of the strongest in the region and an example to the rest. But it has been dogged in recent years because of allegations of fraud.

AusAID funding and the executive director, Nimo Kama, was suspended pending an inquiry. But the outcome of this has been kept very quiet. AusAID reportedly funded the PNG Media Council to the tune of $500,000 in 2010.

In a Radio Australia Correspondents' Report (the last time a sensible item was published or broadcast about the issue apart from this Pacific Scoop update), Liam Fox said in an interview with Emily Bourke:

[A] recent audit found some of the money "had not been managed in accordance with procurement guidelines" and there was "anecdotal evidence of fraud".

Digital media building a milestone for NZ’s AUT University

The $98 million Sir Paul Reeves building at AUT University ... a digital
media boost for the journalism school. Photo: Del Abcede/PMC

By Nicholas Jones

ONE OF New Zealand's major universities has opened a new digital media age building which has transformed its campus and significantly altered Auckland city's learning quarter.

Auckland University of Technology's new $98 million precinct, the Sir Paul Reeves building, was officially opened by Prime Minister John Key on Friday.

Vice-chancellor Derek McCormack, speaking as he gave the New Zealand Herald a tour of the new building, which was named after a former AUT Chancellor, the late Sir Paul Reeves, said it was a huge moment in the development of the campus.

"AUT has been the fastest growing university in the country. There have been big challenges. And we are only on the way, this is a milestone in a long process."

The $98 million building is the latest in a line of major building projects since AUT gained university status in 2000. Many of those projects, such as the business building, completed in 2005, had suffered from being slightly isolated.

How to make censorship 'obsolete' - a bold new RSF digital strategy

REPORTERS sans frontières (RSF - Reporters Without Borders) has launched a website called WeFightCensorship (WeFC) on which it will post content that has been censored or banned or has given rise to reprisals against its creator.

This original website’s aim is to make censorship obsolete. It is an unprecedented initiative that will enable Reporters Without Borders to complement all of its other activities in defence of freedom of information, which include advocacy, lobbying and assistance.

Content submitted by journalists or netizens who have been the victims of censorship – articles, videos, sound files, photos and so on – will be considered for publication on the WeFightCensorship site.

The content selected by the WeFC editorial committee will be accompanied by a description of the context and creator. It may also be accompanied by copies of documents relating to the proceedings under which it was banned or other documents that might help the public to understand its importance.

There will be French and English-language versions of the site. Documents from all over the world will be published in their original language (including Chinese, Persian and Vietnamese) and in translation.

The site is designed to be easily duplicated and mirror versions will be created in order to thwart attempts to filter or block it. Internet users will be asked to circulate the censored content in order to give it as much visibility as possible.

“Reporters Without Borders is providing a deterrent designed to encourage governments and others to respect freedom of information, the freedom that allows us to verify that all the other freedoms are being respected,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“This website aims to exploit the so-called ‘Streisand effect,’ under which the more you try to censor content online, the more the Internet community tends to circulate it. We want to show that jailing an article’s author, seizing copies of a newspaper or blocking access to a website with a certain video can prove very counter-productive and can result in the content going around the world.”

By accessing a secured “digital safe,” Internet users will be able to submit content for publication anonymously.

The website will also offer a “digital survival kit” with information about Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), encryption software such as TrueCrypt, online anonymization techniques such as Tor and other tools that news providers can use to protect their sources and, in authoritarian countries, their own safety.

Private access to a beta version of the site has already been available since 13 November to those that register. To support the launch, the Publicis Bruxelles advertising agency devised a campaign ad free of charge that shows several heads of State, including Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Assad in their birthday suits with the legend “Totalitarian regimes will no longer be able to hide anything from us.” It will appear in the print media and online.

Reporters Without Borders is an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO and the International Organisation of the Francophonie. It has its international secretariat in Paris, 10 international bureaux (in Berlin, Brussels, Geneva, Madrid, New York, Rome, Stockholm, Tunis, Vienna and Washington) and more than 150 correspondents across all five continents.

The WeFC project is supported by the European Union’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) and the Paris City Hall.

• We Fight Censorship

Inspirational Fiji widow's story credit to Wansolwara team

NICE to see Fiji sisters Sherita and Sheenal Sharma, who have been the maestros of the Wansolwara journalism newspaper at the University of the South Pacific this year, being so innovative about their skills. They have made a showcase of their work on their Sharma Productions Facebook page. There has been a lot of interest in their inspirational video Bangladesh's Supermum about the life of a young Indo-Fijian widow. That's "Bangladesh" as in the squatter settlement Nanuku in the capital Suva, not the country. This is what they say about the programme:

A 10-minute video of a widowed mum teaching at a school for the blind, and surviving in a squatter settlement in Fiji's capital, Suva. The settlement known as Nanuku ... is one of many that have sprung up in the greater Suva area. The story of a woman who struggles to live in a two-bedroom house, with her parents, not accepted by her in-laws as well as earning very little and having to work multiple jobs, Anshoo is an inspiration to the many women who live in poverty-stricken parts of Fiji.

 This is development journalism - and good storytelling - at work. Congratulations Sherita and Sheenal! In fact, double congratulations for Sherita because she has just won the Gold Medal for the top USP journalism student for 2012.

Café Pacific also takes the opportunity to applaud the journalism students for reviving Wansolwara Online. Not yet quite the finished product, but it is just good to be back in cyberspace after being offline since March 2007. The website follows an award-winning pedigree. Back in the 2000, the Wansolwara website (then known as Pacific Journalism Online, incorporating Wansolwara), won the international JEAA awards for Best Online and Best Publication (any media) for its coverage of the George Speight coup. In other words, the best produced by any journalism school in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region.

• Sharma Productions on YouTube
• Fiji youth and constitution-making
• Cyberspace news on campus: The South Pacific experience
• Wansolwara Online - revived five years on