A story, “Locked Up Warriors”, about the New Zealand jail culture on Al Jazeera’s East 101 series. See Tom Carnegie's story below on New Zealand journalists working at Al Jazeera. Image: Al Jazeera – Watch video.
SCOOP has been hosting a lively series entitled The State of NZ News Media that is providing some rare insights into an industry under siege (not that you would know much about this from local publications). The short-term objective is identifying possible ways of reinventing Scoop and ensuring its future as the vital independent news service that it is.
A longer-term goal is giving New Zealand journalism an energy boost and new directions.
As part of the debate, some interesting pieces are coming to light on the wider issues of freeing New Zealand from the shackles of an insular and short-sighted industry. Niche media such as Scoop are essential for the country.
We need independent and vigorous media with an international outlook prepared to challenge the neo-liberal orthodoxies and prejudices, such as Australia has with the Antipodean edition of The Guardian, The Conversation, New Matilda, Crikey and others.
Alison McCulloch's provocative piece is a particularly good read: Stop the Press - is corporate media a flawed product? It is, of course. But Alison's argument concludes with her own personal response and suggestions about what to do:
I appreciate absenting myself from daily corporate
churnalism isn’t going to bring about a media revolution.
But the structural problems run so deep, this profit-making
media monster simply can’t be fixed with a little tweaking
about the edges.
The Pacific Media Centre's director, Professor David Robie, has called for more emphasis on critical development journalism in the Asia-Pacific region.
Speaking on ABC's Media Report, Dr Robie said there was a tendency globally - and not just in the Pacific - for journalism to be a "bit too cosy with political power".
"Agendas are often set in the media based around press galleries and what's seen as priorities by governments, whereas critical development journalism is really a proclamation - if you like - for ordinary people getting their values and their needs investigated and getting some sort of result from policy changes," Dr Robie told presenter Richard Aedy.
Discussing the state of media freedom in the Pacific, Dr Robie said West Papua was the most neglected region in the Pacific in terms of media coverage, mainly because there was "virtually no ready access into West Papua by journalists".
To report from West Papua without being sanctioned by the Indonesian government was risky for journalists, and even more so for their contacts and sources, added the author of the recently published Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.
Scoop editor and general manager Alastair Thompson (left)
and Pacific
Media Centre’s director Professor David Robie
at the Scoop Foundation
launch. Image: Del Abcede/PMC
An address by Scoop editor and general manager Alastair Thompson for the launch of the Scoop Foundation project and Pacific Scoop Internship at AUT's Pacific Media Centre.
In a push to offer new support and momentum for public interest journalism, New Zealand's leading independent news provider, Scoop Media, is lending its weight to two initiatives being announced for the first time.
The first initiative, the Scoop Foundation Project, brings Scoop.co.nz together with a group of New Zealand’s leading practitioners of public interest journalism to create a charitable trust to fund investigative journalistic work.
This coincides with the launch by Scoop of a $5000 Pacific Scoop internship being awarded in conjunction with AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre (PMC). The first recipient, Danish radio journalist Daniel Drageset, was named at the School of Communication Studies Awards event held at the newly opened Sir Paul Reeves Building at AUT last week.
The name for Scoop's "Scoop Foundation Project" plays on the associated ideas of "foundation" and "construction". It is clear that we now need to build a new journalism.
The one that we have has been struggling for some time, and a key component of it - print - is now on life support.
And to build a new journalism we need to start by (re)constructing some foundations. And that is what the Scoop Foundation project will do.
The first important thing to understand about the Scoop Foundation Project is that it is a completely separate entity from Scoop Media Limited, publisher of the Scoop.co.nz.
PACIFIC SCOOP led the way in reporting and backgrounding a horrendous video exposing - yet again - Indonesian human rights atrocities against West Papuans. Here, Scoop's duty editor Rory MacKinnon analyses in his columnDeadline the week's events in an indictment of Foreign Minister Murray McCully's inept response, lack of media coverage and a pattern of failure by the New Zealand governnent over human rights in East Timor and West Papua.
With all the Hobbit-chat of late you could be forgiven for thinking it was a slow newsweek – but here at the Scoop offices it was nothing of the sort. On Monday, the independent West Papua Media network released video it had received of Indonesian soldiers torturing two Papuan men: punching and kicking them, running a bayonet over one’s throat and burning the other’s penis with a charred stick. [WARNING: link features real and graphic violence]
Within hours the horrific footage made the headlines of Al-Jazeera, the BBC, CNN and the Sydney Morning Herald, while Amnesty International and other NGOs demanded an independent investigation by Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission.
Meanwhile, coverage here in the Shire was practically non-existent, other than here at Pacific Scoop and the equally tiny newsroom at Radio New Zealand International. Even MFAT didn’t bother to brief our foreign minister Murray McCully on the video – despite his going on a two-day trip to Indonesia the very next day.
It might not have been evident in my reporting, but I could sympathise with McCully’s situation. Imagine the midnight phone call; the gut-churning realisation that the complex system of memos and digests and reminders that diplomacy depends on has utterly failed you; knowing that the ‘Friendship Council’ you launched just hours ago will come across to many as a cruel joke and the knowledge that tomorrow morning you will have to walk back into the meeting room and make a very lonely choice about New Zealand’s foreign policy.
But McCully’s choice was a poor and predictable one, and that’s where my sympathy ends. McCully allowed his counterpart Dr Marty Natalegawa to feed him the usual canned response: the Indonesian government took such incidents “very seriously”, their military had already begun an internal investigation and so on and so on.
But as any MFAT official worth his salt would know, the promise of an in internal investigation means absolutely nothing in the context of human rights abuse in Indonesia. Christ, we don’t even trust internal investigations here. But the notion of an Indonesian internal investigation is especially laughable, because we’ve played this game so many times before.
Consider the case of the Balibo Five, a group of journalists killed during the 1975 invasion of East Timor – a group which incidentally included a Kiwi cameraman, Gary Cunningham, and a sixth Australian reporter, Roger East, who was killed two months later while investigating their deaths. In the 35 years since the Indonesian government has refused point-blank to mount any kind of inquiry, even refusing to cooperate with a 1997 Australian coroner’s inquest which implicated Indonesian special forces commander Yunus Yosfiah in the shootings.
Yet despite the court’s findings and pressure directly from the UN, the Serious Crimes Unit in Dili refused to press charges, making extradition impossible. [It should also be noted that despite literally decades of petitions from Cunningham’s own family, no New Zealand government has ever demanded Yosfiah’s arrest either.] Today Yusfiah is the most highly-decorated member of Indonesia’s army, a former Minister of Information and a senior politician, while the foreign journalists he murdered lie in a mass grave in Jakarta. If there was no justice for them, what hope is there for two unmourned villagers in the backblocks of West Papua?
Consider also the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991, when Indonesian soldiers gunned down a Timorese funeral procession for a young man killed by militia. 271 killed, 278 wounded and a further 270 ‘disappeared’ – and again a New Zealander died in the crosshairs; this time the 21-year-old Kamal Bamadhaj. The response from both the New Zealand and Indonesian governments is farcically familiar, as summarised in human rights activist Maire Leadbeater’s secret history Negligent Neighbour: New Zealand’s Complicity in the Invasion and Occupation of Timor-Leste. [Lack of New Zealand response over both East Timor is also extensively analysed in David Robie's Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific (Zed Books, 1989) and in an article about the Dili massacre in NZ Monthly Review]
It was clear that a cover-up was under way. The Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs sent a preliminary response to the New Zealand Embassy that referred to Kamal’s “accidental death” and insinuated that he should not have been taking part in the demonstration. The official inquiry would conduct a thorough and comprehensive investigation but would also look into Kamal’s ‘activities in Dili during his stay there as well as the nature of his presence among the demonstrators in the incident leading to his death.
Publicly, New Zealand diplomats stressed that they were vigorously pressing for a full explanation of Kamal’s death but the cabled reports suggest the diplomats were resigned to being fobbed off.
The Indonesian government did indeed mount an internal investigation, forming a “Council of Military Honour” and court-martialling nine soldiers and one policeman in 1992. But as Timor-Leste’s president Xanana Gusmao noted, none of those convicted had ordered the shooting, buried the bodies or participated in the attempted cover-up, and neither the report from the National Commission of Inquiry nor the Council of Military Honour’s report have ever been released in full. This was a massacre of literally hundreds of people, caught on camera by foreign journalists. Again, what hope is there for the two men in Monday’s footage?
Yet there is hope: McCully and his prime minister can publicly insist on a genuinely independent investigation. They can join calls in the Pacific Islands Forum for a fact-finding mission into human rights violations in West Papua. They can withdraw their joint training exercises with Indonesian law enforcement until the law is actually enforced in the region.
There are all sorts of things they can do to give Monday’s victims and the people of West Papua hope. But trusting the butchers in Indonesia’s military to sort it out among themselves is not one of them.
Rory MacKinnon is Scoop’s duty editor and political reporter. He also writes about journalism and social issues at www.mediadarlings.net.
INTERESTING development at Scoop, the largest and most influential independent website in New Zealand ... Scoop Media is tomorrow launching Pacific.Scoop - a new department of the website devoted to telling the "untold" stories of the Pacific with flair and insight. This is a partnership with AUT University's communication studies school, which already produces an award-winning newspaper, radio station and regular television stories. Undoubtedly, the web content will be rather different from what mainstream news sites in New Zealand offer on the Pacific. The new Pacific offering was pushed by Scoop co-editor Selwyn Manning and carried on by co-editor and manager Alastair Thompson. Scoop already has a cutting edge with several specialised sections, notably Gordon Campbell's political and current affairs blog and Jeremy Rose's Scoop Review of Books. Pacific.Scoop is being edited by Café Pacific’s David Robie and his team at AUT University's Pacific Media Centre. There will be a strong educational core with student journalists filing from AUT, USP, Papua New Guinea and Samoa and elsewhere. And some development journalism tackling resources issues in the region. The team promises "independent news and comment" on a shoestring. Next March, the university is introducing a new Graduate Diploma in Pacific Journalism. Watch this space ...
