'Cry Freedom: Mandela's Legacy' - new Peter Cronau investigation on ABC

Cry Freedom: Mandela's Legacy. Photos by Louie Eroglu/ACS

Four Corners TV report by Matt Carney and Peter Cronau

NELSON MANDELA promised a South Africa based on freedom and equality. But as the country's former leader lies in hospital critically ill, the nation he fought to create is slowly disintegrating.

Violence is commonplace, unemployment is out of control and the ruling ANC government is accused of rampant corruption.

Next on Four Corners reporter Matthew Carney goes to South Africa to try and understand the forces that threaten to pull the "rainbow nation" apart. What he finds after nearly 20 years of ANC in government is a tiny black elite have enriched themselves at the expense of a poor black majority.

For the poor not much has changed... 18 million people live on less than $2 a day.

The Marikana mine massacre illuminates the massive contradictions and difficulties confronting the country.

On 16 August last year, 3000 miners gathered to protest substandard wages. The police opened fire killing 34 people and wounding another 78.

Vigilance for media freedom in East Timor

PETER CRONAU, one of the co-founders of Pacific Media Watch, has just done an interview with PMW's Josephine Latu about the state of media freedom in the Pacific 12 years on since the group's campaign to free Kalafi Moala from jail. (Moala was imprisoned unconstitutionally for contempt of Parliament). Cronau is busy writing a new book about East Timor and the case of the Balibo Five, the shameful murder by the Indonesians of five Australian-based journalists (including a Kiwi) back in 1975. He and his ABC Four Corners team won a Gold Walkley in 2006 for their programme Stoking the Fires about the bitter post-independence political rivalries in East Timor. This book is certain to rock the media and political establishments in Canberra with its revelations.

While there have been a few hard-to-find improvements in media freedom over the past decade or so, Cronau warns newshounds not to sit on any Pacific laurels. Vigilance is the name of the game. Peter - at the time director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) - and Café Pacific's David Robie - then head of journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea - founded PMW at a particularly rocky time 21 years after the Balibo massacre:

Persistence by some journalists ... saw them reporting the Indonesian preparations for the invasion - and six media workers [the sixth, Roger East, was executed later on Dili wharf] paid with their lives for reporting this truth.

I guess the lesson to take from the book is that like all freedoms, freedom of the press is lost unless guarded vigilantly. That's the essential reason we set up Pacific Media Watch in the first place.

• Media freedom image from the Centru Jornalista Investigativu Timor Leste (CJITL) blog
• Interview with Peter Cronau
• Pacific Media Watch

New lease of life for Pacific Media Watch

Just 11 years or so after it was founded, Pacific Media Watch has discovered a new lease of life at its new home at AUT University. Always with an eye to journalist freedom in the region - and sometimes a persistent thorn in the side of self-interested media fat cats - the voluntary media monitoring service has been relaunched as a "future proofed" dynamic digital resource. Launching the database along with the latest edition of the research journal Pacific Journalism Review, Office of Pasifika Advancement director Pauline Winter described the new media resource as invaluable for media and journalism schools. The new Pacific Media Centre took over development of the PMW service last year and has established the database as the first project on DSpace, a digital archive set up by the university's Creative Industries Research Institute (CIRI). The revamped service combines more than 5000 news reports on Pacific media freedom, ethics, education and training issues - updated daily - with a major archive of media research reports and documents, and audio and video clips. But the new database is just at the first stage of its new development. Many new improvements will come in the months ahead.
The original PMW news monitoring service was established in 1996 as a journalism partnership between the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Papua New Guinea. The University of the South Pacific journalism school has also been a key contributor in recent years.
PMW campaigned in support of Tongan publisher Kalafi Moala, fellow journalist Filokalafi 'Akau'ola and pro-democracy MP 'Akilisi Pohiva who were wrongfully jailed that year for contempt of Parliament.
At the launch, I paid tribute to the researchers and students involved in the centre. But I would especially like to single out Sydney television journalist Peter Cronau for his sustained work on PMW over many years - including setting up the original PMW website and Kiribati journalist Tabs Korauaba who helped work on developing files for the digital archive last year.

• Pacific Media Watch database
• Press freedom in the South Pacific - the Kalafi Moala sequel