Asia Pacific Report - a new venture for independent journalism

Alistar Kata's video about the Pacific Media Centre.

By David Robie

Comments from the AsiaPacificReport.nz and video launch in Auckland tonight.

OUR new adventure really began back in 2007 when Selwyn Manning joined the Pacific Media Centre as the founding advisory board chair, but really took a big leap forward when he initiated the Pacific Scoop concept and we developed that together, launching it at the 2009 Māori Expo.

Over the next six years, Pacific Scoop played an inspiring role in independent journalism alongside the main Scoop Media website, providing a range of Asia and Pacific stories and analyses.

A significant core of this project was its role as the official output from AUT’s postgraduate Asia Pacific Journalism course. We have sent students all over the Pacific on key story and research assignments over the years. Some of these stories have won awards.

While at AUT, Selwyn did two innovative postgraduate honours degrees – producing ground-breaking documentaries for both, Morality of Argument and Behind the Shroud, which are featured on AsiaPacificReport.

Libération newspaper now fighting for its own ‘liberation’

Not a "brand" ... 40 years of Libération on display in a gallery near les Halles, Paris,
last October. Photo: David Robie

By DAVID ROBIE

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE would have turned in his grave over the fate of his cherished daily newspaper.

Founded by Sartre and Serge July more than four decades ago in the aftermath of the 1968 student riots in Paris, the left-leaning Libération has fallen on hard times.

But the company’s new shareholders came up with a plan to rescue it that has been greeted with derision by staff.

Founded on a non-conformist editorial policy that shunned commercialisation, the paper’s headquarters would be turned into a multimedia cultural centre, with a bar, restaurant, a TV studio and a social network “hub”.

This new proposal followed failed negotiations to put the Libération’s online edition behind a paywall.

Timor-Leste’s Max Stahl – documenting the audiovisual and development ‘war’

Filmmaker and digital historian Max Stahl with an image from his 1991 Santa Cruz
massacre footage in Timor-Leste. Photo: David Robie

By David Robie

A YEAR after Indonesian troops killed more than 270 peaceful demonstrators at the cemetery of Santa Cruz in the Timor-Leste capital of Dili in 1991, news footage secretly shot by a cameraman surfaced in a powerful new film.

The Yorkshire Television documentary, In Cold Blood: The Massacre of East Timor, screened in six countries and later broadcast in other nations, helped change the course of history.

Until then, countries such as Australia and New Zealand – in spite of a New Zealander being killed in the massacre – had been content to close a blind eye to the illegal Indonesian invasion in 1975 and the atrocities committed for a quarter century.

The cameraman, Max Stahl, who risked his own life to film the massacre and bury the footage cassette in a freshly dug grave before he was arrested, knew this evidence of the massacre would be devastating.

In a documentary made a decade later by Yorkshire Television’s Peter Gordon, Bloodshot: The Dreams and Nightmares of East Timor, that interviewed key players –including Stahl himself - in the transition to restored independence in 2002, Timorese leaders reveal just how critical this footage was in telling their story of repression to the world.

Nuclear Savage filmmaker accuses media of cover-up of impact of US nuclear weapons testing on Pacific people

“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.”
– Vice Admiral William P. Blandy, Bikini bomb test commander, 25 July 1946 

WHEN the military scientists of an advanced technological nation deliberately explode their largest nuclear bomb (and 66 others) over Pacific islands and use the opportunities to study the effects of radiation on nearby native people, which group is best described as “savage”?

And what should you call the people who prevent a documentary about these American post-war crimes from reaching a wide audience in the United States?

Nuclear Savage is a recent documentary film that explores American nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, 1946-1958 - and particularly the secret Project 4.1: an American experiment in exposing Pacific Islanders to overdoses of radiation – deliberate human radiation poisoning – just to get better data on this method of maiming and killing people.

The public broadcasting establishment has spent more that two years keeping this story off the air.

Rebuilding the foundations of independent public interest journalism

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.

By Alastair Thompson

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.

'Melanesia isn't free until West Papua is free'

In the face of state repression and international indifference by Indonesian authorities, West Papuan
activists have been locked in a life or death struggle for independence.

Al Jazeera's People & Power reports on one of the most forgotten conflicts in the world.

Airi Ingram and Jason MacLeod trace the upsurge in regional Pacific support for the free West Papua movement. They conclude that even if politicians have traditionally been slow to respond, "ordinary people in this part of the Pacific are painfully aware that the West Papuan people continue to live under the gun". And the good news is that even politicians are now starting to wake up and support the cause, especially in neighbouring Papua New Guinea.

MELANESIAN support for a free West Papua has always been high. Travel throughout Papua New Guinea and you will often hear people say that West Papua and Papua New Guinea is "wanpela graun" – one land – and that West Papuans on the other side of the border are family and kin.

In the Solomon Islands, Kanaky, Fiji and especially Vanuatu, people will tell you that “Melanesia is not free until West Papua is free”. This was the promise that the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister, made.

Ordinary people in this part of the Pacific are painfully aware that the West Papuan people continue to live under the gun. It is the politicians in Melanesia who have been slow to take up the cause.

But that may be changing.

West Papua's realpolitik - the brutal struggle for independence

WHEN the Dutch decolonised their East Indies empire after the Second World War they handed it all to the emergent country of Indonesia - all except the territory of West Papua, which forms one half of New Guinea, the second largest island on Earth. This remarkable landmass - split neatly by colonial powers into West Papua and Papua New Guinea - is like few other places in the world.

Its mountainous terrain and dense rainforests have spawned extraordinary linguistic diversity among its indigenous population, some of whom are still in uncontacted tribes. Five decades ago few, if any of these tribes, showed any desire for their land to become an extension of Indonesia, a new nation state with which they shared neither history, culture, religion nor ethnicity, but which wanted resource-rich West Papua within its borders. 

The Dutch resisted Indonesia's demands for a while, beginning to invest in West Papuan education and encouraging nationalism. But eventually global realpolitik intervened in the shape of US President Kennedy. Concerned about the possibility of communism spreading across South and Southeast Asia, the Kennedy administration saw Indonesia as a useful regional ally that should be kept happy.

In 1963, with American backing, the United Nations gave Indonesia caretaker rights over the territory, on condition that a referendum on independence should follow. But when the poll - named, without apparent irony, as the "Act Of Free Choice" - took place in 1969 it was widely perceived as a sham.

Vendetta journalism and counterpropaganda, 'Fiji style'

Former USP journalism head Dr Marc Edge "on edge" at a Media and Democracy
symposium in Suva last September. Photo: Café Pacific

IN RECENT weeks, the Fiji blogosphere has run hot over attempts by the ousted former head of journalism of the University of the South Pacific, Dr Marc Edge, a self-styled “counterpropagandist”, to portray himself as some kind of martyr for the Fiji media freedom cause. His claims peaked with an allegation that he “feared my safety was in jeopardy” in a curiously lop-sided Radio Australia interview with journalist Bruce Hill.

However, Café Pacific today exposes another side of the story. It had been an open secret for months at USP and in media education circles around the Pacific that Dr Edge was on the way out after the shortest tenure ever of any expatriate journalism coordinator – barely serving half of a three-year contract. He was dumped after sustained and embarrassing complaints by students, colleagues and media academics in at least two other Pacific Islands Forum countries. The situation had become untenable for the Canadian lecturer as he was perceived to be “waging war” on his students. Initially, he was “relieved”  of his position as acting head of journalism with a humiliating public statement by USP management on November 14  and then he was gone from the faculty staff by Christmas.

Part of the USP statement about Dr Edge's "demotion" on November 14, 2012.

But there was no inkling of any of this in Bruce Hill’s Radio Australia interview on January 25. (Although Hill did ask Edge whether he had been dismissed or resigned and got a "cannot comment" reply). Nor did Hill put the obvious question to Edge about why he had used the Fiji Media Tribunal mechanism to file a controversial complaint against a local media organisation that he had been accusing of practising “self-censorship”  – conveniently using the very Media Industry Development Decree  he had been condemning for months. Edge blamed his demise at USP solely on the military-backed regime and Qorvis Communications, a US-based media spin company contracted to the Suva government, and ignored the journalism programme wreckage - his legacy:

Fiji game on - Repúblika aims to restore media credibility

Publisher and editor Ricardo Morris at the Repúblika launch in Suva yesterday. Photo: Fiji Times

SO, AT long last, the era of soft journalism and self-censorship in Fiji is truly over. Or is it? Some media personalities such as Communications Fiji's Vijay Narayan say there is no self-censorship. And he is backed up by "checking" this out with three other media organisations. But others disagree. In fact, some disagree so strongly that former Mai Magazine editor Ricardo Morris has jumped ship and launched a new monthly magazine, Repúblika, yesterday which is dedicated to restoring Fiji's media credibility. This crusading step is so courageous, that it is worth republishing his launch release here:

Mainstream Fiji media failed in its duty

The first edition.

Over the past decade or more, Fiji along with the wider Pacific – and indeed the world – has seen a change in the media environment. Apart from government regulation there has been corporate encroachment, ethical lapses and a failure to serve the public in whose interests we should have been working.

The news media in general has embraced commercialism at the expense of journalism; the independence of newsrooms from the commercial arms and activities of their companies has become suspect.

The mainstream print media in particular, with relatively vast resources at their disposable, has failed to consistently and properly carry out its public service duty. They have failed to maintain integrity, balance and accuracy. Failed to tell people what they need to know, as opposed to the fluff the media thinks they ought to know. Infotainment has overcome news analysis.

Certain media outlets have blatantly sided with one side or the other of vested interests in their news reporting.  The profession of journalism, once an honourable and respected calling, has taken a tumble in the eyes of many.

As journalists, we have sometimes easily been swayed, letting the baggage of our biases, political leanings, provincialism, racism and sometimes our open support for political parties and actors, get in the way of good, honest journalism.

We must regain the vibrancy, excitement, the passion, the truth-telling and – probably even some of the gung-ho attitude – that were once the hallmarks of some of Fiji and the Pacific great journalists such as the late Robert Keith-Reid.

That’s why we’ve created Repúblika. Over the past six months, the team at Republika has worked on putting together a publication whose time has come. We have been blessed to have had the unconditional support of family, friends and colleagues – and all those who contributed without hesitation to the first edition.

In the week since we have launched, we have had several questions about how the project is being funded.  Whoever is interested in finding the answer to that question is welcome to pursue it.  I can confirm that there are no big corporate interests behind Repúblika. The creation of Repúblika has been pure sweat, tears and sleepless nights to assemble a magazine that captures pressing issues that affect Fiji and the region today.  What we may lack in finances and resources is more than made up for in passion, drive and determination and a belief in our dreams.

For too often, the media has insulted the intelligence of its audiences by delivering content that’s been passed off as journalism but has involved nothing more than ripping articles off the internet. This is something we will change.

Through the public’s support we will be able to produce journalism that jumps. For Repúblika, content is king and our editorial independence is important to us. We are less gloss and more substance.

It may seem idealistic, and whatever the practice may be, the bottom line is that as journalists we serve the public interest first and foremost. When we conceal or confuse issues for the public, we fail in that duty.

Our entry into the market has been described as triggering a “magazine war”, which is nonsense and baseless.  The established magazines have their own approaches and audiences but a wide gap currently exists in the market with nobody willing to take on what’s perceived to be a sensitive and difficult market – current affairs, corruption and politics, without the propaganda.

Repúblika will bring back investigative journalism, ask the hard questions without fear or favour, on issues of current affairs, corruption or politics. Politics affects all of our lives every day, whether we like it or not, so we might as well discuss it.  And with a new constitution in the making, it is an even better time to document the course of Fiji’s political development.

We at Repúblika wish to acknowledge the members of the public who have given us their blessings and whole-hearted support. We have come into existence to serve the public and we will only be able to survive with the support of the public.

We also urge our journalist colleagues to rally around us and work with us to bring back honour and integrity into our profession.

 To sum up, as I wrote in the inaugural edition of Repúblika:

We aim to regain some of the vibrancy of a free media, to act as a mirror on society without fear or favour. The Pacific – and Fiji – has not been immune to the ethical lapses that have been all too common in recent years in media establishments around the world so we anticipate being held to the same high standards we expect of our leaders and those we criticise.

Repúblika also recognises the inextricable link we share as Oceanians. We will explain Fiji to Oceania and explain Pasifika to Fijians.

We are independent, we aim to be informative and we will inspire you.

Ricardo Morris
Editor/Publisher

Café Pacific says good luck Ricardo. And now the challenge is really on to deliver on the promises.

• The Repúblika launch in Suva
• Repúblika website