University of Papua New Guinea's Emily Matasororo ... in the background, images of heavily armed police
shortly beforethey opened fire on peaceful students. Image:" Del Abcede/PMC
SURPRISING that a conference involving some of the brightest minds in
journalism education from around the world should be ignored by New
Zealand’s local media.
The range of diversity alone at the Auckland University of Technology hosted event was appealing, but it was the heady mix of
ideas and contributions that offered an inspiring backdrop.
Topics
included strategies for teaching journalism for mobile platforms – the
latest techniques; “de-westernising” journalism education in an era of
new media genres; transmedia storytelling; teaching hospitals;
twittering, facebooking and snapchat -- digital media under the periscope;
new views on distance learning, and 21st century ethical issues in
journalism are just a representative sample of what was on offer.
Keynote speakers included Divina Frau-Meigs (Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle) with a riveting account on how "powerful journalism" makes "prime ministers jump", the
Center of Public Integrity’s Peter Bale (a New Zealander) on the need to defend press
freedom, and Tongan newspaper publisher and broadcaster who turned
“inclusivity” on its head with an inspiring “include us” appeal from the Pacific,"where we live in the biggest continent on planet Earth".
David Robie speaking at the Eyes of Fire launch last night.
Image: Del Abcede/PMC; background screen image: John Miller
COMMENT:This was David Robie's book launch address.
IT'S HARD to believe that it is now 30 years – three whole decades – since state-backed terrorists blew up the peaceful environmental ship Rainbow Warrior – a vessel with such an inspiring name – and our friend and campaigner Fernando Pereira lost his life.
I vowed to myself that I would continue the crusade as an engaged journalist by telling and retelling this story on any occasion I could.
This was the best I could do to keep Fernando’s memory alive, and to support the struggle of the Rongelap people – and all Pacific peoples harmed by the nuclear powers and their testing for more than a half century.
I remember the launch of the very first edition of Eyes of Fire in early 1986 out on the Viaduct aboard an old Auckland ferry.
Thanks to publisher Michael Guy, we had this giant cake iced with the French Tricolore. Dancing on the top of the cake were three frogmen and the phrase “J’accuse”.
Pacific Media Watch editor Alistar Kata interviewing Kiribati Independent editor Taberannang Korauaba
about his climate change research in Micronesia at last night's seminar. Photo: Del Abcede/PMC
FIVE YEARS ago, as an environmental journalist and journalism educator, I attended “Oceans, Islands and Skies” – the Oceanic Conference of Creativity and Climate Change – at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
I found this a very moving, stimulating and inspiring experience. Until then, I had largely worked on the global and Pacific political dimensions of climate change.
At that conference I found myself thrust among a tremendously talented group of people from all over the globe. And it was where I first encountered Briar March’s remarkable documentary There Once Was An Island: Te Henua e Nnoho about the plight of the people of Takuu, a tiny Polynesian atoll in Papua New Guinea, also known as Takuu Mortlock.
The islanders were confronted with the harsh reality of rising seas and climate change and were forced to make a decision about whether to abandon their traditional Pacific homeland for the coast of Bougainville. (They were divided, some left for Bougainville - mostly younger people, others stayed).
In many ways this is an iconic storytelling of the reality of climate change told by the islanders themselves.
Publisher of Repúblika Media Limited Ricardo Morris (second from left) with University of the South Pacific journalism award
recipients. Image: USP
This is the keynote message from Repúblika publisher Ricardo Morris at the University of the South Pacific/Wansolwara journalism awards 2014.
JOURNALISM is an act of faith in the future. That’s what the American television correspondent Ann Curry wrote in a 2010 cover essay in Guideposts magazine. Journalism, she argued, should do more than inform. It should make you care.
Ann’s essay, titled "Telling Stories of Hope", marked her long-deserved promotion to co-host of NBC’s Today show. Ann describes the lure of journalism for her as “a call, an urgency” to report because she knew that doing so would “give voice to those who need to be heard".
Not only do the people affected deserve to be heard, the media-consuming public also deserved to hear about what was happening in other parts of the world because it gave us “a chance to care, and it is that empathy that offers the greatest hope".
In today’s world, with short attention spans, competing media outlets and platforms and a world of information – not all of it edifying – at ordinary people’s fingertips, journalism can still be a way to inject some hope into our world.
The headline on The Australian media editor Sharri Markson's 'undercover' beat-up about journalism schools
that sparked off the latest attacks on journalism educators.
OPINION:FIRST they came for journalism educator Julie Posetti, for simply tweeting some critical comments made publicly by a former staffer of The Australian. [That time I did write a commentary in Crikey about why editors shouldn’t sue for defamation.]
Well, this week they came for a good friend and colleague, Penny O’Donnell from the University of Sydney, and I refuse to remain silent. Enough is enough.
She is one of the most committed and respected journalism educators I know – in both research and teaching – and has shown the greatest courage in her personal life in recent years that has elevated my esteem for her even higher.
Sadly, the reputation of The Australian newspaper has followed the opposite trajectory. It is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, and my view is that the first 40 were far better than the last ten.
Mads Anneberg's profile on Ricardo Morris and Repúblika.
THREE STUDENTS from AUT University covered Fiji's historic “from dictatorship to democracy” general election this month.
While the election arguably legitimised Voreqe Bainimarama’s so-called 2006 “coup to end all coups”, the students performed something of a coup themselves.
Not only were they providing the first ever comprehensive coverage of a Pacific national election by a New Zealand journalism school, but their reportage was far superior to much of the Kiwi media that was ill-prepared for the occasion.
In fact, some were unashamedly parachute journos covering a complex event on September 17 that was overshadowed by New Zealand’s own election three days later.
All three students were reporting as a “package” for Pacific Scoop, the course outlet for AUT’s postgraduate Asia-Pacific Journalism course run by the Pacific Media Centre. But while two were on the ground in Fiji, the third was an “anchor” - monitoring, writing and editing stories to provide an overall contextualised story.
Brent Edwards in The Walkley Magazine looks at journalist and academic David Robie’s scrutiny of the Pacific region’s governance and journalism. Cartoon by David Pope.
DAVID ROBIE has spent 35 years working as a journalist and journalism academic in the Asia- Pacific region. In Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, mayhem and human rights in the Pacific, Robie summarises his reportage on many of the significant events that have marked his years working in the Pacific. It is part autobiography, part history and part journalism treatise.
As well as providing his perceptive analysis of human rights and democracy, or lack of, in the Pacific, Robie also spends time commenting on journalistic practices, particularly as they relate to reporting on our immediate neighbourhood. For someone like me, who is not an expert on the Pacific, the book is a valuable reference to the significant issues that continue to bedevil the region.
Robie’s book is broad in its compass. It covers the Kanaky struggle for self-determination in New Caledonia, the rise of the Flosse dynasty in Tahiti, coups in Fiji, Chinese influence in Tonga, the struggle in Bougainville, the fight for independence in Timor Leste, the ongoing struggle in West Papua and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland in New Zealand. His stories range as far away as covering indigenous struggles in Canada to the violence in the Philippines. And always he is concerned with human rights in the Pacific.
Robie includes articles he has written over the past 30 years or so, updated by his contemporary analysis of what is happening now. Take New Caledonia for instance. That chapter includes an article Robie wrote for the New Zealand Listener in 1984 titled “Blood on their banner”.
He writes that his reporting on New Caledonia led to a protracted and acrimonious dispute with Fiji’s Islands Business publisher Robert Keith-Reid, when the magazine accused him in 1989 of alleged “leftist” support of Kanak activists. It is just one example of the pressure that has been exerted on Robie and other journalists over their coverage of independence movements in the region.
But it is Robie’s comments on the practice of journalism that should excite the most debate. He makes no bones about his distaste of the tendency of regimes and other vested interests in the region trying to suppress press freedoms, often by intimidation and threats.
His views on journalism in the region have not just been shaped by his experience as a journalist. He has also been the head of journalism at both the universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific and he is now journalism professor and director of the AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre in Auckland.
He praises those journalists throughout the region who struggle to do their job in the face of intimidation, legal restraints and poor pay. But he is less effusive about the role of Western journalism in covering the Pacific. He questions whether the Western notion of news is appropriate to covering the many complex issues in the region. And, before some journalists protest too loudly, this is not a cry for the media to go soft. But Robie does raise some interesting questions about the role of journalism and whether its approach could be altered.
Robie puts forward the case for journalists practising what he calls critical deliberative journalism in the region. He argues that Pacific journalists now have a greater task than ever in encouraging democratisation of the region and informed insights into development, social justice and peace issues facing related island states. In other words, he says journalists should be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Robie says this does not mean allowing politicians’ slogans, such as “cultural sensitivity”, to be used as a smokescreen for the abuse of power and violations of human rights. Instead, he says the approach he advocates will put greater pressure on journalists to expose the truth and report on alternatives and solutions.
Robie sums it up this way: “Critical deliberative journalism also means a tougher scrutiny of the region’s institutions and dynamics of governance. Answers are needed for the questions: Why, how and what now?”
Those questions do not just apply to the island states. Here in Australia and New Zealand we, too, might consider a different approach to the way we practise journalism.
USP protagonists (from left): Acting journalism coordinator and journalism fellow Pat Craddock,
deputy vice-chancellor Dr Esther Williams and journalism lecturer and author
Dr Matt Thompson. Montage: Fijileaks
Café Pacific is on holiday with the publisher looking for “summer” somewhere in western Ireland. But this blog couldn’t stay on hold any longer with all the current shenanigans going on at Fiji’s University of the South Pacific.
Beleaguered journalism academics Pat Craddock, the acting regional media programme leader who is a New Zealand broadcaster and has long experience at USP and is widely respected on campus, and Australian author, educator and journalist Dr Matt Thompson, have stirred a hornet’s nest in administration circles over the past week because of their frank and defiant talking about media and freedom of speech issues in Fiji.
The controversy has stirred condemnation by Amnesty International and sparked a column by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. In the latest statement by Craddock, published by Fijileaks, he has refused to be “silenced” by the university:
ADVOCATES, campaigners, journalists and researchers gathered at New Zealand's AUT University today to honour past campaigns for the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP) and to strategise for the future.
Panel presentations ranged from the US Castle Bravo nuclear test on Bikini Atoll in 1954 - today, March 1, was the 60th anniversary - to the Rongelap Atoll evacuation by Greenpeace in May 1985, the protests against French nuclear testing, the ICAN campaign to abolish all nuclear weapons, the "forgotten struggle" in West Papua, and to the future self-determination vote in Kanaky.
David Robie has been committed to developing quality journalism in the Pacific, and especially in developing a “Pacific brand” of journalism.
Kalafi Moala, Pasifika Media Association (PASIMA)
SO it’s Scapegoat Season again at the University of the South Pacific journalism programme. Barely more than a year has elapsed since the last incumbent was dumped as head.
Dr Ian Weber ... out the USP
"revolving door".
Photo: Jay Folio blog
And now Australia-based Dr Ian Weber, a colleague of his predecessor, has shot out the “revolving door”, as Fijileaks put it. He apparently resigned the same week as the journalism classes were supposed to start for the year.
His litany of complaints about the USP establishment is much the same as many coordinators have expressed in the past, in private if not always publicly – “favouritism, lack of consultation and unethical pressure” plus general lack of support.
So what’s new? Well, this time Dr Weber has launched into an extraordinary and unfounded personal attack on his distant colleague, a local Fiji Islander who is well on the way to becoming the first Pacific Islands media educator at the regional university with a doctorate in journalism.
And Shailendra Singh, a former editor of the Fiji news magazine The Review who has put in far more of the hard yards for the benefit of Fiji and Pacific journalism over the past decade than any expatriate fly-by-nighter, is not even on the Laucala campus in Fiji.
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.
TIMOR-LESTE newspaper editor and investigative journalist Jose Belo is
no stranger to controversy, legal threats or the inside of a prison cell.
He was imprisoned and tortured by the Indonesian
occupation forces for a period during the 24 years of illegal occupation of Timor-Leste
while smuggling out reports to the world from the beleagured resistance
movement.
Five years ago he was threatened with a seven-year prison
sentence for criminal defamation over allegations of corruption against the
then justice minister.
This prompted a high-profile international appeal by
journalists, academics and media freedom campaigners to then President Jose
Ramos-Horta to have the case dropped.
Threats are common over Belo's campaigns
to root out corruption and nepotism in his fledgling Asia-Pacific state - the
world's newest nation barely a decade old.
A light-hearted moment for a police squad during a demonstration in Vilnius. Image from
the Lithuanian National Press Agency exhibition at the Helsinki Town Hall, Finland.
Photo: David Robie
CAFÉ PACIFIC’S publisher David Robie has been travelling widely on sabbatical across Scandinavia and France in the past few weeks, meeting media freedom campaigners (such as at Reporters Sans Frontières), giving guest lectures at journalism schools such as at Stockholm University and the Danish School of Media and Journalism, and on various research projects.
David Robie 'reading' Norway's Aftonbladet Söndag.
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".
Pacific Media Centre's David Robie ... “We need to educate the universities."
Photo: Jamie Small/Te Waha Nui
INVESTIGATIVE journalists are calling for new models of funding to
fill a gap in the industry where the private sector has failed.
By Jamie Small of Te Waha Nui
Nicky Hager, author of The Hollow Men and Other People’s Wars, says there is not enough support for investigative journalists in countries like New Zealand.
“I hope that one day there will be a return to serious public funding for investigative journalism,” he says.
Hager says most investigative journalists do not have much industry
training or support. They are often citizens who begin investigating a
crime or wrongdoing and do not realise they have become a journalist.
Professor David Robie, director of AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre, believes he has an answer.
“As the mainstream media reduces its reporting skills, universities should be picking up the slack,” he says.
AT THE heart of a global crisis over news media credibility and trust has been Britain's so-called Hackgate scandal involving allegations of phone-hacking and corruption against the now defunct Rupert Murdoch tabloid newspaper News of the World.
Major inquiries on media ethics, professionalism and accountability have been examining the press in Australia, Britain and NZ over the past two years.
The Murdoch media empire has stretched into the South Pacific with the sale of one major title being forced by political pressure.
The role of news media in global South nations and the declining credibility of some sectors of the developed world's Fourth Estate also pose challenges for the future of democracy.
Truth, censorship, ethics and corporate integrity are increasingly critical issues in the digital age for a region faced with coups, conflicts and human rights violations, such as in West Papua.
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.
Dr Marc Edge ... "a caricature of colonial attitudes,"
according to some USP staff. Photo: Wansolwara
IN RESPONSE to this blog’s “Vendetta journalism” article and ousted former head of journalism Dr Marc Edge’s attack on David Robie, Café Pacific has received this anonymous feedback from inside sources, including staff and senior students, at the University of the South Pacific's Laucala Campus in Fiji:
LOOKING FOR SCAPEGOATS
FEEDBACK: No journalism lecturer in USP journalism's 25-year history had racked up as many complaints as Dr Marc Edge did - and in record time. Now, he is desperately looking for scapegoats in an attempt to salvage a tarnished academic reputation and failed USP tenure, and lashing out at his perceived enemies.
After his antics at USP, only a very “brave” university would want to touch Marc Edge, although it seems that normally he is on his best behaviour while working at developed world universities; it is in developing countries that he develops a superior, know it all, colonial attitude, which made him a laughing stock at USP.
Many at USP regarded Marc as a caricature of colonial attitudes. He made a lot of noise, created a lot of controversies and spent too much time on these. It was taking time away from teaching and affecting the students. This not only carried on for months, it only got worse. It was one of the reasons why he was asked to resign.
SO WANSOLWARA finally has its own new-look Facebook page (three days old), with a revival of its online edition coming along soon (promised for a good while now). Excellent move. The original Pacific Journalism Online website student team at USP scooped the pool in the Journalism Education Association (JEA) awards that year and were treated to a standing ovation at Moolaabaa, Queensland, for their coverage of the George Speight putsch in May 2000. International journalism standards? Yes, they started way back - far more than a decade ago. Pity the USP journalism website slipped into disuse in March 2007. But good to see an online version of Wansolwara finally returning alongside its newspaper edition, printed by the Fiji Sun. Congratulations Sherita and Sheenal Sharma and their team.
Wansolwara has been publishing for 17 years now. Has any other Pacific (or NZ) journalism school matched that? Never. (I notice the newspaper has recently dropped the list of international awards it has won - too much "global" evidence for some?) Radio Pasifik has a strong history too and great to see the revival there with Semi Francis and his team.
It is also great to see the USP Journalism students and graduates bag prizes in the Development Asia Environment Awards. Well done - and especially Fiji TV team leader Anish Chand! (Even though this belated praise actually refers to awards in 2010).
A story about a frothy debate over the state of journalism education at USP compiled by the Pacific Media Centre team while recently in Suva for the Media and Democracy in the Pacific conference seems to have stirred some region-wide interest. It was picked up by other media, including the Fiji Sun. Here it is for those who missed out:
By Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Alex Perrottetin Suva
JOURNALISM educators in the Pacific have called for more and better industry incentives and collaboration with journalism schools as a way of improving reporting standards.
A robust debate at the University of the South Pacific among experienced journalism educators revealed that improving the quality of education was an ongoing task.
But it could be helped if journalists had some motivation to stay in the job, instead of moving to higher paid global NGOs.
Lack of experience
A former head of journalism at USP and current PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, Shailendra Singh, said he observed a “plethora of writing” and a “diversity of views” in the Australian media that was lacking in Fiji.
“In Australia, there are bald-headed and pot-bellied journalists. Fiji doesn’t see that due to a high turnover of staff,” he said.
Radio Pasifik's new look studio
with presenter Kirry Veikoso.
Photo: David Robie
USP's Radio Pasifik manager Semi Francis confirmed that media organisations in Fiji employed students straight from school, overlooking university graduates.
Lecturer Misa Vicky Lepou from the National University of Samoa, and a onetime graduate from USP, said it was the same in Samoa.
She confirmed there were many schoolleavers in journalism competing with graduates, and their "substandard work" was noticeable. She said the industry still criticised the journalism school for the poor level of journalism among young reporters.
Improving standards
Dr Marc Edge, current head of journalism at USP, said he was there to “increase the standard of journalism not just in Fiji, but across the Pacific”.
“It needs to improve. Grammar, subject-verb agreement, style, little things like this need to improve considerably,” he said, adding that he too was still learning about the region, having arrived from Canada fairly recently.
He said low staffing at USP in recent years had not helped.
However, Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie responded that the journalism schools at USP and at the University of Papua New Guinea had achieved a lot on the international stage, particularly with USP’s success with the award-winning newspaper Wansolwara.
“At that stage in the 1990s, no New Zealand journalism course had a regular newspaper. We [at AUT University] do have today Te Waha Nui, which I started with a colleague after I came from USP, on the basis of the experience at USP.
“So I think it is hats off to USP - and UPNG in the past - and so on. Wansolwara has received quite a lot of awards. This paper [he waved a copy of Te Waha Nui] has also been an award-winning paper, but it hasn’t won nearly as many awards as Wansolwara.”
Commercial reality
Dr Robie also pointed out that Wansolwara integrated the "commercial reality" of producing a paper, unlike most other journalism schools, which were typically funded by the university or school.
“So students don’t get that broader picture of the economic reality and the difficulties producing a newspaper but Wansolwara does.”
Singh was also concerned to point out that there was much hard work done on the paper in previous years, which had continued under the work of former Fiji Times journalist Irene Manueli.
“The person working day and night on Wansolwara is Irene Manueli. Is she here, has she been acknowledged?”
A resounding round of applause broke out.
Dr Edge remained optimistic about the quality of future USP graduates.
“The first-year students we have this year are incredibly bright. They are as bright as any students I have taught anywhere in the world,” he said.
“And I believe with the kind of training and education they are going to get in the next three years we’ll soon be graduating students of great passion and depth.”
But Singh reminded Dr Edge that there had been great achievements in the past.
“It is not year zero, and you need to understand the local context ... If you come with the wrong attitude you put a lot of people off, and then it’s a very bad start.”
Room for improvement
Professor Robie also said Australia and New Zealand could learn from USP, as its internship period was six weeks, while AUT internships were only two weeks and far too short.
He said journalism schools needed to train students in an ever-increasing range of complex skills.
“One of the things we like to look for in graduates is the range of skills and the capability, because the media industry is changing at such a pace… they have to be incredibly flexible.”
He spoke about giving students practice in real reporting of "live" events against deadline pressure such as AUT's Pacific Media Centre has done with the Pacific Scoop coverage of the Pacific Islands Forum in the last three years.
“It surprises me that no other journalism school anywhere in the region covers the forum, because you’ve got an opportunity there of such a range of issues and the politicians in one place, the NGOs and so on - so it’s an enormously beneficial training environment for any journalism school.”
He said AUT was focusing on producing “well-rounded graduates with critical thinking skills, strong exposure to business, economics, environment, government, history, politics, human rights and culture.
“And education is so vitally important in that process, just simply being trained in a newsroom is not enough. It’s a combination of the industry and journalism schools.”
In the Fijian context, Singh said there was a need to distinguish between responsible journalism and self-censorship, which was of growing concern in Fiji.
“More cautious, more responsible and more circumspect, doesn’t mean self-censorship,” he said.
Dr Edge said USP was looking to begin a postgraduate diploma in digital journalism in the near future, as well as an option to undertake a master’s degree.
In past years, USP had a postgraduate journalism programme and there have been graduates but this was dropped two years ago because of USP funding cuts.
Alex Perrottet is contributing editor of Pacific Media Watch. He was at the USP symposium as both a a reporter and as a research paper presenter.
RAMPANT SELF-CENSORSHIP in action? It was astonishing to see a Media and Democracy symposium at the University of the South Pacific – which raised the tempo of “quality” journalism debate in post-coup Fiji by quantum leaps – being ignored over substantive issues while the regime’s chief media official was splashed across both daily front pages.
Keynote speaker Professor Robert Hackett, a world-renowned Canadian authority on peace journalism and “alternative” journalism models, was not even reported. Instead, the news was Permanent Secretary for Information Sharon Smith-Johns saying “rise to the challenge” and take advantage of the lifting of censorship. But while the local media duly splashed this message, few local journalists actually engaged with the challenging ideas canvased at the conference.
Speaking to some of the young journos on hand, Café Pacific certainly had the impression that they were not experienced enough or well-equipped to cope with fundamental questions challenging the news media. Countries as diverse as Britain, Australia and New Zealand are pre-occupied with rebuilding public trust in the media – and strategies for doing this - in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry triggered by the “hackgate” scandal that closed Murdoch’s big-selling tabloid News of the World and has led to prosecutions of several journalists and media personalities.
But the local Fiji journalists seemed immune from this and not familiar with global debates about the future of journalism. A critical conference opening speech by USP Deputy Vice-Chancellor Esther Williams savaged the Fiji media (front page in the journalism student newspaper Wansolwara), complaining about reports “riddled with editorial mistakes”, drew defensive retorts from local scribes.
Yet the interesting research and analysis about Fiji and Pacific media presented at the symposium was covered in a very superficial manner, if reported at all. Fiji Television produced an atrocious Close-Up programme about the symposium by Myron Williams - not in the same class of the Geoffrey Smith special report about the Pacific Media Summit run by PINA earlier this year. Even Radio Australia and Radio NZ International (usually reliable) failed their audience on coverage. Readers need to go to Pacific Scoop or Pacific Media Watch for independent and informed and reportage.
The most insightful preliminary article was actually an offshore blog column on Grubsheet by Fiji-born journalist Graham Davis who wasn't actually even there (and should have been invited). While this mainly dealt with behind-the-scenes tensions leading into the conference, it at least raised some of the core philosophical issues facing the future of regional media. Such issues included what models of journalism might be best suited for Fiji and the Pacific – an unbridled “publish and be damned” Anglo-American approach, or something more subtle but equally robust such as a range of journalism models grouped under the label “deliberative journalism”. “Deliberative” models – as deconstructed by the Pacific Media Centre’s Professor David Robie, are essentially those more suited to citizen empowerment for a better democracy – include those such as public journalism, alternative journalism, critical development journalism, peace journalism and human rights journalism. None of these models are “soft” or core journalism values, but add a wider range of skills as well.
Bob Hackett, co-editor of a recent book called Expanding Peace Journalism – comparative and critical approaches, deserved serious attention by the local media. His speech will eventually be published in Pacific Journalism Review. He spoke about what kind of journalism a democratic society needs, if it wants democratic governance to be stable and sustainable. Depending on which rationale for democracy is key – “protection or development” – there are “different models of democracy, each with different expectations of how journalism should function, what their ethical pronciples and practices should be and what legal framework best supports it”. He considered three models, in particular:
1. Market liberalism – the “free market” model in Fiji (as it used to be) shared with Australia and NZ: “Democracy is seen not as an end in itself, but as normally the best institutional arrangement to maintain political stability and a liberal political culture characterised by individual rights and choice.” The media serves as a watchdog on government power. 2. “Public sphere” liberalism – “prioritises the role of the media in facilitating or even constituting a public sphere so that public opinion can be formed”. The independent watchdog role continues, but a higher value is placed on popular participation. 3. “Radical democracy” and a political economy critique – “radical democrats seek not to just reinvigorate an existing system of representative democracy, or to ensure quality of legal and political rights for everybody. They also prize direct participation by people in making the decisions that affect their lives and approximate equality in wealth and power.” The watchdog media role is endorsed, but greater emphasis is placed on social change and popular mobilisation against social injustices.
During the conference, the excellent new USP documentary on media freedom in the Pacific, made in association with the International Federation of Journalists (and directed by Don Pollock), was also screened. And there were feisty debates about media freedom and journalism education.
The local media partially redeemed itself a week later with the Fiji Sun republishing a symposium overview by the Pacific Media Centre team on Pacific Scoop and the Fiji Times running a short (900 word) extract from David Robie's 8400 word paper about "deliberative" journalism and media models. Perhaps they read this blog? But Café Pacific wonders why no local scribes present at the conference produced a reflective overview article.
Fiji's Permanent Secretary for Information Sharon Smith-Johns (speaking) and USP Deputy Vice-Chancellor Dr Esther Williams at last week's media and democracy forum. Photo: USP
