Asia-Pacific Network: 21 June and 1 July 1999
MEDIA: CYBERSPACE MEDIA AND THE PACIFIC'S POLITICAL FRONTIER
The 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis and the 1999 Fiji general election have been defining moments for South Pacific online journalism and the coverage of political events. The "coconut wireless" is giving way to the cyberspace kava bowl.
By DAVID ROBIE
Abstract: The 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis and the 1999 Fiji general election have been defining moments for South Pacific online journalism and the coverage of political events. How is the region's news media facing the challenge? What is the context they work in? And how are media educators and trainers shaping the new generation of journalists? The "coconut wireless" is giving way to the cyberspace kava bowl.
A paper presented at Griffith and Canberra universities, in Australia.
A COUPLE OF DECADES AGO, when I was working as an editor with the Daily Nation in Kenya, our then editor-in-chief, George Githi, had this to say:
This quote has stuck in mind since then and I use it on my email signature.
But in recent times, with the global surge of the information superhighway, many news media or information websites have been giving governments a rocky time.
Websites might not have exactly taken over governments, but the Internet has certainly given a dramatic impetus to the winds of change.
As media educator and film maker Bob Hooper argues,
In Indonesia, momentous change and a move to independence, or at least autonomy, in East Timor, unthinkable a year ago, has been fuelled by the Internet.
In April, students from the Institute for the Study of Information Flow (ISAI) and NGO activists pressured the House of Representatives to draft a new press freedom bill before the inauguration of a new president and cabinet after the general election on June 7 (Pacific Media Watch 1999a).
The need for a new bill, the campaigners claim, stems from a risk that the new political elite in Indonesia will be made up of the same people who controlled and exploited the nation during the Suharto era.
Websites focusing on developments in Indonesia and the courageous activism of the Alliance for Independent Journalists (AJI) seeking freedom of speech and information have hastened the changes.
Repression against journalists in East Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia has continued, and Information Minister Yunus Yosfiah is an unlikely champion of a free press, given his role as the military commander in the October 1975 assault in which the Balibo Five were murdered by Indonesian soldiers.
According to a recent Committee to Protect Journalists' report, journalists in Indonesia are "attempting to forestall future repression by holding seminars and discussions on ethics and working to build a press council that will be responsive to public concerns over irresponsibility". The report adds:
In China, activists have been imprisoned for advocating democracy.
Software engineer Lin Hai was arrested on 25 March 1998 for providing 30,000 email addresses to a pro-democracy Internet newsletter. On 20 January 1999, he was sentenced to two years in prison.
Physicist and dissident Wang Youcai was sentenced on 21 December 1998 to 11 years in prison; the charges against Wang included trying to organise a peaceful opposition party and sending email messages to dissidents in the U.S.
According to the Blue Ribbon Free Expression website - one of the world's four most "hit" sites - more than 20,000 email messages have been sent to the Chinese Government on behalf of Lin Hai and Wang Youcai.
A press release will be issued when the number of messages reaches 30,000 to match the number of email addresses Lin Hai was convicted of sending.
In Zambia, the revelations on a website of the independent Post newspaper had been so threatening to the national government that authorities in April laid siege to the editorial offices and printing plant and arrested eight journalists (Pacific Media Watch 1999b).
The editor-in-chief, Fred M'membe, well known in Commonwealth media circles, was charged with espionage - along with the eight staff members - over a front page story that questioned the country's military capacity to withstand an incursion from neighbouring Angola.
In Yugoslavia, international protests in early May followed the police shutdown of the independent Radio B92 and three other radio stations in Serbia in a crackdown on dissent and to suppress news on the NATO bombing (Foreign Correspondent 1999).
According to B92's website, "our premises have been sealed off" and the station's director had been "ousted" from his job. He was replaced by a political hack from the country's ruling Socialist Party, effectively imposing Government control.
The Internet has played a prominent role in the Balkans conflict. Since foreign journalists were expelled from Yugoslavia, much information was relayed to the outside world via email and the World Wide Web.
Even in the South Pacific, in spite of relatively few users, news sites on the Internet have caused more than ripples.
In 1997, the Websites of both daily newspapers in Papua New Guinea "came of age during the Sandline mercenary crisis, underscoring the value of content on the Internet" (Robie 1997).
During the decade-long secessionist rebellion against the Papua New Guinea Government, the Bougainville Freedom Movement's Webpage based in Australia publicised - and still publicises - the struggle for peace. It has had remarkable success with its website and a global email list in setting a Pacific-wide and global media agenda.
"With the Internet, we have broken a barrier and gone out to the world, and the world is listening, watching and waiting,'' says Vikki John, the movement's national coordinator in Sydney.
And in Fiji, the freedom of the Internet affair in 1998 and the latest media website which was established in April - and quickly featured a controversial interview with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka about the so-called "Kama Sutra" scandal about politicians added political spice in the run-up to the historic elections (Robie, 1998a).
Fijilive followed up on this with scoops which included Rabuka's apology to the Indo-Fijians of the nation for his military coups in 1987, saying he had been "used" by others. He also named his five co-conspirators - two who are dead and a third who is now Opposition Leader (Fijilive, 1999).
It also reported on the possible legal actions against him for treason, kidnap and torture if he lost the election - as he did - and he travelled outside the Fiji Islands.
SHOW ELECTIONS NEWS CLIP
In the 24 hour period after counting began, Fijilive had a phenomenal 10,000 visits - almost three times the normal load. With 10 staff, the site posted the first website election coverage, well ahead of the Fiji government's official site.
Fijilive's journalists kept updating every five minutes in 24-hour shifts.
Publisher Yashwant Gaunder says he believes the remarkable success of his website was due to the 60,000 Fiji Islanders who had migrated from the country after the coups.
"It is early days yet," he says. "Some news sites are closing. I was in New Zealand recently where the National Business Review site closed and the Time-Pathfinder one closed. Media are finding they are not making any money.
"But we are determined to keep our lead. We have always been an innovator."
Websites are likely to closely monitor the progress of the new Labour government. Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, the country's first Indo-Fijian national leader, has pledged an "open and free press" but his government has been sending out conflicting signals. Time will tell.
The outgoing regime led by Rabuka had been accused of paranoia and blatant attempts at manipulating the media on the eve of the election campaign when the government bought a controlling 44 per cent shareholding in the ailing Daily Post newspaper during February.
It was argued by critics that taking over the Daily Post was breaching the "spirit and the letter" of section 30 of the 1997 Constitution which guarantees freedom of the media and expression.
The Rabuka government had been angered by some trenchant articles in the Post, particularly by its outspoken political columnist Mesake Koroi, provoking an extraordinary full page government advertisement, at public expense, attacking the
"false allegations" in Koroi's popular weekly Opinion column.
Ironically, the publicity ensured Koroi's articles would be read on the web.
A clash over a television interview with a rival politician, former military commander Ratu Epeli Ganilau, along with the refusal to allow a "blacklisted" New Zealand journalist into the country, did nothing to allay concerns about the government's commitment to a free media.
The barring of the TV journalist was dismissed as a bureaucratic bungle by Assistant Minister Ratu Josefa Dimuri, who called for a review of the so-called blacklist. But critics remained unconvinced.
Senator Jokapeci Koroi, president of the Fiji Labour Party, asked: "What has happened to the freedom of the press which this government supposedly respects? Or is it still in the modus operandi that existed immediately after the coup."
As it turned out, the Daily Post brushed aside the criticisms over its sale and, under the leadership of editor Jale Moala, turned in arguably the best print media coverage of the elections.
It has proved a rather gutsy newspaper in spite of its limited resources and staff when competing with the established Fiji Times, a Murdoch paper.
But promises by the Labour government have looked rather empty given several incidents since the election, including a "freeing up" of reporting on the traditional and secretive Great
Council of Chiefs which was not free at all, and the roughing up of a television reporter by an over-zealous security policeman "minding" Prime Minister Chaudhry.
Fiji Television lodged an official complaint with the Information Ministry over the incident.
Both a former Information Minister, Filipe Bole, and Assistant Information Minister Dimuri were dumped by Fijian voters in the election.
Chaudhry, formerly a trade unionist, now has the information portfolio in his hands. Assistant Minister Lekh Ram Vayeshnoi has warned that the media will not be allowed to "abuse this enormous power" being promised under a draft Freedom of Information Bill.
The Bill is a positive spin-off from a comprehensive study of Fiji's news media undertaken on behalf of the Rabuka government by the Thomson Foundation in 1996. However, questions hang over proposed legislation under the previous government for a code of ethics and broadcasting standards and a statutory body to replace
the successful self-regulating Fiji Media Council.
Vayeshnoi said:
They have shown that they have seriously eroded their credibility and their very important position in a free functioning democracy (Vayeshnoi, 1999).
In fact, all the Fiji news media performed credibly and fairly in reporting the election, which involved a new preferential voting system and was covered for the first time by national television.
[References here to parliamentary speeches on June 21-22 condemning the Fiji news media and comments on hints of ownership legislation].
The Internet is transforming both the way many news media work in developing nations, and also how radical movements try to change the world and exploit the media message.
Alternative news media are being given a tremendous boost.
The modest Green-Left Weekly, for example, which covers environmental, political, gender, labour and human rights issues, has just as big potential as the $350,000-a-year Sydney Morning Herald site.
Early examples of effective use of the Internet were demonstrated in the early 1990s by Latin American guerrilla movements such as Mexico's Zapatistas and Peru's Tupac Amaru.
The use of cyberspace to spread their message quickly has been adopted widely among activist groups around the world. As InterPress Third World news agency's former Manila bureau chief Kunda Dixit says:
Its inherent anarchy, decentralised nature and freedom from official control has made the Internet the ideal medium for civil society (Dixit 1997: 148).
However, although they may have mastered the Internet to bypass government control over traditional media and reach a larger audience, most of these groups have not yet adapted their messages to their new medium. Often their Internet message is still doctrinaire and parochial.
The Internet is especially suited to underground organisations, NGOs and alternative media because a website can easily be moved from one country to another.
Many radical groups also avoid censorship by operating through sympathisers based in other countries who have access to the Internet.
In many ways the Internet is a contemporary equivalent to the days of the pamphleteering style of journalism two to three centuries ago - when news media were genuinely a pluralistic "marketplace of ideas".
This is in sharp contrast with the conventional news media of today which has been rapidly shrinking, swallowed up by closures and takeovers by the Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi and Ted Turner style of mega media corporations.
Surviving independent media voices have been gagged by the trivial era of "infotainment" and "tabloid" babblespeak.
But the degree to which people can benefit from the Internet's democratisation potential, bringing about true decentralisation or spreading knowledge and awareness of issues, and education, will depend on how much support the "information poor" get to log on.
In countries like India, for example, only seven in every 1000 people have a phone.
Low cost is also one of the great advantages of free speech on the Internet. Except for the initial cost, building a website is less expensive than running a newspaper, and it reaches a newspaper-size audience running to thousands.
The cost savings of the Internet is an important factor in the digital technology revolution happening in many newsrooms around the world. The Singapore Straits Times is one of the world leaders in Internet innovation.
The Straits Times sends reporters and photographers into the field locally and abroad all the time. In addition, the paper has nine bureaus abroad. And two offshore editorial units - a Sydney office consisting of a fulltime team of Australian subeditors - and an office in Manila supplementing the art and infographics output of the paper's Singapore-based team.
The telephone bills have in the past been astronomical.
As the paper's business editor and a technical expert, Paul Jansen, says, the Internet and email have now made the newspaper's economics far rosier (Jansen 1998).
Since email involves calls only to the Internet Service Provider in the sender and recipient's respective countries, there is no IDD charge, just local call charges.
In the South Pacific, after a slow start, the news media cyberspace revolution has rapidly caught on.
The first news site was curiously the Tonga Chronicle, a sort of hybrid affair on Tahola Kami's pioneering Kavabowl Website in late 1995. However, the first actual full newspaper online in the Pacific was the University of Papua New Guinea's journalism training newspaper Uni Tavur, hosted on the Sydney University of Technology's "Online Journalist" website in March 1996.
By August 1996, The National in Port Moresby, the fastest growing newspaper in the South Pacific, had developed the first daily newspaper Website online in the region. One of its sister papers in the Rimbunan Hijau timber group of companies, The Star in Malaysia, had a long-established and successful Website.
Every day he and a senior systems executive colleague wade through the paper, converting files into html format and gaining enormous international goodwill for the paper as a result (Robie 1997).
The National's website is arguably still the most popular cyberspace newspaper in the South Pacific.
Its long-established rival, the PNG Post-Courier, followed the next month, in September 1996, with a classified advertising Website linked to the News Ltd advertising Website in Australia.
Finally, the Post-Courier also introduced a news website in December 1996. This meant a 100 per cent web presence for Papua New Guinea's national daily newspapers at a time when New Zealand, for example, only had a handful of newspapers on line.
Following this, websites were set up by PNG's national news weekly, The Independent (owned by the nation's churches) in 1998, EM TV (1997) and NauFM (1997).
News media organisation websites have been slow to take off in Fiji, although the sister radio station of NauFM, FM96 (Fiji Communications Ltd), had established a lively Website in 1997, and the news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (1997) has a popular site which is mainly a teaser for potential subscribers.
Islands Business International (1999) has also developed a website. Many other news media have developed sites in the region too, including American Samoa (1997), Cook Islands (1998), French Polynesia (1996) and an Auckland-based Tongan newspaper, Tongan Times (1998).
But now probably the most innovative Pacific news media development on the Internet has been the debut of fijilive - a combination of the news magazine resources of The Review news magazine, the Daily Post newspaper and Bula Networks radio.
This is backed up by what the publishers claim to be the largest Pacific Website archive, two years in the making. Although the long-established Pacific virtual library and media site of the Australian National University might dispute this claim, there is no doubt that fijilive is a remarkable resource.
Publisher Yashwant Gaunder is matter-of-fact about his objective: "Our immediate aim is to provide an award-winning information source on Fiji."
Although Fiji has the largest number of Internet users in the Pacific, about 2500, this is still a tiny market.
Fiji's largest circulation daily newspaper, The Fiji Times, is also planning a Website as part of an upgrade of its computer pagination system [launched in mid-June 1999]. The company says its PIM Website is the only media one making a profit in the Pacific.
What do all these rapid and dramatic changes mean for the traditional methods for journalism education in the Pacific? Like elsewhere in the world, it is a major challenge.
According to one recent Australian study, 168 new journalistic tasks and practices have been identified as emerging as an influence of the Internet. Journalism educator Mark Pearson concludes "influences of the Internet upon both the context of journalism and its practice render current approaches anachronistic and demand a reevaluation of the aim, role and function of journalism education" (Pearson 1998).
Nevertheless, another journalism educator, Stephen Quinn, was heartened by his research that the educators appeared to be ahead of the Australian media industry in computer-assisted reporting (CAR). He suggested they "take the lead and drag the media into the digital era".
Quinn also says that Pacific tertiary institutions ignore Internet journalism education "at their peril".
In a sense, the University of the South Pacific has already taken the lead in the region, last year introducing basic Internet web design and CAR techniques in two courses, 201 Print and Online Journalism and 302 Journalism Research.
In the Print and Online course, this means web design is integrated with the training newspaper Wansolwara and online editors process the web edition.
In Journalism Research, students have been introduced to the Internet and databases as part of researching HIV/AIDS stories, the Fiji elections, media reports and major regional stories, such as the controversial shutdown of two faculties and a journalism programme at the University of Papua New Guinea.
They have just completed working on Pacific human rights assignments.
The USP journalism programme also provides an Internet news digest, Pasifik Nius, feeding websites such as Pacific Islands Report and researchers worldwide.
Journalism students also contribute to the Cyber-Times electronic newspaper at City University, Hongkong.
As Kunda Dixit points out:
Virtually all second and third-year journalism students will routinely get Internet tuition. The USP journalism newsroom has five World Wide Web computers available for regular use by students.
By the standards of journalism schools in Australia or elsewhere, this may not seem much. But by the standards of South Pacific media newsrooms, where usually no more than one Internet computer is available for reporting - and this is often locked up in the general manager or chief editoršs office, it is remarkable.
The journalism facilities are also put into context when it is realised that the university as a whole has just eight computers in the library's Internet Cafe for the use of more than 5000 students.
The University of Papua New Guinea pioneered journalism education on the Internet in the Pacific in 1996. At a time when UPNG was still waiting to go online, a partnership with UTS's Department of Journalism and Social Analysis meant that the UTS Online Journalist website hosted UPNG's initial efforts (Robie 1998).
The Papua Niugini Nius email listserve service and website were also created in 1996 in partnership with Pactok Communications, a low cost Asia-Pacific regional email and website cooperative with partners in Cambodia and Malaysia as well as South Pacific states.
By March 1998, the pivotal centre of Internet initiatives in journalism education moved from UPNG to the University of Hawai'i and USP's main Laucala campus in Fiji. In Hawai'i, it took just over a year for Pacific Islands Report to become a key regional news source with around 15 stories a day.
A collaborative project of the East-West Center's Pacific Islands Development Program and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai'i it aims, according to editor Al Hulsen, to increase public knowledge and understanding of the Pacific.
Three journalism students are involved in the project.
At USP, in April 1998, the USP Journalism programme launched Pacific Journalism Online, the region's first extensive Internet journalism training tool and research resource.
In August 1998, UNESCO awarded a F$5000 grant to USP Journalism to help develop the project. Equipment was purchased and a journalism graduate was employed part-time to upload files for the website, including the training newspaper Wansolwara Online subsite.
This role has now been taken over by journalism students as they become trained in Internet publishing. By the beginning of June 1999, eighteen second-year USP journalism students had created websites which had been posted on Pacific Journalism Online.
One particular plus of the Internet training, is a growing awareness of the Pacific region as a whole. Never before have journalism students - or journalists for that matter - had such quick and comprehensive access to the regionšs news media and other research sources.
The new curriculum involves greater attention to issues of legal risks across international jurisdictions, ethics, privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression, social justice, business acumen and consumer protection as well as the technical skills involved.
However, online journalists still vitally need the key abilities of critical thinking, research skills, story-telling and a passion to keep people informed.
These then, are the fresh voices of the future in Pacific cyberspace. Hopefully, their brand of journalism will contribute to regional solutions rather than problems.
References:
Committee to Protect Journalists, 1999, "No Turning Back: Indonesia's Press Strives to Maintain its Hard-won Freedom" report, June 3.
Dixit, Kunda (1997), Dateline Earth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered, Manila: InterPress.
Fijlive (1999), "Rabuka names five responsible for coups", May 4.
http://www.fijilive.com/news/may99/4w.htm
Foreign Correspondent (1999), "Belgrade police shut down independent (sic)", foreign@onelist.com at the Journalism Department, University of Queensland, April 3.
Granier-Deferre, Karine (1998), "Radical politics embrace the Internet", International Herald-Tribune, September 28.
Hooper, Robert A. (1998), "An Internet driven national transition: Was Vice-President Gorešs speech a catalyst for change or a strategic blunder", Los Angeles Times.
Jansen, Paul (1998), "Slashing costs, expanding sources, raising quality One organisationšs battle to enslave technology for the Newsroom", paper presented at the Commonwealth Editors' Forum in Penang on October 22.
Pacific Media Watch (1999a), "2014 INDONESIA: Students urge House to discuss press bill", March 27.
Pacific Media Watch (1999b), "2010 ZAMBIA: Police charge The Post editor with 'espionage' ", March 25.
Pearson, Mark (1998), "Curricular implications of the influences of the Internet upon journalism", paper presented at the Journalism Education Association (JEA) conference at Yeppoon, Queensland, December 1-4.
Robie, David (1997), "Hot-wired Pacific media", Pacific Journalism Review, Vol 4 No 1, pp 61-70.
- (1998a), "Cafe Pacific and Pacific Journalism Online: Cyberspace media in an Island state" paper presented at the Journalism Education Association (JEA) conference at Yeppoon, Queensland, December 1-4.
- (1998b), "The Internet and journalism education in the South Pacific", paper presented at the Commonwealth Editors' Forum, Penang, Malaysia, October 21-23.
Vayeshnoi, Lekh Ram (1999), Address at the opening of workshop for government media liaison officers, June 8.
For governments which fear newspapers there is one consolation: We have known many instances where governments have taken over newspapers, but we have not known a single incident in which a newspaper has taken over a government.
If the Soviet Union was brought down by the fax machine, Malaysia's transition to new leadership will be driven by the Internet ... In the power struggle between [Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad] and his former protege, [Anwar Ibrahim], at least in cyberspace, clearly holds the advantage (Hooper 1998).
Publishers are quietly hoping that new publications don't offend public sensibilities by pushing the envelope too far in what remains a conservative, overwhelmingly Muslim country. Media groups have supported the creation of a dozen more watchdog organisations around the country that investigate and respond to complaints against the press. Even the most vocal of Indonesia's Press associations, the once-banned Aliansi Jurnalis Independen (Alliance for Independent Journalists, or AJI), has started a monthly publication called Independent Watch to monitor the quality of press reports (CPJ, 1999).
Some media organisations, to some extent, have been seriously lacking in carrying out their duties. They have shown that the public's right to accurate and factual information appears the least of their concerns.
Across the world, human rights activists, national liberation movements, indigenous groups from the Ogoni to the Karens, NGOs and activists have found silicon bonding in the horizontal communication provided by the Internet.
Today, our reporters in the field and from our overseas bureaus, can choose to file their reports directly into our computer system through a special modem connection, or through email which we then pick up and transfer to our main system in a simple two-step "save file" and "drag and drop" procedure.
The [National's] Website, the first daily news one in the region, was the innovative brainchild of the general manager, S. F. Yong. A cyberspace buff and enthused by the lively Website of The Star, he was convinced it could be done in Papua New Guinea too.
While we may think that we live in the age of information, more and more of that information is completely useless in working out answers to global problems or searching for alternative [economic strategies] more suited to living on a planet with finite resources" (Dixit 1997: 151).
Blue Ribbon Freedom of Expression website, http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html