Autonomous Bougainville Government President Ishmael Toroama has condemned the circulation of an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated video depicting a physical confrontation between him and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape.

The clip, first shared on Facebook last week, is generated from the above picture of Toroama and Marape taken at a news conference in September 2024, where the two leaders announced the appointment of former New Zealand Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae as the independent moderator for the Bougainville peace talks.

It shows Toroama punching Marape from a sitting position as both fall down. The post has amassed almost 190,000 views on Facebook and more than 360 comments.

• READ MORE: Other Bougainville independence reports

In a statement today, President Toroama said such content could have a negative impact on Bougainville’s efforts toward independence.

He said the “reckless misuse of artificial intelligence and social media platforms has the potential to damage the hard-earned trust and mutual respect” between the two nations.

“This video is not only false and malicious — it is dangerous,” the ABG leader said.

“It threatens to undermine the ongoing spirit of dialogue, peace, and cooperation that both our governments have worked tirelessly to build.”

Toroama calls for identifying of source
Toroama wants the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA) of PNG to find the source of the video.

He said that while freedom of expression was a democratic value, it was also a privilege that carried responsibilities.

He said freedom of expression should not be twisted through misinformation.

“These freedoms must be exercised with respect for the truth. Misusing AI tools to spread falsehoods not only discredits individuals but can destabilise entire communities.”

He has urged the content creators to reflect on the ethical implications of their digital actions.

Toroama also called on social media platforms and regulatory bodies to play a bigger role in stopping the spread of misleading AI-generated content.

“As we move further into the digital age, we must develop a collective moral compass to guide the use of powerful technologies like artificial intelligence,” he said.

“Truth must remain the foundation of all communication, both online and offline.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Papua New Guinea government has admitted to using a technology that it says was “successfully tested” to block social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for much of the day yesterday.

Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr said the “test” was done under the framework of the Anti-Terrorism Act 2024, and sought to address the growing concerns over hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content online.

Tsiamalili did not specify what kind of tech was used, but said it was carried out in collaboration with the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC), the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA), and various internet service providers.

• READ MORE: Other Facebook reports

“We are not attempting to suppress free speech or restrict our citizens from expressing their viewpoints,” Tsiamalili said.

“However, the unchecked proliferation of fake news, hate speech, pornography, child exploitation, and incitement to violence on platforms such as Facebook is unacceptable.

“These challenges increasingly threaten the safety, dignity, and well-being of our populace.”

However, government agencies responsible for communications and ICT, including NICTA, said they were not aware.

‘Confidence relies on transparency’
“Public confidence in our digital governance relies on transparency and consistency in how we approach online regulation,” NICTA chief executive Kilakupa Gulo-Vui said.

“It is essential that all key stakeholders, including NICTA, law enforcement, telecommunications providers, and government agencies, collaborate closely to ensure that any actions taken are well-understood and properly executed.”

He said that while maintaining national security was a priority, the balance between safety and digital freedom must be carefully managed.

Gulo-Vui said NICTA would be addressing this matter with the Minister for ICT to ensure NICTA’s role continued to align with the government’s broader policy objectives, while fostering a cohesive and united approach to digital regulation.

The Department of Information Communication and Technology (DICT) Secretary, Steven Matainaho, also stated his department was not aware of the test but added that the police have powers under the new domestic terrorism laws.

Papua New Guinea’s recently introduced anti-terror laws are aimed at curbing both internal and external security threats.

Critics warn of dictatorial control
However, critics of the move say the test borders on dictatorial control.

An observer of Monday’s events, Lucas Kiap, said the goal of combating hate speech and exploitation was commendable, but the approach risks paving way for authoritarian overreach.

“Where is PNG headed? If the government continues down this path, it risks trading democracy for control,” he said.

Many social media users, however, appeared to outdo the government, with many downloading and sharing Virtual Area Network (VPN) apps and continuing to post on Facebook.

“Hello from Poland,” one user said.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said today that the country’s anti-terrorism law could target anyone because “the definition of a terrorist is left to the Police Minister to decide”.

‘Designed to take away our freedoms’
“During the debate on the anti-terrorism bill in Parliament, I pointed out that the law was too broad and it could be used against innocent people,” he wrote on Facebook.

He said government MPs laughed at him and used their numbers to pass the bill.

“Yesterday, the Police Minister used the Anti-terrorism Act to shut down Facebook. That was just a test, that was step one,” Governor Bird said.

“There is no limit to the powers the Minister of Police can exercise under this new law. It is draconian law designed to take away our freedoms.

“We are now heading into dangerous territory and everyone is powerless to stop this tyranny,” he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The future of Māori radio in Aotearoa New Zealand requires increased investment in both online platforms and traditional airwaves, says a senior manager.

Matthew Tukaki, station manager at Waatea Digital, spoke with Te Ao Māori News about the future of Māori radio.

He said there was an urgent need for changes to ensure a sustainable presence on both AM/FM airwaves and digital platforms.

• READ MORE: Waatea News reports
• Other Māori media reports

“One of the big challenges will always be funding. Many of our iwi stations operate with very limited resources, as their focus is more on manaakitanga (hospitality) and aroha (compassion),” Tukaki said.

He said that Waatea Digital had been exploring various new digital strategies to enhance viewership and engagement across the media landscape.

“We need assistance and support to transition to these new platforms,” Tukaki said.

He also highlighted the continued importance of traditional AM frequencies, particularly during emergencies like Cyclone Gabrielle, where these stations served as vital emergency broadcasters.

Report originally by Te Ao Māori.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The future of Māori radio in Aotearoa New Zealand requires increased investment in both online platforms and traditional airwaves, says a senior manager.

Matthew Tukaki, station manager at Waatea Digital, spoke with Te Ao Māori News about the future of Māori radio.

He said there was an urgent need for changes to ensure a sustainable presence on both AM/FM airwaves and digital platforms.

• READ MORE: Waatea News reports
• Other Māori media reports

“One of the big challenges will always be funding. Many of our iwi stations operate with very limited resources, as their focus is more on manaakitanga (hospitality) and aroha (compassion),” Tukaki said.

He said that Waatea Digital had been exploring various new digital strategies to enhance viewership and engagement across the media landscape.

“We need assistance and support to transition to these new platforms,” Tukaki said.

He also highlighted the continued importance of traditional AM frequencies, particularly during emergencies like Cyclone Gabrielle, where these stations served as vital emergency broadcasters.

Report originally by Te Ao Māori.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

For nearly half a century, Papua New Guinea has been more than just a home for Laurence “Rocky” Roe — it has been his canvas, his inspiration, and his great love.

A master behind the lens, Rocky has captured the soul of the nation through his photography, preserving moments of history, culture, and progress.

He bid farewell to the country he has called home since 1976 in June 2021 and is now retired and living in Australia. We reflect on the extraordinary journey of a man whose work has become an indelible part of PNG’s visual history.

• WATCH: The Malum Nalu’s full interview with Rocky Roe
• Other Malum Nalu articles

A journey born of adventure
Rocky Roe’s story began in Adelaide, Australia, where he was born in 1947. His adventure in Papua New Guinea started in 1976 when he arrived as a mechanical fitter for Bougainville Copper. But his heart sought more than the structured life of a mining camp.

In 1979, he took a leap of faith, moving to Port Moresby and trading a higher salary for a passion — photography. What he lost in pay, he gained in purpose.

“I wanted to see Papua New Guinea,” Rocky recalls. “And I got an opportunity to get paid to see it.”

Capturing the essence of a nation
From corporate photography to historic events, Rocky’s lens has documented the evolution of Papua New Guinea. He was there when leaders rose to prominence, capturing moments that would later adorn national currency — his photograph of Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare graces the K50 note.

His work went beyond the formal; he ventured deep into the Highlands, the islands, and bustling townships, preserving the heart and spirit of the people.

With each shot, he chronicled the changing landscape of Port Moresby. From a city of well-kept roads and modest housing in the 1970s to its present-day urban sprawl, Rocky witnessed and documented it all.

The evolution of photography
Rocky’s career spanned a transformative era in photography — from the meticulous world of slide film, where exposure errors were unforgiving, to the digital revolution, where technology made photography more accessible.

“Autofocus hadn’t been invented,” he recalls. “Half the world couldn’t focus a camera back then.” Yet, through skill and patience, he mastered the art, adapting as the industry evolved.

His assignments took him to mine sites, oil fields, and remote locations where only helicopters could reach.

“I spent many hours flying with the door off, capturing PNG from above. Looking through the camera made it all feel natural. Without it, I might have been scared.”

The man behind the camera
Despite the grandeur of his work, Rocky remains humble. A storyteller at heart, his greatest joy has been the connections he forged—whether photographing Miss PNG contestants over the years or engaging with young photographers eager to learn.

He speaks fondly of his colleagues, the friendships he built, and the country that embraced him as one of its own.

His time in Papua New Guinea was not without challenges. He encountered moments of danger, faced armed hold-ups, and saw the country grapple with law and order issues. Yet, his love for PNG never wavered.

“It’s the greatest place on earth,” he says, reflecting on his journey.

A fond farewell, but not goodbye
Now, as Rocky returns to Australia to tend to his health, he leaves behind a legacy that will live on in the countless images he captured. Papua New Guinea will always be home to him, and its people, his extended family.

“I may come back if someone brings me back,” he says with a knowing smile.

Papua New Guinea bids farewell to a legend, a visual historian who gave us the gift of memories frozen in time. His photographs are not just images; they are stories, emotions, and a testament to a life well-lived in the pursuit of beauty and truth.

Farewell, Rocky Roe. Your work will continue to inspire generations to come.

Independent Papua New Guinea journalist Malum Nalu first published this article on his blog Happenings in Papua New Guinea as part of a series leading up to PNG’s 50th anniversary this year. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Fijian newsrooms are under pressure to adapt as audiences shift away from traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and television, in favour of Facebook and other social media platforms.

Asia Foundation research showed that Fijians ranked Facebook as their third most significant source of information about covid-19 during the pandemic, surpassing newspapers and “word of mouth”, despite recognising social media as their least trusted choice.

Radio and television still exceeded Facebook, but surveys during the pandemic reveal the increasing significance of Facebook and other social media, such as Twitter, YouTube and TikTok as widely used sources of news, particularly for Fijians younger than 45.

• READ MORE: Other QUT Project journalism reports

A survey revealed that of Fiji’s 924,610 population, 551,000 were social media users in January 2023. Facebook, the country’s most popular platform, limits access to people aged 13 and older. Of those eligible in Fiji to create an account in 2023, 71 percent used Facebook.

Australian National University researcher Jope Tarai attributes the rise in social media usage in the 2010s to the 2006 coup and subsequent change in Fijian leadership, suggesting it “cultivated a culture of self-censorship”.

“The constrained political context saw the emergence of blogging as a means of disseminating restricted information that would have conventionally informed news reporting,” Tarai says.

Tarai says concerns about credibility of blogs meant this avenue was replaced by Facebook, “which was more interactive, accessible via handheld devices and instantaneous”.

Increased media freedom
With the increased media freedoms that have arisen following Fiji’s change in government at the end of 2022, newspapers and other traditional newsrooms should be poised to reassert themselves, but they face significant challenges due to the global shift in how people consume information.

As audiences migrate to newer digital platforms, newsrooms that have traditionally depended on physical newspaper sales and advertising revenue are now under increasing pressure to adapt.

Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley says news outlets are struggling to capture the attention of younger audiences through conventional formats, prompting a shift towards social media platforms to enhance audience engagement and boost traffic.

“Young people are not going to news websites or reading physical papers,” he says. “Young people are getting their news from social media.”

The University of the South Pacific’s technical editor and digital communication officer, Eliki Drugunalevu, says he has observed a growing preference among the general Fijian population for receiving news through social media as opposed to traditional outlets.

“When people refer to a certain news item that came out that day or even the previous day, they just go to their social media pages and search for that news item or even go to the social media page of that particular news outlet to read/access that story,” he says.

Drugunalevu identifies two contributors to this shift.

‘At your fingertips’
“Everything is just at your fingertips, easily accessible,” he says. “Internet charges in Fiji are affordable now so that you can pretty much be online 24/7.”

Newsrooms across Fiji are not oblivious to this shift. Editors and journalists are recalibrating their strategies to meet the demands of a digital audience.

Islands Business managing editor Samantha Magick says the abundance of readily available online content has resulted in young people refraining from paying for it.

“I think there’s a generational shift. My daughter would never pay for any news, would never buy a newspaper to start with. She would probably never think about paying for media, unless its Netflix,” she says.

However, Magick believes social media can be leveraged to fulfil evolving audience demands while offering fresh advantages to her organisation.

“Social media for us is a funnel to get people to our website or to subscribe,” she says. “Facebook is still huge in the region, not just in Fiji [and] that’s where a lot of community discussions are happening, so it’s a source as well as a platform for us.”

Magick says incorporating social media in her organisation requires her to stay more vigilant on analytics, as it significantly influences her decision-making processes.

‘Understanding content’s landing’
“There’s all that sort of analytic stuff that I feel now I have to be much more across whereas before it was just generating the content. Now it’s understanding how that content’s landing, who’s seeing it, making decisions based on that,” she says.

Fiji TV digital media specialist Edna Low says social media data analytics like engagement and click-through rates provide valuable insight into audience preferences, behaviours and demographics.

“Social media platforms often dictate what topics are trending and what content resonates with audiences, which can shape editorial decisions and coverage priorities,” she says.

Fiji TV’s director of news, current affairs and sports, Felix Chaudhary, echoes this.

“We realise the critical importance of engaging with our viewers and potential viewers via online platforms,” he says. “All our new recruits/interns have to be internet and social media savvy.”

Transitioning his organisation to a fully online model is the path forward in the digital era, Chaudhary says.

“Like the world’s biggest news services, we are looking in the next five to ten years to transitioning from traditional TV broadcast to streaming all our news and shows,” he says. “The world is already moving towards that, and we just have to follow suit or get left behind.”

As TikTok gains increasing popularity among younger Fijians and social platforms introduce initiatives to combat misinformation, it seems possible that social media could snatch the top spot for Fijian’s primary news source.

It is clear that newsrooms and journalists must either navigate the evolving digital trends and preferences of audiences or risk becoming old news.

Catrin Gardiner contributed research to this story. Georgia Brown and Catrin Gardiner were student journalists from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is published in a partnership of QUT with Asia Pacific Report, Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and The University of the South Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

New Zealand cannot sit back and see the collapse of its Fourth Estate, the director of Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, Sir Peter Gluckman, says in the foreword of a paper published today.

The paper, “If not journalists, then who?” paints a picture of an industry facing existential threats and held back by institutional underpinnings that are beyond the point where they are merely outdated.

It suggests sweeping changes to deal with the wide impacts of digital transformation and alarmingly low levels of trust in news.

• READ MORE: The full Koi Tū media report – Dr Gavin Ellis

The paper’s principal author is Koi Tū honorary research fellow Dr Gavin Ellis, who has written two books on the state of journalism: Trust Ownership and the Future of News and Complacent Nation.

He is a former newspaper editor and media studies lecturer, and also a member of Asia Pacific Media Network. The paper was developed following consultation with media leaders.

“We hope this paper helps open and expand the conversation from a narrow focus on the viability of particular players,” Sir Peter said, “to the needs of a small liberal democracy which must face many challenges in which citizens must have access to trustworthy information so they can form views and contribute appropriately to societal decision making.

“Koi Tū’s core argument, along with that of many scholars of democracy, is that democracy relies on honest information being available to all citizens. It needs to be provided by trustworthy sources and any interests associated with it must be transparently declared.

Decline in trust
“The media itself has contributed much to the decline in trust. This does not mean that there is not a critical role for opinion and advocacy — indeed democracy needs that too. It is essential that ideas are debated.

“But when reliable information is conflated with entertainment and extreme opinion, then citizens suffer and manipulated polarised outcomes are more likely.”

Dr Ellis said both news media and government were held to account in the paper for the state in which journalism in New Zealand now found itself. The mixing of fact and opinion in news stories was identified as a cause of the public’s low level of trust, and online analytics were found to have aberrated news judgement previously driven by journalistic values.

For their part, successive governments have failed to keep pace with changing needs across a very broad spectrum that has been brought about by digital transformation.

Changes suggested in the paper include voluntary merger of the two news regulators (the statutory Broadcasting Standards Authority and the industry-supported Media Council) into an independent body along lines recommended a decade ago by the Law Commission.

The new body would sit within a completely reorganised — and renamed — Broadcasting Commission, which would also be responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Classifications Office, NZ On Air and Te Māngai Pāho.

An administrative umbrella
The reconstituted commission would become the administrative umbrella for the following autonomous units:

• Media accountability (standards and complaints procedures)
• Funding allocation (direct and contestable, including creative production)
• Promotion and funding of Māori culture and language.
• Content classification (ratings and classification of film, books, video gaming)
• Review of media-related legislation and regulation, and monitoring of common law development, and
• Research and advocacy (related civic, cultural, creative issues).

The paper also favours dropping the Digital News Fair Bargaining Bill (under which media organisations would negotiate with transnational platforms) and, instead, amending the Digital Services Tax Bill, now before the House, under which the proposed levy on digital platforms would be increased to provide a ring-fenced fund to compensate media for direct and indirect use of their content.

It also suggests changes to tax structures to help sustain marginally profitable and non-profit media outlets committed to public interest journalism.

Seventeen separate Acts of Parliament affecting media are identified in the paper as outdated — “and the list is nor exhaustive”. The paper recommends a comprehensive and closely coordinated review.

The Broadcasting Act is currently under review, but the paper suggests it should not be re-evaluated in isolation from other necessary legislative reforms.

The paper advises individual media organisations to review their editorial practices in light of current trust surveys and rising news avoidance. It says these reviews should include news values, story selection and presentation.

They should also improve their journalistic transparency and relevance to audiences.

Collectively, media should adopt a common code of ethics and practice and develop campaigns to explain the role and significance of democratic/social professional journalism to the public.

Statement of principles
A statement of journalistic principles is included in the paper:

“Support for democracy sits within the DNA of New Zealand media, which have shared goals of reporting news, current affairs, and information across the broad spectrum of interests in which the people of this country collectively have a stake.

“Trained news media professionals, working within recognised standards and ethics, are the only group capable of carrying out the functions and responsibilities that have been carved out for them by a heritage stretching back 300 years.

“They must be capable of holding the powerful to account, articulating many different voices in the community, providing meeting grounds for debate, and reflecting New Zealanders to themselves in ways that contribute to social cohesion.

“They have a duty to freedom of expression, independence from influence, fairness and balance, and the pursuit of truth.”

Republished from Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Time is running out for media people and academics wanting to tell their innovative story or present research at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference in July.

Organisers say the deadline is fast approaching for registration in less than two weeks.

Many major key challenges and core problems facing Pacific media are up for discussion at the conference in Suva, Fiji, on July 4-6 hosted by The University of the South Pacific (USP).

• READ MORE: Other 2024 Pacific Media International Conference reports

“Interest in the conference is very encouraging, both from our partners and from presenters — who are academics, professional practitioners and others who work in the fields of media and society,” conference chair Associate Professor Shailendra Singh of USP told Asia Pacific Report.

“Some very interesting abstracts have been received, and we’re looking forward to more in the coming days and weeks.”

The USP is partnered for the conference by the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

“There’s a lot to discuss — not only is this the first Pacific media conference of its kind in 20 years, there has been a lot of changes in the Pacific media sector, just as in the media sectors of just about every country in the world.

Media sector shaken
“Our region hasn’t escaped the calamitous impacts of the two biggest events that have shaken the media sector — digital disruption and the covid-19 pandemic.”

Both events had posed major challenges for the news media organisations and journalists — “to the point of even being an existential threat to the news media industry as we know it”.

“This isn’t very well known or understood outside the news media industry,” Dr Singh said.

The trends needed to be examined in order to “respond appropriately”.

“That is one of the main purposes of this conference — to generate research, discussion and debate on Pacific media, and understand the problems better.”

Dr Singh said the conference was planning a stimulating line-up of guest speakers from the Asia-Pacific region.

Chief guest
Chief guest is Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica, who is also Communications and Technology Minister.

The abstracts deadline is April 5, panel proposals are due by May 5, and July 4 is the date for final full papers.

Key themes include:

• Media, Democracy, Human Rights and Governance
• Media and Geopolitics
• Digital Disruption and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Media Law and Ethics
• Media, Climate Change and Environmental Journalism
• Indigenous and Vernacular Media
• Social Cohesion, Peace-building and Conflict-prevention
• Covid-19 Pandemic and Health Reporting
• Media Entrepreneurship and Sustainability

Email abstracts to the conference chair: Dr Shailendra Singh

Full details at the conference website: www.usp.ac.fj/2024-pacific-media-conference/

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand’s media and communications minister is defending pulling out of pre-booked interviews about her portfolio, saying they would have been “boring” for the interviewers.

Last week, Media Minister Melissa Lee cancelled interviews with NZME’s Media Insider and RNZ’s Mediawatch, despite initially agreeing to do them.

It is a tumultuous time for media, with the proposed shutting of Newshub and cancellation of news and current affairs shows at TVNZ, as well as the unclear fate of legislation to make social media giants pay for the news they use.

• READ MORE: RNZ Mediawatch: NZ media facing an apocalypse now?
• Other NZ media reports

Lee is set to take a paper to cabinet soon, setting out her plans for the portfolio. She has been consulting with coalition partners before she takes the paper to cabinet committee.

Yesterday, she said that given the confidentiality of the process, there was nothing more she could say in the one-on-one interviews.

“I have actually talked about what my plans are, but not in detail. And I think talking about the same thing over and over, just seemed, like, you know . . . ”

Lee said she received advice from the prime minister’s office, but the decision to pull out was ultimately hers.

‘A lot of interviews’
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of interviews, and I couldn’t sort of elaborate more on the paper and the work that I’m actually doing until a decision has actually been made, and I felt that it would be boring for him to sit there for me to tell him, ‘No, no, I can’t really elaborate, you’re going to have to wait until the decision’s made’,” she said.

It is believed Lee was referring to either the NZ Herald’s Shayne Currie or RNZ’s Colin Peacock.

Asked whether it was up to her to decide what was boring or not, Lee repeated she had done a lot of interviews.

“I didn’t think it was fair for me to sit down with someone on a one-to-one to say the same thing over to them,” she said.

Lee said her diary had been fairly full, due to commitments with her other portfolios.

The prime minister said his office’s advice to Lee was that she may want to wait until she got feedback from the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill process, which was still going through select committee.

‘The logical time’
“Our advice from my office, as I understand it, was, ‘Look, you’re gonna have more to say after we get through the digital bargaining bill, and that’s the logical time to sit down for a long-format interview,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said.

Labour broadcasting spokesperson Willie Jackson said he believed the prime minister’s office was trying to protect Lee from scrutiny.

“There’s absolutely no doubt she’s struggling. If you look at her first response when she fronted media, she had quite a cold response,” he said.

“That’s changed, of course now she’s giving all her aroha to everyone. So they’ve been working on her, and so they should, because the media deserve better and the public deserve better.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Television New Zealand’s proposals to balance its worsening books by killing news and current affairs programmes mean New Zealanders could end up with almost no national current affairs on TV within weeks.

It is a response to digital era changes in technology, viewing and advertising — but also the consequence of political choices.

“I can see that I’ve chosen a good night to come on,” TVNZ presenter Jack Tame said mournfully on his stint as a Newstalk ZB panelist last Wednesday.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: ‘Apocalypse now – take 2’
• READ MORE: NZ media facing an apocalypse now?
• Other NZ media reports

The news that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning had just broken.

It was less than a week since Newshub’s owners had announced a plan to close it completely in mid-year and TVNZ had reported bad financial figures for the last half of 2023.

The following day — last Thursday — TVNZ’s Midday News told viewers 9 percent of TVNZ staff — 68 people in total — would go in a plan to balance the books.

“The broadcaster has told staff that its headcount is high and so are costs,” said reporter Kim Baker-Wilson starkly on TVNZ’s Midday.

On chopping block
Twenty-four hours later, it was one of the shows on the chopping block — along with late news show Tonight and TVNZ’s flagship weekly current affairs show Sunday.

“As the last of its kind — is that what we want in our media landscape . . . to have no in-depth current affairs show?” said Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo (also the host of the weekend show Marae).

Consumers investigator Fair Go — with a 47-year track record as one of TVNZ’s most popular local shows — will also be gone by the end of May under this plan.

If Newshub vanishes from rival channel Three by mid year, there will be just one national daily TV news bulletin left — TVNZ’s 1News — and no long form current affairs at all, except TVNZ’s Q+A and others funded from the public purse by NZ on Air and Te Mangai Paho.

Tellingly, weekday TVNZ shows which will carry on — Breakfast and Seven Sharp — are ones which generate income from “partner content” deals and “integrated advertising” — effectively paid-for slots within the programmes.

TVNZ had made it known cuts were coming months ago because costs were outstripping fast-falling revenue as advertisers tightened their belts or spent elsewhere.

TVNZ executives had also made it clear that reinforcing TVNZ’s digital-first strategy would be a key goal as well as just cutting costs.

Other notable cut
So the other notable service to be cut was a surprise — the youth-focused digital-native outlet Re: News.

After its launch in 2017, its young staff revived a mothballed studio and gained a reputation for hard work — and then for the quality of its work.

It won national journalism awards in the past two years and reached younger people who rarely if ever turn on a television set.

Reportedly, the staff of Re: News staff is to be halved and lose some of its leaders.

The main media workers’ union E tū said it will fight to save jobs and extend the short consultation period.

Some staff made it plain that they weren’t giving up just yet either and would present counter-proposals to save shows and jobs.

In a statement, TVNZ said the proposals “in no way relate to the immense contribution of the teams that work on those shows and the significant journalistic value they’ve provided over the years”.

Money-spinners
But some were money-spinners too.

Fair Go and Sunday still pull in big six-figure live primetime TV audiences and more views now on TVNZ+. Its marketers frequently tell the advertisers that.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell knows all about that. She was previously TVNZ’s commercial director.

So why kill off these programmes now?

Mediawatch’s requests to talk to O’Donnell and TVNZ’s executive editor of news Phil O’Sullivan were unsuccessful.

But O’Donnell did talk to Newstalk ZB on Friday night.

“I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows. And we need to find some ways to stop doing some things for us to reduce our costs,” O’Donnell told Newstalk ZB.

“TVNZ’s still investing over $40 million in news and current affairs — so we absolutely believe in the future of news and current affairs. But we have a situation right now that our operating model is more expensive than the revenue that we’re making. And we have to make some really tough, tough decisions,” she said.

“We’ll constantly be looking at things to keep the operating model in line with what our revenue is. Within the TVNZ Act it’s clear that we need to be a commercial broadcaster, We are a commercial business, so that’s the remit that we need to work on.

“Our competitors these days are not (Newstalk ZB) or Sky or Warner Brothers (Discovery) but Google and Meta. These are multi-trillion dollar organisations. Ninety cents of every dollar spent in digital news advertising is going offshore. That’s 10 cents left for the likes of NZME, TVNZ, Stuff and any of the other local broadcasters.”

Jack Tame also pointed the finger at the titans of tech on his Newstalk ZB Saturday show.

Force of digital giants ‘irrepressible’
“Ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs and local programming in a country with five million people . . .  is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off,” he told listeners.

But few countries have a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, disconnected from publicly-funded ones also doing news on TV and radio and online.

That makes TVNZ a state-owned broadcaster that serves advertisers as much as New Zealanders.

But if things had panned out differently a year ago, that wouldn’t be the case now either.

What if the public media merger had gone ahead?
A new not-for-profit public media entity incorporating RNZ and TVNZ — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM)  — was supposed to start one year ago this week.

It would have been the biggest media reform since the early 1990s.

The previous government was prepared to spend more than $400 million over four years to get it going.

Almost $20 million was spent on a programme called Strong Public Media, put in place because New Zealand’s media sector was weak.

“Ailing” was the word that the business case used, noting “increased competition from overseas players slashed the share of revenue from advertising.”

But the Labour government killed the plan before the last election, citing the cost of living crisis.

The new entity would still have needed TVNZ’s commercial revenue, but if it had gone ahead, would that mean TVNZ wouldn’t now be sacrificing news shows and journalists?

“Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change,” Tracey Martin — the chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running — told Mediawatch.

“I don’t have any problem believing that (TVNZ) would have had to change what they were delivering. But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality . . . was not the major driver (of ANZPM),” Martin said.

“That was where we started from. If Armageddon happens — and all other New Zealand media can no longer exist — you have to be there as the Fourth Estate — to make sure that New Zealanders have a place to go to for truth and trust.”

What were the assumptions about the advertising revenue TVNZ would have been able to pull in?

“[TVNZ] was telling us that it wouldn’t be as bad as we believed it would be. TVNZ modeling was not as dramatic as our modeling. We were happy to accept that [because] our modeling gave us a particular window by which to change the ecosystem in which New Zealand media could survive to try and stabilise,” Martin told Mediawatch.

The business case document tracked TVNZ revenue and expenses from 2012 until 2020 — the start of the planning process for the new entity.

By 2020, a sharp rise in costs already exceeded revenue which was above $300 million.

And as we now know, TVNZ revenue has fallen further and more quickly since then.

“We were predicting linear TV revenue was going to continue to drop substantially and relatively quickly — and they were not going to be able to switch their advertising revenue at the same capacity to digital,” Martin said.

“They had more confidence than we did,” she said.

The ANZPM legislation estimated it as a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.

TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”.

“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better,” the chief executive at the time Simon Power told Mediawatch in 2023.

“It was a very rosy picture they painted. They had a mandate to be a commercial business that had to give confidence to the advertisers and the rest of New Zealand but they were very confident two years ago that this wouldn’t happen,” she said.

In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described the merger as “ideological and insane” and “a solution looking for a problem”.

He wasn’t alone.

But if that was based on TVNZ’s bullish assessments of its own revenue-raising capacity — or a disregard of a probable downturn ahead, was that a big mistake?

“I won’t comment for today’s government, but statements being made in the last couple of days about people getting their news from somewhere else; truth and trust has dropped off; linear has got to be transferred into the digital environment . . . none of those things are new comments,” Martin told Mediawatch.

“They’re all in the documentation that we placed into the public domain — and I asked the special permission, as the chair of the ANZPM group, to brief spokespersons for broadcasting of the Greens, Act and National to try and make sure that everybody has as much and as much information as we could give them,” she said.

Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee said this week she was working on proposals to help the media to take to cabinet.

“I don’t give advice to the minister, but I would advise officials to go back and pull out the business case and paperwork for ANZPM — and to look at the submissions and the number of people who supported the concept, but had concerns about particular areas,” Tracey Martin told Mediawatch.

“Don’t let perfection get in the way of action.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Newshub, one of the key media companies in Aotearoa New Zealand, is to close its newsroom on June 30, reports RNZ News.

Staff were told of the closure at an emergency meeting today.

Newshub is owned by US-based global entertainment giant Warner Bros Discovery which also owns Eden, Rush, HGTV and Bravo.

• READ MORE: Other Newshub reports

In 2020, it took over the New Zealand channel’s assets which had been then part of Mediaworks.

Staff were called to a meeting at Newshub at 11am, RNZ News reported on its live news feed.

They were told that the US conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, owners of Newshub, was commencing consultation on a restructuring of its free-to-air business

This included the closure of all news operations by its Newshub operation

All local programming would be made only through local funding bodies and partners.

James Gibbons, president of Asia Pacific for Warner Bros Discovery, said it was a combination of negative events in NZ and around the world. The economic downturn had been severe and there was no long hope for a bounce back

Revenue has ‘disappeared quickly’
“Advertising revenue in New Zealand has disappeared far more quickly than our ability to manage this reduction, and to drive the business to profitability,” he said.

He said the restructuring would focus on it being a digital business

ThreeNow, its digital platform, would be the focus and could run local shows

All news production would stop on June 30.

The consultation process runs until mid-March. A final decision is expected early April.

“Deeply shocked’
Interviewed on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme, a former head of Newshub, Mark Jennings, said he was deeply shocked by the move.

Other media personalities also reacted with stunned disbelief. Rival TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver said: “Thinking of my friends and colleagues from Newshub.

“So many super talented wonderful people. Its a terrible day for our industry that Newshub [will] close by June, we will be all the much poorer for it. Much aroha to you all.”

Newshub has broken some important Pacific stories over the years.

Jennings told RNZ a cut back and trimming of shows would have been expected — but not on this scale.

“I’m really deeply frankly shocked by it,” said Jennings, now co-founder and editor of Newsroom independent digital media group.

He said he expected all shows to go, including AM Show and investigative journalist Patrick Gower’s show.

Company ‘had no strategy’
“I think governments will be pretty upset and annoyed about this, to be honest.”

“Unless they have been kept in the loop because we’re going to see a major drop in diversity.

“Newshub’s newsroom has been, maybe not so much in recent times, but certainly in the past, a very strong and vibrant player in the market and very important one for this country and again as [RNZ Mediawatch presenter] Colin [Peacock] points out, who is going to keep TVNZ’s news honest now?

“I think this is a major blow to media diversity in this country.”

“First of all, Discovery and then Warner Bros Discovery, this has been an absolute shocker of entry to this market by them. They came in with what I could was . . . no, I couldn’t see a strategy in it and in the time they owned this company, there has been no strategy and that’s really disappointing.

“If this had gone to a better owner, they would have taken steps way sooner and maybe we wouldn’t be losing one of the country’s most valued news services.”

Loss of $100m over three years
Jennings said his understanding was the company had lost $100 million in the past three years, which was “really significant”.

“I wonder if it had been a New Zealand owner, whether the government might have taken a different view around this, but I guess because it’s owned by a huge American, multi-national conglomerate, they would’ve been reluctant to intervene in any way.”

He said Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee, a former journalist who ran the Asia Down Under programme for many years, faced serious questions now.

“It’ll be her first big test really, I guess, in that portfolio.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Pacific Media Network (PMN) has continued its transition into the “Moanaverse” with a new digital home for its news and media

PMN said in a statement it was pleased to reveal its new website that “ensures the future of Pacific storytelling, radio and news media continues to connect with its growing online audience”.

Pacific communities were at the heart of the new website www.pmn.co.nz, said CEO Don Mann.

• READ MORE: Other PMN reports at Asia Pacific Report
• Go to the new PMN website

“PMN’s new digital platform is all about serving the Pacific community. The stories we share deserve an online space that upholds the mana and respect of Pacific people,” he said.

“We have an obligation to provide a digital home that best serves the interests of the Pacific community.”

The redesigned site makes it easier to discover its brands — Niu FM, 531pi, PMN News — and its 10 language programmes all in one place.

Included in the refresh was a branding approach that seeks to connect and be relevant with an increasingly digitally savvy Pacific youth audience.

The project was completed within a year and was led by web agency Daylight Group, the team behind award winning site The Spinoff.

“We liken our online space to a digital version of a kupega or upega: a net that seeks to contain Pacific knowledge that sustains us and to share this koloa across the Moanaverse,” Mann said.

The main colour tapa black is an intentional neutral backdrop that “holds the vibrancy of our islands”.

The site is said by PMN to be mobile-friendly, optimising the display for any screen size so content can be accessed “on the go”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

News media in Indonesia act as “government loudspeakers” by advancing a one-sided narrative regarding the conflict in West Papua, a new study reveals.

The human rights abuses against indigenous Papuans, who have been under military occupation of the Indonesian armed forces since 1962-63 and their struggle for independence from Jakarta, remains a sticking point for the Indonesian government in the region.

However, the Indonesian national media provides an unfair coverage on the plight of the West Papuans by only amplifying the state’s narrative, according to research published in Pacific Journalism Review.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Journalism Review research reports
• Other West Papua reports

The paper, which looks at how six dominant news media organisations in Indonesia report on the Free West Papua movement, found that they “tend to be only a ‘loudspeaker’ for the government” by using mainly statements issued by state officials when reporting about West Papua.

The findings come from in-depth interviews that were conducted between 2021 and 2022 with six informants and journalists who have a history of writing on West Papua in the last five years.

Additionally, the research analysed over 270 news items relating to West Papua issues that appeared in the six Indonesian online media — Okezone, Detik, Kompas.com, Tribunnews, CNN Indonesia and Tirto — in the week after the Indonesian government formally labelled the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (TPNPB-OPM) as a terrorist group in April 2021.

“The Indonesian media does not use a balanced frame, for example, in terms of explaining why and how acts of violence are chosen on the path to fight for West Papuan independence,” the author of the research from Universitas Padjadjaran, Justito Adipresto, writes.

‘Prolonging human rights violations’
Non-state actors have acknowledged that “labelling West Papuan separatist groups as terrorist will not only not solve the problem, but that it also has the potential to prolong the human rights violations that have been taking place in West Papua,” Adipresto says.

While some point to the economic disparities as a starting point to the West Papua conflict, the research shows that the media fall significantly short of providing a nuanced coverage by ignoring the “haunting track record of violence and militarism, ethnicity and racism” in their reports.

“The imbalance of representation that occurs in relation to reporting on West Papua cannot be separated from Indonesia’s treatment of ethnic groups and the region of West Papua,” Adipresto says.

He says the government’s labelling of the Free West Papua movement has “severe implications for the current and future situation and conflict in West Papua”.

“Media in Indonesia is under the shadow of the state,” he said adding that reporting on West Papua lacks “explanation and sufficient context”.

He said Indonesian media were “very concerned about the readers clicks”, and therefore on the quantity of reports rather than the quality.

“The concentration of reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, also leads to reporting from reporters not located in or never having visited West Papua, potentially reducing empathy and understanding of human rights or economic aspects in their reporting.

‘Quality, ethics of journalists are an issue’
“The quality and ethics of journalists are an issue in reporting on West Papua, considering that journalists do not tend to cover the issue of labelling a ‘terrorist’ comprehensively.”

The research shows Indonesian media place greater importance on comments from government officials, often ignoring or not providing space for other voices, in particular the West Papuan community.

“It is necessary to develop a more systematic and consolidated strategy for the national media to cover West Papua better,” the author concludes.

The full paper, titled “Government loudspeakers: How Indonesian media amplifies the state’s narrative towards the Free West Papua movement”, can be found at Pacific Journalism Review, published by the Asia Pacific Media Network. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

The comedians on 7 Days had a few laughs at RNZ’s expense against a backdrop of the Kremlin on TV Three this week.

“A Radio New Zealand digital journalist has been stood down after it emerged they’d been editing news stories on the broadcaster’s website to give them a pro-Russian slant, which is kind of disgusting,” host Jeremy Corbett said.

“You’d never get infiltration like that on 7 Days. Our security is too strong. Strong like a bear. Strong like the glorious Russian state and its leader Putin,” he said.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: The RNZ editing fallout
• RNZ appoints panel to investigate inappropriate editing of online stories
• ‘I think it’s really important that we preserve the editorial independence of an institution like RNZ’ – PM Chris Hipkins
• Prime Minister responds to questions on RNZ investigation into pro-Russian editing
• Other RNZ inquiry reports

“I love this Russian strategy: ‘First, we take New Zealand’s fourth best and fourth most popular news site — then the world!” said Melanie Bracewell, who said she had not kept up with the news.

Just a joke, obviously, but this week some people have been asking if Kremlin campaigns played a role in the inappropriate editing of online world news.

It was on June 9 that the revelation of it kicked off a media frenzy about propaganda, misinformation, Russia, Ukraine, truth, trust and editorial standards that has been no laughing matter at RNZ.

The story went up a notch last weekend when TVNZ’s Thomas Mead revealed Ukrainian New Zealander Michael Lidski — along with 20 others — had complained about a story written by the journalist in May 2022, which RNZ had re-edited on the day to add alternative perspectives after prompting from an RNZ journalist who considered it sub-standard.

The next day on RNZ’s Checkpoint, presenter Lisa Owen said the suspended RNZ web journalist had told her he edited reports “in that way for five years” — and nobody had ever queried it or told him to stop.

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson, who is also editor-in-chief, then told Checkpoint he did not consider what he had called “pro-Kremlin garbage” a resignation-worthy issue.

“I think this is a time for us actually working together to fix the problem,” he said.

RNZ had already begun taking out the trash in public by listing the corrupted (and now corrected) stories on the RNZ.co.nz homepage as they are discovered.

Thompson said the problem was “confined to a small area of what RNZ does” but by the following day,  RNZ found six more stories — supplied originally by the reputable news agency Reuters — had also been edited in terms more favourable to the ruling regimes.

“RNZ has come out with a statement that said: ‘In our defence, we didn’t actually realise anyone was reading our stories’,” said 7 Days’ Jeremy Corbett.

That was just a gag — but it did actually explain just how it took so long for the dodgy edits to come to light and become newsworthy.

Where the problem lay
Last Wednesday’s cartoon in the Stuff papers — featuring an RNZ radio newsreader with a Pinocchio-length nose didn’t raise any laughs there either — because none of the slanted stories in question ever went out in the news on the air.

They were only to be found online — and this was a significant distinction as it turned out, because the checks and balances are not quite the same or made by the same staff.

“In radio, a reporter writes a story and sends it to a sub-editor who will then check it. And then a news reader has to read it so there’s a couple of stages. Maybe even a chief reporter would have checked it as well,” Corin Dann told RNZ Morning Report listeners last Monday.

“What I’m trying to establish is what sort of checks and balances were there to ensure that that world story was properly vetted,” he said.

That question — and others — will now be asked by the external experts appointed this week to run the rule of RNZ’s online publishing procedures for a review that will be made public.

On Thursday a former RNZer Brent Edwards made a similar point in the National Business Review where he’ is now the political editor.

“For a couple of years, I was the director of news gathering. I had a large responsibility for RNZ’s news coverage but technically I had no responsibility whatsoever for what went on the web,” he said.

“Done properly the RNZ review panel could do all news media a favour by providing a template for how online news should be curated. It should reinforce the importance of quality, ethical journalism,” Edwards added.

His NBR colleague Dita di Boni said “there but for the grace of God go other outlets” which have “gone digital” in news.

“I worked at TVNZ and there was a rush to digital as well with lots of resources going in but little oversight from the main newsroom.”

Calls for political action
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has made it clear he doesn’t want the government involved in RNZ’s editorial affairs.

David Seymour of the ACT party wanted an inquiry — and NZ First leader Winston Peters called for a Royal Commission into the media bias and manipulation.

Former National MP Nathan Guy told Newshub Nation this weekend “heads need to roll” at RNZ.

“If I was the broadcasting minister, I would want the chair in my office and to hold RNZ to account. I want timeframes. I want accountability because we just can’t afford to have our public broadcaster tell unfortunate mistruths to the public,” he said.

In the same discussion, Newsroom’s co-editor Mark Jennings reminded Guy that RNZ’s low-budget digital news transition happened under his National-led government which froze RNZ’s funding for almost a decade.

“This is what happens when you underfund an organisation for so long,” he said.

Jennings also said “trust in RNZ has been hammered by this” — and criticised RNZ chairman Dr Jim Mather for declining to be interviewed on Newshub Nation.

Earlier — under the headline Media shooting itself in the foot — Jennings said surveys have picked up a decline and trust and news media here.

“And the road back for the media just had a major speed bump,” he concluded.

How deep is the damage to trust?

While the breach of editorial standards is clear, has there been an over-reaction to what may be the actions of just one employee, which took years to come to light?

Last week the think-tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at Auckland University hosted a timely “disinformation and media manipulation” workshop attended by executives and editors from most major media outlets.

It was arranged long before RNZs problems arose — but those ended up dominating discussion on this theme.

Among the participants was media consultant and commentator Peter Bale, who has previously worked overseas for Reuters, as well as The Financial Times and CNN.

“I really feel for RNZ in this, for the chief executive and everybody else there who does generally a great job. The issue of trust here is in this person’s relationship with their employer and their relationship with the facts.”

Bale is also the newsroom initiative leader at the International News Media Association, which promotes best practice in news and journalism publishing.

The exposure of the “inappropriate editing” undetected for so long has created the impression a lot of content is published online with no checking. That is sometimes the case when speed is a priority, but the vast majority of stuff does go past at least two eyes before publication.

“I think it is true also that editing has been diminished as a skill. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a failure of editing here but a failure of this person’s understanding of what their job is,” Bale told Mediawatch.

“You shouldn’t necessarily need to have a second or third pair of eyes when processing a Reuters story that’s already gone through multiple editors. The critical issue for RNZ is whether they took the initial complaints seriously enough,” he said.

‘Pro-Kremlin garbage’?

There have been many reports in recent years about Russia seeding misinformation and disinformation abroad.

Last Tuesday, security and technology consultant Paul Buchanan told Morning Report that RNZ should be better prepared for authoritarian states seeking to mess with its news.

“This incident that prompted this investigation may or may not be just one individual who has certain opinions about the war between Russia and Ukraine. But it is possible that . . . stories were manipulated from abroad,” he said.

Back in March the acting Director-General of the SIS told Parliament: “States are trying, in a coercive disruptive and a covert way, to influence the behaviors of people in New Zealand and influencing their decision making”.

John Mackey named no nations at the time, but his GCSB counterpart Andrew Hampton told MPs research had shown Russia was the source of misinformation many Kiwis were consuming.

Is it really likely the Kremlin or its proxies are pushing propaganda into the news here? And if so, to what end?

“I think there’s been a little bit of ‘too florid’ language used about this. This person has inserted what are in some people’s views genuine talking points from those who . . . want to have expressed what the Russian view is. But it was very ham-fisted,” said Bale.

“There are ways to do this. You could have inserted the Russian perspective to highlight the fact that there is a different view about things like the Orange Revolution when the pro-Kremlin leader in Kyiv was overthrown,” he said.

Not necessarily ‘propaganda’
“I don’t think it is necessarily ‘Kremlin propaganda’ as it’s been described. It was just a misguided attempt to bring another perspective, I suspect, but it still represents a tremendous breach of trust,” he said.

“I write a weekly newsletter for The Spinoff about international news, and I try sometimes to show . . . there are other perspectives on these stories. Those things are legitimate to address — but not just surreptitiously squeeze into a story in some sort of perceived balance.

“I don’t think in this particular case that it is to do with the spread of disinformation or misinformation by Russia. I think this is a different set of problems. But I agree (there’s a) threat from the kind of chaos-driving techniques that Russia is particularly brilliant at. They’re very skilled at twisting stories . . . and I think we need to be ready for it,” he said.

The guest speaker at that Koi Tū event last Wednesday was Dr Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein center on Media and Politics at Harvard University in the US, where she researches and tracks the sources of misrepresentation and misinformation in the media, and the impact they have on public trust in media — and also how media can prepare for it.

At the point where 15 supplied news stories had been found to be “inappropriately edited” by RNZ, she took to Twitter to say: “This is wild. Fake news has reached new heights.”

Set against what we’ve seen in US politics — and about Russia and Ukraine — is it really that bad?

“Usually what you see is the spoofing of a website or a URL in order to look like you’re a certain outlet and distribute disinformation that way. It’s very unlikely that someone would go in and work a job and be editing articles without proper oversight,” said Donovan  — who is also the co-author of recently published book, Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy. 

“I think when it comes to one country, wanting to insert their views into another country — even though New Zealand is very small — it does track that this would be a way to influence a large group of people.

“But I don’t think if any of us know the degree to which this could be an international operation or not,” she told Mediawatch.

“What you learn is that their pattern is that they happen over and over and over again until a news agency or platform company figures out a mitigation tactic, whether it’s removing that link from search or writing critical press or debunking those stories.

“When I think about the fallout of it . . . using the legitimacy of RNZ in a parasitical kind of way and that legitimacy to spread propaganda is one of the most important pieces of this puzzle that we would need to explore more,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

At a time when the West has weaponised human rights, the United Nations body that promotes freedom of expression needs to rethink what it means.

Every year UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation) marks World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) on May 3, with a particular theme and this year’s was its 30th edition.

UNESCO has mainly provided a platform through their WPFD to civil society groups that are funded by Western agencies to shape the free speech agenda.

• READ MORE: Other media freedom reports in the Pacific

With many countries in the Global South seeing these groups involved in so-called “colour revolutions” as a security threat, it is time UNESCO paid some attention to the views of its member states who are not of the Western alliance.

This year’s theme was “Shaping of Future Rights: Freedom of Expression as a Driver of all other human rights”.

UNESCO gave four special briefs in their website for campaign action on the day.

First of which is the “misuse” of the judicial system to attack freedom of expression.

Focuses on defamation
It focuses on the use of criminal defamation to silence journalists, but no mention at all about how the UK and US judicial systems are being used to silence Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

Yonden Lhatoo, the chief news editor of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post in a recent videolog made a powerful indictment regarding the Assange case.

“There is no limit to the insufferable hypocrisy of these gangsters in glass houses,” he said referring to the US, UK and Australian government action against Assange.

Safety of foreign journalists and those covering protests are two other issues, while the fourth UNESCO brief is about journalism and whistleblowing.

The 16-page UNESCO brief on whistleblowing talks about the new electronic means of leaks to media and publishing of such information.

It mentions “Pub/Leaks” and “Latamleaks” in Latin America but no mention of Wikileaks.

It also argues that whistleblowers and publishers must have guarantees of protection and that their actions do not lead to negative consequences, such as financial sanctions, job dismissals, undermining their family members or circles of friends, or threats of arbitrary arrest.

US views Assange as ‘hacker’
But no mention whatsoever about Assange’s case including Western financial institutions blocking donations to Wikileaks.

The document seems to distance itself completely from this case because the US considers Assange a computer hacker not a journalist.

The brief talks about the benefits to society from whistleblowers that “allow people to get information and evidence of acts of corruption, human rights violations, or other matters of unquestionable public interest” but no direct reference to war crimes, that Wikileaks exposed through whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Unfortunately, today, it is okay to talk about war crimes if the Russians are doing it but not when the Americans, NATO or Australians are involved.

In June 2019, the Australian Federal Police raided the newsroom of Australia’s national broadcaster ABC after it exposed Australian forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan.

They took away the laptops of some journalists in an attempt to trace the whistleblowers describing the action as a “national security” operation.

Today, human rights arguments have lost credibility because of these double standards.

China’s human rights agenda
Thus, it is interesting to note how China is now pushing a new human rights agenda via the United Nations.

In July 2021, China succeeded in getting a resolution adopted at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council on development rights.

It affirmed that the eventual eradication of extreme poverty must remain a high priority for the international community and that international cooperation for sustainable development has an essential role in shaping our shared future.

The resolution was adopted by 31 votes to 14 against.

Interestingly, those voting against were 12 European countries plus Japan and South Korea.

Joining China in voting for it were Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Indonesia, Philippines and Fiji, plus several African and Latin American countries.

The vote itself gives a good indication of the new trends in the human rights agenda promoted by the Global South.

Issue of free speech
This brings us to the question of where freedom of speech stands in this human rights agenda.

Human rights according to this agenda are what is prescribed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Providing clean water and sanitation to the people, a good education, developing and nurturing sustainable systems of agriculture to provide food security to people, protecting the environment and protecting communities from the impacts of climatic change, empowering women, providing proper housing and healthcare to people, and so forth.

Governments should be held accountable to provide these rights to people, but that cannot be achieved by the media always accusing governments of corruption, or people coming out to the streets shouting slogans or blocking roads or occupying government buildings.

Reporters need to go out to communities, talk to the people and find out how they live, what is lacking and how they think these services could be provided by governments.

Journalists could even become facilitators of a dialogue between the people and the government.

Marvellous concept on paper
Human rights is a marvellous concept on paper, but its practice is today immersed in double standards and hypocrisy.

Media has been a party to this.

In 2016-17, I was part of a team at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to develop a curriculum to train Asian journalists in what we call “mindful communication for sustainable development”.

It was funded by UNESCO, and we used Asian philosophical concepts in designing the curriculum, to encourage journalists to have a compassionate mindset in reporting grassroots development issues from the peoples’ perspective.

We want to develop a new generation of communicators, who would not demand rights and create conflicts, but work with all stakeholders, including governments, to help achieve the SDGs in a cooperative manner rather than confrontation.

It is time that UNESCO listened to the Global South and rethinks why we need to have freedom of speech and for what purpose.

Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka-born journalist, broadcaster and international communications specialist. He is currently a consultant to the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific. He is also the former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) in Singapore. This article was first published in The Fiji Times on 3 May 2023 and is republished under content sharing agreement between Asia Pacific Report, USP Journalism and The Fiji Times.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

Journalist, author and media academic David Robie has launched an independent news and current affairs website to complement his long-established Asia Pacific Report.

While Asia Pacific Report will continue to cover regional affairs, the new website — dubbed Café Pacific, the same name as his blog which is being absorbed into the new venture — will focus on more in-depth reports and make available on open access a range of books and articles previously hidden behind paywalls.

Café Pacific will be operated on a Creative Commons licence basis as is APR.

• READ MORE: Other reports from the author/publisher
• Café Pacific website

Dr Robie, formerly founding director of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre and a professor of Pacific journalism, described the website project as “innovative”.

The about page says: “Café Pacific : Media freedom and transparency is the Asia-Pacific news articles archive and website of journalist and author David Robie, published with the support of Multimedia Investments Ltd in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report, EveningReport.nz and the Asia Pacific Media Network, and contributing colleagues, academics and freelancers.”

“There is a real need for an outlet such as this — specialist Asia-Pacific websites are rare,” says Dr Robie.

“It will be a rather eclectic website, but will focus on many of the critical issues that are either ignored in mainstream media or underplayed — such as climate justice, decolonisation in ‘French’ Polynesia and Kanaky New Caledonia, digital divide, education equity, environmental integrity, human rights, media freedom, podcasts, sustainable development and the crisis in West Papua.”

Recent scoops
Among recent scoops on the website were publication of the detailed “what we told the French Prime Minister” document of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) and several exclusive West Papua reports.

The website will also be a repository for Dr Robie’s past journalism, books and academic research, making publications more publicly accessible.

Dr Robie praised EveningReport.nz and Multimedia Investments managing director Selwyn Manning for his “perceptive” role in designing and developing the website.

“Selwyn has a long track record of supporting student and alternative journalism as witnessed with first Pacific Scoop and then Asia Pacific Report. And now we see it again with Café Pacific.”

Selwyn Manning and security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan will resume their popular weekly podcasts, “A View From Afar”, about current issues on EveningReport.nz and social media outlets tomorrow at noon.

• The promo for Thursday’s programme
• Listen to the podcasts
• Watch the podcasts
• Midday Thursdays (NZT)
• 8pm Wednesdays (EDT)
• Past episodes

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

On World Press Freedom Day the world remembers the importance of a free and independent media as the cornerstone of thriving and healthy democracies.

For our developing and developed Pacific nations of the Blue Continent, the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day is also an opportunity to acknowledge the role of journalists whose first rule is to uphold the news creed — to tell the truth without fear or favour, to serve the public interest, to hold power to account.

For our Forum leaders, the primacy and importance of independent reporting and communication of Forum decisions goes back to our beginnings.

One of the key decisions in those early years more than five decades ago was the mandate to communicate, recognising the benefits of sharing information about the leaders meetings and decisions.

I am pleased to note our strong relationship with Pacific media continues to this day.

Across our key regional leader meetings, we actively partner with and brief news journalists to ensure quality reporting of the issues shaping our world. We recognise that editorial independence and quality journalism rely on strong access to facts, information, and certainty.

The watchdog and public interest role of the press as the Fourth Estate complementing the other three — the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, has never been more important to public accountability, transparency, and good governance.

Together, they ensure engaged, active, and informed Pacific citizens. This level of empowerment sets the basis for a Pacific future that is safe, secure, and peaceful.

From the Biketawa Declaration on Good Governance to the Boe Declaration on Regional Security and the Teieniwa Vision on Anti-Corruption, our leaders are demonstrating their understanding that independent and free media are part of the work we do.

The digital age, amid times of covid and climate crisis, has also brought a new layer of transformative disruption and opportunity.

A free, thriving, and diverse Pacific press is a key partner to our Blue Pacific strategy to 2050. Today we can all celebrate the independence and impact of quality news journalism led by news and media practitioners across the Pacific and globally.

Despite often harsh work conditions, they continue a vocation for a news agenda of truth, transparency, and accountability.

The global rights-based theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day is a timely recognition that in serving the public interest, the journalist is often the implementing arm of the people’s right to know. Independent truth telling and investigation is not an easy or popular calling.

World Press Freedom Day allows us to reiterate the safety and the rights of journalists, particularly women in journalism.

Without this ability to do their work without fear or favour, we cannot count on the facts that matter, that stand out in a world of fake news, misinformation, and noise.

Today, I join those who pay tribute to all journalists who frame the stories of our times in the values of truth, balance, and our collective right to know. Vinaka vakalevu, thank you.

PIF Secretary-General Henry Puna gave this message for the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May 2023. It has been republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Highly respected and convivial Koroi Hawkins has become RNZ Pacific’s first Melanesian editor after arriving in New Zealand in 2010 and says he is “truly humbled” after nearly a decade at RNZ.

“It is a great honour. I am a Pacific journalist from the school of hardknocks so it was already a massive achievement just making it into the RNZ Pacific team,” Hawkins tells Asia Pacific Report.

“Never in a million years did I imagine I could ever become the editor when I arrived here. It is testament to all of the support and mentoring I have received here at RNZ Pacific that I was even confident to put my hand up,” he says humbly.

• READ MORE: Pacific correspondent Koroi Hawkins
• Koroi Hawkins’ RNZ profile
• Other Koroi Hawkins reports

But what made RNZ Pacific’s manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor choose Hawkins for the role of editor in the first place?

The deciding factor was RNZ Pacific’s flagship daily current affairs programme Pacific Waves that delves into issues of Pacific peoples wherever they are in the world, and airs proudly and loudly across Pacific at 8pm (NZT) every weeknight, she says.

“Koroi’s time as producer and presenter of Pacific Waves has allowed him to develop his leadership and mentoring skills within the team, in particular with some of our younger reporters who had never worked in radio,” Tuilaepa-Taylor said.

“There’s respect and trust in his leadership and skills by the team, and that’s when we knew that he was the right candidate for the role. He had the right cultural attributes,” she said.

Science aspirations
However, Tuilaepa-Taylor was not the manager who hired Hawkins in the first place. Instead, it was former RNZ Pacific manager Linden Clark and ex-news editor Walter Zweifel who brought him to RNZ Pacific.

Ironically, Hawkins never wanted to be journalist originally — he studied science in high school.

“I never aspired to be a journalist. I was a science student through high school and wanted to be a marine biologist,” he said.

“But, I had a keen love for storytelling thanks to my mum Effie Hawkins, who is a retired early childhood teacher and who would always read me books.

“When I was old enough she encouraged me to read and to write letters to our family members overseas.

“I think that is when I realised as a working journalist that we could give a voice to the voiceless and hold those in power to account. That is when I found my passion for the craft,” says Hawkins.

Hawkins started working as a journalist in the Solomon Islands under the tutelage and guidance of Solomon’s legendary journalist Dorothy Wickham.

Start-up TV in Honiara
“I started as a news presenter for local start-up TV outfit One Television Solomon Islands under Dorothy Wickham.

“I was on holiday in Malaita with my wife and our newly born daughter Janelle and I wrote a small sport story on a futsal tournament at Aligegeo which was well received by the news department — and the rest is history they say.

He developed photography and videography skills for which is renowned for whenever on assignment covering events in the Pacific.

“I started with RNZ Pacific as an intermediate reporter. I brought with me photography and videography skills which I mostly used on reporting assignments in the region,” he says matter-of-factly as if it were nothing.

However, that wasn’t the only skill he mastered. When I worked with him he was adept and very helpful when doing digital web stories, knowing where the photo goes and how to web edit.

He was also very helpful to the younger reporters when it came to mastering audio for radio.

The one thing you notice about Hawkins when you meet him is a sense of calming presence about him when all else would be chaos around. That was the case in 2018 covering the Fiji elections, especially when covering about-to-become PM Sitiveni Rabuka’s court case just two days before the election.

‘Calmness from my mother’
“My calmness comes from my mother, she was always calm in a crisis and it also comes from operating in our Pacific newsroom situations where when things go wrong they are literally operation halting things like cyclones, power cuts and equipment breakdowns, riots, and coups,” he says.

“Things over which we have no control and just have to work around.”

“By comparison, the crises in New Zealand newsrooms are relatively manageable. I think also it must be an age thing, as I grow older both at home and at work I find myself always seeing solutions rather seeing obstacles.

“Some of it just comes with experience and I am always open to learning new things and trying new ways of doing things better than we did in the past.”

He rates his career highlight was when while calling his mum and dad in the Solomon Islands they told him they had heard him on air.

“I think the two main highlights in my career is calling my mum and dad in Munda and them telling me they heard me on the radio.

“And bringing my family out here to New Zealand to join me. They are my biggest fans and harshest critics and the reason I get up each day and head out the door,” Hawkins says.

Cyclone Pam, Papua assignments toughest
By far the most difficult assignments he has done was covering Cyclone Pam in 2015 as well as travelling to West Papua with RNZ Pacific’s legendary Johnny Blades.

“Cyclone Pam in 2015 was the most difficult in terms of length of time on the ground in challenging circumstances,” he says.

And Tuilaepa-Taylor agrees with him .

“His coverage of tropical cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, and also coverage of the Fiji elections with Sally Round and Kelvin Anthony — these are the things that come to my mind,” says Tuilaepa-Taylor.

Then there was the harrowing trip he went on to Jayapura in “untamed” West Papua in 2015 with Johnny Blades.

“Shooting video for Johnny Blades on a trip to West Papua was the most difficult in terms of operating in a hostile environment,” he said

“It was harrowing in the sense that you were being watched (by the Indonesian authorities) who were surveillng you.

‘Unnerving being watched’
“There was no harassment but it was very unnerving knowing you were being watched,” he says.

“But I would say reporting on political situations in the region like the most recent election in Fiji are the most challenging journalistically in terms of getting the facts and local context correct,” Hawkins says.

While in contrast he found the gentle and joyous Pacific creativity a very enjoyable experience.

“Our cultural festivals like the Festival of Pacific Arts or even Pasifika in Auckland and Wellington are the most enjoyable assignments for me seeing our Pacific cultures and languages celebrated gives me so much pride and hope for the future which my own children will inherit long after I am gone.”

It is that very depth of experience he brings to the vastness of his role as editor.

“I think the most important thing I bring to the role is my experience I have worked my way up the ladder form the bottom in Pacific and New Zealand newsrooms.

“I have affinity to a few Pacific cultures through my own heritage, my partner Margret’s heritage and through our extended families,” Hawkins says.

Consultative style
He seeks in his editorial stye to be fair and yet firm, but not authoritative but rather being consultative.

“ I believe we are stronger if everyone in the team contributes and I like to gather as much information and input as possible from my team before making decisions,” Hawkins said.

“Because I literally started from the bottom, I am very empathetic to people’s journeys and believe that where someone is now is not where they will be in a few years’ time.

“A lot of people took a chance on me and invested in me and gave me opportunities that helped me advance in my own career and I aspire to pay that forward,” Hawkins says.

With his time likely to be in high demand he will not continue doing Pacific Waves.

“No I will not be. The future of this role is still being decided. I am excited for whoever will be stepping into this role as it has been a transformative one for me.

“The programme has a huge regional and international following and we hope to continue building on the great work that was started by current and former RNZ Pacific colleagues.

And, does he hail from the Solomon Islands or elsewhere?

“That’s probably a whole article in itself,” he said.

“In short, I was born in Nadi to a Fijian father and a part-Fijian part-Solomon Islands mother. I was adopted when I was three-weeks-old by my great aunt, who I call my mum, and who raised me in Honiara, Australia and Muna in the Western Solomons in that order.

“I speak English, Roviana and Pidgin and understand very basic Fijian. Although I am keen to learn more.

Fond Aotearoa memories
He speaks fondly of Aotearoa and he remembers the first time he came to the country.

“The first time I ever came to New Zealand was actually in 2010, thanks to Professor David Robie and the AUT Pacific Media Centre.

“I presented on the ethnic crisis in Solomon Islands and was accompanied by my partner Margret little did we know then that our future lay in Aotearoa. I first came to New Zealand to work for RNZ International in 2014,” he said.

The knowledge he intends to impart to his younger journalists to help them in the search for knowledge and experience comes from having been there and done that.

“I think sharing my experiences and being accessible has been well received so far. I am a living breathing example of how far you can come in this field if you apply yourself,” Hawkins says.

“Just letting them know I am in their corner I think is important. Every chance I get I love to introduce and connect people and not just within RNZ Pacific but in the wider region.

“It gives me great joy to see someone succeed of the back of an introduction or a contact reference.

“This work is hard but know we are all in it together makes it a little more bearable. It really is about the person next to you,” he says.

Sri Krishnamuthi is an independent journalist, former editor of the Pacific Media Watch project at the Pacific Media Centre and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

New Zealand pay-TV company Sky TV plans to cut some jobs in the country as it outsources roles to India and the Philippines, reports the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union.

Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney said the proposal would result in some of Sky’s work in technology and content operations being outsourced to experienced international provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to TVNZ’s 1News.

TCS is an India-based information technology services and consulting company.

In customer care, Sky TV said it would adopt a hybrid model, with one third of its team based in New Zealand and two-thirds in the Philippines (through Sky’s existing partner Probe CX Group).

It said the proposal would see “over 100 roles” retained in its New Zealand call centre, while “around 200” roles would be created in the Philippines to deal with “more straightforward” inquiries.

“Overall, the proposed changes would boost Sky’s customer service capacity by 40 percent across the two teams, driving better customer experiences and the ability to meet customer demand as it flexes,” said Sky in an announcement to New Zealand’s stock exchange last month.

Sky said the changes would result in “multi-million dollar permanent savings within two years”.

Sky TV provides pay television services via satellite, media streaming services and broadband internet services.

It has no connection with the UK’s Sky Group or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A New Zealand-based media research and publication group has called for an “urgent rethink” on Papua New Guinea’s draft media development policy, saying its proposed regulation plan for the country’s media council and journalists threatened a free press.

The Asia Pacific Media Network Inc. (APMN), publishers of the research journal Pacific Journalism Review, said in a statement that it supported the Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) plea for more time to be granted for public consultation.

The CCAC is a loose coalition of NGOs chaired by Transparency International-PNG and the PNG Media Council and is supported by churches, chambers of commerce, the Ombudsman Commission and the Office of the Public Solicitor.

• READ MORE: Learn from Timor-Leste ‘freedom’, says former PNG media council head
• NGO group criticises ‘haste over media policy’ that may hit PNG freedom
• Papua New Guinea: Concerns raised at swift review period for media policy
• Other PNG media reports

While noting that the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology had granted an extra week from today following the original 12 days for submissions on the draft National Media Development Policy 2023, the APMB said this was still “manifestly inadequate and rather contemptuous of the public interest”.

“In our view, the ministry is misguided in seeking to legislate for a codified PNG Media Council which flies in the face of global norms for self-regulatory media councils and this development would have the potential to dangerously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea,” the statement said.

The statement was signed by the APMN chair Dr Heather Devere; deputy chair Dr David Robie, a retired professor of Pacific journalism and author, and a former head of journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea in the 1990s; and Pacific Journalism Review editor Dr Philip Cass, who was born in PNG and worked on the Times of Papua New Guinea and Wantok newspapers.

“The draft policy appears to have confused the purpose of a ‘media council’ representing the ‘public interest’ with the objectives of a government department working in the “national interest’,” the statement said.

Risk to PNG media freedom
“If the ministry pushes ahead with this policy without changes it risks Papua New Guinea sliding even further down the RSF World Press Freedom Index. Already it is a lowly 62nd out of 180 countries after falling 15 places in 2021.”

The statement made reference to several principles for media freedom and media councils, including Article 42 of the Papua New Guinea Constitution, the M*A*S systems of media accountability and ethics pioneered by Professor Claude-Jean Bertrand, and the 2019 declaration for press freedom of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum.

It said the ministry needed to consult more widely and take more time to do this.

The APMN called on the ministry to “immediately discard” the proposed policy of legislating the PNG Media Council and regulating journalists and media “which would seriously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea”.

It also asked the ministry to extend the public consultation timeframe with a “realistic deadline to engage Papua New Guinean public interest and stakeholders in a meaningful dialogue”.

It added that “essentially journalism is not a crime, but a fundamental pillar of democracy as espoused through the notion of a Fourth Estate and media must be free to speak truth to power in the public interest not the politicians’ interest”.

• The full APMN statement

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

RNZ Mediawatch

New Zealand’s media were in emergency mode yet again this week, offering hours of extra coverage on air, online and in print.

Outlets in the hardest-hit places reported the basics — even without access to basics like power, communications and even premises.

What will Gabrielle’s legacy be for media’s role in reporting disasters and national resilience?

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: Before and after Gabrielle
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• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Susana Suisuiki reports
  
• Cyclone Gabrielle death toll rises to 9, thousands uncontactable and landslide risk in Auckland
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Where to donate
• Follow RNZ live updates

“Keep listening to the radio. You guys have done a great job updating people and it’s very much appreciated,” the Civil Defence Minister Keiran McAnulty told Newstalk ZB’s last Sunday afternoon as Gabrielle was just beginning to wreak havoc.

Barely two weeks earlier, sudden and catastrophic flooding in and near Auckland caught the media off-guard, but some commentators claimed the heavy warnings about Gabrielle were oppressively ominous — and risked “crying wolf”.

Gabrielle ended up as a national emergency and sparked non-stop rolling news coverage. There were few flat spots on TV and radio, and live online reporting around the clock also give a comprehensive picture — and pictures — of what was going on.

It stretched newsrooms to their limits, but news reporters’ work was skillfully and selectively supplemented with a steady stream of vivid eyewitness accounts.

Forestry slash flood
Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker’s description on RNZ Nine to Noon of yet another inundation at her place with added forestry slash was among the most confronting (and sweary).

Checkpoint’s emotional interview on Wednesday with a couple that owned a house in which a friend “disappeared under water” was compelling — but also chilling.

RNZ’s Kate Green arrived in Gisborne on Monday with the only means of communicating that worked — a satellite phone.

“You can’t even dial 111. Everything that can break is broken,” she told RNZ Morning Report listeners, quoting the local mayor.

RNZ’s Māni Dunlop, who managed to fly in on Tuesday, told listeners that from the air the East Coast looked “buggered”.

Gisborne is a city and Tairawhiti a region not well covered at the best of times by New Zealand’s national media, which have no bureaux there. It is a bit of an irony that in the worst of times, it was so hard to get the word out.

But the locally-owned Gisborne Herald stepped up, somehow printing editions every day distributed free to 22,000 homes — with the help of NZDF boots n the ground on some days.

Proud news day
“I’m proud to be working on this paper today,” reported Murray Robertson said, signing off an eye-opening video of scenes of the stricken city posted online once power came back and a fresh Starlink unit kicked in.

On Wednesday, ZB’s Mike Hosking pleaded on air for diesel to keep their signal up in Hawke’s Bay, while the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today Chris Hyde — only months into his job — found himself literally powerless to publish when the rivers rose, cutting the electricity and cutting him off from many of his staff.

“The first day I was in a black hole. In a big news event, the phones ring hot. This was the biggest news event in Hawke’s Bay since the Napier earthquake  . . . and my phone wasn’t ringing at all,” he told Mediawatch.

Hyde, just 32 years old, was a student in Christchurch when The Press stunned citizens by publishing a paper the morning after the deadly 2011 quake.

Hyde said NZME chief editor Shayne Currie and The New Zealand Herald’s Murray Kirkness were instrumental in putting the Auckland HQs resources into getting NZME’s upper North Island dailies promptly back in print and available for free.

“Just keep supporting local news, because in moments like this, it really does matter,” Chris Hyde told Mediawatch.

On Wednesday, Hyde had the odd experience of seeing Tuesday’s edition of the paper on the AM show on TV before he had even seen it himself.

Cut-off news focus
On Wednesday, RNZ switched to focus on news for areas cut off or without power — or both — where people were depending on the radio. RNZ’s live online updates went “text-only” because those who could get online might only have the bandwidth for the basics.

Day of ‘danger’

This is the first copy of Tuesday’s @hawkesbaytoday that I’ve seen. It never made it to my home, to our offices, to our subscribers. When I wrote that headline had some idea of what was coming, and yet we had no idea. pic.twitter.com/57PmhoeyYr

— Chris Hyde (@chrishydejourno) February 16, 2023

“Thank God for news media in a storm,” was former Herald editor Gavin Ellis in his column The Knightly Views.

He was among the critics of media coverage of Auckland’s floods a fortnight earlier.

Back then he said social media and online outlets had trumped traditional news media in quickly conveying the scale and the scope of the flooding.

This time social media also hosted startling scenes and sounds reporters couldn’t capture — like rural road bridges bending then buckling.

But Gavin Ellis said earlier this week he couldn’t get a clearer picture of Gabrielle’s impact without mainstream media.

“Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent, both in warning people about what was to come – although that wasn’t universal – and then talking people through it and into the aftermath, And what an aftermath it’s been,” he told Mediawatch.

“This is precisely why we need news media. They draw together an overwhelming range of sources and condense information into a readily absorbed format. Then they keep updating and adding to the picture.” he wrote.

Retro but robust radio

“It’s even more pressing if you haven’t got electricity, and you haven’t got those online links. That was when radio really came into its own,” said Ellis.

“Organisations like the BBC,and the ABC (Australia) are talking about a fully-digital future and moving away from linear broadcasting. What happens to radio in those circumstances if you haven’t got power? If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on, he said.

“We need to have a conversation about the future of media in this country and the requirements in times of urgency need to be looked at,” Ellis told Mediawatch.

RNZ’s head of news Richard Sutherland’s had the same thoughts.

“It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster. This will also sharpen the minds of people on just how important ‘legacy’ platforms like AM transmission are in civil defence emergencies like the one we’ve had,” he said.

“With the Tonga volcano, Tonga was cut off from the internet. and the only thing getting through was shortwave radio. In the 2020s, we are talking about something that’s been around since the early 1900s still doing the mahi. In this country, we are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces of broadcasting infrastructure,” he told Mediawatch.

“Everyone was super-aware of the way that the Auckland flooding late last month played out — and no one wanted to repeat that,” said Sutherland, formerly a TV news executive at Newshub, TV3, TVNZ and Sky News.

“Initially the view was this is going to be bad news for Auckland because Auckland, already very badly damaged and waterlogged. But as it turned out, of course, it ended up being Northland, Coromandel, Hawke’s Bay have been those areas that caught the worst of it,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.

News contraction
“Over the years, and for a number of reasons, a lot of them financial, all news organisations have contracted. And you contract to your home city or a big metropolitan area, because that’s where the population is, and that’s where the bulk of your audience is,” he said.

“But this cyclone has reminded us all as a nation, that it’s really important to have reporters in the regions, to have strong infrastructure in the regions. I would argue that RNZ is a key piece of infrastructure,” he said.

“This incident has shown us that with the increasing impact of climate change, news organisations, particularly public service lifeline utility organisations like RNZ, are going to have to have a look at our geographic coverage, as well as our general coverage based on population,” he said

“We are already drawing up plans for have extra boots on the ground permanently  . . but also we need to think where are the regions that we need to have more people in so that we can respond faster to these sorts of things,” he said.

“We are at a moment where we could do something a bit more formal around building a more robust media infrastructure . . . for the whole country. I would be very, very keen for the industry to get together to make sure that the whole country can benefit from the combined resources that we have.

“Again, everything comes down to money. But if the need is there, the money will be found,” he said.

Now that the government’s planned new public media entity is off the table, it will be interesting to see if those holding the public purse strings see the need for news in the same way.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Veteran Fijian journalist Netani Rika and his wife were resting in their living room when he was suddenly woken, startled by the sound of smashed glass. “I got up, I slipped on the wet surface,” he recalls.

He turned on the lights and a bottle and wick were spread across the floor. It was one of the many acts of violence and intimidation he endured after the 2006 military coup.

Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.

• LISTEN TO ABC PACIFIC BEAT: Media freedom under the new Fiji government
• READ MORE: Former Fiji Times editor has no regrets about resisting censorship
• Fiji’s media veterans recount intimidation under FijiFirst government – eye on reforms

No news at 6pm, no news at 10pm
Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.

He vividly remembers the time his car was smashed with golf clubs by two unknown men — one he would later identify as a member of the military — and the day he was locked up at a military camp.

“We were monitoring the situation . . .  once the takeover happened, there was a knock at the door and we had some soldiers present themselves,” he said.

“We were told they were there for our protection but our CEO at the time, Ken Clark, said ‘well if you’re here to protect us, then you can stand at the gate’.

“They said, ‘no, we are here to be in the newsroom, and we want to see what goes to air. We also have a list of people you cannot speak to … ministers, detectives’.”

Rika remembered denying their request and publishing a notice on behalf of Fiji TV News that said it would “not broadcast tonight due to censorship”, promising to return to air when they were able to “broadcast the news in a manner which is free and fair”.

“There was no news at six, there was no news at 10, it was a decision made by the newsroom.”

Organisations like Human Rights Watch have repeatedly criticised Voreqe Bainimarama, who installed himself as prime minister during the 2006 coup, for his attacks on government critics, the press and the freedom of its citizens.

Fear and intimidation
Rika reported incidents of violence to Fiji police, but he said detectives told him his complaints would not go far.

“There was a series of letters to the editor which I suppose you could say were anti-government. Shortly after … the now-honourable leader of the opposition (Voreqe Bainimarama) called, he swore at me in the Fijian iTaukei language … a short time later I saw a vehicle come into our street,” he said.

“The next time (the attackers) came over the fence, broke a wooden louvre and threw one (explosive) inside the house.”

The ABC contacted Bainimarama’s Fiji First party and Fiji police for comment, but has not received a response.

The following year, Rika left his job to become the editor-in-chief at The Fiji Times, the country’s leading independent newspaper. With the publication relying on the government’s advertising to remain viable, Rika said the government put pressure on the paper’s owners.

“The government took away Fiji Times’ advertising, did all sorts of things in order to bring it into line with its propaganda that Fiji was OK, there was no more corruption.”

Rika said the government also sought to remove the employment rights of News Limited, which owned The Fiji Times.

“The media laws were changed so that you could not have more than 5 percent overseas ownership,” Rika said.

Rika, and his deputy Sophie Foster — now an Australian national — lost their jobs after the Media Act 2011 was passed, banning foreign ownership of Fijian media organisations.

‘A chilling law’
The new law put in place several regulations over journalists’ work, including restrictions on reporting of government activities.

In May last year, Fijian Media Association secretary Stanley Simpson called for a review of the “harsh penalties” that can be imposed by the authority that enforces the act.

Penalties include up to F$100,000 (NZ$75,00) in fines or two years’ imprisonment for news organisations for publishing content that is considered a breach of public or national interest. Simpson said some sections were “too excessive and designed to be vindictive and punish the media rather that encourage better reporting standards and be corrective”.

Media veterans hope the controversial act will be changed, or removed entirely, to protect press freedom.

Retired journalism professor Dr David Robie, now editor of Asia Pacific Report, taught many of the Pacific journalists who head up Fijian newsrooms today, but some of his earlier research focused on the impact of the Media Act.

Dr Robie said from the outset, the legislation was widely condemned by media freedom organisations around the world for being “very punitive and draconian”.

“It is a chilling law, making restrictions to media and making it extremely difficult for journalists to act because … the journalists in Fiji constantly have that shadow hanging over them.”

In the years after Fijian independence in 1970, Dr Robie said Fiji’s “vigorous” media sector “was a shining light in the whole of the Pacific and in developing countries”.

“That was lost … under that particular law and many of the younger journalists have never known what it is to be in a country with a truly free media.”

‘We’re so rich in stories’
Last month, the newly-elected government said work was underway to change media laws.

“We’re going to ensure (journalists) have freedom to broadcast and to impart knowledge and information to members of the public,” Fiji’s new Attorney-General Siromi Turaga said.

“The coalition government is going to provide a different approach, a truly democratic way of dealing with media freedom.” But Dr Robie said he believed the only way forward was to remove the Media Act altogether.

“I’m a bit sceptical about this notion that we can replace it with friendly legislation. That’s sounds like a slippery slope to me,” he said.

“I’d have to say that self-regulation is pretty much the best way to go.”

Reporters Without Borders ranked Fiji at 102 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom, falling by 47 places compared to its 2021 rankings.

Samantha Magick was the news director at Fiji radio station FM96, but left after the 2000 coup and returned three years ago to edit Islands Business International, a regional news magazine.

“When I came back, there wasn’t the same robustness of discussion and debate, we (previously) had powerful panel programs and talkback and there wasn’t a lot of that happening,” she said.

“Part of that was a reflection of the legislation and its impact on the way people worked but it was often very difficult to get both sides of a story because of the way newsmakers tried to control their messaging … which I thought was really unfortunate.”

Magick said less restrictive media laws might encourage journalists to push the boundaries, while mid-career reporters would be more creative and more courageous.

“I also hope it will mean more people stay in the profession because we have this enormous problem with people coming, doing a couple of years and then going … for mainly financial reasons.”

She lamented the fact that “resource intensive” investigative journalism had fallen by the wayside but hoped to see “a sort of reinvigoration of the profession in general.”

“We’re so rich in stories … I’d love to see more collaboration across news organisations or among journalists and freelancers,” she said.

Lice Movono is a Fijian reporter for the ABC based in Suva. An earlier audio report from her on the Fiji media is here. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

It is unlikely that the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, took any lessons from the city’s devastating floods but the rest of us — and journalists in particular — could learn a thing or two.

Brown’s demeanour will not be improved by a petition calling for his resignation or media columnists effectively seeking the same. He will certainly not be moved by New Zealand Herald columnist Simon Wilson, now a predictable and trenchant critic of the mayor, who correctly observed in the Herald on Sunday: “In a crisis, political leaders are supposed to soak up people’s fears…to help us believe that empathy and compassion and hope will continue to bind us together.”

Wilson’s lofty words may be wasted on the mayor, but they point to another factor that binds us together in times of crisis. It is communication, and it was as wanting as civic leadership on Friday night and into the weekend.

• READ MORE: Auckland deputy mayor talks up media role in disasters in wake of mayor Brown ‘drongos’ text
• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘I’m talking to you now, I’ll talk to you at any time’ – Auckland deputy mayor Desley Simpson
• Other Asia Pacific Reports on the North Island floods

Media coverage on Friday night was limited to local evacuation events, grabs from smartphone videos and interviews with officials that were light on detail. The on-the-scene news crews performed well in worsening conditions, particularly in West Auckland.

However, there was a dearth of official information and, crucially, no report that drew together the disparate parts to give us an over-arching picture of what was happening across the city.

I waited for someone to appear, pointing to a map of greater Auckland and saying: “These areas are experiencing heavy flooding . . . State Highway 1 is closed here, here and here as are these arterial routes here, here, and here across the city . . . cliff faces have collapsed in these suburbs . . . power is out in these suburbs . . . evacuation centres have been set up here, here, and here . . . :

That way I would have been in a better position to understand my situation compared to other Aucklanders, and to assess how my family and friends would be faring. I wanted to know how badly my city as a whole was affected.

I didn’t get it from television on Friday night nor did I see it in my newspaper on Saturday. My edition of the Weekend Herald, devoting only its picture-dominated front page and some of page 2 to the flooding, was clearly hampered by early deadlines. The Dominion Post devoted half its front page to the storm and, with a later deadline, scooped Auckland’s hometown paper by announcing Brown had declared a state of emergency.

So, too, did the Otago Daily Times on an inside page. The page 2 story in The Press confirmed the first death in the floods.

I turned to television on Saturday morning expecting special news programmes from both free-to-air networks. Zilch . . . nothing. Later in the day TV1 and Newshub did rise to the occasion with specials on the prime minister’s press conference, but it seems a small concession for such a major event.

Radio fared better but only because regular hosts such as NewstalkZB’s All Sport Breakfast host D’Arcy Waldegrave and Today FM sports journalist Nigel Yalden rejigged their Saturday morning shows to also cover the floods.

RNZ National’s Kim Hill was on familiar ground and her interview with Wayne Brown was more than a little challenging for the mayor. RNZ mounted a “Midday Report Special” with Corin Dann that also tried to break through the murk, but I was left wondering why it had not been a Morning Report Special starting at 6 am.

Over the course of the weekend the amount of information provided by news media slowly built up. Both Sundays devoted six or seven pages to the floods but it was remiss of the Herald on Sunday not to carry an editorial, as did the Sunday Star Times.

It was also good to see Newsroom and The Spinoff — digital services not usually tied to breaking news of this kind — providing coverage.

“Live” updates on websites and news apps added local detail but there was no coherence, just a string of isolated events stretching back in time.

Overall, the amount of information I received as a citizen of the City of Sails was inadequate. Why?

Herein lie the lessons.

News media under-estimated the impact of the event. Although there were fewer deaths than in the Christchurch earthquake or the Whakaari White Island eruption, the scale of damage in economic and social terms will be considerable. The natural disaster warranted news media pulling out all the stops and, as they did on those occasions, move into schedule-changing mode (and that includes newspaper press deadlines).

Lesson #1: Do not allow natural disasters to occur on the eve of a long holiday weekend.

Media were, however, hampered by a lack of coherent information from official sources and emergency services. Brown’s visceral dislike of journalists was part of the problem but that was not the root cause. That fell into two parts.

The first was institutional disconnects in an overly complex emergency response structure which is undertaken locally, coordinated regionally and supported from the national level. This complexity was highlighted after another Auckland weather event in 2018 that saw widespread power outages.

The report on the response was resurrected in front page leads in the Dominion Post and The Press yesterday. It found uncoordinated efforts that did not use the models that had been developed for such eventualities, disagreements over what information should be included in situation reports, and under-estimation of effects.

Massey University director of disaster management Professor David Johnston told Stuff he believed the report would be exactly the same if it was recommissioned now because Auckland’s emergency management system was not fit for purpose — rather it was proving to be a good example of what not to do

Lesson #2: Learn the lessons of the past.

The 2018 report did, however, give a pass mark to the communication effort and noted that those involved thought they worked well with media and in communicating with the public through social media.

Can the same be said of the current disaster response when there “wasn’t time” to inform a number of news organisations (including Stuff) about Wayne Brown’s late Friday media conference, and when Whaka Kotahi staff responsible for providing updates clocked-off at 7.30 pm on Friday?

Is it timely for Auckland Transport to still display an 11.45 am Sunday “latest update” on its website 24 hours later? Is it relevant for a list of road closures accessed at noon yesterday to have actually been compiled at 7.35 pm the previous night? Why should a decision to keep Auckland schools closed until February 7 cause confusion in the sector simply because it was “last minute”?

Lesson #3: Ensure communications staff know the definition of emergency: A serious, unexpected, and potentially dangerous situation requiring immediate action.

There certainly was confusion over the failure to transmit a flood warning to all mobile phones in the city on Friday. The system worked perfectly on Sunday when MetService issued an orange Heavy Rain Warning.

It appears that emergency personnel believed posts on Facebook on Friday afternoon and evening were an effective way of communicating directly with the public. That is alarming because social media use is so fragmented that it is dangerous to make assumptions on how many people are being reached.

A study in 2020 of United States local authority communication about the covid pandemic showed a wide range of platforms being used and the recipients were far from attentive. The author of the study, Eric Zeemering, found not only were city communications fragmented across departments, but the public audience selectively fragmented itself through individual choices to follow some city social media accounts but not others.

In fact, more people were passing information about the flood to each other via Twitter than on Facebook and young people in particular were using TikTok for that purpose. Media organisations were reusing these posts almost as much as the official information that from some quarters was in short supply.

Lesson #4: When you need to communicate with the masses, use mass communication (otherwise known as news media).

Mistakes will always be made in fast changing emergencies but, having made a mistake, it is usual to go the extra yards to make amends. It beggars belief that Whaka Kotahi staff would fail to keep their website up to date on the Auckland situation when it is quite clear they received an enormous kick up the rear end from Transport Minister Michael Wood for clocking off when the heavens opened.

Or that Auckland Transport could be far behind the eight ball after turning travel arrangements for the (cancelled) Elton John concert into a fiasco.

After spending Friday evening holed up in his high-rise office away from nuisances like reporters attempting to inform the public, Mayor Brown justified his position with a strange definition of leadership then blamed others.

Sideswipe’s Anna Samways collected a number of tweets for her Monday Herald column. Among them was this: “Just saw one of the Wayne Brown press conferences. He sounded like a man coming home 4 hours late from the pub and trying to bull**** his Mrs about where he’d been.”

Lesson #5: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The BBC celebrated its 100th birthday last Tuesday. It came as the institution faces increasing competition for audiences from global entertainment providers, anxieties about the sustainability of its funding and a highly competitive global news market.

Its international broadcasting operation, the BBC World Service, is only a little younger, established 90 years ago.

Delivering news and programmes in 40 languages across the continents, it faces similar, significant questions about financing, purpose and its ability to deliver in a world of increased social media and online news consumption.

• READ MORE: US and Russia engage in a digital battle for hearts and minds
• 100 years of the BBC: the rebels who reshaped broadcasting – and paid the price

Currently the BBC’s international services are mostly funded by British people who pay a television licence fee, with a third of the total cost covered by the UK government.

The BBC claimed that, as of November 2021, the World Service reached a global audience of 364 million people each week.

The role of radio
Radio is still clearly a key means to extend the reach of the World Service and a core part of the BBC’s global news package. It is highly adaptable and reasonably affordable.

It also gives people in parts of the world where access to media can be difficult relatively easy access to news. Short-wave radio, the traditional means of broadcasting over very long distances, is also difficult for hostile regimes to block.

Recently, fears that Russia would target Ukraine’s internet infrastructure and erect firewalls to prevent its own citizens’ accessing western media sources, led the BBC to reactivate shortwave radio news services for listeners in both countries. UK government funding of £4.1 million supported this.

Current thinking about the World Service has been shaped by a 2010 decision of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s government to withdraw Foreign and Commonwealth Office funding for BBC international operations from 2014. This seemed to end a 60 years-long era when the BBC was the key subcontractor for British global “soft power” (using cultural resources and information to promote British interests overseas).

The plan was that British TV licence-fee payers would fund the World Service, seemingly as an act of international benevolence, free of government ties. However, this seemed unlikely to be sustainable at a time when BBC income was being progressively squeezed.

In 2015, World Service revenues were boosted by a major grant from the UK’s Official Development Assistance fund, covering around a third of the World Service’s running costs.

One anonymous BBC insider was quoted by The Guardian saying that this would sustain the corporation’s “strong commitment to uphold global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news”.

Even before the Second World War, the BBC claimed it only broadcast truthful and objective news. Policy makers recognised this as a crucial asset for promoting British interests overseas, and seldom sought to challenge (openly at least) the “editorial independence” of the BBC.

The BBC’s 2016 royal charter further entrenched this thinking, stating that news for overseas audiences should be “firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness”. The idea that a truthful approach to news was a core “British value” that could help promote democracy around the world became part of the BBC’s basic mission statement.

In 2017, the BBC established 17 new foreign-language radio and online services. To maximise possibilities for listening it purchased FM transmitter time in major cities around the world, and deployed internet radio, increasingly accessible to many users via mobile devices.

The focus was on Africa and Asia. However, the World Service also strengthened its Arabic and Russian provision to serve those who “sorely need reliable information”.

The British Broadcasting Company has placed an advertisement in today’s edition of The Times for its first permanent members of staff.

(14 October 1922) pic.twitter.com/iRSDfvHsAz

— The BBC, 100 years ago today (@BBC100yearsago) October 14, 2022

Fake news factor
The World Service’s rationale has been strengthened by growing concerns about “fake news”: distorted and untrue reports designed to serve the commercial or geopolitical interests of those who manufacture it.

The BBC has, in response, further emphasised its historic role as a truthful broadcaster. In its trusted news initiative it has worked with other global media outlets to tackle disinformation, hosting debate and discussion, and sharing intelligence about the most misleading campaigns.

Claims for continued relevance also rest on a drive to bring news to an ever larger audience. The BBC’s stated aim is to reach 500 million people this year, and a billion within another decade.

In 2021 the BBC claimed to be on course to realise this goal, reaching a global audience of 489 million. The audience for the World Service accounted for the single largest component of this global figure.

What then should we make of the BBC’s announcement in September 2022 that 400 jobs would have to go at the World Service due to the freezing of the licence fee and rapidly rising costs?

Radio services in languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Chinese will disappear, and programme production for the English-language radio service will be pared down. Certainly, these cuts will reduce the BBC’s impact overseas.

But they should also be understood as part of a longstanding and ongoing transition from shortwave radio to web radio.

Similarly, cutting back on World Service non-news programming might not be a major cause for concern. In an age of global streaming services and social media, audiences can receive programmes from providers from across the globe.

The World Service would find it hard to compete with many of these services. However, the BBC remains in a pre-eminent position to offer trusted news.

By focusing on providing news online, the World Service is putting its resources where it can best promote British soft power and international influence, thereby improving prospects for its own continued existence.

However, abandoning radio entirely would be a mistake. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, radio remains a crucial way to reach audiences who might find their access to trusted news via the internet suddenly cut off.

Dr Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Philippines Court of Appeals has denied the motion for reconsideration filed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. over their cyber libel case.

In a 16-page decision dated October 10, the court’s fourth division denied the appeal.

Associate Justices Roberto Quiroz, Ramon Bato Jr., and Germano Francisco Legaspi signed the ruling. They were the same justices who signed the court decision, which earlier affirmed the conviction of Ressa and Santos.

• READ MORE: Cybercrime, criminal libel and the media: From ‘e-martial law’ to the Magna Carta in the Philippines — David Robie and Del Abcede
• Philippine Nobel laureate Maria Ressa appeals to Supreme Court
• Other Maria Ressa and Rappler reports

According to the court, the arguments raised by Ressa and Santos were already resolved.

“A careful and meticulous review of the motion for reconsideration reveals that the matters raised by the accused-appellants had already been exhaustively resolved and discussed in the assailed Decision,” the court said.

The court also claimed Ressa’s and Santos’ conviction is not meant to curtail freedom of speech.

“In conclusion, it [is] worthy and relevant to point out that the conviction of the accused-appellants for the crime of cyberlibel punishable under the Cybercrime Law is not geared towards the curtailment of the freedom of speech, or to produce an unseemingly chilling effect on the users of cyberspace that would possibly hinder free speech.”

‘Safeguard’ for free speech
On the contrary, the court said, the purpose of the law is to “safeguard the right of free speech, and to curb, if not totally prevent, the reckless and unlawful use of the computer systems as a means of committing the traditional criminal offences…”

In a statement, Nobel Peace laureate Ressa said she was “disappointed” but not surprised by the ruling.

Rappler’s video report on YouTube.

“The ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against me and Rappler continues, and the Philippines legal system is not doing enough to stop it. I am disappointed by today’s ruling but sadly not surprised,” Ressa said.

“This is a reminder of the importance of independent journalism holding power to account. Despite these sustained attacks from all sides, we continue to focus on what we do best — journalism.”

Santos, in a separate statement, said he still believed that the rule of law would prevail.

“The [Appeal Court’s] decision to deny our motion is not surprising, but it’s disheartening nevertheless. As we elevate our case to the SC, our fight against intimidation and suppression of freedom continues. We still believe that the rule of law will prevail.”

Theodore “Ted” Te, Rappler’s lawyer and former Supreme Court spokesperson, said they would now ask the Supreme Court to review and reverse Ressa’s conviction.

“The CA decision denying the MFR [motion for reconsideration] is disappointing. It ignored basic principles of constitutional and criminal law as well as the evidence presented. Maria and Rey will elevate these issues to the SC and we will ask the SC to review the decision and to reverse the decision,” Te said in a statement.

The decision
The Appeal Court also explained its findings on the arguments based on:

• Applications of the provisions of cyber libel under the cybercrime law
• Subject article should have been classified as qualifiedly privileged” in relation to Wilfredo Keng as a public figure

On the validity of the cybercrime law, the court cited a ruling which, according to them, decided the constitutionality of the law.

“We find it unnecessary to dwell on the issue raised by accused-appellants since the Supreme Court, in Jose Jesus M. Disini, Jr., et al., v. The Secretary of Justice, et al. (Disini Case), 5 had already ruled on its validity and constitutionality, with finality.”

The court also reiterated that the story in question was republished. The court said the argument that ex-post facto was applied on the theory that the correction of one letter is too unsubstantial and cannot be considered a republication is “unavailing.”

“As settled, the determination of republication is not hinged on whether the corrections made therein were substantial or not, as what matters is that the very exact libelous article was again published on a later date,” the appeals court said.

On the increase of penalty, the CA said the argument that Wilberto Tolentino v. People has no doctrinal value and cannot be used as a binding precedent as it was “an unsigned resolution, is misplaced.”

That case said the “prescriptive period for the crime of cyber libel is 15 years.”

Traditional, online publications
The appeals court also highlighted the difference between traditional and online publications: “As it is, in the instance of libel through traditional publication, the libelous article is only released and circulated once – which is on the day when it was published.”

Such was not the case for an online publication, the court said, where “the commission of such offence is continuous since such article remains therein in perpetuity unless taken down from all online platforms where it was published…”

On the argument about Keng, the CA said it was insufficient to consider him a public figure: “As previously settled, the claim that Wilfredo Keng is a renowned businessman, who was connected to several companies, is insufficient to classify him as a public figure.”

The term “public figure” in relation to libel refers more to a celebrity, it said, citing the Ciriaco “Boy” Guingguing v. Honorable Court of Appeals decision. The decision said a public figure is “anyone who has arrived at a position where public attention is focused upon him as a person.”

It also cited the Supreme Court decision on Alfonso Yuchengco v. The Manila Chronicle Publishing Corporation, et al., which resolved the argument whether a businessman can be considered a public figure. The court said that being a known businessman did not make Keng a public figure who had attained a position that gave the public “legitimate interest in his affairs and character.”

There was no proof, too, that “he voluntarily thrusted himself to the forefront of the particular public controversies that were raised in the defamatory article,” the CA added.

In 2020, Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 46 convicted Ressa and Santos over cyber libel charges filed by Keng. The case tested the 8-year-old Philippine cybercrime law.

The Manila court interpreted the cyber libel law as having a 12-year proscription period, as opposed to only a year. The lower court also decided that republication was a separate offence.

Aside from affirming the Manila court’s ruling, the CA also imposed a longer prison sentence on Ressa and Santos, originally set for six months and one day as minimum to six years as maximum.

The appeals court added eight months and 20 days to the maximum imprisonment penalty.

Jairo Bolledo is a Rappler journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Australian government is moving fast to reset relations with Australia’s Pacific partners, including a larger Pacific role for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Detailed research undertaken late last year for the ABC in our six key Pacific markets (Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga) confirms that the ABC today is used, valued and highly trusted by Pacific audiences.

This result has been made possible through the ABC’s multi-channel approach, and by thoughtful programming made with Pacific partners and designed specifically for Pacific audiences.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Radio Australia in the Pacific

In terms of reach, access to AM/FM radio today is significantly higher than access to shortwave across the Pacific, and our research confirms that the most effective way today to engage audiences in urban and peri-urban regions is through FM radio transmission.

ABC Radio Australia currently has 13 transmitters across the Pacific. ABC Australia (TV) broadcasts to 16 Pacific island nations and territories under more than 25 distribution deals.

Meanwhile, a transition to digital and social media in the Pacific is also well underway. Smartphone use is high in urban areas, and increasingly, the ABC connects to its Pacific audiences via Facebook and through our digital offerings.

Our multi-channel approach is paying off. Total Pacific user interactions late last year with the ABC, whether via the ABC website, the ABC app or social media channels, were reportedly higher than usage and interactions with any other international provider, including the BBC, CNN, RNZ and CGTN.

Big jump in numbers
In the Papua New Guinea market, the research showed that more than half of all respondents had either watched ABC Australia (TV), listened to ABC Radio Australia or accessed the ABC online in the second half of 2021. That’s a big jump in audience numbers within just a few years.

The Australian government has plans to review the merits of restoring shortwave radio and the ABC will be contributing to that process. Part of that will include understanding how many people still have access to shortwave radios and the interest or need to use them as an information source.

In terms of content, the ABC’s unique advantage lies in its commitment to, and relationship with, Pacific audiences. We aim to be local. Our Asia–Pacific newsroom is the only one of its kind in Australia, with 50 journalists and producers telling the stories that matter to Indo-Pacific audiences, told in Bahasa Indonesia, Tok Pisin and Chinese as well as English.

Our flagship daily current affairs programme, Pacific Beat on ABC Radio Australia, features interviews with leaders and newsmakers, attracting audiences of all ages and genders. Then there’s Sistas, Let’s Talk (conversations with inspirational Pacific women), Wantok (Pacific-focused news and current affairs in Tok Pisin, Solomon Islands pidgin and Bislama), Island Music (reggae, dancehall and R’n’B with a focus on the Pacific region) and Pacific Playtime (for kids and families across the region).

A shared love of sport offers opportunities to strengthen social ties across the Pacific, and particularly to engage young people. ABC Radio Australia takes the men’s and women’s National Rugby League competitions to lovers of the sport across the region.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade supports the ABC to produce the only pan-Pacific sport-focused TV show, That Pacific Sports Show, and a fresh and humorous sport-oriented radio show and podcast, Can You Be More Pacific?, hosted by Australian and Pacific sportspeople.

This commitment to genuine partnership with the Pacific is paying off. The proportion of respondents in Pacific markets last year who valued the ABC across all its channels as a “trusted source of news and information” was comparable to that in Australia, at a very high 75 percent.

Pacific content locally available
It’s also worth noting that all the content we produce for Pacific audiences is available domestically in Australia, helping to maintain regional ties and build greater Australian awareness about our Pacific neighbours.

The ABC’s International Development Unit, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and donors like USAID and the United Nations, works with partners across the region to enhance journalism skills and media capacity.

The ABC also provides skills development training for specific challenges like election coverage and emergency broadcasting, plus support for media associations, like the Media Association of the Solomon Islands, which has been active in campaigning for press access and freedom in the Solomons.

The government has committed to increase funding to the ABC’s international programme by $8 million a year over the next four years. The focal points of this strategy are enhanced regional transmission, more content production, and increased media capacity training for Pacific partners.

This approach has been informed by the ABC’s own proposals.

Over recent years, various ideas have been floated for a new administrative process or organisation to “manage” Australia’s media presence in the Pacific. That would add unnecessary bureaucracy.

There’s a lot more the ABC could do in and for the Pacific. The ABC today has the strategy, systems and relationships in the Pacific to enable rapid expansion, given funding support.

And our research confirms there is a demand for it.

Claire M. Gorman is the head of international services at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Republished from The Strategist with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

A shortage of resources and investment from major digital platforms has left the Pacific region battling a campaign of misinformation and under-moderation.

The Pacific is currently a global hotspot for misinformation.

The ability of Pacific island countries and territories to respond to “infodemic” risks online has been exposed by the covid-19 pandemic.

Misinformation about the pandemic has persisted online, despite efforts by Pacific governments, civil societies, citizens, media organisations, and institutions to counter it.

The Pacific presently has the smallest percentage of their population using the internet and social media compared with the rest of the world.

Internet difficult, costly
Internet provision is made more difficult and costly in the Pacific due to the region’s unique geographic features. A lack of high-capacity cables and other technical infrastructure has also held back Pacific connectivity.

New undersea cables are arriving in the region, such as the Australian-financed Coral Sea Cable, connecting Sydney to Port Moresby and Honiara, ending decades of reliance on slow and expensive satellite connections.

These cables, along with other planned reforms and upgrades, are expected to increase the number of mobile internet users in the Pacific by about 11 percent annually between 2018 and 2025, according to estimates by industry groups.

More access has rapidly changed how government officials communicate with the public and shifted perceptions of politics.

Both Kiribati and Vanuatu broadcast their national election results live on Facebook.

In Kiribati, the 9400-member Kiribati election 2020 group posted photos of handwritten vote totals. In Vanuatu, the national broadcaster streamed the entire ballot-counting process on Facebook Live.

Sparked by the rollout of mobile broadband across Papua New Guinea, hundreds of thousands of citizens now read the latest news and monitor happenings in Port Moresby through blogs and Facebook groups filled with lengthy discussions and heated calls to action.

Flipside over access
The flipside to such access is that false online rumours and scams directly targeting Pacific people have spread rapidly through Facebook groups and closed messaging applications.

Rising internet access may be exacerbating the problem of child sexual exploitation online.

In some regions of Papua New Guinea, hate speech, harassment, and harmful rumours can sometimes lead to actual acts of violence.

Local politicians in the Pacific are starting to recognise the potential of social media, but unethical online influence techniques can go undetected if proper transparency measures and safeguards are not implemented.

Facebook, for one, has implemented its transparency systems to curb hidden manipulation of its advertising features for partisan ends.

Journalists and investigators in dozens of larger markets use these tools to reveal voter manipulation, but most Pacific island nations are yet to adopt them.

The lack of transparency makes it very difficult for observers to track what political actors are saying online, especially as Facebook’s advertising system allows different messages to be targeted to different parts of the population.

Fake Facebook accounts
Social media companies make little effort to reach out to Pacific leaders, which may explain why so few public figures in the region use the “verified” badges that are useful in helping distinguish official accounts from personal ones.

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape found that out the hard way — fake Facebook and Twitter accounts were created in his name, and his lack of verification made the real profile harder for users to distinguish.

Some governments have threatened to completely block social media to curb the spread of content they deem immoral, harmful, or destructive to established norms and values.

Nauru’s government blocked Facebook from 2015 to 2018, and Papua New Guinea and Samoa hinted at blocking the platform multiple times over the past few years.

In 2019, Tonga considered a ban on Facebook to prevent slander against the monarchy.

Social media bans are rarely implemented, and face fierce opposition from free speech advocates and users.

The frequency with which such measures are proposed in the Pacific reflects a sobering reality: communities in the region often lack the protections that communities elsewhere in the world rely on to address harmful content and abuse on social media.

Rule-breaking content
Current systems for moderating content on social media are not effective in the Pacific. These systems rely on algorithms that flag rule-breaking content in multiple languages, human reviewers who make determinations on flagged material, users who voluntarily report content violating the rules, and legal requests from law enforcement officials.

Social media platforms do not prioritise hiring from the Pacific region, where there are comparatively fewer people. They do not invest in developing language-specific algorithms for languages like Tongan, Bislama, or Chuukese, which have a smaller user base.

Despite the growing importance of third-party fact-checking partnerships, no Pacific Island country is home to a dedicated fact-checking team.

All claims in Australia and the Pacific islands are referred to the Australian Associated Press’s fact-checking unit. Pacific social media users are missing out on one of the few tools that global social media companies use to strengthen information ecosystems due to the lack of a robust local fact-checking organisation.

All signs point to an increase in the dangers posed by false and misleading information in the months and years ahead, as both state and non-state actors attempt to steer online discourse in service of their strategic goals.

Politically-motivated domestic and foreign actors (or proxies) regularly attempt to manipulate online platforms and social media worldwide. These efforts are highly diverse, always in flux, and frequently related to more extensive political or national interests.

At least one organised effort to spread false information online about the West Papuan conflict has already occurred in the Pacific.

Dangers posed
External pressures and crises will amplify the dangers posed by these campaigns, as they did during the covid-19 pandemic when an excess of data and a lack of apparent credibility and fact checking allowed rumours to spread unchecked.

Rising tensions between the developed world and China add to the already complex political situation, and the narrative tug-of-war for influence among significant powers on Covid-19 is likely to continue.

There is a risk that online misinformation from foreign media will increase due to this competition for narrative dominance, leaving countries in the region vulnerable to influence operations that target online discourse, media, and communities.

More robust local capacity (outside of government) to identify problematic content and bad actors online is necessary for the region to recover from Covid-19 and respond to future crises.

This includes better coordination among regional institutions and governments, increased engagement between social media companies and Pacific leaders, and more thorough reporting of online problems.

Foreseeing and preparing for future potential threats to health and safety is something that leaders can do now.

Romitesh Kant is a Fiji PhD scholar at the Australian National University, and a research consultant with more than 10 years’ experience in the fields of governance, civic education and human rights. He is also a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. This article was originally published on 360info under Creative Commons and RNZ Pacific. It has been republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill — introduced to Parliament this week — will have a long journey before it is fit for purpose.

The Bill gives effect to the government’s plan to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a new entity designed for the digital age, but the legislation as it stands does little more than cement the two public broadcasters together.

On first reading (mine, not Parliament’s), it looks like a legislative instrument to give effect to the merger, but its stated intent and functions are much wider. This is supposed to be the legal foundation upon which a new age of public media is to be built.

• READ MORE: Gavin Ellis: An open letter to the incoming media minister
• Public media: new name, new law, new minister, old questions
• The BBC Charter

The general policy statement accompanying the Bill says: “This Bill seeks to strengthen the delivery of public media services by establishing a new public media entity.” It may achieve the latter, but it falls far short of guaranteeing its objective.

The Bill falls short on many fronts: Matters that should be covered are omitted, others are dealt with in obtuse ways, boilerplate clauses are employed in place of purposeful creativity, and ironclad protection of the public interest is absent.

The Bill’s shortcomings are too numerous to set out all of them, but a few key failings give a sense of how much work must be done on the proposed law through its committee stages.

The Bill states the new organisation will be a Crown entity but does not stipulate the category under which it must fall. We need to go to Schedule 2 Part 1 to find that Schedule 2 of the Crown Entities Act is to be amended to make Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media an autonomous Crown entity.

Why the change?
Both TVNZ and RNZ are currently Crown companies. Why the change?

Was it because autonomous Crown entities “must have regard to government policy when directed by the responsible Minister”? While the new public media organisation will be protected against ministerial interference on matters relating content and news gathering, there are many ways to skin the cat.

Why was the new entity not designated an Independent Crown Entity which is “generally independent of government policy”?

The Bill states that, in accordance with provisions of the Crown Entities Act, the Minister of Broadcasting and Media will appoint the board of the new entity, but the new Bill stipulates at least two of those directors will be nominated by the Minister for Māori Development.

As things stand, that means Willie Jackson will appoint the entire board because he holds both portfolios. The proposed legislation does not anticipate that aggregation of power.

Ministers are writ large across the Bill. There is oversight of the new entity by no fewer than three, possibly four. Aside from the Minister of Broadcasting and Media, the finance minister has direct powers over financial issues and the Māori development minister has Te Tiriti oversight.

The Crown Entities Act provides for the broadcasting minister to appoint a monitor to act as his eyes and ears over the new entity. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has been working behind the scenes to gear itself to take on that role – and an even wider role across all media if its current strategy framework draft is anything to go by. So, it is possible that its minister (currently Carmel Sepuloni) will also have a look-in.

Independence absolutely vital
I do not think that augers well for the independence that is absolutely vital if the new body is to gain and retain public trust and confidence.

Yes, the Bill does carry over the provisions in existing legislation that tells ministers to keep their hands off editorial matters. However, there are too many other mechanisms by which politicians can influence the direction of the new organisation.

There is a charter that should provide its own protections, given that the relevant minister’s actions must be consistent with it. However, the charter in the Bill consists largely of boilerplate generalities that are less aspirational than the existing RNZ charter.

It is in marked contrast to the BBC Charter, which is erudite, explicit, and carries more direct obligations.

Submissions on the Bill will, no doubt, focus on the charter and it may yet go through iterations that improve it. One necessary improvement relates to the digital environment that made all of this reorganisation necessary. Although there is passing reference to online services, the tenor of the Bill is rooted in the present, not the future.

The entity’s principal purpose is “broadcasting”. That would be fine if the term was defined in broad enough terms. However, it talks of “transmitting” and “reception by the New Zealand public by means of receiving apparatus”. That hardly conjures up pictures of very smart interactive devices and a community for whom one-way linear transmission is antiquated.

The charter does state that one of its principles is “innovating and taking creative risks” but that looks tame alongside the BBC Charter’s clause on technology that states it “must promote technological innovation, and maintain a leading role in research and development”.

Technologically aspirational requirements
I would have thought that, in order to set the stage for a future-oriented organisation built for the digital age, the Bill just might contain some technologically aspirational requirements.

It is not the only element of the new organisation that is absent from the proposed legislation.

Aside from a pressing need to provide far more robust independent governance, the Bill’s most glaring omissions relate to finance and internal structures.

The Bill contains an explicit requirement that RNZ’s commercial-free services will continue, and where a charge is applied to new services on first broadcast it will later be free. There is no reference in the Bill, however, to TVNZ’s current commercial status, nor to annual appropriations from government.

It takes a careful reading of the Bill’s schedules and amendments to those in other acts to determine whether the current practice of channelling RNZ’s funding through NZ on Air will continue. Reading between the lines it appears that a more direct funding stream is being contemplated, with some form of coordination with other bodies such as NZ on Air and Te Māngai Pāho.

The Bill itself makes no direct reference to future requirements for TVNZ to pay a dividend but a tick in a column in the Bill’s schedule suggests the new entity will not contribute to the Treasury coffers.

Beyond that, the finances of the new entity are a deep void. The new organisation faces real challenges in reconciling public funding and commercial revenue. It must also determine the division of expenditure associated with programming to meet the expectations created by both sources.

No legislative guidance
However, there is no legislative guidance on how these challenges should be met. There is total silence on commercial expectations, and on the mechanisms by which any continuity of government funding will be calculated or guaranteed. The Cabinet papers released to date suggest funding matters will be dealt with through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. So why is that not explicit in the Bill?

Internal structures — which must address the cultural and funding process differences between commercial and non-commercial broadcasting — are apparently entirely in the hands of the Establishment board as there is nothing in the Bill that mandates the unique internal structure that will be needed to satisfy both imperatives. Does Parliament have no view, for example, on whether news and current affairs should be structurally separated from a commercial enterprise, say as a separate subsidiary with its own statutory independence?

Why is there no requirement to follow the Irish precedent whereby the state broadcaster RTÉ must adhere to a Fair Trading Policy that complies with EU rules on State aid? That policy requires RTÉ “to trade in a manner which ensures that public funds are not used to subsidise RTÉ’s commercial activities…[and] that ensures that RTÉ’s commercial activities are compatible with its public service objects.”

These questions, and more, will be raised during the Bill’s select committee hearings. My fear is that the timetable set out for the legislation — it must be passed and in force by the end of the year — will truncate the process to the point where the necessarily exhaustive examination of its provisions will not take place.

Last week I set 12 labours for the new Minister of Broadcasting and Media. This Bill, as it currently stands, will make Willie Jackson’s tasks even more Herculean.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Dear Minister,

Congratulations on assuming the Broadcasting and Media role.

The announcement of your new portfolio put me in mind of Hercules as King Eurystheus told him there were a dozen small jobs he would like done.

Like Hercules, you will find that the tasks ahead are challenging. Some will seem insurmountable. Yet, the underlying message of that particular piece of Greek mythology is that nothing is impossible.

• READ MORE: RNZ-TVNZ mega-entity named ‘Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media’ in draft law
• Public media: new name, new law, new minister, old questions
• Other public media reports

I would hesitate to suggest that success will lead to immortality, but you will certainly make an enduring name for yourself if you are able to ensure that New Zealand’s media ecosystem is fit for purpose.

In order for that to happen you must undertake, if I may be so bold, the Twelve Labours of Willie Jackson.

Here are the tasks you should address:

1. The new public media entity — ensure it is an entirely new approach to a digital future and not merely a TVNZ/RNZ merger, and enshrine independent governance.
2. Media content review – act as the coordinator for a project to determine how we should address harmful media content, which spans a multitude of issues and ministries.
3. Social media platforms — make them pay for plundering our media and our audiences, and make them accountable for content.
4. Public Interest Journalism Fund – restore public confidence in the fund (by removing requirements seen as linked to government policy) and continue to fund the scheme.
5. Regulatory structures – facilitate the replacement of the Media Council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority by a single, demonstrably independent, body.
6. Private sector survival — investigate alternative mechanisms that replace declining revenue, and incentivise plurality.
7. Māori media — Have a stern talk with yourself, as the Minister for Māori Development, to finally bring something concrete out of the Māori Media Sector Shift that has already been three years in the making.
8. Ethnic media — recognise and support media that directly address often hard to reach communities.
9. Media law — review statutes that were predicated on media structures and methodologies that have long been superseded.
10. Media training — resurrect the Journalism Training Organisation with a mandate to devise curricula standards and assess their implementation by tertiary institutions.
11. Policy balance – work to ensure that the legitimate Te Tiriti initiatives being pursued by the Labour Government do not inadvertently ignore the broader needs of the media sector and its audiences (plural).
12. Technology watch — set up a monitoring group to alert government to technological changes (in areas such as artificial intelligence) that will affect media production, impact and oversight.

I realise that it is no more than 18 months to the next election and, even if you expect another term in government, you will need to prioritise.

Three broad rubrics
The tasks fall under three broad rubrics that are inter-related: Media sustainability, media governance, and social cohesion. Admittedly, they involve some activities that currently sit outside your portfolio but there is a crying need for a coordinator. That can, and should, be you.

The most pressing task is the New Public Media Entity, which both Television New Zealand and RNZ openly call “the merger”. You have inherited a project in the second of its three phases, and I am sure the easiest approach would be to leave it to take its (predetermined) course.

That would be both a lost opportunity and, I respectfully suggest, an abrogation of your responsibility to oversee the establishment of an organisation that is truly fit for purpose.

Your predecessor, Kris Faafoi, is admirably well-meaning and I have no doubt the initiative started under his watch had sound core purposes. However, he tended to lead from behind and the outcomes to date suggest the results will be less than the sum of their parts.

There is a golden opportunity to establish an entirely new organisation, born for a digital future that can accommodate but not be led by its legacy technologies and cultures. Its impact on the overall media landscape will be so significant that it must have a unique multi-tiered independent governance structure to insulate it from government control and to contain its own power.

I see neither of these imperatives in any of the material that has so far entered the public domain and I fear the introduction of draft legislation in the next week or two will confirm my misgivings on both fronts. My hope is that you will intervene to ensure the final form of the bill addresses both opportunities and threats, and your discussions with the Establishment Board gives it the courage to think a significant distance beyond the square.

The Content Review, led by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, also demands your attention. While extremely useful work has already been undertaken on harmful content in various forms of media, there is a real need for strong coordination with your portfolio. My fear is that mainstream media could suffer because, when it comes to policing content, they are low hanging fruit. The real danger with harmful content lies with digital platforms.

Absence of strong government direction
Those social media platforms also demand your attention in other ways. The absence of strong government direction (the antithesis of what is evident in Australia and the European Union) has allowed them to apply a cynical cherry-picking approach to compensating New Zealand media for the material they appropriate.

Unless they are forced to act responsibly, they will continue to serve only their own pecuniary interests and to minimise their responsibilities for content. You have an opportunity to align New Zealand internationally.

Your predecessor performed a real service to media and the public in setting up the Public Interest Journalism Fund. I have to declare an interest here: I have been involved in evaluating applications for PIJF on behalf of NZ on Air. That involvement has allowed me to witness at first hand the determination to pursue journalism that is squarely in the public interest and to see successful applications for projects that hold government — and other forms of power — to account.

Blackened the name
However, oppositions forces (both political and more malign) have blackened the name of the fund. It has been characterised as a bribe that has muted criticism of the Labour government.

It may be a hard ask, given that you represent the very people accused of doing the bribing, but you need to restore the fund’s reputation…and commit to its continuation.

You may feel those tasks will be more than sufficient to keep you occupied for the rest of the current term, but you cannot ignore the other Labours of Willie Jackson. I suggest you coalesce them into a single project: Futureproofing New Zealand Media. It could provide the blueprint for your next term as Minister of Communication and Media.

It may also embrace the idea of my long-advocated Bretton Woods #2 and bring together the many elements that make up our media and their audiences to map a collective future. That would make this old man very happy.

I wish you well with your new portfolio. You bring to the role many years of media experience. Complete these 12 labours and, like Hercules, you will be a hero.

Dr Gavin Ellis ONZM MA PhD

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The proposal for a new entity to replace Television New Zealand and RNZ has two fundamental flaws that must be fixed if it is to gain the public’s trust.

The first flaw is the assumption that an existing legal structure — the Autonomous Crown Entity — is an appropriate form of governance. The second is that it has provided inadequate protection from political interference. The two issues are related.

Let me say at the outset that I support the restructuring of public service media. It is an idea whose time has come. It is an opportunity to create, almost from the ground up, a public organisation designed to live up to a digital incarnation of BBC-founder Lord Reith’s dictum that public media should inform, educate and entertain (now, however, in a creative and clever mix).

• READ MORE: Other RNZ and TVNZ merger reports

My concern lies in the need for this new entity to demonstrate from the outset that it will be free-standing and free from influence. By treating its formation little differently from a stock-standard Autonomous Crown Entity (ACE) into which existing organisations are dropped, the government is sending the wrong signals. From Day One (i.e., right now) it needs to be treated very much as a special case.

Let’s not lose sight of what is possible here: The creation of a ground-breaking structure that can set new standards for public service media in the digital age – if it is born out of independent thinking, creativity, and wisdom.

And let’s not forget why it is vital that it succeed in that aim. Public trust in the institutions of democracy and a free society are being systematically undermined. We need to look no further than the darkly manipulated “protest” in front of Parliament.

Stirrers wanted the prime minister and journalists lynched and violent “protesters” set fires and threw paving bricks at police. They were supported throughout by a much wider social media narrative that neither politicians nor the media could be trusted.

Public trust in media eroding
Public trust in media is already on the way down. AUT’s Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy polled trust in media last year and found it had declined across all four industry-wide metrics it had measured in 2020. RNZ and TVNZ remain the most trusted brands but both declined year-on-year. So, too, did all media included in the previous survey.

There is a real need for media institutions in which the public has trust and the JMaD studies point to public service media being at the pinnacle of that structure.

I have no doubt that the Minister of Broadcasting and Media, Kris Faafoi, is well-intentioned. As a former journalist he is only too well aware of the importance of trust and of the need to protect, nurture and champion media independence. Whether his cabinet colleagues have the same set of imperatives is harder to judge.

However, the restructuring requires a longer view than what might happen around the cabinet table over the next few months. We need to be concerned that the structure which emerges is not only fit for purpose now, but will endure for decades and be capable of withstanding winds of political change that on a global scale are showing more negative than positive signs.

In other words, it must be robust enough to survive not only known risks but also some conceivable unknowns: We had a Robert Muldoon, so could we have a Donald Trump?

Unfortunately, the announcement last week provides a less-than-reassuring beginning. The cabinet go-ahead was sparse on structural and operational detail. It did speak of a charter and proposed legislation that will contain a much-vaunted guarantee of editorial independence from ministerial control. However, that is undermined by other planned moves and much of the potential damage could be done even before the new structure is up and running.

Significantly, control of the governance of the implementation phase of the restructuring is one area of the cabinet paper and supporting documents in which there is real detail. Absence of detail elsewhere is explained away by saying these are matters for the Establishment Board to decide.

Seen as the architect
The draft terms of reference for the Establishment Board state it will be responsible for overseeing the detailed organisational design of the new entity and the transition to the new structure. In other words, it is to be seen as the architect. That was certainly the inference in Kris Faaoi’s announcement last week.

Yet the Establishment Board is precisely where the Minister (and his Cabinet colleagues) and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage have a potentially high level of influence.

The Establishment Board is expected to stay aligned to any cabinet decisions and is responsible for ensuring it “progresses government policy” and meets the minister’s objectives.

All members (up to nine) are to be appointed by the minister, who will also appoint the chair. The minister can terminate any member’s term before the expiry date and there is no requirement for him to state cause.

The board will not have its own staff but may ask the Ministry for Culture and Heritage – which will provide the secretariat — to appoint people to provide specialist or technical advice. MCH will also procure other services on the board’s behalf and its chief executive will decide what functions it will delegate to the board. Meanwhile MCH will continue to provide advice directly to the minister.

The Establishment Board will, according to the terms of reference, operate on a consensus basis — not a majority vote — and where it can’t reach consensus “the chair will advise the minister of the difference of opinion”. That begs the question: Does the minister effectively have a deciding vote?

He certainly has a tight hold on what the Establishment Board says in public. The section in the terms of reference relating to the Establishment Board’s relationship with the minister is devoted almost entirely to public statements. There can be “no surprises” (no surprise there) and the chair is the sole spokesperson.

The minister is to be informed of any public comment “either prior to, or as soon as possible after comment is made”, and all press releases must be sent to the minister in advance.

Multiple avenues for influence 
All of this suggests to me that both the minister and the ministry have multiple avenues through which they can influence the way the new structure is put together.

I freely admit there is good reason for liaison. For example, the early activity of the board will take place while the entity’s empowering Act and other law changes are working their way through the legislative process. The board’s thinking on the new entity should be reflected in that legislation and, if it isn’t, we might question why it is not.

However, there are equally good reasons why the Establishment Board should be seen to be independent. If the minister deflected questions on detail by saying they were matters for the Establishment Board, then let it be so.

The way it now stands, it looks (as my betting old dad would say) as though the government is trying to have a quid each way. Hedging bets is not a good way to begin the trust-building process.

Step one in that process should be an unequivocal statement from the minister that the Establishment Board does, in fact, have autonomy and, so long as its actions support the aims of the new entity, it will not be subject to ministerial or ministry direction. It should also have the power to appoint its own advisors.

Then there is the new entity itself. I was frankly surprised that work by a Chief Executives Working Party (to which I was an advisor), a Business Study group, and then a Business Case Governance Group did not produce a unique structure for what will be a unique organisation. Specifically, I expected to see the strongest recommendations for iron-clad protections, and I expected to see such protections accepted by cabinet. That hasn’t happened…yet.

Instead, cabinet has accepted the option of an Autonomous Crown Entity with a traditional minister-appointed board, with two board members appointed in consultation with the Minister for Māori Development. The only aspects that separate it from a stock-standard ACE is a charter (to which I’ll return) and a section that protects the entity’s editorial independence. As it stands, that section is less prescriptive that either the Television New Zealand Act or the Radio New Zealand Act.

Statement of good intentions
Cabinet has approved what is titled a “proposed basis for charter structure” that is little more than a statement of good intentions. Admittedly, no charter should be so detailed that it limits initiative or the ability to respond to changed circumstances.

However, what is missing from this document is an overarching statement that the organisation as a whole will be predicated on autonomy and independence. Instead there is a clause stating that the organisation itself should “demonstrate editorial independence”.

Also missing — or among the 12 redacted sections of the cabinet paper relating to financial implications — is how the new entity will be protected from the cudgel that governments here and elsewhere have used to bring recalcitrant public broadcasters to heel. That big stick is control of the purse-strings.

It is vital that there be some certainty of funding, both for operational reasons and to demonstrate to the public that the entity doesn’t kowtow to government in order to pay the bills.

We do not know what the core level of public funding will be, the term over which it will be paid, and who will set it. Funding, of course, is ultimately in Parliament’s hands and, as we’re talking taxpayer money, that is as it should be. However, it still needs protecting in some way from a vengeful ruling party – and here I want you to think forward to that Trump figure in our possible future. Multi-year funding, for example, is a pre-requisite.

There is still time to put right the governance shortfalls in the proposal.

The first step should be for the government to accept the need for an additional tier of governance that sits, effectively, above the board. Not to second-guess it, but to ensure that it meets the spirit of the charter under which the entity will operate, to review proposed budgets and Crown appropriations, and to act as a shield against external interference from government, the ministry or elsewhere.

Why Guardians are needed
The entity needs Guardians. RNZ’s board is described as guardians but they are effectively the equivalent of company directors (even if they are absolved from the need to turn a profit). The new entity will need something more akin to the Guardians of Lakes Manapouri, Monowai, and Te Anau that were established by Norman Kirk to protect those waters against detrimental effects from the hydro power scheme.

The Guardians of Public Media should, however, differ from that precedent in several fundamental ways.

First, they should not be appointed by a minister but by Parliament. In fact, the board of the entity should be similarly appointed, as is the case with a number of European public service media.

Second, they should produce an annual report, made not to a minister but to Parliament. It should include a judgement on funding adequacy and a review of the entity’s relationship with the minister, the ministry, and government as a whole.

This annual report should replace the proposed yearly review by at least four government departments, but not annual reports to Parliament by the entity itself.

The cabinet paper proposes a five-yearly review of the charter by Parliament. That can be read as a review by the politicians in power. Therefore any parliamentary review should be preceded by a Guardian review of the charter’s fitness for purpose and it is that review that should go to the House. That way, if a ruling party wants to mess unilaterally with the charter, it will be seen for what it is. In addition, each year the guardians should review performance against charter objectives, separate from any assessment by the entity itself.

They should also act as a bulwark against interference in decisions relating to any content produced or disseminated, and that is not limited to news. A shiver still runs down the spines of old broadcasters at the mention of Robert Muldoon’s undoubted role in the decision in 1980 not to screen the drama Death of a Princess to avoid upsetting the Saudi government.

More protection for news
News and current affairs, however, require more protection and guarantees of autonomy than other forms of programming. That was not apparent in the documents released last week. There must be explicit prohibitions — in legislation and in the charter — on both external and internal interference in news operations. A minister is not the sole potential source of pressure. Officials, board members, commercial staff, and management of the entity must be held at arm’s length.

Legislation should also preclude the chief executive from also holding the position of editor-in-chief. Paul Thompson holds both positions at RNZ and has done so without controversy, but the new entity will be both much larger and will be a hybrid of commercial and non-commercial functions.

I believe all of the entity’s news and current affairs functions and decision-making, including the position of editor-in-chief, must be kept within that department if autonomy and independence are to be seen to be real.

Details missing from last week’s announcement and document release created frustration but there may be a brighter side. If the detail has yet to be worked out, there is still time for Kris Faafoi, his cabinet colleagues, his ministry, and the Establishment Board to get it right.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

• Read the full Gavin Ellis article here:

Fundamental flaws in public media plans call for big fixes

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The New Zealand government last week unveiled the creation of a new public media entity that will incorporate RNZ and TVNZ. It will pave the way for digital innovation as well as adding new capability and services.

This is a big shift and is a lot to get your head around.

In particular, the public media focus of the new entity is a watershed.

• READ MORE: RNZ and TVNZ to be folded into mega public media entity, says Faafoi
• Merging commercial TVNZ and non-commercial RNZ won’t be easy — and time is running out — Dr Peter Thompson
• Other RNZ and TVNZ merger reports

New Zealand has had various combinations of public and publicly-owned commercial media entities in the past, but this takes the public media remit to a new level.

The new entity is designed to ensure New Zealand has one well-resourced, comprehensive public media entity that can weather the ongoing disruptions caused by the almost unbridled power of the FANGS (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).

Over recent years the media sector has been in flux, with commercial models under strain and audiences fragmenting and often favouring the products provided by the FANGS. This has contributed to increased misinformation and polarisation.

The government hopes the new entity will be strong and flexible enough to adapt to those challenges in a way a stand-alone RNZ and TVNZ would not be able to achieve.

Four key building blocks
To understand what the government is trying to do it is useful to focus on four key building blocks it is putting in place.

First, the new public media entity will be exactly that — an organisation that is centred on public media services that inform and connect the nation, celebrate our culture and identity and equip people to participate in our democracy.

Commercial activity will play an important role and will be required to support this public media focus.

Second, the entity will operate under a public media charter that will enshrine in law its editorial independence. The Charter will be the north star for the organisation, requiring it aspire to and deliver the best attributes of public media.

The draft charter that is proposed in the Cabinet paper looks promising. This, more than anything else this, will ultimately determine the direction of the new entity, its tone and culture and the services it provides.

Third, the policy places a strong emphasis on the new entity’s obligation to support and recognise the “Māori Crown relationship”. This is another big change. Indeed, the purpose of the new entity will require it to contribute to a “valued, visible, and flourishing te reo Māori me ngā tikanga Māori”.

This is vital as the new entity, from day one, needs to capture what makes Aotearoa New Zealand unique, including Te Tiriti. The new entity’s board will include at least two members with Te Ao Māori and tikanga Māori expertise.

And fourth, the new entity will be required to collaborate with other media and support the overall health of the wider media system. This recognises the critical importance of sustaining a plurality of media sources and perspectives in the years ahead.

Mediawatch: Can RNZ + TVNZ = new PME in 2023? https://t.co/6HDIgnY3L1

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) March 13, 2022

Trusted media underpin democracy
Trusted, independent news and current affairs underpin our democracy. The only way to ensure trust in the media is to ensure people have a range of sources and perspectives to choose from.

The new entity will need to support that diversity in meaningful ways, for example, by training the next generation of reporters, producers, presenters, and programme makers for the benefit of the wider industry.

Public media institutions around the world have been on the back foot recently.

In many countries publicly-owned and funded broadcasters have been reined-in, leaned on and co-opted to serve political ends.

This is happening to a shocking degree in Hong Kong, Turkey, Slovenia,and Hungary, and in southern Africa as authoritarian regimes flexed their muscles.

But even in Australia and the UK it has been tough for the ABC and BBC with attempts to question the pivotal role played by feisty, independent public media in a time of crisis and heightened polarisation.

This all points to the value of strong public media to our democratic processes. Both RNZ and TVNZ carry strong reputations internationally. The rebuilding of our public media mandate will enhance that.

Much is still to be determined, including funding levels, and no doubt there will be intense public debate when the draft legislation is opened for public submissions.

RNZ is up for the challenge and will work hard to contribute our valued services and our public media ethos and expertise to the new entity.

The bottom line will be ensuring all the people of New Zealand benefit.

Paul Thompson is chief executive and editor-in-chief of Radio New Zealand. He is also president of the international Public Media Alliance. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It was first published on the Stuff website.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The announcement of the government’s decision to merge RNZ and TVNZ into a non-profit “public media entity” was long anticipated but, coming in the second year of Labour’s second term, underwhelming in its lack of detail.

Cabinet had discussed the proposal back in 2019, and yesterday’s announcement was expected to be the culmination of extensive planning, consulting, expert committees and corporate accounting reports.

The protracted process was intended to give shape to the broadcasting minister’s vision of a multi-platform public service provider capable of fulfilling its cultural and civil remit into the 21st century.

• READ MORE: BBC funding: licence fee debate risks overlooking value of UK’s public broadcasters
• Closures, cuts, revival and rebirth: how covid-19 reshaped the NZ media landscape in 2020
• Crisis, disintegration and hope: only urgent intervention can save New Zealand’s media

And while it’s significant that the government recognises the importance of strong public media across all platforms in New Zealand, and is committed to its strategic vision, in many respects the announcement raises more questions than it answers.

Video: NZ Herald

Commercial tension
Firstly, how will the organisational and governance structures across radio, television and online services function? Minister Kris Faafoi has indicated that these details will now be delegated to a new “establishment committee”, although the Strong Public Media governance group had delivered a business case to cabinet last year.

Complications arise because TVNZ is a commercial entity, which competes directly with other commercial media for (slowly declining) audiences and advertising revenues, while RNZ is a fully funded public service provider with a charter.

The minister has affirmed that the current non-commercial radio services will be retained. But aligning the commercial television arm and future online services — for example, the integration of the RNZ and TVNZ news operations — entails potentially contradictory priorities, even under the broad directives of a public charter.

Plans unveiled for #NZ‘s new mega public media –
it will operate under a #charter, with “trustworthy #news” as a core service #AsiaPacificReport #RNZnews #RNZPacific #publicmedia #publicbroadcasting #KrisFaafoi @shrek45 @EveningReportNZ #communitymediahttps://t.co/Wf6sLWKP7p pic.twitter.com/5dpefe2XCc

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) March 10, 2022

Secondly, what funding arrangements will support the new public media entity? The ratio of public to commercial revenues and the mechanisms for ensuring its adequacy across future changes of government are critical, but have not been specified — although some redacted figures in related cabinet papers suggest these have been estimated.

The minister suggests these will be determined through forthcoming budget deliberations. If this implies that the level of funding depends on annual budget wrangling with other cabinet portfolios, then there is little hope of gaining substantial and sustainable commitment over the demands of health, education, housing and other policy priorities.

NZME and Stuff voice unease over merger of TVNZ and RNZ, but TV3 owner says ‘so far, so good’. https://t.co/NV9ji1mMJ0

— Stuff (@NZStuff) March 10, 2022

Budget uncertainty
Faafoi’s predecessor, Clare Curran, ran into this problem in 2018. Having announced an anticipated investment of NZ$38 million to develop RNZ’s services, the budget delivered only $15 million.

Prior to that, Labour’s attempt to restructure TVNZ with a dual-remit charter was compromised by cabinet disagreements. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage allocated $95 million of public funding only for Treasury to extract $142 million in dividends.

Crucially, balancing public service and commercial expectations requires the organisational structure and funding arrangements to be in sync. But this is unlikely to happen if one is determined by a committee and the other is left to the uncertainties of the budget.

There are successful public service operators, such as RTE in Ireland or CBC in Canada, which have mixed commercial and public funding. In both cases, though, the public ratio is more than 50 percent. It would be wishful thinking to suppose cabinet would provide 50 percent public funding to align TVNZ’s services with a public charter remit.

That would cost at least $150 million per year — triple the current allocation to RNZ and TVNZ. When reliance on commercial revenue predominates, commissioning and scheduling decisions inevitably reflect the imperative to optimise eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Time is tight
Even with base-line funding assured for the non-commercial RNZ services, without any mechanism to ensure adequate ratios are maintained, there is a risk that future revenue increases will come to depend increasingly on developing commercial spin-offs online.

This would inevitably affect the new entity’s capacity to use the expansion of its online services to deliver more diverse content to a full range of audiences.

The minister has suggested the new entity will be established by 2023. Given the legislation has yet to be drafted, that time-line is already tight. Any further delays or announcements of bold intentions without concrete substance will risk pushing Labour’s public media plans further toward the 2023 election.

If the new entity has not been established before then, and with Labour slipping in the polls, all bets on the future of public media in Aotearoa New Zealand are off.

Dr Peter Thompson is associate professor of media studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

RNZ and TVNZ will be subsidiaries of a new mega public media organisation, Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi has confirmed.

Faafoi announced the long-awaited changes to public broadcasting today, outlining the government’s plans for RNZ and TVNZ and the creation of a new public media entity.

Faafoi, a former journalist, said the government was aiming to have the new organisation up and running by the middle of next year.

• READ MORE: RNZ, TVNZ’s future: Mega public media entity likely to be unveiled
• Other NZ public media reports

He said the government had accepted the recommendations of the business case working group, and agreed to establish the organisation as a new Autonomous Crown Entity.

It will operate under a charter, with “trustworthy news” as a core service. It will be funded by a mix of government funds and commercial revenue, with complete editorial independence. Advertising-free programming will be maintained.

An establishment board will be set up in the next month, with the aim of having the new entity operational by 1 July next year.

Decisions about how the new organisation would work in practice would be left for the board to make.

This could include whether to keep TVNZ and RNZ as subsidiaries, and while current programmes would be maintained there would also be the opportunity for new ones.

This could include the likes of advertising-free television, but again those decisions would be left for the board to make.

Watch the announcement

“Whether it be covid, national emergencies or Olympic Games, the last few years have shown how important a strong media environment is to reflect New Zealanders’ stories, dreams and aspirations and it is important we support public media to flourish,” Faafoi said.

“RNZ and TVNZ are each trying to adjust to the challenges, but our current public media system, and the legislation it’s based on, is focused on radio and television.

“New Zealanders are among some of the most adaptive audiences when it comes to accessing content in different ways; like their phones rather than television and radio, and from internet-based platforms.

“We must be sure our public media can adapt to those audience changes, as well as other challenges that media will face in the future.

“The new public media entity will be built on the best of both RNZ and TVNZ, which will initially become subsidiaries of the new organisation.

“It will continue to provide what existing audiences value, such as RNZ Concert, as well as better reaching those groups who aren’t currently well served; such as our various ethnic communities and cultures.”

He said funding decisions would be made as part of Budget processes, and the new organisation would have a focus on providing quality content to under-served or under-represented audiences.

Deliver on Te Tiriti obligations
It would be required to deliver on the Crown’s Te Tiriti obligations, and could collaborate with and support the wider media sector where appropriate.

Faafoi said the public would have a chance to give their views, including on the new charter, through the select committee process later in 2022.

Faafoi, who is unwell but has tested negative for covid-19, made the announcement from his home today.

Labour first announced intentions to boost public broadcasting through “RNZ Plus” at the 2017 election, but since then the proposal has gone through several iterations.

A working group was commissioned to look into a new public media entity in March last year.

Faafoi said he announced in-principle decisions in February 2020 to ensure public media could face the challenges of the future, to keep up with audience, technology and market trends.

“The world is a vastly different place compared to that time. There are new challenges, but still fundamentally the challenges that face audiences and media are the same and if anything they have intensified.”

He said when the government began looking at this issue, TV and radio were ranked one and two for the biggest daily audience in New Zealand, and now are ranked two and four, with video on demand like YouTube at number one, and subscription video on demand like Netflix at number three.

Process put on ice
The process was put on ice when the covid pandemic hit, but last year the government followed through and asked experts to develop a business case. They delivered their recommendations late last year, to create a modern public media entity.

They also stressed the importance of protecting and future-proofing the trust and strength that public media has built up over decades.

He said the case for change is there, so Cabinet had decided to create the new public media entity, but has committed that all current non-commercial programming and platforms will endure and the likes of RNZ National and Concert FM will continue.

“The establishment of the new entity will allow better use of a range of platforms including current radio and linear TV, and those of third parties, to reach audiences when, where and how audiences choose, and will operate under a public charter set out in legislation.”

He said there will be some areas where it will make sense to collaborate with others, but “there will also be areas where it will continue a long-standing tradition of excellence and fierce competition”.

The establishment board will have members from both RNZ and TVNZ, and Faafoi said he intended to ensure there will be “some representation of people on the shop floor. Someone who understands the media and the issues that are important to staff as we work through this transition”.

Budget announcements will come on Budget Day, he said, but some of the decisions are best left to the establishment board, “which is why that board will be up and running soon”.

A stronger foundation
He said this change will cause some unease, but the future under a new entity with the ability to respond to the challenges and opportunities of local media will give a stronger foundation “to do what public media has done for decades, and that is to tell our stories”.

He disagreed with criticisms that the move would lead to dominance of the media sector by a publicly funded behemoth.

RNZ and TVNZ had a long history of editorial independence and Faafoi said he was pleased that would continue, with protections maintained in legislation.

He said the very heart of the proposal was to ensure the content the public media had provided over decades could continue to be delivered in whatever form audiences would consume it from in future.

“Audiences need to know that the government is moving with it.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

News Corp Australia and Google have announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in partnership with the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. It will provide digital skills training for News Corp journalists and other media outlets.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

The academy won’t provide full degrees, just certificates and a chance to upgrade digital skills in a fast-changing media environment.

• READ MORE: More than protection, Australian journalism needs better standards
• The news media bargaining code could backfire if small media outlets aren’t protected: an economist explains

Many companies in various industries have partnered with universities to deliver what used to be in-house training programmes. Strengthening the links between industry and the academy has been welcomed in many sectors and certainly encouraged by governments for many years.

Why then are we as journalism academics concerned?

There are several reasons. The first and most obvious is the incursion of a high-profile and controversial media company into the higher education sector and the extent to which that is funded by a large disruptive digital search company.

Antagonism towards academia
It is telling that the Digital News Academy will be housed in the University of Melbourne’s private arm, the Melbourne Business School, rather than its Centre for Advancing Journalism within the Arts faculty.

Australia’s largest commercial media company has long criticised university journalism education, and journalism academics, including each of the authors of this article and many of our colleagues.

The company even once sent an incognito reporter into a University of Sydney lecture to uncover criticism of News Corp in the classroom. That reporter, Sharri Markson, is now investigations editor at The Australian and a member of “the panel of experts” that will oversee the Digital News Academy.

So it comes as no surprise that News Corp has avoided journalism programmes.

News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has said part of the academy’s role will be building a stronger Australia by keeping society informed through “strong and fearless news reporting and advocacy”.

Yet partnering with a journalism programme would have facilitated that. It might also have helped assuage News Corp critics, some of whom have been active online during the week with reminders about News Corp’s unethical conduct during the hacking scandal and its disregard for scientific evidence in its reporting on climate change.

University journalism courses teach ethics and critical thinking alongside practical skills such as new digital ways of fact checking, gathering information and telling stories.

Google Australia already offers free tutorials to journalism programmes about smart ways to use its search engine to find and check investigative stories.

University journalism programmes also distinguish between training and education; the former is predominantly about skills, the latter places those skills in context and teaches students how to think critically about the industry and environment in which they work.

By placing this course in a business school and not a liberal arts or humanities faculty, the venture gets the kudos of the University of Melbourne’s backing without the challenging academic culture News Corp dislikes.

News Corp and Google are corporate clients, paying the university for these courses, so the capacity for independent criticism of Australia’s most dominant newspaper company is eroded even further.

What will the Digital News Academy do?
All we know so far about the academic credibility of the Digital News Academy comes from its promotional announcement, in press releases reported in the Media section of The Australian (published by News Corp).

The publicity says the nine-month course will take 750 enrolments from journalists at News Corp Australia, Australian Community Media (the stable of 160 regional publications formerly owned by Fairfax) and smaller media partners.

A “governance committee” will select candidates (who nominate themselves or are put forward by their employers). These students will be expected to use the Google suite of tools as they collaborate online at the Melbourne Business School, to generate, build and sell stories to the course’s “Virtual Academy Newsroom”.

Each year there will be what is being billed as a major journalism conference and a US study tour for a select group of trainees.

There are no public details yet of the academic credentials of the certificate programme but the academy has drawn on a “panel of experts”, almost all of whom come from inside News Corp and Google.

Google gains influence
It’s easy to see why Google was motivated to fund a News Corp training academy above and beyond what it is required to do as part of its bid to stop further intervention in its workings by the Australian government under the terms of the News Media Bargaining Code.

But there are some deeper questions about why a company that has such a stranglehold on the new digital economy is involved. By funding the academy Google may be undercutting full university degrees specialising in journalism.

Relying on Google to make up the shortfall in news organisations’ training budgets is a problem. It allows Google to shape curriculum while appearing to be a champion of the same journalism industry it has been accused of undermining.

As journalism academics we respect the need for specialised training and skills development. But journalism programmes should never be captured or constrained from being critical of the industry for which they prepare students.

They should continue to embed ethics in their courses. The aim, after all, is to improve journalism, for everybody’s benefit.

As it is often said, news is not just another business. While studying journalism often involves the study of business, business imperatives should not drive the study of journalism itself.

Dr Andrew Dodd is director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne; Dr Alexandra Wake is programme manager, journalism, at RMIT University, and Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication at Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Dr Dodd has worked as a journalist at The Australian newspaper and has provided in-house legal and news writing training for News Corp. Dr Wake has provided in-house training for the ABC and for Australian Provincial Newspapers. She is the elected president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). Professor Ricketson has worked on staff at The Australian, among other news outlets. He was a member of the Finkelstein inquiry into the media and media regulation which was sharply criticised in News Corp Australia publications. His appointment as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s representative on the Press Council was also criticised by News Corp Australia. Full disclosures at The Conversation.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

October 2021 was a horror month for Facebook as the headlines screamed “Facebook under fire” which started with the social media behemoth suffering an outage for several hours.

Then it had a whistleblower — American data scientist Francis Haugen — who accused the company of:

• prioritising growth over user safety;
• bowing to the will of state censors in some countries;
• allowing hate speech to burgeon in other countries;
• ignoring fake accounts that may influence voters and undermine elections;
• allowing the antivaccine message to proliferate; and
• having algorithms that fuel noxious behaviour online.

Add to that, a major impending problem of capturing a young audience who are flocking elsewhere and turning their backs on the oldest social media platform which was founded in 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

• READ MORE: Facebook profits top $9bn amid whistleblower revelations
• Other Pacific Newsroom reports
• The Pacific Newsroom

Even so, its success as the leading platform is undeniable with it announcing a $9 billion quarterly profit in October with a massive 3 billion users.

It was the access to smartphones when they were offered in the Pacific and technology that drove Facebook’s popularity to largely receptive devotees. The uptake of the social media platform in French Polynesia (72.1 percent penetration by 2020), Fiji (68.2 percent, Guam (87.8 percent), Niue (91.7 percent), Samoa (67.2 percent) and Tonga (62.3 percent) made it a no-brainer for Sue Ahearn, founder of the highly credible The Pacific Newsroom page to use the platform.

Measured success
The success of The Pacific Newsroom page can be measured by the site garnering in excess of 40,500 members most of who can participate actively by contributing to the page.

Ahearn is no stranger to the Asia-Pacific region. An Australian journalist for more than 40 years, 25 at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who originally hails from Martinborough in New Zealand, she was drawn to set up the page primarily because of misinformation that tends to flourish in the Pacific news.

“It came to me about four years ago when the ABC cut back on all of its coverage of the Pacific, and I could see there was a big gap there,” she says.

“The ABC was only providing a small service and there was a lack of interest in most of the Australian media. You could see the technology was changing, how the information was flowing from the region was changing.’’

The apathy for a thirst for Pacific knowledge has had a profound effect on insularity in the media, especially in Australia and New Zealand, although the Public Interest Journalism Fund is attempting to address that in some way in New Zealand.

“I wish I knew, Sean Dorney, Jemima Garrett and all of the Pacific journalists just can’t fathom why is there so little interest in our region among the Australian media,’’ says Ahearn.

“It doesn’t make sense. There tends to be three or four journalists that cover the region and try to convince news outlets to run their stories or send reporters, and that has become very difficult.”

Only Pacific correspondent based in Pacific
Natalie Whiting of the ABC and the recipient of the Dorney-Walkley Foundation grant 2021 is the only journalist from Australasia who is based in the Pacific. She is stationed in the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby.

“In New Zealand, that’s not a problem and New Zealand does good coverage of the Pacific. New Zealand has a much closer relationship with the Pacific,” Ahearn says.

However, Michael Field in Auckland, a page administrator and a veteran of the Pacific who went to journalism school with Ahearn, had qualms about the coverage out of New Zealand.

“The thing that really bugs me is that only Radio New Zealand (RNZ) seems to be doing Pacific news. For example, you’d pick up the (New) Herald and see who’s covering the hurricane out in Fiji only to see it is a re-run of a RNZ story,” says Field.

“It bothers me. The Herald should have had a different angle on the story, RNZ a different angle, The Dominion Post would be different and there would be work for stringers in the Pacific. Now that is not the case because RNZ takes up everybody else’s work and runs it that way,

“I guess that is the reality of it now, but it seems the voice of the Pacific these days is state radio.

“Call me old fashioned, but I’d be too embarrassed to run a story quoting another media organisation, and if you had to do it you’d do it grudgingly. We are starting to fail in the coverage of the region,” he says.

Success stirs amazement
The success and growth of The Pacific Newsroom as an organic, quasi news agency akin to Reuters, Agence France Press (AFP) or Australian Associated Press (AAP) in a tiny way, has caught Ahearn by amazement.

“I am surprised because we have a lot of engagement, some stories get 80,000 or 90,000 engagements so there is a lot of interest in it, and I think it fills a huge niche.

She speaks about the talanoa concept of The Pacific Newsroom.

“It’s like a town square where people can meet, share stories and talk about what is happening. Michael (Field) and I spend an enormous time on this project and we’re basically volunteers, we’re not being paid or making any money from it,” she says.

Nor would she entertain the thought of applying for funding either in New Zealand or Australia, preferring instead to maintain their editorial independence.

“Mike and I have discussed this, and we think one of the main attractions of our site is it is not monetised, that it is a voluntary site, there are no advertisements on it, we try and keep it independent, and we are both at the stage in our lives where we’re not working fulltime in the media,” Ahearn says.

“We’ve got time to spend doing this as a public interest, we really enjoy doing it too, it’s a lot of fun.

Many great stories
“There are so many great stories in the Pacific that need to be amplified to the world.

“Things are happening with technology and it’s giving a much stronger voice to the Pacific whether it’s on climate change or fishing or other important issues and that is why it is going to get stronger and stronger,” Ahearn says.

Among the stories that gained the site momentum was the University of the South Pacific (USP) having its vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia at the centre of controversy during his first term when Fiji government and educational officials tried to oust him from office in the so-called USP saga, eventually unceremoniously deporting him in a move widely condemned around the Pacific.

“The big story which moved us along was the USP saga last year, for quite political reasons which had to do with the players, we were leaked all the reports and people could see if it got a certain amount of information on Pacific Newsroom that things might happen, and it did,” Field says.

“More recently we’ve had the same with the Samoan elections where a number of players wanted to be interviewed directly; the former Prime Minister (Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi) seemed to have some misinformed view that we are more powerful than we are. We cope with that so it is constantly moving thing.”

Another worrying development were the libel laws in Australia where last month the court ruled publishers to be liable for defamatory comments.

“The libel laws, it’s another tension and another thing we’ve got to watch. We watch it like a hawk (as moderators) and that is not to characterise the particular audience we’ve got,” Field says.

‘Shooting your mouth off’
“Shooting your mouth off seems to be regarded in much of the Pacific as a God-given right — ‘why you trying to stop me from saying this’, we just delete people now. We tried saying to people right at the beginning we didn’t need expletives, swear words and all that stuff, and we were going to take them down.

“It is learning experience, moderating a site like Pacific Newsroom can be hard, depressing work and sometimes there’s a lot of people that sort of feel they have to say something even though it is a complete nonsense, and it is hard yakka that sort of stuff,’’ Field says.

On the flip side of it were the tangible rewards that make it all worthwhile.

“I can remember one particular point where we were tracking a superyacht that was tripping around Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga; there were people from quite remote village areas of these countries that would send us pictures saying, ‘here is a picture of the yacht that has just passed my village ‘. Whereas back in the day you tried to get a shortwave radio operator to tell you what happened three weeks after the event.

“The Pacific is now full of people with smartphones and with good connections so we can cover everything in the Pacific,” Field says.

As for the credibility of the site, Field declined an approach from a major mainstream New Zealand media company that sought copyright and permission to use the material that was published.

Then there was the young journalist from another mainstream media company who asked Field for a contact in relation to a Vanuatu story, telling Field that they all shared their contacts in the newsroom. Needless to say, he went away disappointed and empty-handed.

Ancient settler societies
Just how well The Pacific Newsroom is regarded in the Pacific is summed up eloquently by history associate professor Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano of the USP who tells it with a Pacific panache.

“Apart from Australia, New Zealand, Tokelau, Hawai’i, Guam, American Samoa, West Papua, Rapanui, and the French territories (New Caledonia, Uvea and Futuna, Tahiti), the nature of independent and self-governing Pacific societies is that they are ancient settler societies steeped in conservatism,” Tuimaleali’ifano says.

“While their constitutions have absorbed Western influences, imperial laws, Christianity, fundamental freedoms/rights, monetary capitalism, they remain steeped in ancient systems of governance based largely on hereditary hierarchies.

“Two worlds co-exist with the constitutional democratic model heavily influenced by kinship patterns of thought and behaviour. Within kinship hierarchies, there exists diverse governance structures and no two villages share the exact governing structure,” he says.

“Equally important are the constitutions and parliamentary legislation. These law-making institutions together with the judiciary are constantly evolving as they must with changing circumstances and best practices.

“It is within these social dynamics that journalism provides the Fourth or Fifth Estate to maintain an even keel on the Pacific’s growth as a viable region of nation-states.

“The Pacific Newsroom plays a vital role, of mirroring the changing Pasifika people needs and commenting on sensitive matters that many may find unsavoury difficult and overwhelming to articulate within ultra-conservative societies.

‘Without fear or favour’
“Without fear or favour, The Pacific Newsroom and its sister networks provide a critical service for a multi-faceted Pasifika struggling to reconcile and reshape a new consciousness for Pasifika.

“These include the enduring issues of regional identity and solidarity and unity within the context of relentless ideological and geopolitical power plays.”

As associate professor and head of journalism at USP Shailendra Singh in Suva, who continues to strive to keep his students well abreast in journalism under draconian media laws in Fiji, says:

“It is indeed a success story, due to a large following, because of media restrictions in Fiji. Users from Fiji especially feel more comfortable expressing themselves on this page.

“The page is prudently and professionally moderated, so it is respectable. The page uses information from credible news sources. (Independent sources like Bob Howarth on Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste; former Vanuatu Daily Post publisher Dan McGarry; current Pacific Island Times publisher Mar-Vic Cagurangan; and photojournalist Ben Bohane, until he returned to Australia from Vanuatu; as well as David Robie‘s Asia-Pacific Report which is a huge contributor to the page).

“I promote USP journalism students’ work on Pacific Newsroom. It is exemplary of how Facebook can support democracy.”

A vital source of information in the covid era. You get a cross-section of news and views on one platform. It is definitely the most popular virtual “kava bar” in the Pacific.

• Browse The Pacific Newsroom

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Sri Krishnamurthi.

By Antonio Sampaio in Dili

Max Stahl has died, almost 30 years after capturing images of the Indonesian massacre at Santa Cruz cemetery in the Timor-Leste capital Dili, which helped change forever the course of the country’s struggle for independence.

By coincidence, he passed away on the same day as the death in 1991 of Sebastião Gomes, the young man who was buried in Santa Cruz and whose death led to the protest that would eventually end in the Santa Cruz Massacre.

More than 2000 people had headed to Santa Cruz to pay tribute to Gomes, killed by militia connected to Indonesian forces in the Motael neighborhood.

• READ MORE: Timor-Leste’s Max Stahl – documenting the audiovisual and development “war” — David Robie’s tribute to Max on Café Pacific

The action of the Indonesian military was secretly filmed by Max Stahl and international attention on East Timor dramatically changed.

At the graveyard, the Indonesian military opened fire on the crowd and caused the deaths of 74 people at the scene. Over the next few days, more than 120 young people died in hospital or as a result of persecution of occupying forces.

Most bodies were never recovered.

Born on 6 December 1954 in the United Kingdom and a Timorese citizen since 2019, journalist and documentary maker Christopher Wenner, better known as Max Stahl, began his connection to the country in 1991 when he managed to enter East Timor for the first time.

Hiding among the graves
On November 12, hiding among the graves of Santa Cruz cemetery, he filmed one of many massacres during the Indonesian occupation of the country, with images being circulated  around the world and changing the country’s history.

Decorated with the Order of Timor-Leste, the highest award given to foreign citizens in the country, with the Rory Peck Prize for filmmakers and several other rewards, Max Stahl leaves as a legacy one of the main archives of images from the last years of the Indonesian occupation of the country and the period immediately before and after the independence referendum.

The Max Stahl Audiovisual Center in Timor-Lete (CAMSTL) contains thousands of hours of video, including extended interviews with key actors in the Timorese struggle for independence.

The archive was adopted by UNESCO for the World Memory Register and has been used for teaching and research purposes on Timor’s history under the framework of the cooperation protocol established between the University of Coimbra, the National University of East Timor and the CAMSTL

The descendant of a family of diplomats, he was wounded as a war correspondent in the Balkans.

Stahl studied literature at the University of Oxford and was a fluent speaker of several languages, including the two official languages of East Timor — Portuguese and Tetum.

He began his career writing for theatre and children’s television shows and found his calling as a war reporter when he lived with his family — his father was ambassador — in El Salvador where he sent reports about the civil war between 1979 and 1992.

Among other conflicts he covered were those of Georgia, former Yugoslavia and — from 30 August 1991 — East Timor, where he arrived as a “tourist” at the invitation of resistance groups.

“The king is dead. With great sadness, I write to inform you that Max passed away this morning around 04 am.”

— Max Stahl’s wife Dr Ingrid Brucens

Historic resistance leaders
Throughout his long ties to East Timor, where he lived until recently when he had to travel to Australia for medical treatment, he interviewed some of the historic resistance leaders like Nino Konis Santa, David Alex and others.

It would be Santa Cruz, and the 12 November 1991 massacre that would make the name Max Stahl known internationally with the images exposing the barbarism of the Indonesian occupation.

In Portugal, the images eventually made a special impact, both through the brutality of the violence and with the fact that survivors gathered in the small chapel of Santa Cruz praying in Portuguese while listening to the bullets from the Indonesian military and police.

The 1999 referendum prompted Max Stahl to return to East Timor where he covered the violence before the referendum and after the announcement of independence victory and accompanied families on the flight to the mountains.

News of Max Stahl’s death on Wednesday at a Brisbane hospital quickly became the most commented subject on social media in East Timor, raising condolences from several responsible and personalities linked to the cause of the struggle for independence.

In statements to Lusa, former President José Ramos-Horta described Max Stahl’s death a “great loss” to Timor-Leste and the world, and which will cause “deep consternation and pain” to the Timorese people.

“What a great loss for all of us to East Timor, to the world. Someone like Max, with a big heart, with a great dedication and love for East Timor … being taken to another world,” he told Lusa.

Dr Ingrid Brucens, Max Stahl’s wife, and who was with the children in Brisbane, announced his death to his friends.

“The king is dead. With great sadness, I write to inform you that Max passed away this morning around 04 am,” she wrote in messages to friends.

Antonio Sampaio is the Lusa correspondent in Dili

CAMSTL video tribute
This video below is the  CAMSTL team’s tribute to the memory of Stahl, who had dedicated 30 years of his life to the people of Timor-Leste. CAMSTL colleagues said on their Facebook page:

“The images and testimonies recorded by the journalist in the 1990s alerted the world to the serious human rights violations taking place in Timorese territory.

“From then on, the country’s independence restoration process gained momentum.

“Today, the journalist’s heroic trajectory ends on the earthly plane, but his legacy will continue to live on in the large archive created and directed by him, the Centro Audiovisual Max Stahl Timor-Leste.

“Dear Max. We will always be together with you in preserving the memory of the resistance struggle and the construction of the Timorese nation.

“We would like to thank Max’s friend José Ramos-Horta — Nobel Peace Prize and Former President of the Republic– for participating in this video.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

By Antonio Sampaio in Dili

Max Stahl has died, almost 30 years after capturing images of the Indonesian massacre at Santa Cruz cemetery in the Timor-Leste capital Dili, which helped change forever the course of the country’s struggle for independence.

By coincidence, he passed away on the same day as the death in 1991 of Sebastião Gomes, the young man who was buried in Santa Cruz and whose death led to the protest that would eventually end in the Santa Cruz Massacre.

More than 2000 people had headed to Santa Cruz to pay tribute to Gomes, killed by militia connected to Indonesian forces in the Motael neighborhood.

• READ MORE: Timor-Leste’s Max Stahl – documenting the audiovisual and development “war” — David Robie’s tribute to Max on Café Pacific

The action of the Indonesian military was secretly filmed by Max Stahl and international attention on East Timor dramatically changed.

At the graveyard, the Indonesian military opened fire on the crowd and caused the deaths of 74 people at the scene. Over the next few days, more than 120 young people died in hospital or as a result of persecution of occupying forces.

Most bodies were never recovered.

Born on 6 December 1954 in the United Kingdom and a Timorese citizen since 2019, journalist and documentary maker Christopher Wenner, better known as Max Stahl, began his connection to the country in 1991 when he managed to enter East Timor for the first time.

Hiding among the graves
On November 12, hiding among the graves of Santa Cruz cemetery, he filmed one of many massacres during the Indonesian occupation of the country, with images being circulated  around the world and changing the country’s history.

Decorated with the Order of Timor-Leste, the highest award given to foreign citizens in the country, with the Rory Peck Prize for filmmakers and several other rewards, Max Stahl leaves as a legacy one of the main archives of images from the last years of the Indonesian occupation of the country and the period immediately before and after the independence referendum.

The Max Stahl Audiovisual Center in Timor-Lete (CAMSTL) contains thousands of hours of video, including extended interviews with key actors in the Timorese struggle for independence.

The archive was adopted by UNESCO for the World Memory Register and has been used for teaching and research purposes on Timor’s history under the framework of the cooperation protocol established between the University of Coimbra, the National University of East Timor and the CAMSTL

The descendant of a family of diplomats, he was wounded as a war correspondent in the Balkans.

Stahl studied literature at the University of Oxford and was a fluent speaker of several languages, including the two official languages of East Timor — Portuguese and Tetum.

He began his career writing for theatre and children’s television shows and found his calling as a war reporter when he lived with his family — his father was ambassador — in El Salvador where he sent reports about the civil war between 1979 and 1992.

Among other conflicts he covered were those of Georgia, former Yugoslavia and — from 30 August 1991 — East Timor, where he arrived as a “tourist” at the invitation of resistance groups.

“The king is dead. With great sadness, I write to inform you that Max passed away this morning around 04 am.”

— Max Stahl’s wife Dr Ingrid Brucens

Historic resistance leaders
Throughout his long ties to East Timor, where he lived until recently when he had to travel to Australia for medical treatment, he interviewed some of the historic resistance leaders like Nino Konis Santa, David Alex and others.

It would be Santa Cruz, and the 12 November 1991 massacre that would make the name Max Stahl known internationally with the images exposing the barbarism of the Indonesian occupation.

In Portugal, the images eventually made a special impact, both through the brutality of the violence and with the fact that survivors gathered in the small chapel of Santa Cruz praying in Portuguese while listening to the bullets from the Indonesian military and police.

The 1999 referendum prompted Max Stahl to return to East Timor where he covered the violence before the referendum and after the announcement of independence victory and accompanied families on the flight to the mountains.

News of Max Stahl’s death on Wednesday at a Brisbane hospital quickly became the most commented subject on social media in East Timor, raising condolences from several responsible and personalities linked to the cause of the struggle for independence.

In statements to Lusa, former President José Ramos-Horta described Max Stahl’s death a “great loss” to Timor-Leste and the world, and which will cause “deep consternation and pain” to the Timorese people.

“What a great loss for all of us to East Timor, to the world. Someone like Max, with a big heart, with a great dedication and love for East Timor … being taken to another world,” he told Lusa.

Dr Ingrid Brucens, Max Stahl’s wife, and who was with the children in Brisbane, announced his death to his friends.

“The king is dead. With great sadness, I write to inform you that Max passed away this morning around 04 am,” she wrote in messages to friends.

Antonio Sampaio is the Lusa correspondent in Dili

CAMSTL video tribute
This video below is the  CAMSTL team’s tribute to the memory of Stahl, who had dedicated 30 years of his life to the people of Timor-Leste. CAMSTL colleagues said on their Facebook page:

“The images and testimonies recorded by the journalist in the 1990s alerted the world to the serious human rights violations taking place in Timorese territory.

“From then on, the country’s independence restoration process gained momentum.

“Today, the journalist’s heroic trajectory ends on the earthly plane, but his legacy will continue to live on in the large archive created and directed by him, the Centro Audiovisual Max Stahl Timor-Leste.

“Dear Max. We will always be together with you in preserving the memory of the resistance struggle and the construction of the Timorese nation.

“We would like to thank Max’s friend José Ramos-Horta — Nobel Peace Prize and Former President of the Republic– for participating in this video.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A Frontline investigative journalism article on the politics behind the decade-long Bougainville war leading up to the overwhelming vote for independence is among articles in the latest Pacific Journalism Review.

The report, by investigative journalist and former academic Professor Wendy Bacon and Nicole Gooch, poses questions about the “silence” in Australia over the controversial Bougainville documentary Ophir that has won several international film awards in other countries.

Published this week, the journal also features a ground-breaking research special report by academics Shailendra Singh and Folker Hanusch on the current state of journalism across the Pacific – the first such region-wide study in almost three decades.

• READ MORE: Pacific Journalism Review – the articles

Griffith University’s journalism coordinator Kasun Ubayasiri has produced a stunning photo essay, “Manus to Meanjin”, critiquing Australian “imperialist” policies and the plight of refugees in the Pacific.

The main theme of the double edition focuses on a series of articles and commentaries about the major “Pacific crises” — covid-19, climate emergency (including New Zealand aid) and West Papua.

Unthemed topics include journalism and democracy, the journalists’ global digital toolbox, cellphones and Pacific communication, a PNG local community mediascape, and hate speech in Indonesia.

This is the first edition of PJR published since it became independent of AUT University last year after previously being published at the University of Papua New Guinea – where it was launched in 1994 – and the University of the South Pacific.

Lockdowns challenge
“Publishing our current double edition in the face of continued covid-driven lockdowns and restrictions around the world has not been easy, but we made it,” says editor Dr Philip Cass.

“From films to photoessays, from digital democracy to dingoes and disease, the multi-disciplinary, multi-national diversity of our coverage remains a strength in an age when too many journals look the same and have the same type of content.”

“We promise this journal will have a strong focus on Asian media, communication and journalism, as well as our normal focus on the Pacific.”

Founding editor Dr David Robie is quoted in the editorial as saying the journal is at a “critical crossroads for the future” and he contrasts PJR with the “oppressively bland” nature of many journalism publications.

“I believe we have a distinctively different sort of journalism and communication research journal – eclectic and refreshing,” he said.

The next edition of PJR will be linked to the “Change, Adaptation and Culture: Media and Communication in Pandemic Times” online conference of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) being hosted at AUT on November 25-27.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The criminalisation of activists — including those in West Papua — in 2019 and 2020 has been cited as one of the factors for the decline in the quality of democracy in Indonesia.

Based on a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), democracy in Indonesia scored its worst figure ever with a score of 6.3 and was placed 64th out of 167 countries.

Advocacy Team for Democracy (TAUD) member Teo Reffelsen said that the criminalisation of activists contributed to Indonesia’s poor record on civil freedoms.

• READ MORE: Papua’s KNPB accuses Jakarta of using military post attack to criminalise them

“It has been marked by the criminalisation of expression and public opinion, through to repressive actions ridden with violence,” said Reffelsen in a media release, reports CNN Indonesia.

Between 2019 and 2020, said Reffelsen, TAUD recorded at last 10 incidents of the criminalisation of activists in Indonesia.

This included six Papuan activists — Watchdoc founder and senor journalist Dandhy Dwi Laksono, Jakarta State University (UNJ) sociologist Robertus Robet, musician Ananda Badudu, Papua Student Alliance (AMP) lawyer and human rights activist Veronica Koman and public policy activist Ravio Patra.

Also, 5198 demonstrators were arrested during the protests against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation in September and October 2019, Save Indonesia Action Coalition (KAMI) activists Syahganda Nainggolan and Jumhur Hidayat along with Banda Aceh Syiah Kuala University lecturer Saiful Mahdi.

12 cases in 2021
In 2021, TAUD recorded at last 12 cases of criminalisation of activists. Two of these cases were related to senior state officials, namely Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko and Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan.

“The criminalisation of two Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) researchers, Egi [Primayogha] and Miftah, threats of criminalisation against [rights activist] Haris Azhar from the Lokataru [Foundation] and Fatia Maulidiyanti from Kontras [Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence],” wrote Reffelsen.

Reffelsen also said they found several cases of attacks on civil freedoms in the form of doxing or attacks in digital space against people who were critical of the government such as those suffered by Ravio Patra and critical online media Tempo.co and Tirto.id.

“The [police] cyber patrols which were legitimised by an instruction by the Indonesian police chief is another example,” said Reffelsen.

Apart from civil freedoms, another factor was that it appeared as if the government lacked the involvement of public participation in policy formulation.

The enactment to revisions to the Corruption Eradication Commission Law, the Omnibus Law and other legislation were examples.

Another aspect was actions by law enforcement agencies such as the judiciary which were seen as corrupt and the lack of seriousness on the part of the government to resolve human rights violations.

“The decline in Indonesia’s democratic index is in keeping with TAUD’s findings on the ground, primarily in relation to civil freedoms which have shrunk,” said Reffelsen.

Translated by James Balowski for Indoleft News. The original title of the article was “Kriminalisasi Aktivis Disebut Buat Indeks Demokrasi Menurun”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A video by a Fiji doctor on adverse side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine has been misconstrued to support conspiracy theories and myths not supported by any scientific evidence, says Fiji College of General Practitioners president Dr Ram Raju.

He said the college “does not condone any member spreading false information to the public”.

He was commenting critically about the video made by Lautoka-based Dr Baladina Kavoa.

• READ MORE: Fiji reports record 522 new cases of covid-19 – three more deaths
• Sayed-Khaiyum leading Fiji into chaos, says women’s crisis centre leader
• Other reports on the Fiji covid crisis

“It is a time for all of our healthcare workers to unite and educate the public about the truth and dispel all fears,”Dr Raju said.

“Doctors are seen to be community leaders who should therefore exercise extreme care and restraint in posting any news on social media.

“The Fiji College of GP’s is fully behind the vaccination programme rolled out by the Ministry of Health and Medical Services and we support their efforts.”

He said they had held many seminars on this subject well before the first covid-19 case was identified in March last year and all the doubts were dispelled.

Vaccinations ‘can save lives’
“At the moment, the covid-19 vaccination is the only method which can save lives,” Dr Raju said.

“It’s just like giving vaccination for a host of other diseases to save lives, like measles, diphtheria, tetanus, pneumonia, hepatitis, etc.”

He said there were some vaccination side effects that were to be expected.

“Getting covid-19 is not a joke and these conspiracy theories need to be laid to rest.

“By vaccinating, you are protecting yourself, your family and the population of Fiji.”

• The Fiji Times did not publish any comment by Dr Kavoa.

Repeka Nasiko is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I have been reading the tea leaves in the bottom of the online subscription cup.

My fortune-telling has been assisted by some very interesting international statistics.

The pattern in the bottom of the cup is telling me that the winner-takes-most paywall phenomenon that has characterised the US market may not be repeated in the New Zealand market in the longer term.

• READ MORE: Other Gavin Ellis commentaries

If we follow the American example of great success by the New York Times and Washington Post, The New Zealand Herald (which is the subscription leader in New Zealand with more than 110,000 online premium subscribers) will soak up the majority of those willing to pay for their news.

In the United States, where 21 percent have paid for online news in the past 12 months, more than half subscribe to either the New York Times or Washington Post and less than a quarter to local or regional sites.

In Britain, the heavyweight nationals – Telegraph, Times, and Guardian – command 55 percent of the paid online market and the very small percentage of Brits who are prepared to pay (only 8 percent) won’t look at paying for papers further down the food chain.

However, the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report contains statistics that suggest winner-takes-most may not be a foregone conclusion. We could follow the Scandinavian experience.

Norwegian model
In Norway, where close to half the population pay for online news, the three biggest national titles do command a significant subscriber audience between them but so, too, do regional and local news sites. Almost half of the subscribers take either VG, Aftenposten or Dagbladet but almost 60 percent subscribe closer to home.

In Norway, according to the Reuters survey, local newspapers are seen as the “go-to” source for politics (71 percent), crime (73 percent), coronavirus news (53 percent), and things to do (46 percent).

“Our research this year also shows a link between how attached people are to their local community and levels of local news consumption,” the report states. “Respondents in both Austria and Switzerland are amongst those countries that feel most strongly attached and – like Norway – these are also countries where local news consumption tends to be higher and the value of local newspapers is more keenly felt…

“None of this is to suggest that publishers in countries with more attachment are not also suffering from the impact of digital disruption. We see blind spots and decline in most markets, but the fact that local newspapers in Norway are still valued for a local newspaper bundle of different information services gives them a stronger chance of persuading people to pay for online news.”

New Zealand is a country that traditionally has had a regional and local focus in paid-for news. There are historical reasons for that. Transport in the newspaper industry’s formative period was difficult and the country’s topography means it remains expensive.

Newspapers developed around regional and local population centres. Even if they don’t buy it each day, most people will be able to tell you the name of their local newspaper. It is a different story with free-to-air broadcasting.

After short private enterprise experiments, broadcasting became government-owned and news management centralised. Network technology solidified the national focus of television in particular.

Closest to national daily
We have never had a national daily general newspaper. The closest we came was National Business Review’s five-year stint as a daily from the late 1980s. Efforts a decade later to fly The New Zealand Herald into Wellington and the South Island (The Dominion was briefly flown into Auckland) were expensive exercises that could not be sustained as revenue declined and internet use grew.

And, in any event, the Herald was an additional purchase for the majority of buyers in those centres, not an alternative.

Like most countries, New Zealand is still feeling its way through the conundrum of payment for news in the digital age. There are various forms of subscription in the online news market but the most obvious (and numerically superior) is the paywall.

The New Zealand Herald had first mover advantage on paywalls in the daily general news market (National Business Review had long ago introduced an expensive and impenetrable paywall on anything worth reading on its site). It also has far and away the largest regional population base.

So, although it has done remarkably well with its premium subscriptions, it is premature to put the title up there with the winner-take-most titles The New York Times, Washington Post and Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

Stuff has yet to take the subscription plunge but it will come in one shape or another. The donation strategy it currently pursues is drawing support but it is too haphazard in terms of contributions to cashflow. It relies on goodwill and there is no real downside to not donating. How it characterises its subscription strategy will be the key to success or failure.

If it sells itself as a national news source serving all of the country it may come second. NZME is already pursuing that strategy with the Herald brand. It is banking on New Zealand following the US/UK model and last November unveiled plans to make the Herald “New Zealand’s Herald” by, among other things, rebranding its regional titles – Bay of Plenty Herald, Rotorua Herald, Hawkes Bay Herald and so on.

NZME has first-mover advantage
If the US/UK model is working here, NZME has a clear first-mover advantage. If, however, the New Zealand market does not perform to that model, Stuff may capture the same sentiment that is manifesting itself in Norway. If it capitalises on the legacy value of its regional titles as subscriber brands, that could be more successful than the perception of a bunch of JAFAs playing fast and loose with a local masthead that has been around for more than a century.

This does not necessarily mean a host of separate news sites that could be a nightmare to administer. Technology is now clever enough to construct individual and group offerings that are tailored to need. What appears to be a separate site may, in fact, be a subset of Stuff determined by algorithms.

Stuff might like to look to Canada’s Globe and Mail (whose publisher is one-time New Zealand Herald chief executive Phillip Crawley). It has developed artificial learning technology, which it calls Sophi, to automate and optimise a host of publishing decisions around its paywall.

It can, for example, determine what covid-19 information to put behind the paywall and what to provide free for everyone to access. It is a powerful engine that is now used by 11 different publishers across 50 outlets.

The leaves at the bottom of my cup tell me that regional and local brand identity will play a crucial role when the major paid-for news outlets go head-to-head in a subscription contest.

Time will tell whether the dregs of my cup are better at foretelling the future than the cup of someone’s desk at NZME. If I have any advantage it may be that I make a very nice cup of Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Tea.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications – covering both editorial and management roles – that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a blog called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

• Read the full Gavin Ellis column here

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“Not a great week for journalism at the ABC”, News Corp’s Sharri Markson tweeted earlier this month, when the week was barely a day old.

It is hard to remember the last time a News Corp columnist declared it was a great week for journalism at the ABC. Markson’s tweet linked to a story in The Australian that quoted former Attorney-General Christian Porter saying his dropping of his defamation claim against the ABC was “a humiliating backdown by the ABC”.

Apart from reporting the settlement, the main basis for the article was that the ABC had warned its staff not to claim victory following Porter’s withdrawal, and to be careful in the way they talked about it.

• READ MORE: View from The Hill: Porter decides it’s time to ‘fold em’ in ABC defamation case
• Latest $84 million cuts rip the heart out of the ABC, and our democracy
• Conspiracy theories on the right, cancel culture on the left: how political legitimacy came under threat in 2020

At such a legally sensitive moment, one might have thought the ABC warning to staff was mere prudence, but it also points to more recurring issues about how media organisations view their journalists’ statements on social media. These issues are likely to become more common, not less.

The right to tweet?
The Sydney Morning Herald recently published a story quoting Liberal Senator and former ABC journalist Sarah Henderson saying the national broadcaster’s social media policy was “woefully inadequate”.

There are genuine dilemmas here. Journalists as professionals and employees are subject to certain disciplines. What they tweet can and will affect the way others perceive their work.

Conversely, as citizens, they also have the right to free expression.

In April, The Australian’s economics editor, Adam Creighton, sent this tweet:

Covid19 has killed free speech. Covid19 will be the most formative event of my life.
Virtue signalling dominates truth.
The West is finished.

— Adam Creighton (@Adam_Creighton) April 11, 2021

Does such a cri de coeur affect how readers regard his judgement and capacity to report? Or should he have the right to say how he feels?

What constitutes crossing the line?
The ABC is the Australian media organisation that has most earnestly sought to resolve these dilemmas. It has four eminently sensible guidelines:

• do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute
• do not undermine your effectiveness at work
• do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views
• do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

Henderson pointed to two breaches of these guidelines. One was from an ABC lawyer who called the Coalition government “fascist” and Prime Minister Scott Morrison “an awful human being” on Twitter, and then resigned. Henderson said he should not have been allowed to resign, but should have been fired.

Her other example involved what she called “Laura Tingle’s trolling of a prime minister” last year. This is an inaccurate use of the word trolling, but increasingly politicians (and journalists) seem to equate any criticism of themselves on social media as trolling.

Tingle’s single offending tweet concluded “we grieve the loss of so many of our fine colleagues to government ideological bastardry. Hope you are feeling smug Scott Morrison”. The tweet was posted late at night after a farewell function for her friend and colleague Philippa McDonald, and it was deleted the next morning.

It is asking a lot of ABC journalists to feel detached and impartial about government cutbacks to their own organisation that adversely affect the careers of their colleagues. Nevertheless, the ABC has a large investment in Tingle’s public credibility, and the tweet was immediately addressed internally.

ABC managing director David Anderson injected an unusual note of common sense when he was asked whether Tingle was reprimanded during a Senate estimates hearing. He called Tingle’s tweet “an error of judgement” and said “there’s a proportionality that needs to be applied”.

ABC boss David Anderson says rural and regional jobs have been ring fenced from the current cuts. As of last week about 70 ABC staff whose roles are gone are yet to depart the public broadcaster. Everyone leaving knows their job is gone. #estimates

— Tom McIlroy (@TomMcIlroy) October 21, 2020

The dangers of an unduly restrictive approach
The larger danger is that journalists, especially those at the ABC, will get caught up in public controversies surrounding their own work. While at one level they clearly should have the right to defend themselves, the problem is the temptation to succumb to the cheap point-scoring in which critics often engage, to be dragged down from the professional standards of the original programme.

Though recent public controversies have focused on apparent breaches on social media not being sufficiently punished, there are also dangers and potential injustices in an unduly restrictive approach.

The most obvious victim of a journalist being punished for social media activity was SBS football commentator Scott McIntyre, who posted a series of tweets on ANZAC Day in 2015 about the “cultification of an imperialist invasion”.

Then-Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull thought they were “despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned”, and contacted the head of SBS, Michael Ebeid. Ebeid fired McIntyre the same day.

Malcolm Turnbull denies influence over SBS decision to sack Scott McIntyre over controversial Anzac tweets. http://t.co/tzxHMBkCrD

— The Sydney Morning Herald (@smh) April 27, 2015

Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson was then quoted as saying McIntyre’s freedom of speech was not being curtailed, and that his historical claims “will be judged very harshly”.

Whatever the merits of his ANZAC tweets, they had no relationship to his role as a football commentator. Is his reporting on soccer compromised by his views on the ANZAC tradition?

This episode illustrates that “political correctness” and “cancel culture” are found across the political spectrum — and media organisations will continue to grapple with these issues as the social media profiles of their journalists continue to grow.

Dr Rodney Tiffen, is emeritus professor in the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“If I don’t steal your house, someone else will.”

This is how an Israeli settler called “Yakob” responded to the Jerusalemite journalist Muna El Kurd when she asked him to leave the garden of her home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

The video of the exchange Kurd posted on her Instagram page was shared on many news pages and sites, going viral and becoming iconic of the oppression her family—and the neighbourhood—currently faces.

The ongoing apartheid in Jerusalem.

“Even if i get out of the house, it won’t be returned to u” pic.twitter.com/5sELdmClH5

— Abed #SaveSheikhJarrah (@Abd_HajYahia) May 1, 2021

• WATCH: #Palestine: Videos of violence, images of death on social media – Al Jazeera’s Listening Post

Since El Kurd posted her video, tensions in the occupied Palestinian territories have flared up to the worst level in years. The blockaded enclave of Gaza has been pounded by Israeli airstrikes as Muslims marked the end of Ramadan, their holy month of fasting.

So far, at least 212 people, including 61 children, have been killed in Gaza so far since the latest violence began more than a week ago. Some 1500 Palestinians were also wounded.

Ten Israelis, including two children, have been killed as Hamas, which governs Gaza, fired hundreds of rockets on Israeli-occupied territories, in response to earlier Israeli provocation.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Jerusalemites have been wounded by occupation forces who have clamped down on protesters and worshippers in the past weeks.

The tensions in Jerusalem coincided with the start of Ramadan on May 13. Occupation Israeli forces set up barricades to block Jerusalemites from accessing the area of Bab Al-Amud, preventing them from observing a longtime ritual of casual gatherings in that part of the Old City.

This resulted in protests—which have come to be called the “Bab Al Amud Uprising”— which eventually displaced the barriers and obstacles erected by the Occupation forces.

This was followed by Israeli forces’ storming of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, one of Islam’s holiest sites, firing tear gas and stun grenades and wounding many, and coincided with Israeli settlers appropriating the homes of Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, citing Israeli court verdicts.

Sheikh Jarrah: a decades-old struggle
The struggle over Sheikh Jarrah dates back to 1948, when representatives of the then-nascent state of Israel tried to storm the neighborhood, displace its people and destroy their homes. They were prevented from doing so by the British forces, which were protecting the city of Jerusalem at the time.

Fast-forward to the Six-Day War—also known as the June 1967 War—when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank, including Jerusalem and its environs.

Since then, consecutive Israeli governments have sought to displace the Palestinian population from the city of Jerusalem to shift its demographics to a Jewish majority, in line with efforts to position the city as Israel’s capital and mobilise countries to relocate their embassies there.

This despite Palestine’s United Nations-backed claim to at least part of the city as its capital.

The neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located to the north of Jerusalem’s Old City, contains one of the main arteries linking the concentration of the city’s Jewish population in the city to Hebrew University. Seizing control of the neighbourhood would bring the entire eastern side of Jerusalem under Israel’s authority.

The expulsion of Palestinians goes back to the period 1948-1967, when Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. In 1956, the Jordanian authorities, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), constructed housing for 28 refugee families in Sheikh Jarrah. The Jordanian Ministry of Construction and Development provided the land, with the proviso that construction took place through the UNRWA and that ownership of the homes would be transferred to their residents three years after the completion of construction. But this did not happen until 1967, when Jordan lost control of the West Bank.

أيام قليلة تفصلنا عن قرار محكمة الاحتلال بإخلاء حي #الشيخ_جراح او تأجيله.
أكثر من 500 فلسطيني موزعين على 28 عائلة يواجهون شبح نكبة جديدة وتهجير قسري.
لنعلي أصواتنا دعماّ وإسنادا لأهلنا في الحي المقدسي. #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/XjDc6pL541

— فلسطين27 (@Pal_27KM) April 30, 2021

A few days separate us from the occupation court’s decision to evacuate the Sheikh Jarrah’s neighborhood #الشيخ_جراح or postpone it. More than 500 Palestinians over 28 families face the spectre of a new catastrophe and forced displacement. Let’s raise our voices to support our people in the Jerusalem’s neighborhood. #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/XjDc6pL541 — فلسطين27 (@Pal_27KM) April 30, 2021

With Jerusalem under Israeli control, Israeli settler organizations began occupying houses whose residents happened to be absent at the time, even if temporarily. The Shatti family, for example, lost their house while they were away on a visit to Kuwait in 1967.

In 1972, two Israeli societies comprising Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews went to the Israeli Land Registry Department claiming ownership of the area of Karm Al-Jaouni in Sheikh Jarrah. The claim was based on a purchase document allegedly dating from the Ottoman period. The societies were granted ownership of the land.

Between 1974-1975, the two societies then filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force four families to evacuate their homes. The Israeli court dismissed the cases because the residents were tenants protected by law.

But the lawsuits resumed again in 1982, this time against 23 families, 17 of whom retained an Israeli lawyer, Tosya Cohen. In 1991, however, Cohen shocked his clients by concluding a deal with the two settler societies, recognising their ownership of the land. Cohen’s recognition created a legal precedent that paved the way for the two societies to strip Palestinians such as the Hanoun and Ghawi families of their homes.

An initial court decision directed these two families to pay rent to the plaintiffs, and although they complied, they were expelled in 2002. In 2003, the two societies sold their share in the land to an investment company. The change in ownership allowed the Hanoun and Ghawi families to appeal their expulsion, enabling them to return to their homes until the case was adjudicated.

Mona ElKurd’s family has been the target of lawsuits since the beginning of the 1990s. After numerous rulings, the last of which was in 2009, Israeli settlers were granted the right to appropriate the ElKurd’s house. Since that time, ElKurd family has been sharing their home with the settlers who appropriated it, leaving them with only 50 metres to live in.

More recently, in October 2020, El Kurd, Al Qasim, Al Jauni and Al Skafi families received evacuations notifications from the Israeli Magistrate’s Court. In September, three other families—Hammad, Dajani, and Al Dawoudi—received similar notifications, bringing the total of people facing threats of eviction from their homes to 55. These decisions were suspended until February 2021, during which an evacuation order was issued to be carried out by Thursday, May 6, 2021, resulting in the current escalation.

Sheikh Jarrah residents ‘can’t breathe’
As tensions brewed, Palestinians took to social media to speak about the oppression they’re facing.

Bentzi Gopstein (Lehava), one of the “Death To Arabs” march organizers, is coming to Sheikh Jarrah tonight at 8:30 pm. #SaveSheikhJarrah from colonial violence. https://t.co/ov5rqBjDVE

— mohammed el-kurd (@m7mdkurd) May 6, 2021

The phrase “I can’t breathe”—the last words uttered by George Floyd as he was killed by police last year in Minnesota—is trending on social media among Palestinian users and sympathisers, as Israeli occupation forces violently cracked down on those expressing solidarity with the evicted residents of Sheikh Jarrah.

“I cant breath” he said.

The apartheid never stops. pic.twitter.com/jnQXZr6W5M

Another Twitter user, Kawther, wrote:

— Abed #SaveSheikhJarrah (@Abd_HajYahia) May 4, 2021

The same violence but no one speak . #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/N1HYD5M4iF

— kawther slama (@KawtherSlama) May 6, 2021

In a gesture of solidarity with residents of Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalemites broke their fast every day of Ramadan in front of houses whose residents were being made to evacuate. This prompted Itamar Ben Ghafir, a member of Israel’s Knesset and leader of the Israeli far-right party Otzma Yehudit, to participate in a gathering in the district on May 6, the day set by the court to evacuate these houses, where he made the provocative announcement that he would relocate his office to Sheikh Jarrah to confront the “Arab extremists”.

When a crowd of Palestinians gathered to express their rejection of the parliamentarian’s incitements, a settler pepper-sprayed the Palestinians, an act documented in many video clips.

Israeli settlers spray pepper gas at Palestinian youths in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
#SaveSheikhJarrah #انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/baiP9UeuH0

— Huda Fadil #Gaza (@HudaFadil2) May 6, 2021

This led to a clash between the two sides, involving the throwing of chairs and stones.

مستوطن يرش الشباب بغاز الفلفل وقت الافطار، والشباب ما قصرو معاه .#انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح #SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/pmNArc0bFy

— شجاعية (@shejae3a) May 6, 2021

A settler sprays the guys with pepper spray, and the guys didn’t disappoint #انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح

#SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/pmNArc0bFy

— شجاعية (@shejae3a) May 6, 2021

Israeli occupation forces intervened and arrested several Palestinians.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented the official documents containing details of the displacement operations carried out by Israel to the International Criminal Court on May 5, but the confrontations on the ground are not expected to abate.

On May 10, an Israeli court postponed a session scheduled that day to decide the fate of Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah. Announcing that the date of the upcoming session would be set within 30 days, the court permitted families facing eviction to remain in their houses until the session is held.

Muna El Kurd, whose Instagram video has turned her into an emblem of the struggle of Sheikh Jarrah’s residents, wrote:

We should not stop. Freezing [the decision] is not cancelling it.. The movement of Sheikh Jarrah is a popular and global movement against displacement and colonization in Jerusalem and all of Palestine. We must raise our voices, and intensify efforts through our presence and solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, and intensify our voice on social media platforms, because the violence of the colonial occupation is prevalent and its outbreak in our cities has not been frozen.

أيمن حسونة and Yasmeen Omera are Global Voices contributors.Republished with permission from Global Voices under a Creative Commons licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“If I don’t steal your house, someone else will.”

This is how an Israeli settler called “Yakob” responded to the Jerusalemite journalist Muna El Kurd when she asked him to leave the garden of her home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

The video of the exchange Kurd posted on her Instagram page was shared on many news pages and sites, going viral and becoming iconic of the oppression her family—and the neighbourhood—currently faces.

The ongoing apartheid in Jerusalem.

“Even if i get out of the house, it won’t be returned to u” pic.twitter.com/5sELdmClH5

— Abed #SaveSheikhJarrah (@Abd_HajYahia) May 1, 2021

• WATCH: #Palestine: Videos of violence, images of death on social media – Al Jazeera’s Listening Post

Since El Kurd posted her video, tensions in the occupied Palestinian territories have flared up to the worst level in years. The blockaded enclave of Gaza has been pounded by Israeli airstrikes as Muslims marked the end of Ramadan, their holy month of fasting.

So far, at least 212 people, including 61 children, have been killed in Gaza so far since the latest violence began more than a week ago. Some 1500 Palestinians were also wounded.

Ten Israelis, including two children, have been killed as Hamas, which governs Gaza, fired hundreds of rockets on Israeli-occupied territories, in response to earlier Israeli provocation.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Jerusalemites have been wounded by occupation forces who have clamped down on protesters and worshippers in the past weeks.

The tensions in Jerusalem coincided with the start of Ramadan on May 13. Occupation Israeli forces set up barricades to block Jerusalemites from accessing the area of Bab Al-Amud, preventing them from observing a longtime ritual of casual gatherings in that part of the Old City.

This resulted in protests—which have come to be called the “Bab Al Amud Uprising”— which eventually displaced the barriers and obstacles erected by the Occupation forces.

This was followed by Israeli forces’ storming of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, one of Islam’s holiest sites, firing tear gas and stun grenades and wounding many, and coincided with Israeli settlers appropriating the homes of Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, citing Israeli court verdicts.

Sheikh Jarrah: a decades-old struggle
The struggle over Sheikh Jarrah dates back to 1948, when representatives of the then-nascent state of Israel tried to storm the neighborhood, displace its people and destroy their homes. They were prevented from doing so by the British forces, which were protecting the city of Jerusalem at the time.

Fast-forward to the Six-Day War—also known as the June 1967 War—when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank, including Jerusalem and its environs.

Since then, consecutive Israeli governments have sought to displace the Palestinian population from the city of Jerusalem to shift its demographics to a Jewish majority, in line with efforts to position the city as Israel’s capital and mobilise countries to relocate their embassies there.

This despite Palestine’s United Nations-backed claim to at least part of the city as its capital.

The neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located to the north of Jerusalem’s Old City, contains one of the main arteries linking the concentration of the city’s Jewish population in the city to Hebrew University. Seizing control of the neighbourhood would bring the entire eastern side of Jerusalem under Israel’s authority.

The expulsion of Palestinians goes back to the period 1948-1967, when Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. In 1956, the Jordanian authorities, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), constructed housing for 28 refugee families in Sheikh Jarrah. The Jordanian Ministry of Construction and Development provided the land, with the proviso that construction took place through the UNRWA and that ownership of the homes would be transferred to their residents three years after the completion of construction. But this did not happen until 1967, when Jordan lost control of the West Bank.

أيام قليلة تفصلنا عن قرار محكمة الاحتلال بإخلاء حي #الشيخ_جراح او تأجيله.
أكثر من 500 فلسطيني موزعين على 28 عائلة يواجهون شبح نكبة جديدة وتهجير قسري.
لنعلي أصواتنا دعماّ وإسنادا لأهلنا في الحي المقدسي. #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/XjDc6pL541

— فلسطين27 (@Pal_27KM) April 30, 2021

A few days separate us from the occupation court’s decision to evacuate the Sheikh Jarrah’s neighborhood #الشيخ_جراح or postpone it. More than 500 Palestinians over 28 families face the spectre of a new catastrophe and forced displacement. Let’s raise our voices to support our people in the Jerusalem’s neighborhood. #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/XjDc6pL541 — فلسطين27 (@Pal_27KM) April 30, 2021

With Jerusalem under Israeli control, Israeli settler organizations began occupying houses whose residents happened to be absent at the time, even if temporarily. The Shatti family, for example, lost their house while they were away on a visit to Kuwait in 1967.

In 1972, two Israeli societies comprising Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews went to the Israeli Land Registry Department claiming ownership of the area of Karm Al-Jaouni in Sheikh Jarrah. The claim was based on a purchase document allegedly dating from the Ottoman period. The societies were granted ownership of the land.

Between 1974-1975, the two societies then filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force four families to evacuate their homes. The Israeli court dismissed the cases because the residents were tenants protected by law.

But the lawsuits resumed again in 1982, this time against 23 families, 17 of whom retained an Israeli lawyer, Tosya Cohen. In 1991, however, Cohen shocked his clients by concluding a deal with the two settler societies, recognising their ownership of the land. Cohen’s recognition created a legal precedent that paved the way for the two societies to strip Palestinians such as the Hanoun and Ghawi families of their homes.

An initial court decision directed these two families to pay rent to the plaintiffs, and although they complied, they were expelled in 2002. In 2003, the two societies sold their share in the land to an investment company. The change in ownership allowed the Hanoun and Ghawi families to appeal their expulsion, enabling them to return to their homes until the case was adjudicated.

Mona ElKurd’s family has been the target of lawsuits since the beginning of the 1990s. After numerous rulings, the last of which was in 2009, Israeli settlers were granted the right to appropriate the ElKurd’s house. Since that time, ElKurd family has been sharing their home with the settlers who appropriated it, leaving them with only 50 metres to live in.

More recently, in October 2020, El Kurd, Al Qasim, Al Jauni and Al Skafi families received evacuations notifications from the Israeli Magistrate’s Court. In September, three other families—Hammad, Dajani, and Al Dawoudi—received similar notifications, bringing the total of people facing threats of eviction from their homes to 55. These decisions were suspended until February 2021, during which an evacuation order was issued to be carried out by Thursday, May 6, 2021, resulting in the current escalation.

Sheikh Jarrah residents ‘can’t breathe’
As tensions brewed, Palestinians took to social media to speak about the oppression they’re facing.

Bentzi Gopstein (Lehava), one of the “Death To Arabs” march organizers, is coming to Sheikh Jarrah tonight at 8:30 pm. #SaveSheikhJarrah from colonial violence. https://t.co/ov5rqBjDVE

— mohammed el-kurd (@m7mdkurd) May 6, 2021

The phrase “I can’t breathe”—the last words uttered by George Floyd as he was killed by police last year in Minnesota—is trending on social media among Palestinian users and sympathisers, as Israeli occupation forces violently cracked down on those expressing solidarity with the evicted residents of Sheikh Jarrah.

“I cant breath” he said.

The apartheid never stops. pic.twitter.com/jnQXZr6W5M

Another Twitter user, Kawther, wrote:

— Abed #SaveSheikhJarrah (@Abd_HajYahia) May 4, 2021

The same violence but no one speak . #انقذوا_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/N1HYD5M4iF

— kawther slama (@KawtherSlama) May 6, 2021

In a gesture of solidarity with residents of Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalemites broke their fast every day of Ramadan in front of houses whose residents were being made to evacuate. This prompted Itamar Ben Ghafir, a member of Israel’s Knesset and leader of the Israeli far-right party Otzma Yehudit, to participate in a gathering in the district on May 6, the day set by the court to evacuate these houses, where he made the provocative announcement that he would relocate his office to Sheikh Jarrah to confront the “Arab extremists”.

When a crowd of Palestinians gathered to express their rejection of the parliamentarian’s incitements, a settler pepper-sprayed the Palestinians, an act documented in many video clips.

Israeli settlers spray pepper gas at Palestinian youths in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
#SaveSheikhJarrah #انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح pic.twitter.com/baiP9UeuH0

— Huda Fadil #Gaza (@HudaFadil2) May 6, 2021

This led to a clash between the two sides, involving the throwing of chairs and stones.

مستوطن يرش الشباب بغاز الفلفل وقت الافطار، والشباب ما قصرو معاه .#انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح #SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/pmNArc0bFy

— شجاعية (@shejae3a) May 6, 2021

A settler sprays the guys with pepper spray, and the guys didn’t disappoint #انقذو_حي_الشيخ_جراح

#SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/pmNArc0bFy

— شجاعية (@shejae3a) May 6, 2021

Israeli occupation forces intervened and arrested several Palestinians.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented the official documents containing details of the displacement operations carried out by Israel to the International Criminal Court on May 5, but the confrontations on the ground are not expected to abate.

On May 10, an Israeli court postponed a session scheduled that day to decide the fate of Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah. Announcing that the date of the upcoming session would be set within 30 days, the court permitted families facing eviction to remain in their houses until the session is held.

Muna El Kurd, whose Instagram video has turned her into an emblem of the struggle of Sheikh Jarrah’s residents, wrote:

We should not stop. Freezing [the decision] is not cancelling it.. The movement of Sheikh Jarrah is a popular and global movement against displacement and colonization in Jerusalem and all of Palestine. We must raise our voices, and intensify efforts through our presence and solidarity in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, and intensify our voice on social media platforms, because the violence of the colonial occupation is prevalent and its outbreak in our cities has not been frozen.

أيمن حسونة and Yasmeen Omera are Global Voices contributors.Republished with permission from Global Voices under a Creative Commons licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Less than half the New Zealand public now professes “overall trust” in news media outlets, despite big rises in audience numbers during the covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

The 2021 Trust in News in New Zealand survey released yesterday found the level of overall trust falling from 53 percent in 2020 to 48 percent in 2021 and trust in the news sources used by respondents themselves falling by 7 points from 62 percent to 55 percent.

The drops in NZ mirrored international research findings in the Reuters Digital News Report 2020, which put trust in media at the lowest level since it began seeking such data in 2016.
But our overall trust figure at 48 percent remains high compared to the international average of 38 percent.

• READ MORE: Trust in News in New Zealand 2021

The local survey of 1200 people, run online nationwide by Horizon Research in March on behalf of AUT’s research centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy found all news brands experienced erosion in trust over the 12 months, with Newshub and Newstalk ZB suffering “statistically significant” falls.

Respondents were asked to rate 11 media brands out of 10 for trustworthiness (with 10 being completely trustworthy). Average scores out of 10 were calculated from those who knew of each source.

“In general, trust in the news has declined because the news media is seen as increasingly opinionated, biased, and politicised,” says JMAD co-director Dr Merja Myllylahti.

The survey shows New Zealanders want factual information and not opinion dressed up as news, the researchers say.

While news organisations reported fully on the covid outbreak and were rewarded with big rises in readership, viewership and even user donations, the ebbing away of trust will puzzle some newsrooms.

The JMAD report suggests reasons for mistrust in the media include:

• political bias, especially in talkback radio (“They’re pretty right-wing”)
• politicisation of media
• media pushing certain social/other agenda (including climate change)
• media offering opinions, not factual news and information
• not offering a full picture of events
• selective reporting
• poor standard of journalism, including poor sourcing, factual mistakes, poor grammar and low standard of writing

Readers’ trust in news encountered on social media is particularly low, at 14 percent (down 2) in New Zealand and 22 percent (down 1) internationally, and just 12 percent here would trust social media for good news and information on the pandemic.

Trust in news in New Zealand is clearly below Finland, Portugal and Turkey, but much higher than in countries such as Australia, the US and the UK.

The most trusted sources for news and information on the covid-19 virus and pandemic were RNZ and TVNZ, both state owned.

RNZ riding high in online audience
Not only is RNZ the country’s most trusted news source, it has also surged in the online readership stakes, overtaking TVNZ and now closing in on Newshub for third biggest website audience in the latest, March, Nielsen monthly ratings.

In first place, nzherald.co.nz has pushed back to its near record monthly unique audience at 1.95 million, with Stuff – at 1.77m – now around 300,000 down on its own highs of 2.1m due to removing its content from Facebook. Newshub recorded 890,000, just holding off RNZ at 860,000, with 1News some distance back among the second tier sites, at just 720,000.

The rnz.co.nz audience now is about 60 percent higher than before the Covid-19 pandemic hit a year ago, having spiked like those of many news outlets at the beginning of the outbreak in March and April 2020, but unlike some, holding on to much of its gain.

Stuff is no longer officially part of the Nielsen measurement, so its monthly unique number would be less reliable than others, but the Herald site went past it last year and has not been bested for months on end. When Stuff left Facebook, it was anticipated its total audience would drop as most sites receive major contributions to their readership from referrals from the social media giant.

If the government’s mooted merger of TVNZ and RNZ into a new public broadcaster comes to fruition, the joint public news website could be expected to be a serious challenger (even when the current, separate Nielsen audience numbers are unduplicated) to the Stuff and nzherald.co.nz pairing at the pinnacle of online audiences.

Newsroom is not part of the Nielsen survey.

Discovery discovers cost cutting
It was always going to be on the cards. Four months after taking over MediaWorks’ television arm, Discovery Inc is looking to make cost savings.

The process of talking to staff began last week and will play out over the next couple of months. The company is positioning the cuts as the integration of its Australasian businesses.

Discovery already owned the small free-to-air channels, Choice and HGTV when it bought Three, Bravo, and Edge TV off MediaWorks. Sales and back office functions are obvious areas for rationalisation, although the savings are likely to be minor.

In Australia, free-to-air channel, 9Rush is a joint venture between Discovery Inc and Nine entertainment. Discovery also supplies content to Aussie pay TV networks Foxtel and Fetch.

MediaWorks sold its TV arm because it had been losing millions year after year and dragging the profitable radio operation down. Discovery’s options to cut the loses seem limited unless it gives Three a supply of cheap reality programming, but this risks a ratings drop as TVNZ further ramps up its local production.

Three’s news operation is unlikely to escape the cost-cutters’ attention. Sources say Newshub is part of the cost review but staff are likely to be redeployed rather than axed.

Tim Murphy is co-editor of Newsroom. He writes about politics, Auckland, and media. Twitter: @tmurphynz
Mark Jennings is co-editor of Newsroom. This Newsroom article is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Less than half the New Zealand public now professes “overall trust” in news media outlets, despite big rises in audience numbers during the covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

The 2021 Trust in News in New Zealand survey released yesterday found the level of overall trust falling from 53 percent in 2020 to 48 percent in 2021 and trust in the news sources used by respondents themselves falling by 7 points from 62 percent to 55 percent.

The drops in NZ mirrored international research findings in the Reuters Digital News Report 2020, which put trust in media at the lowest level since it began seeking such data in 2016.
But our overall trust figure at 48 percent remains high compared to the international average of 38 percent.

The local survey of 1200 people, run online nationwide by Horizon Research in March on behalf of AUT’s research centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy found all news brands experienced erosion in trust over the 12 months, with Newshub and Newstalk ZB suffering “statistically significant” falls.

Respondents were asked to rate 11 media brands out of 10 for trustworthiness (with 10 being completely trustworthy). Average scores out of 10 were calculated from those who knew of each source.

“In general, trust in the news has declined because the news media is seen as increasingly opinionated, biased, and politicised,” says JMAD co-director Dr Merja Myllylahti.

The survey shows New Zealanders want factual information and not opinion dressed up as news, the researchers say.

While news organisations reported fully on the covid outbreak and were rewarded with big rises in readership, viewership and even user donations, the ebbing away of trust will puzzle some newsrooms.

The JMAD report suggests reasons for mistrust in the media include:

• political bias, especially in talkback radio (“They’re pretty right-wing”)
• politicisation of media
• media pushing certain social/other agenda (including climate change)
• media offering opinions, not factual news and information
• not offering a full picture of events
• selective reporting
• poor standard of journalism, including poor sourcing, factual mistakes, poor grammar and low standard of writing

Readers’ trust in news encountered on social media is particularly low, at 14 percent (down 2) in New Zealand and 22 percent (down 1) internationally, and just 12 percent here would trust social media for good news and information on the pandemic.

Trust in news in New Zealand is clearly below Finland, Portugal and Turkey, but much higher than in countries such as Australia, the US and the UK.

The most trusted sources for news and information on the covid-19 virus and pandemic were RNZ and TVNZ, both state owned.

RNZ riding high in online audience
Not only is RNZ the country’s most trusted news source, it has also surged in the online readership stakes, overtaking TVNZ and now closing in on Newshub for third biggest website audience in the latest, March, Nielsen monthly ratings.

In first place, nzherald.co.nz has pushed back to its near record monthly unique audience at 1.95 million, with Stuff – at 1.77m – now around 300,000 down on its own highs of 2.1m due to removing its content from Facebook. Newshub recorded 890,000, just holding off RNZ at 860,000, with 1News some distance back among the second tier sites, at just 720,000.

The rnz.co.nz audience now is about 60 percent higher than before the Covid-19 pandemic hit a year ago, having spiked like those of many news outlets at the beginning of the outbreak in March and April 2020, but unlike some, holding on to much of its gain.

Stuff is no longer officially part of the Nielsen measurement, so its monthly unique number would be less reliable than others, but the Herald site went past it last year and has not been bested for months on end. When Stuff left Facebook, it was anticipated its total audience would drop as most sites receive major contributions to their readership from referrals from the social media giant.

If the government’s mooted merger of TVNZ and RNZ into a new public broadcaster comes to fruition, the joint public news website could be expected to be a serious challenger (even when the current, separate Nielsen audience numbers are unduplicated) to the Stuff and nzherald.co.nz pairing at the pinnacle of online audiences.

Newsroom is not part of the Nielsen survey.

Discovery discovers cost cutting
It was always going to be on the cards. Four months after taking over MediaWorks’ television arm, Discovery Inc is looking to make cost savings.

The process of talking to staff began last week and will play out over the next couple of months. The company is positioning the cuts as the integration of its Australasian businesses.

Discovery already owned the small free-to-air channels, Choice and HGTV when it bought Three, Bravo, and Edge TV off MediaWorks. Sales and back office functions are obvious areas for rationalisation, although the savings are likely to be minor.

In Australia, free-to-air channel, 9Rush is a joint venture between Discovery Inc and Nine entertainment. Discovery also supplies content to Aussie pay TV networks Foxtel and Fetch.

MediaWorks sold its TV arm because it had been losing millions year after year and dragging the profitable radio operation down. Discovery’s options to cut the loses seem limited unless it gives Three a supply of cheap reality programming, but this risks a ratings drop as TVNZ further ramps up its local production.

Three’s news operation is unlikely to escape the cost-cutters’ attention. Sources say Newshub is part of the cost review but staff are likely to be redeployed rather than axed.

Tim Murphy is co-editor of Newsroom. He writes about politics, Auckland, and media. Twitter: @tmurphynz
Mark Jennings is co-editor of Newsroom. This Newsroom article is republished with permission.

Australia’s journalists’ union – the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – has voted to end its decades long relationship with the Australian Press Council, citing concerns about governance and consistency of rulings at the press regulator.

Formed in 1976 as an alternative to government intervention, the Australian Press Council has been an important arbiter of media standards, adjudicating complaints from the public about material in newspapers, magazines and online news sites at publishers that belong to the Press Council.

MEAA’s predecessor, the Australian Journalists’ Association, played a crucial role in establishing the Press Council after more than 20 years of lobbying for self-regulation. Despite not being a publisher itself, MEAA has contributed more than A$100,000 each year to the organisation within recent years.

• READ MORE: Turnbull tells Senate inquiry Rupert Murdoch admitted ‘crazy agenda’
• How large is Rupert Murdoch’s reach through News Corp in Australian media, old and new?

The Press Council also draws on media academics and selected public representatives to run its adjudication processes.

In recent years, MEAA members have become increasingly frustrated by a lack of financial transparency and accountability at the Press Council and the inconsistent manner in which it has adjudicated on complaints, some of which are out of step with community expectations.

In April, delegates to MEAA’s National Media Section committee, made up of rank-and-file union members, voted to formally quit the Press Council.

Under the rules of the APC, four years notice must be given to withdraw, which means MEAA will officially leave the organisation in 2025.

Overwhelming feedback
The decision to withdraw came after MEAA – which represents more than 5000 journalists and other media workers – consulted with its members, who overwhelmingly gave feedback that the union should leave the Press Council.

The federal president of MEAA’s Media section, Marcus Strom, said there was a pervasive dissatisfaction among MEAA members about the role played by the regulator.

He said it had failed to change with the times during more than a decade of media convergence and was not effective in the contemporary industry where there is cross-over between print, digital and broadcast journalism.

Australia’s broadcast media are regulated by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“The Press Council has lost credibility with journalists and even with the publishers who make up its membership. There have been too many cases in recent years where adjudications have been mocked or ignored,” Strom said.

“Currently our members are more concerned about being hauled over the coals on Media Watch [a weekly national television program that regularly exposes misdemeanours and unethical practices by journalists and publishers] than being called before the Press Council. That’s obviously not an acceptable situation.”

MEAA Media federal vice-president Karen Percy said readers who made complaints were also frustrated with the response they received from the Press Council, which eroded trust in journalists and the media.

Credible regulator ‘is critical’
“In order to maintain integrity in journalism in Australia, a credible regulator – where there are real consequences for breaches – is critical,” Percy said.

“Unfortunately, the Press Council is no longer fit-for-purpose for the modern, cross-platform media industry.”

Percy said MEAA’s Journalist Code of Ethics should play a more prominent role in media standards.

First established in 1944, and updated twice since, the Code of Ethics is the most enduring and best-known set of guidelines for journalists.

The public are also able to make complaints about union members who breach the code, with a range of sanctions available including termination of membership of MEAA.

“The industry needs a simpler system of self-regulation that is consistent across all platforms and organisations, upholds the standards of public interest journalism, and serves the needs of members and the public who want ethical practices and accountability,” Percy said.

“The status quo is serving no-one – not the industry, nor the public.”

Senate media inquiry
The decision by MEAA to withdraw from the Press Council coincides with an inquiry into media ownership by the Australian Senate, with the future of media regulation and questions of how to maintain trust in journalism coming under scrutiny by inquiry.

Strom said many journalists regarded the Press Council as toothless and wanted a more robust regulator to ensure standards of good journalism were maintained.

“Arbitrations at the Press Council have been inconsistent, slow and are increasingly out of touch with community expectations.

He said it was time for a broad review of media regulation in Australia. MEAA has publicly stated it would like to see a one-stop-shop regulator to replace the multitude of confusing, inconsistent bodies and processes currently in place.

“We want our notice to leave the Press Council to spark a serious discussion about media regulation,” he said.

As part of its decision to withdraw from the Press Council, MEAA will engage with the Press Council and other industry stakeholders to discuss what shape the regulatory environment should take in future.

As the IFJ’s Australian affiliate, MEAA is the largest and most established union and industry advocate for Australia’s creative professionals.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Australia’s journalists’ union – the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – has voted to end its decades long relationship with the Australian Press Council, citing concerns about governance and consistency of rulings at the press regulator.

Formed in 1976 as an alternative to government intervention, the Australian Press Council has been an important arbiter of media standards, adjudicating complaints from the public about material in newspapers, magazines and online news sites at publishers that belong to the Press Council.

MEAA’s predecessor, the Australian Journalists’ Association, played a crucial role in establishing the Press Council after more than 20 years of lobbying for self-regulation. Despite not being a publisher itself, MEAA has contributed more than A$100,000 each year to the organisation within recent years.

The Press Council also draws on media academics and selected public representatives to run its adjudication processes.

In recent years, MEAA members have become increasingly frustrated by a lack of financial transparency and accountability at the Press Council and the inconsistent manner in which it has adjudicated on complaints, some of which are out of step with community expectations.

In April, delegates to MEAA’s National Media Section committee, made up of rank-and-file union members, voted to formally quit the Press Council.

Under the rules of the APC, four years notice must be given to withdraw, which means MEAA will officially leave the organisation in 2025.

Overwhelming feedback
The decision to withdraw came after MEAA – which represents more than 5000 journalists and other media workers – consulted with its members, who overwhelmingly gave feedback that the union should leave the Press Council.

The federal president of MEAA’s Media section, Marcus Strom, said there was a pervasive dissatisfaction among MEAA members about the role played by the regulator.

He said it had failed to change with the times during more than a decade of media convergence and was not effective in the contemporary industry where there is cross-over between print, digital and broadcast journalism.

Australia’s broadcast media are regulated by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“The Press Council has lost credibility with journalists and even with the publishers who make up its membership. There have been too many cases in recent years where adjudications have been mocked or ignored,” Strom said.

“Currently our members are more concerned about being hauled over the coals on Media Watch [a weekly national television program that regularly exposes misdemeanours and unethical practices by journalists and publishers] than being called before the Press Council. That’s obviously not an acceptable situation.”

MEAA Media federal vice-president Karen Percy said readers who made complaints were also frustrated with the response they received from the Press Council, which eroded trust in journalists and the media.

Credible regulator ‘is critical’
“In order to maintain integrity in journalism in Australia, a credible regulator – where there are real consequences for breaches – is critical,” Percy said.

“Unfortunately, the Press Council is no longer fit-for-purpose for the modern, cross-platform media industry.”

Percy said MEAA’s Journalist Code of Ethics should play a more prominent role in media standards.

First established in 1944, and updated twice since, the Code of Ethics is the most enduring and best-known set of guidelines for journalists.

The public are also able to make complaints about union members who breach the code, with a range of sanctions available including termination of membership of MEAA.

“The industry needs a simpler system of self-regulation that is consistent across all platforms and organisations, upholds the standards of public interest journalism, and serves the needs of members and the public who want ethical practices and accountability,” Percy said.

“The status quo is serving no-one – not the industry, nor the public.”

Senate media inquiry
The decision by MEAA to withdraw from the Press Council coincides with an inquiry into media ownership by the Australian Senate, with the future of media regulation and questions of how to maintain trust in journalism coming under scrutiny by inquiry.

Strom said many journalists regarded the Press Council as toothless and wanted a more robust regulator to ensure standards of good journalism were maintained.

“Arbitrations at the Press Council have been inconsistent, slow and are increasingly out of touch with community expectations.

He said it was time for a broad review of media regulation in Australia. MEAA has publicly stated it would like to see a one-stop-shop regulator to replace the multitude of confusing, inconsistent bodies and processes currently in place.

“We want our notice to leave the Press Council to spark a serious discussion about media regulation,” he said.

As part of its decision to withdraw from the Press Council, MEAA will engage with the Press Council and other industry stakeholders to discuss what shape the regulatory environment should take in future.

As the IFJ’s Australian affiliate, MEAA is the largest and most established union and industry advocate for Australia’s creative professionals.

Australia’s journalists’ union – the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – has voted to end its decades long relationship with the Australian Press Council, citing concerns about governance and consistency of rulings at the press regulator.

Formed in 1976 as an alternative to government intervention, the Australian Press Council has been an important arbiter of media standards, adjudicating complaints from the public about material in newspapers, magazines and online news sites at publishers that belong to the Press Council.

MEAA’s predecessor, the Australian Journalists’ Association, played a crucial role in establishing the Press Council after more than 20 years of lobbying for self-regulation. Despite not being a publisher itself, MEAA has contributed more than A$100,000 each year to the organisation within recent years.

The Press Council also draws on media academics and selected public representatives to run its adjudication processes.

In recent years, MEAA members have become increasingly frustrated by a lack of financial transparency and accountability at the Press Council and the inconsistent manner in which it has adjudicated on complaints, some of which are out of step with community expectations.

In April, delegates to MEAA’s National Media Section committee, made up of rank-and-file union members, voted to formally quit the Press Council.

Under the rules of the APC, four years notice must be given to withdraw, which means MEAA will officially leave the organisation in 2025.

Overwhelming feedback
The decision to withdraw came after MEAA – which represents more than 5000 journalists and other media workers – consulted with its members, who overwhelmingly gave feedback that the union should leave the Press Council.

The federal president of MEAA’s Media section, Marcus Strom, said there was a pervasive dissatisfaction among MEAA members about the role played by the regulator.

He said it had failed to change with the times during more than a decade of media convergence and was not effective in the contemporary industry where there is cross-over between print, digital and broadcast journalism.

Australia’s broadcast media are regulated by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“The Press Council has lost credibility with journalists and even with the publishers who make up its membership. There have been too many cases in recent years where adjudications have been mocked or ignored,” Strom said.

“Currently our members are more concerned about being hauled over the coals on Media Watch [a weekly national television program that regularly exposes misdemeanours and unethical practices by journalists and publishers] than being called before the Press Council. That’s obviously not an acceptable situation.”

MEAA Media federal vice-president Karen Percy said readers who made complaints were also frustrated with the response they received from the Press Council, which eroded trust in journalists and the media.

Credible regulator ‘is critical’
“In order to maintain integrity in journalism in Australia, a credible regulator – where there are real consequences for breaches – is critical,” Percy said.

“Unfortunately, the Press Council is no longer fit-for-purpose for the modern, cross-platform media industry.”

Percy said MEAA’s Journalist Code of Ethics should play a more prominent role in media standards.

First established in 1944, and updated twice since, the Code of Ethics is the most enduring and best-known set of guidelines for journalists.

The public are also able to make complaints about union members who breach the code, with a range of sanctions available including termination of membership of MEAA.

“The industry needs a simpler system of self-regulation that is consistent across all platforms and organisations, upholds the standards of public interest journalism, and serves the needs of members and the public who want ethical practices and accountability,” Percy said.

“The status quo is serving no-one – not the industry, nor the public.”

Senate media inquiry
The decision by MEAA to withdraw from the Press Council coincides with an inquiry into media ownership by the Australian Senate, with the future of media regulation and questions of how to maintain trust in journalism coming under scrutiny by inquiry.

Strom said many journalists regarded the Press Council as toothless and wanted a more robust regulator to ensure standards of good journalism were maintained.

“Arbitrations at the Press Council have been inconsistent, slow and are increasingly out of touch with community expectations.

He said it was time for a broad review of media regulation in Australia. MEAA has publicly stated it would like to see a one-stop-shop regulator to replace the multitude of confusing, inconsistent bodies and processes currently in place.

“We want our notice to leave the Press Council to spark a serious discussion about media regulation,” he said.

As part of its decision to withdraw from the Press Council, MEAA will engage with the Press Council and other industry stakeholders to discuss what shape the regulatory environment should take in future.

As the IFJ’s Australian affiliate, MEAA is the largest and most established union and industry advocate for Australia’s creative professionals.

The New Zealand government has appointed eight people to oversee a business case for a new public media entity to replace state-owned Television NZ and RNZ.

The Minister of Broadcasting and Media Kris Faafoi says he plans to present the business case – due to be completed by mid-year – to cabinet for approval by the end of the year.

The business case will consider what a new public media entity would cost to develop, implement and operate –  and how it would “collaborate with and complement the work of private media”.

The business case for Strong Public Media is expected to be completed around the middle of the year – a tight timeframe.

The group will be chaired by former NZ First party deputy leader Tracey Martin.

Board appointees
The other appointees are:

• Broadcasting Standards Authority chair Glen Scanlon – a former head of news at RNZ
• Former MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson
• TV producer, former reporter  and member of Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council Bailey Mackey
• Broadcasting and technology consultant William Earl
• Dr Trisha Dunleavy, Victoria University of Wellington media academic
• Producer Sandra Kailahi, former journalist at TVNZ’s Tagata Pasifika, Te Karere and Fair Go
• John Quirk, former chair and director of state-owner transmission company Kordia.

Media Minister Faafoi said the Minister for Māori Development, Willie Jackson, was also “leading work to enhance support for the Māori media sector”.

“The Governance Group will oversee the development of a business case . . . which will  look at how a potential new public media entity could meet the changing expectations of New Zealand audiences and support a strong, vibrant media sector,” Faafoi said in a statement

The minister also said the group would “lead work to gather input on a Charter for the potential new public media entity”.

The process has been heavily criticised by the National Party and its broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee.

She has said it has taken too long and effectively stalled progress on important projects at both broadcasters, including the review of RNZ’s Charter – which was due to begin next week – and RNZ’s plans for a new youth service, the subject of major controversy in 2020 when plans to reallocate RNZ Concert’s FM frequency and cut back the network were announced, and then scrapped.

The story so far
It was back in 2019 that Minister Faafoi first raised the prospect of a new state-owned public media entity under the banner Strengthening Public Media.

Thanks to a source spilling the beans to RNZ in January 2020, it was revealed the government had settled on that option to replace state-owned RNZ and TVNZ within three years.

But back then cabinet wanted to know more about precisely how it would work and ministers demanded a business case before giving it a green light.

It was even common knowledge that PwC had been hired for the task under the guidance of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage before the minister confirmed all that the following month.

He also said it would have revenue from both “Crown and non-Crown sources”  –  a mix of public funding then and commercial revenue in other words.

(This was re-stated by the minister today, but he has declined to discuss the balance of public and commercial funding until after the completion of the business case).

Those who called it a “merger” were corrected by the minister and officials.

Not just mashing together
They have insisted all along this was not just mashing together the public service non-commercial RNZ – whose foundation is radio – with a heavily-commercialised TVNZ founded on television broadcasting and advertising.

But how a completely new digital-age media organisation with a new charter could be created by 2023 out of the resources of two organisations with very different budgets, priorities and cultures remains an unanswered question.

When MPs asked about that in the annual reviews of TVNZ and RNZ last year, the answer was “wait for the business case”.

When covid-19 intervened in March 2020, Strengthening Public Media took a back seat to saving the media.

The business case was put on ice in April 2020.

But earlier this month, Minister Faafoi told the Parliamentary committee reviewing TVNZ and RNZ that work was back on,

TVNZ‘s chief executive Kevin Kenrick told the committee TVNZ was merely an “observer” in the process.

“This future public media entity is basically being progressed by officials at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage right now,” he said.

But RNZ chairman Jim Mather echoed the minister’s language on strengthening public media when he declared RNZ’s strong support.

“We believe, as a board and executive team, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a stronger public media system the would benefit all New Zealanders,” he told Parliament’s Social Services Committee.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet) – an institution concerned with freedom of expression in the digital world – has criticised Indonesia’s newly established virtual police (VP) unit formed under the national police headquarters that is tasked with monitoring the activities of netizens.

The programme, the brainchild of Indonesian police chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, was formed to prevent indictments under the Information and Electronic Transaction Law (UU ITE).

SAFEnet executive director Damar Juniarto is concerned however that instead of providing a sense of security the virtual police would in fact give rise to new fears.

The reason being that virtual police officers would intrude too far into the private lives of citizens in the digital sphere.

“This will instead give rise to new fears, where the police can appear at any time in citizen’s private [digital] space,” said Juniarto when contacted by CNN Indonesia last week.

Juniarto said that it was if the virtual police were reviving an Orwellian state. The term Orwellian state refers to a system and public situation that is anti-freedom and anti-openness and is taken from a fictional work by author and journalist George Orwell.

One of the criteria for an Orwellian state is when the state continuously monitors what is being done by its citizens.

‘Correcting’ citizens
In such a situation, continued Juniarto, the state can directly correct citizens who are deemed to be in error. Instead of feeling protected, people will in fact feel threatened and fearful.

“Even without this direct police presence, people are already afraid of the threat of the UU ITE [being used against them], never mind with methods such as this,” he said.

Not only that, Juniarto emphasised that the virtual police negate the space for people to defend themselves if a posting on the internet is deemed to be hate speech or violate the ITE Law.

The virtual police, according to Juniarto, would in fact negate the judicial process so people would only have one option – to obey or be punished.

Juniarto revealed that the virtual police’s presence have already turned people’s discussions in digital space into something has to be treated or cured. He is also concerned that they would destroy the climate of discussion and debate on digital media.

“So the VP needs to be corrected so their implementation prioritises education, not appearing as a figure which wants to punish disobedient citizens,” said Juniarto.

Earlier this week, the police officially launched the virtual police unit to monitor potential violations of the ITE Law on the internet.

Healthy cyber world
According to national police spokesperson Inspector General Argo Yuwono, the virtual police’s presence in digital space is a form of maintaining security and public order so that activities in the cyber world can be clean, healthy and productive.

“Through the virtual police, the police will provide education and notifications if what is written is a criminal violation, request that it not be written again and be deleted,” Yuwono told journalists.

According to Yuwono, the virtual police had already sent warnings to three accounts recently. One of the accounts had posted a picture with the caption “Don’t forget I’m a thief”.

“Virtual police alert. Warning 1. The content on your Twitter account uploaded on February 21, 2021, at 3.15 pm local time has the potential to be criminal hate speech.

“In order to avoid further legal proceedings you are asked to make a correction to the social media content after you have received this message. Salam Presisi [predictability, responsibility, transparency, justice],” said Yuwono reading out the contents of the warning.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “SAFEnet Kritik Aksi Virtual Police Terobos Ruang Privat Warga”.

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Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

“Your post goes against our community standards on nudity or sexual activity” was the terse message that Professor David Robie, director of the Auckland-based Pacific Media Centre, RSF’s Oceania partner, received from Facebook whenever he tried to share an article about press freedom in Melanesia, especially the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, reports RSF.

Posted on August 6 on the International Federation of Journalists website, the article described the contents of the latest issue of the Pacific Journalism Review, a research journal published by the Pacific Media Centre.

READ MORE: PJR warns growing risks and hostile laws ‘silencing’ Melanesian media

Facebook’s algorithms censored it because, according to an automatic message sent to Dr Robie, “some audiences are sensitive to different things when it comes to nudity”.

The closest thing to nudity in the IFJ article was a photo of an anti-racism protest by Papuan students showing two of the participants in traditional highlands costume – consisting of necklaces and penis sheaths.

‘Tyranny’ of algorithms
“Anybody with common sense would see that the photograph in question was not ’nudity’ in the community standards sense of Facebook’s guidelines,” Dr Robie said, condemning the “tyranny” of the platform’s algorithms.

A former journalist himself as well as an academic, Dr Robie tried to report the mistake to Facebook three times on August 7, without success.

“There is no proper process to challenge or appeal against such arbitrary rulings,” he said.

RSF contacted Mia Garlick, the person responsible for Australian and New Zealand policy at Facebook, to get her position on this issue, but had not received any substantive response at the time of writing.

“This utterly absurd case of censorship shows the degree to which Facebook’s arbitrary algorithms pose serious threats to the free flow of information and, by extension, to press freedom,” said Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“As Facebook has imposed itself as a leading conveyor of news and information and, as such, is bound by the requirements of responsibility and transparency, we call on its regional desk to immediately lift the censorship on this article.”

Exploiting algorithms
This is not the first time that Facebook has censored content about the rights of Indonesia’s Papuan population on “nudity” grounds. It deleted a Vanuatu Daily Post article in April 2018 because it was accompanied by a photo of Papuan warriors in traditional costume taken by the Australian photographer Ben Bohane in 1995.

Pro-Indonesia trolls and fake Facebook accounts are known to report this kind of photo to Facebook, exploiting its algorithms to get content they dislike censored.

The issue of West Papua, the Indonesian-ruled western half of the island of New Guinea, is taboo in Indonesia and accessing its two provinces is very difficult for independent journalists, who need a special visa to go there.

When pro-independence demonstrations erupted in August 2019, the Indonesian authorities imposed an internet blackout on the region, preventing journalists from covering the protests.

Indonesia is ranked 119th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.

Republished from the Pacific Media Centre’s partner Reporters Without Borders’ website.

ANALYSIS: By Ross Tapsell, of the Australian National University

The recent police interrogations of six Al Jazeera journalists in Malaysia – five of whom are Australian – was not about shaping international reportage or a diplomatic rift.

Rather, it was part of a troubling pattern of crackdowns on the media and freedom of speech in the country, driven by the domestic concerns of an insecure government highly sensitive to criticism.

While the previous government led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was by no means consistent or perfect, Malaysia was hailed just last year as an example of a country improving on press freedom.

READ MORE: Malaysia takes a turn to the right, and many of its people are worried

This started to change in March, however, as Muhyiddin Yassin’s new government came to power. Tolerance for criticism and dissent has since been in short supply.

Since Muhyiddin Yassin’s new government came to power. Tolerance for criticism and dissent has since been in short supply. Image: Ahmad Yusni/EPA

Pattern of repression
The Al Jazeera journalists have been accused of sedition and defamation over a documentary about the government’s treatment of migrant workers during the covid-19 pandemic. Malaysian officials and national television claim the documentary was inaccurate, misleading and unfair.

But these journalists are hardly the only ones to be targeted by the new government.

Steven Gan arriving at court this week. Image: Ahmad Yusni/EPA

Steven Gan, chief editor of the trusted online news portal Malaysiakini, is facing contempt of court charges and could be sent to jail over reader comments briefly published on the news site that were apparently critical of the judiciary. Gan’s lawyer warned the case could have a “chilling effect”.

South China Morning Post journalist Tashny Sukamaran has been investigated for reporting on police raids of migrant workers and refugees.

Another journalist, Boo Su-Lyn, is being investigated for publishing the findings of an inquiry into a fire at a hospital in 2016 that left six dead.

A book featuring articles by political analysts and journalists has been banned over the artwork on the cover that allegedly insulted the national coat of arms. Sukamaran and journalists from Malaysiakini have been questioned by police about their involvement.

Opposition politicians have also been questioned by police for tweets and comments they made in the media prior to the new government taking power.

Whistle-blowers are included in this, too. For example, the government this week cancelled the work permit of the migrant worker who was featured in the Al Jazeera documentary.

Why the recent crackdown?
Malaysia’s current coalition government – Perikatan Nasional – was controversially formed earlier this year. The alliance came to power via backdoor politicking and support from the Malaysian king as Mahathir’s dysfunctional coalition imploded.

The new government coalition includes the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the party voted out of power in 2018 following a massive corruption scandal. This was the first time Malaysia had changed government in its 60-year history.

With UMNO now back in government, it is perhaps no surprise there are again more crackdowns on the media, as their previous rule saw regular attacks on journalists, activists and opposition figures.

Malaysia has also become known for its “cybertroopers” – social media commentators similar to “trolls” – who drive heated nationalistic and race-related agendas, and target government critics.

After the Al Jazeera documentary, these cyber-troopers provided fervent support for the government’s actions, arguing it had every right to round up migrants and evict them if it sees fit. Al Jazeera said its journalists were also targeted by cyber-troopers, saying they

faced abuse online, including death threats and disclosure of their personal details over social media.

Shaky government looking to firm up support
There’s another reason for the return of media crackdowns and online-driven activity beyond just the government’s desire to control the media.

It is also tactical as it allows government ministers to respond with firm statements asking security forces to intervene – enabling them to look strong, coherent and nationalistic.

Muhyiddin’s coalition is on shaky ground. It holds a slim majority in parliament and internal party factions have come to dominate political debate, with “party-hopping” becoming increasingly common. Malaysiakini even has a rolling news page regularly updated to track politicians’ changing alliances.

Malaysia’s parliament also finally resumed this week after a long and unstable hiatus, and was described as a “circus”. Politicians shouted over one another, with some trading racist and sexist remarks.

The house speaker, who was part of Mahathir’s administration, was also
controversially replaced. There has been consistent talk of snap polls.

In this environment, politicians who don’t respond forcefully enough in the “culture wars” over documentaries and controversial artwork on book covers, or conform with the online mob on immigration, risk looking weak.

A ‘new normal’ settling in
A snap election won’t necessarily help Muyhiddin strengthen his position, as parties within the coalition can become rivals during a campaign for certain seats.

But no matter who rules Malaysia in the coming months, the result will likely be a government that is fragile, insecure and worried about its legitimacy. For Malaysians, this is their “new normal”.

The risk for journalists in this “new normal” is further repression and harassment of independent media. As we have seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well as in Australia, the state seems increasingly willing to use legal and regulatory pressure to make sure journalists and whistle-blowers are afraid to speak up.

Dr Ross Tapsell is senior lecturer in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific., Australian National University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the up to six years in jail sentence that Philippine journalist Maria Ressa faces on a criminal libel charge in a “shocking judicial masquerade” in Manila yesterday.

It called on the country’s justice system to recover a “semblance of credibility” by overturning her conviction on appeal, RSF said in a statement as global media freedom and human rights watchdogs protested over the verdict.

A Manila regional court convicted Maria Ressa, co-founder and director of the independent news website Rappler, over an article published in 2012 that was the subject of a complaint by a businessman.

READ MORE: Maria Ressa found guilty in blow to Philippines’ press freedom

But the case was brought under a cyber crime law that took effect after the article’s publication. Rappler‘s former researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr received the same sentence.

Both were allowed to post bail, pending an appeal.

– Partner –

As no criminal legislation can be retroactive, the National Bureau of Investigation dismissed the case in February 2018. But President Rodrigo Duterte’s Department of Justice decided otherwise.

‘Continuous publication’
It revived the case in February 2019 on the grounds that a supposed principle of “continuous publication” could be applied to websites.

“By passing this extremely harsh sentence at the end of utterly Kafkaesque proceedings, the Philippine justice system has demonstrated a complete lack of independence from the executive,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“This sentence bears the malevolent mark of President Duterte and his desire, by targeting Rappler and the figure of Maria Ressa, to eliminate all criticism whatever the cost.

“We urge Manila’s judges to restore a semblance of credibility to the Philippine judicial system by overturning this conviction on appeal.”

🇵🇭 @rapplerdotcom‘s @mariaressa could get six years in jail! By passing this harsh sentence after utterly Kafkaesque proceedings, the #Philippines‘ justice system has demonstrated a complete lack of independence from from pdt #Duterte‘s administration. https://t.co/RSK6RARyfM

— RSF (@RSF_inter) June 15, 2020

Systematic harassment
This conviction of Ressa and Rappler is the latest chapter in the systematic judicial harassment to which they have been subjected by various government agencies for more than two years.

Either directly or through Ressa, the website is facing 10 other similar complaints, each as baseless as the other, with the aim of intimidating its journalists.

“What with denying its reporters access to the presidential palace, threatening to withdraw its licence and accusing it of tax evasion, the authorities have stopped at nothing to harass Rappler, even arbitrarily detaining Ressa overnight in February 2019,” said Bastard.

ABS-CBN, the biggest Philippine broadcast network and one of the few other media outlets to dare criticise the government, had its franchise withdrawn last month.

Its radio stations and TV channels all stopped broadcasting on May 5 at the behest of the Justice Department and National Telecommunications Commission.

The country’s authoritarian president had warned the network’s executives last December: “If you expect that [the franchise] will be renewed, I’m sorry. I will see to it that you’re out.”

After falling seven places since 2017, the Philippines is ranked 136th out of 180 countries and territories in RSF’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.

‘Damaging precedent’
In Brisbane, Professor Peter Greste, director and spokesperson of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom and UNESCO chair of journalism and communication at the University of Queensland, said the verdict set “an extraordinarily damaging precedent” for Asia-Pacific and global press freedom.

“To suggest there was no political pressure in this case would be incredibly naïve. The Philippine government has made it abundantly clear that they don’t think Maria should be free. The judge will have been acutely aware of this pressure.

“As a former political prisoner myself, I am deeply concerned about Maria and her former colleague, researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr. who was also convicted in this case. More broadly though, I am concerned about what this means for the people of the Philippines.

“They might not all read Maria’s website, Rappler.com, but they all benefit from a free press that is able to question and challenge those in power. This judgment strikes a blow for every independent journalist in the country, chilling the kind of enquiry that makes democracy work.

“But this is not just about the Philippines. The human rights group, Freedom House, has charted a decline in democracy across the Asian region, and this conviction accelerates that trend.

“The AJF urges democratic governments – including Australia’s – to respond swiftly and decisively. This is a test case for the world’s resolve in standing up to authoritarianism by supporting press freedom.”

Maria Ressa found guilty in blow to Philippines’ press freedom #cyberlibel #mediafreedom @pacmedcentre @cnnphilippines @rapplerdotcom @mongster @dannyarao https://t.co/P6h8lNvEYr pic.twitter.com/FL75VyrdOy

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 15, 2020

‘Another nail in coffin’
In Auckland, Professor David Robie, director of the Pacific Media Centre, said the conviction of Rappler’s Maria Ressa and Raynaldo Santos Jr “drives another nail into the coffin of a free press and democracy” in the Philippines.

“It is also a chilling cautionary tale for the Asia-Pacific region and especially for those Pacific countries, such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji, that have imposed draconian cyber crime and social media laws that are really designed to stifle free expression and a free media.

“Fiji is currently deploying its social media law in a blatant attempt to muzzle its democratic opposition and intimidate the media. The behaviour of the state and security forces frequently display the typical characteristics of a virtual dictatorship.”

The Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project collaborates with the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

Even before the coronavirus arrived to turn life upside down and trigger a global infodemic, social media platforms were under growing pressure to curb the spread of misinformation.

Last year, Facebook cofounder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg called for new rules to address “harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability”.

Now, amid a rapidly evolving pandemic, when more people than ever are using social media for news and information, it is more crucial than ever that people can trust this content.

READ MORE: Social media companies are taking steps to tamp down coronavirus misinformation – but they can do more

Digital platforms are now taking more steps to tackle misinformation about Covid-19 on their services. In a joint statement, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube have pledged to work together to combat misinformation.

Facebook has traditionally taken a less proactive approach to countering misinformation. A commitment to protecting free expression has led the platform to allow misinformation in political advertising.

– Partner –

More recently, however, Facebook’s spam filter inadvertently marked legitimate news information about Covid-19 as spam. While Facebook has since fixed the mistake, this incident demonstrated the limitations of automated moderation tools.

In a step in the right direction, Facebook is allowing national ministries of health and reliable organisations to advertise accurate information on Covid-19 free of charge.

Twitter, which prohibits political advertising, is allowing links to the Australian Department of Health and World Health Organisation websites.

Twitter has also announced a suite of changes to its rules, including updates to how it defines harm so as to address content that goes against authoritative public health information, and an increase in its use of machine learning and automation technologies to detect and remove potentially abusive and manipulative content.

Previous attempts unsuccessful
Unfortunately, Twitter has been unsuccessful in its recent attempts to tackle misinformation (or, more accurately, disinformation – incorrect information posted deliberately with an intent to obfuscate).

The platform has begun to label doctored videos and photos as “manipulated media”. The crucial first test of this initiative was a widely circulated altered video of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which part of a sentence was edited out to make it sound as if he was forecasting President Donald Trump’s re-election.

It took Twitter 18 hours to label the video, by which time it had already received 5 million views and 21,000 retweets.The label appeared below the video (rather than in a more prominent place), and was only visible to the roughly 757,000 accounts who followed the video’s original poster, White House social media director Dan Scavino.

Users who saw the content via reweets from the White House (21 million followers) or President Donald Trump (76 million followers), did not see the label.

Labelling misinformation doesn’t work
There are four key reasons why Twitter’s (and other platforms’) attempts to label misinformation were ineffective.

First, social media platforms tend to use automated algorithms for these tasks, because they scale well. But labelling manipulated tweets requires human labour; algorithms cannot decipher complex human interactions. Will social media platforms invest in human labour to solve this issue? The odds are long.

Second, tweets can be shared millions of times before being labelled. Even if removed, they can easily be edited and then reposted to avoid algorithmic detection.

Third, and more fundamentally, labels may even be counterproductive, serving only to pique the audience’s interest. Conversely, labels may actually amplify misinformation rather than curtailing it.

Finally, the creators of deceptive content can deny their content was an attempt to obfuscate, and claim unfair censorship, knowing that they will find a sympathetic audience within the hyper-partisan arena of social media.

So how can we beat misinformation?
The situation might seem impossible, but there are some practical strategies that the media, social media platforms, and the public can use.

First, unless the misinformation has already reached a wide audience, avoid drawing extra attention to it. Why give it more oxygen than it deserves?

Second, if misinformation has reached the point at which it requires debunking, be sure to stress the facts rather than simply fanning the flames. Refer to experts and trusted sources, and use the “truth sandwich”, in which you state the truth, and then the misinformation, and finally restate the truth again.

Third, social media platforms should be more willing to remove or restrict unreliable content. This might include disabling likes, shares and retweets for particular posts, and banning users who repeatedly misinform others.

For example, Twitter recently removed coronavirus misinformation posted by Rudy Guilani and Charlie Kirk; the Infowars app was removed from Google’s app store; and probably with the highest impact, Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube removed corona misinformation from Brasil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.

Finally, all of us, as social media users, have a crucial role to play in combating misinformation. Before sharing something, think carefully about where it came from. Verify the source and its evidence, double-check with independent other sources, and report suspicious content to the platform directly. Now, more than ever, we need information we can trust.

Dr Tobias R. Keller is visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Queensland University of Technology and Dr Rosalie Gillett is a research associate in digital platform regulation at the Queensland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.