"UNRWA is Hamas. Hospitals are Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. Civilian infrastructure is Hamas. Ambulances, schools and mosques are Hamas . . . " Image: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
The Israeli Knesset has banned UNRWA, an absolutely critical agency for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, with the architect of the bill saying this was happening because “UNRWA equals Hamas”.
In addition to everything else this genocide has been, it’s been a colossal insult to our intelligence.
UNRWA is Hamas. Hospitals are Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. Civilian infrastructure is Hamas. Ambulances, schools and mosques are Hamas. The women and babies — okay maybe they’re not technically Hamas, but Hamas is definitely hiding behind them and using them as human shields.
We are asked to believe self-evidently idiotic things, and if we don’t, we get called Nazi Jew-haters. We are being asked to turn ourselves into empty-headed morons to advance the information interests of a foreign state that’s allied with our government.
Stupidity is being framed as a sign of patriotism. Gullibility is being framed as a sign of rejecting antisemitism. In this morally bankrupt and perverse civilisation, the noblest thing you can be is a blithering imbecile.
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Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid have penned yet another White House press release disguised as a news story about how “concerned” the Biden administration is about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“The Biden administration is ‘deeply concerned’ that two bills passed by the Israeli Knesset on Monday will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and harm Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Ravid writes.
Oh shit you guys, the Biden administration is deeply concerned that Israel is doing something bad in Gaza! You’re in trouble now, Bibi!
Like I said. Just one nonstop insult to our intelligence.
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CNN has issued an apology after its panelist Ryan Girdusky told fellow panelist Mehdi Hasan “I hope your pager doesn’t go off” after Hasan said he supports Palestinians. Israel supporters have been directing this “hurr hurr you should be murdered with an explosive pager” wisecrack at Israel’s critics for weeks, and apparently Girdusky just forgot where he was in the heat of the moment.
CNN was like, This network is shocked and appalled that our panelist joked about murdering a British Muslim journalist with an explosive beeper. That kind of language is only appropriate when directed at Muslims who live in the Middle East.
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Per the rules of the Western Empire you are a religious extremist if you want to fight against an occupying force who has been abusing you your entire life, but you are not a religious extremist if you want to carpet bomb the Middle East to help fulfill a Biblical prophecy.
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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is back to pushing her “Russians are interfering in the US election” narrative, so we know what we’ll be hearing again if Kamala loses. No matter who wins we can expect a bunch of outraged shrieking from the other side that the election was unfairly stolen from them.
The US presidential race is very openly a contest between two oligarch-owned Zionist war whores, and yet after the results are announced next week you’re still going to hear half the country going “OMG election interference! The election was stolen from us!”
It already was, you dopes. It was stolen before the race even started. The rest is just narrative.
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I sure hope all the US progressives who obediently stopped talking about Gaza these last couple of months remember to start that thing up again after the election is over.
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I’m just gonna say this ahead of time so it’s out there: you don’t get to campaign on continuing a genocide and then blame other people when you lose. That is not a thing.
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“Trump will be worse on Gaza” is such an obnoxiously dishonest argument. It’s completely unfalsifiable and can’t even be tested after the election since abuses keep getting worse in Gaza anyway, and it’s based on nothing but the claim that very vague statements made by Trump prove he’ll facilitate Israeli atrocities more than the current administration already has been.
It’s completely empty narrative fluff with no basis on the facts in evidence.
There are all kinds of legitimate cases to be made that Harris would be a little bit better than Trump on some aspects of domestic policy and the environment, but there is no case whatsoever to be made that he’ll be worse on Gaza than the administration that’s already committing genocide there.
He could be worse, he could be a bit better, or he could be exactly the same. There’s no way to know, and there won’t be any way to know in a universe where we can’t observe alternate realities to compare what each presidential candidate would have done if they’d won. It’s an entirely unanswerable question that people are just pretending to know the answer to.
Harris and the Democrats have repeatedly attacked Trump for not starting a war with Iran when he was president. She criticised him for making John Bolton sad when he refused to bomb Iran. How is that less insanely pro-Israel than anything Trump has said?
If you want to argue that Harris will be better on reproductive rights or something then go ahead, but when it comes to Gaza don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I am Amy Goodman, with Juan González:
The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post newspapers are facing mounting backlash after the papers’ publishers announced no presidential endorsements would be made this year. The LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and The Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
National Public Radio (NPR) is reporting more than 200,000 people have cancelled their Washington Post subscriptions, and counting.
A number of journalists have also resigned, including the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, who wrote, “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”
Veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein have also resigned from the L.A. Times editorial board.
At The Washington Post, David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned on Monday from the Post editorial board. Michele Norris also resigned as a Washington Post columnist, and Robert Kagan resigned as editor-at-large.
David Hoffman, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his series “Annals of Autocracy,” wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
David Hoffman joins us now, along with former Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza.
David Hoffman, let’s begin with you. Explain why you left The Washington Post editorial board. Oh, and at the same time, congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize.
Writers resign from The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times in protest over the blocking of their editorials by the billionaire owners. Video: Democracy Now!
DAVID HOFFMAN: Thank you very much.
I worked for 12 years writing editorials in which I said over and over again, “We cannot be silent in the face of dictatorship, not anywhere.” And I wrote about dissidents who were imprisoned for speaking out.
And I felt that I couldn’t write another editorial decrying silence if we were going to be silent in the face of Trump’s autocracy. And I feel very, very strongly that the campaign has exposed his intention to be an autocrat.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, is there any precedent for the publisher of The Washington Post overruling their own editorial board?
DAVID HOFFMAN: Yeah, there’s lots of precedent. It’s entirely within the right of the publisher and the owner to do this. Previous owners have often told the editorial board what to say, because we are the voice of the institution and its owner. So, there’s nothing wrong with that.
What’s wrong here is the timing. If they had made this decision early in the year and announced, as a principle, they don’t want to issue endorsements, nobody would have even blinked. A lot of papers don’t. People have rightly questioned whether they actually have any impact.
What matters here was, we are right on the doorstep of the most consequential election in our lifetimes. To pull the plug on the endorsement, to go silent against Trump days before the election, that to me was just unconscionable.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mariel Garza, could you talk about the situation at the LA Times and your reaction when you heard of the owner’s decision?
MARIEL GARZA: Certainly. It was a long conversation over the course of many weeks. We presented our proposal to endorse Kamala Harris. And, of course, there was — to us, there was no question that we would endorse her. We spent nine years talking about the dangers of Trump, called him unfit in 5 million ways, and Kamala Harris is somebody that we know. She’s a California elected official.
We’ve had a lot of conversations with her. We’ve seen her career evolved. We were going to — we were going to endorse her. And there was no indication that we were going to suddenly shift to a neutral position, certainly not within a few weeks or months of the election.
At first, we didn’t get a clear answer — sounds like it’s the same situation that happened at The Washington Post — until we pressed for one. We presented an outline with — these are the points we’re going to make — and an argument for why not only was it important for us, an editorial board whose mission is to speak truth to power, to stand up to tyranny — our readers expect it.
We’re a very liberal paper. There is no — there is no question what the editorial board believes, that Donald Trump should not be president ever.
AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to —
MARIEL GARZA: So, it was perplexing. It was mystifying. It was — go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to get your response to the daughter of the LA Times owner. On Saturday, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika Soon-Shiong posted a message online suggesting that her father’s decision was linked to Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Nika wrote, “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process.
“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she wrote.
Her father, Patrick Soon-Shiong, later disputed her claim, saying that she has no role at the Los Angeles Times. Mariel Garza, your response?
MARIEL GARZA: Look, I really don’t know what to say, because I have — that was — if that was the case, it was never communicated to us. I do not know what goes on in the conversation in the Soon-Shiong household. I know that she is not — she does not participate in deliberations of the editorial board, as far as I know. I’ve never spoken to her.
We all know how she feels about Gaza, because she’s a prolific tweeter. So, I really can’t say. And this is part of the bigger problem, is we were never given a reason for why we were being silent.
If there was a reason — say it was Israel — we could have explained that to readers. Instead, we remain silent. And that’s — I mean, this is not a time in American history where anybody can remain silent or neutral.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, this whole issue has been raised by some critics of Jeff Bezos that his company has a lot of business with the US government, and whether that had any impact on Bezos’s decision. I’m wondering your thoughts.
DAVID HOFFMAN: I can’t be inside his mind. His company does have big business, and he’s acknowledged it’s a complicating factor in his ownership. But I can’t really understand why he made this decision, and I don’t think it’s been very well explained. His explanation published today was that he wants sort of more civic quiet, and he thought an endorsement would add to the sense of anxiety and the poisonous atmosphere.
But I disagree with that. I think, like in the LA Times, I think readers have come to expect us to be a voice of reason, and they’ve looked to endorsements at least for some clarity. So, frankly, I also feel that we’re still lacking an explanation.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, you have subtitle, the slogan of The Washington Post, of course, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It’s being mocked all over social media. One person wrote, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend.”
David Hoffman, your response to that? But also, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your series “Annals of Autocracy,” and you talk about digital billionaires, as well, and what this means. How does this fit into your investigations?
DAVID HOFFMAN: You know, I would hope everybody would understand and acknowledge that we’ve done a lot of good for democracy and human rights. You know, I’ve had governments react sharply to a single editorial. When we call them out for imprisoning dissidents, it matters that we are very widely read.
And that’s another reason why I feel this was a big mistake, because we actually were on a path, for decades, of championing democracy and human rights as an institution.
And, you know, I have to tell you, I wrote a book in Russia about oligarchs. I understand how difficult it is when you have a lively and independent group of journalists. And ownership really matters. And, you know, we’re not just another widget company.
This is actually a group of very, very deep-thinking and oftentimes very aggressive people that have a desire to change the world. That’s the kind of journalism that The Washington Post has sponsored and engaged in.
In 2023, we published a series of editorials that took a look deep inside how China, Russia, Burma, you know, other places — how these autocracies function. One of the findings was that many of these dictatorships are using technology to clamp down on dissent, even things as tiny as a single tweet.
Young people, young college students are being thrown in prison in Cuba, in Belarus, in Vietnam. And I documented these to show how this technology actually isn’t becoming a force for freedom, but it’s being turned on its head by dictatorship.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Hoffman, Washington Post reporter, stepped down from the Post editorial board when they refused to endorse a presidential candidate; Mariel Garza, LA Times editorials editor who just resigned.
The Washington Post masthead . . . at stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal. Image: MediaPost
ANALYSIS: By Denis Muller
In February 2017, as Donald Trump took office, The Washington Postadopted the first slogan in its 140-year history: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
How ironic, then, that it should now be helping to extinguish the flame of American democracy by refusing to endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.
This decision, and a similar one by the second of America’s big three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.
At stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal who has already incited violence to overturn a presidential election and has shown contempt for the conventions on which democracy rests.
Everyone should cancel their Washington Post subscription after Bezos copped out on a presidential endorsement. It is shameful how far a once great newspaper has fallen. I cancelled today.
Why did they do it? Why would two of the Western world’s finest newspapers take such a recklessly irresponsible decision?
It cannot be on the basis of any rational assessment of the respective fitness for office of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
It also cannot be on the basis of their own reporting and analysis of the candidates, where the lies and threats issued by Trump have been fearlessly recorded. In this context, the decision to not endorse a candidate is a betrayal of their own editorial staff. The Post’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned in protest at the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris.
This leaves, in my view, a combination of cowardice and greed as the only feasible explanation. Both newspapers are owned by billionaire American businessmen: The Post by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and the LA Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his billions through biotechnology.
Bezos bought The Post in 2013 through his private investment company Nash Holdings, and Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018 through his investment firm Nant Capital. Both run the personal risk of suffering financially should a Trump presidency turn out to be hostile towards them.
During the election campaign, Trump has made many threats of retaliation against those in the media who oppose him. He has indicated that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him, toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he doesn’t like.
Trump threatens to jail political opponents. Video: CBS News
Logic would suggest that in the face of these threats, the media would do all in their power to oppose a Trump presidency, if not out of respect for democracy and free speech then at least in the interests of self-preservation. But fear and greed are among the most powerful of human impulses.
The purchase of these two giants of the American press by wealthy businessmen is a consequence of the financial pressures exerted on the professional mass media by the internet and social media.
Bezos was welcomed with open arms by the Graham family, which had owned The Post for four generations. But the paper faced unsustainable financial losses arising from the loss of advertising to the internet.
At first he was seen not just by the Grahams but by the executive editor, Marty Baron, as a saviour. He injected large sums of money into the paper, enabling it to regain much of the prestige and journalistic capacity it had lost.
Baron, in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, was full of praise for Bezos’s financial commitment to the paper, and for his courage in the face of Trumpian hostility. During Trump’s presidency, the paper kept a log of his lies, tallying them up at 30,573 over the four years.
Against this history, the paper’s abdication of its responsibilities now is explicable only by reference to a loss of heart by Bezos.
At the LA Times, the ownership of the Otis-Chandler families also spanned four generations, but the impact of the internet took a savage toll there as well. Between 2000 and 2018 its ownership passed through three hands, ending up with Soon-Shiong.
Both newspapers reached the zenith of their journalistic accomplishments during the last three decades of the 20th century, winning Pulitzer Prices and, in the case of The Post, becoming globally famous for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.
This, in the days when American democracy was functioning according to convention, led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.
The two reporters responsible for this coverage, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, issued a statement about the decision to not endorse a candidate:
Marty Baron, who was a ferociously tough editor, posted on X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Now, of the big three, only The New York Times is prepared to endorse a candidate for next month’s election. It has endorsed Harris, saying of Trump: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.”
Why does it matter? It matters because in democracies the media are the means by which voters learn not just about facts but about the informed opinion of those who, by virtue of access and close acquaintance, are well placed to make assessments of candidates between whom those voters are to choose. It is a core function of the media in democratic societies.
Their failure is symptomatic of the malaise into which American democracy has sunk.
In 2018, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a book, How Democracies Die. It was both reflective and prophetic. Noting that the United States was now more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, they wrote:
America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares he might not accept the election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both potential and existing autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.
Symbolically, that The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times should have gone dark at this moment is reminiscent of the remark made in 1914 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
It was a heady week for the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) — celebration of seven years of its Taipei office, presenting a raft of proposals to the Taiwan government, and hosting its Asia-Pacific network of correspondents.
Director general Thibaut Bruttin and the Taipei bureau chief Cedric Alviani primed the Taipei media scene before last week’s RSF initiatives with an op-ed in the Taiwan Times by acknowledging the country’s media freedom advances in the face of Chinese propaganda.
But the co-authors also warned over the credibility damage caused by media “too often neglect[ing] journalistic ethics for political or commercial reasons”.
As a result, only three in 10 Taiwanese said they trusted the news media, according to a Reuters Institute survey conducted in 2022, one of the lowest percentages among democracies.
“This climate of distrust gives disproportionate influence to platforms, in particular Facebook and Line, despite them being a major vector of false or biased information,” Bruttin and Alviani wrote.
“This credibility deficit for traditional media, a real Achilles heel of Taiwanese democracy, puts it at risk of being exploited for malicious purposes, with potentially dramatic consequences.”
RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin speaking at the reception celebrating seven years of Taipei’s Asia Pacific office. Image: Pacific Media Watch
The week also highlighted concerns over the export of the China’s “New World Media Order”, which is making inroads in some parts of the Asia-Pacific region, including the Pacific.
At the opening session of the Asia-Pacific correspondents’ seminar, delegates referenced the Chinese disinformation and assaults on media freedom strategies that have been characterised as the “great leap backwards for journalism” in China.
The Great Leap Backwarda of Journalism in China, 2022. Image: RSF
“Disinformation — the deliberate spreading of false or biased news to manipulate minds — is gaining ground around the world,” Bruttin and Alviani warned in their article.
“As China and Russia sink into authoritarianism and export their methods of censorship and media control, democracies find themselves overwhelmed by an incessant flow of propaganda that threatens the integrity of their institutions.”
Both Bruttin and Alviani spoke of these issues too at the celebration of the seventh anniversary of the Asia-Pacific office in Taipei.
Why Taipei? Hongkong had been an “likely choice, but not safe legally”, admitted Bruttin when they were choosing their location, so the RSF team are happy with the choice of Taiwan.
Hub for human rights activists
“I think we were among the first NGOs to have established a presence here. We kind of made a bet that Taipei would be a hub for human rights activists, and we were right.”
About 200 journalists, media workers and press freedom and human rights advocates attended the birthday bash in the iconic Grand Hotel’s Yuanshan Club. So it wasn’t surprising that there was a lot of media coverage raising the issues.
RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin (centre) with correspondents Dr David Robie and Dr Joseph Fernandez in Taipei. Image: Pacific Media Watch
In an interview with Voice of America’s Joyce Huang, Bruttin was more specific about the “insane” political propaganda threats from China faced by Taiwan.
However, Taiwan “has demonstrated resilience and has rich experience in resisting cyber information attacks, which can be used as a reference for the world”.
Referencing China as the world’s “biggest jailer of journalists”, Bruttin said: “We’re very worried, obviously.” He added about some specific cases: “We’ve had very troublesome reports about the situation of Zhang Zhan, for example, who was the laureate of the RSF’s [2021 press freedom] awards [in the courage category] and had been just released from jail, now is sent back to jail.
“We know the lack of treatment if you have a medical condition in the Chinese prisons.
“Another example is Jimmy Lai, the Hongkong press freedom mogul, he’s very likely to die in jail if nothing happens. He’s over 70.
“And there is very little reason to believe that, despite his dual citizenship, the British government will be able to get him a safe passage to Europe.”
Problem for Chinese public
Bruttin also expressed concern about the problem for the general public, especially in China where he said a lot of people had been deprived of the right to information “worthy of that name”.
“And we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people. And it’s totally scandalous to see how bad information is treated in the People’s Republic of China.”
Seventeen countries in the Asia-Pacific region were represented in the network seminar.
Representatives of Australia, Cambodia, Hongkog, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Korea, Tibet, Thailand and Vietnam were present. However, three correspondents (Malaysia, Singapore and Timor-Leste) were unable to be personally present.
Discussion and workshop topics included the RSF Global Strategy; the Asia-Pacific network and the challenges being faced; best practice as correspondents; “innovative solutions” against disinformation; public advocacy (for authoritarian regimes; emerging democracies, and “leading” democracies); “psychological support” – one of the best sessions; and the RSF Crisis Response.
RSF Oceania colleagues Dr David Robie (left) and Dr Joseph Fernandez . . . mounting challenges. Image: Pacific Media Watch
What about Oceania (including Australia and New Zealand) and its issues? Fortunately, the countries being represented have correspondents who can speak our publicly, unlike some in the region facing authoritarian responses.
“While this puts Australia in the top one quarter globally, it does not reflect well on a country that supposedly espouses democratic values. It ranks behind New Zealand, Taiwan, Timor-Leste and Bhutan,” he says.
“Australia’s press freedom challenges are manifold and include deep-seated factors, including the influence of oligarchs whose own interests often collide with that of citizens.
“While in opposition the current Australian federal government promised reforms that would have improved the conditions for press freedom, but it has failed to deliver while in government.
“Much needs to be done in clawing back the over-reach of national security laws, and in freeing up information flow, for example, through improved whistleblower law, FOI law, source protection law, and defamation law.”
Dr Fernandez criticises the government’s continuing culture of secrecy and says there has been little progress towards improving transparency and accountability.
“The media’s attacks upon itself are not helping either given the constant moves by some media and their backers to undermine the efforts of some journalists and some media organisations, directly or indirectly.”
A proposal for a “journalist register” has also stirred controversy.
Dr Fernandez also says the war on Gaza has “highlighted the near paralysis” of many governments of the so-called established democracies in “bringing the full weight of their influence to end the loss of lives and human suffering”.
“They have also failed to demonstrate strong support for journalists’ ability to tell important stories.”
An English-language version of this tribute to the late RSF director-general Christophe Deloire, who died from cancer on 8 June 2024, was screened at the RSF Taipei reception. He was 53. Video: RSF
Aotearoa New Zealand
In New Zealand (19th in the RSF Index), although journalists work in an environment free from violence and intimidation, they have increasingly faced online harassment. Working conditions became tougher in early 2022 when, during protests against covid-19 vaccinations and restrictions and a month-long “siege” of Parliament, journalists were subjected to violence, insults and death threats, which are otherwise extremely rare in the country.
Research published in December 2023 revealed that high rates of abuse and threats directed at journalists put the country at risk of “mob censorship” – citizen vigilantism seeking to “discipline” journalism. Women journalists bore the brunt of the online abuse with one respondent describing her inbox as a “festering heap of toxicity”.
While New Zealand society is multicultural, with mutual recognition between the Māori and European populations enshrined in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, this balance is under threat from a draft Treaty Principles Bill.
The nation’s bicultural dimension is not entirely reflected in the media, still dominated by the English-language press. A rebalancing is taking place, as seen in the success of the Māori Television network and many Māori-language programmes in mass media, such as Te Karere, The Hui and Te Ao Māori News.
New Zealand media also play an important role as a regional communications centre for other South Pacific nations, via Tagata Pasifika, Pacific Media Network and others.
Papua New Guinea’s Belinda Kora (left) with RSF colleagues . . . “collaborating in our Pacific efforts in seeking the truth”. Image: Belinda Kora
Papua New Guinea
The Papua New Guinea correspondent, Belinda Kora, who is secretary of the revised PNG Media Council and an ABC correspondent in Port Moresby, succeeded former South Pacific Post Ltd chief executive Bob Howarth, the indefatigable media freedom defender of both PNG and Timor-Leste.
“I am excited about what RSF is able and willing to bring to a young Pacific region — full of challenges against the press,” she says.
“But more importantly, I guess, is that the biggest threat in PNG would be itself, if it continues to go down the path of not being able to adhere to simple media ethics and guidelines.
“It must hold itself accountable before it is able to hold others in the same way.
“We have a small number of media houses in PNG but if we are able to stand together as one and speak with one voice against the threats of ownership and influence, we can achieve better things in future for this industry.
“We need to protect our reporters if they are to speak for themselves and their experiences as well. We need to better provide for their everyday needs before we can write the stories that need to be told.
“And this lies with each media house.
The biggest threat for the Pacific as a whole? “I guess the most obvious one would be being able to remain self-regulated BUT not being accountable for breaching our individual code of ethics.
“Building public trust remains vital if we are to move forward. The lack of media awareness also contributes to the lack of ensuring media is given the attention it deserves in performing its role — no matter how big or small our islands are,” Kora says.
“The press should remain free from government influence, which is a huge challenge for many island industries, despite state ownership.
Kora believes that although Pacific countries are “scattered in the region”, they are able to help each other more, to better enhance capacity building and learning from their mistakes with collaboration.
“By collaborating in our efforts in seeking the truth behind many of our big stories that is affecting our people. This I believe will enable us to improve our performance and accountability.”
“Taiwan really is one of the test cases for the robustness of journalism in the world,” added Bruttin, reflecting on the country’s transformation from an authoritarian regime that censored information into a vibrant democracy that fights disinformation.
Lee, the feature film debut from director Ellen Kuras, explores the rawness of authentic image making and the impact of gender in war reporting.
Kate Winslet stars as the world weary photojournalist Elizabeth “Lee” Miller — better known for featuring in an iconic photograph, rather than taking one.
The same day Adolf Hitler committed suicide at his Berlin bunker in 1945, photojournalist David E. Scherman took a photograph of Miller sitting in the bath in Hitler’s Munich apartment.
But Miller was also a trailblazing, feminist photojournalist who managed to shift Vogue magazine from beauty and aesthetics to capturing the reality of the Second World War. She gave us images of the frontline, fearful women and children, concentration camps, and the aftermath of war.
Here is what you should know about the real woman behind the film — and what we can learn about war correspondents today through her story.
The trailer for the feature film Lee.
In front of and behind the camera Miller was born in New York in 1907, and began her bohemian life as a model for Vogue before the war, and as a muse to her surrealist mentor Man Ray.
The film follows Miller from her work as a fashion photographer pre-war, through to her photographing the Second World War and then the liberation of Paris in 1945.
Lee explores tensions with other renowned photographers at the time, such as Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett); her relationship with the second husband, English artist, historian and poet Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård); and her connections to the French resistance.
When Miller was in her 30s, her photographs for Vogue leaned towards the surreal. This was also seen in her Blitz images, where two staff from the magazine wearing creatively designed gas masks about to enter a bomb shelter was published in the London edition.
When the war broke out, Miller was accredited as one of four American female photojournalists. Like fellow American Margaret Bourke-White, Miller was known for the horrific images of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps in Germany, reinforcing the fact that photojournalism tells a story that is more powerful than any other form of journalism.
Ethics and photojournalism A 2019 study examined how professional photojournalists apply ethics to their work.
Photojournalists believe photographs should be published alongside news, that photographers are key in supporting the public’s “right to know”, and they must balance “their obligation to the truth, while minimising harm”.
You can see these ethical frameworks all at play in Miller’s work, especially in her images of Dachau just after the war.
Lee faced similar issues around ethics that photojournalists face today. Images: StudioCanal
The editor of British Vogue, Audrey Withers (played in the film by Andrea Riseborough), refused to publish the photos. But American Vogue published them in June 1945, with the headline “Believe it”, as a modern memorial to the war.
But photojournalists also take actions that prioritise themselves. Sherman’s image of Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath, though a visual metaphor for the end of the war, has been criticised as a “look at me” moment.
In 2006, The New York Times described the photograph as “a woman caught between horror and beauty, between being seen and being the seer”.
The place of the woman photographer Contemporary research suggests female photojournalists are more empathetic and have better access to vulnerable subjects than their male counterparts.
In the film, Miller’s gentle photo of a French woman publicly accused of being an informant to the Germans illustrates empathy, while masking the hidden contradictions of war.
Befriending a frightened girl in a bomb shelter, Miller has flashbacks of her youth as a victim-survivor of sexual violence.
“There are different kinds of wounds, not just the ones you see,” she says in the film.
The most rebellious photographer.
A survey in 2019 of 545 female photojournalists from 71 countries found women faced more obstacles than their male counterparts, are still considered subordinate in the profession and subject to sexism.
During the war, Miller used the gender-neutral Lee as her first name, instead of Elizabeth, fearing press accreditation on the frontline would not be approved if she was a woman.
The National Press Photographers Association says gender bias and assumptions still continue to hinder female photojournalists. These commonly held assumptions include women are weaker, less skilled and will eventually leave the profession to raise a child.
Living through her archive Lee begins and ends with the 70-year-old Miller reflecting on her career to a young male journalist, while continuously gulping down alcohol, perhaps illustrating undiagnosed post traumatic stress syndrome, all too common among news photographers.
Returning to London after the war, Miller gave up photojournalism.
After her death in 1977, more than 60,000 negatives of her work were discovered in her attic at home. These images of surrealist photography, Vogue editorials, Second World War photojournalism and portraits of important 20th century figures formed the basis of her 1985 biography, The lives of Lee Miller, written by her son Antony Penrose.
Lee is a visually, brave story about a female photojournalist whose images alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at – and what we have a right to observe.
Also in continuation of Israel’s war on journalism, the IDF has published the names of six Al Jazeera reporters who it claims are actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing as evidence documents which it claims Israeli forces found in Gaza.
These allegations would mark these journalists as legitimate military targets.
Al Jazeera has denounced these claims as unfounded, saying in a statement: “The Network views these fabricated accusations as a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.”
There is of course no reason to ever believe any claim Israel makes about anything whatsoever absent mountains of independently verifiable evidence, after the mountains of lies it has churned out over the last year.
The fact that Western news outlets are treating these allegations as plausible is evidence of their propagandistic nature.
Israel claims everyone it wants to kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the aid trucks are Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the mosques are Hamas, the water infrastructure is Hamas, the civilian homes are all Hamas, and Hamas is hiding behind every woman and child in Gaza.
The only exception to this rule is in Lebanon, in which case everyone Israel wants to kill is Hezbollah.
“Israel hates truth” . . .Gaza: The Al Jazeera investigation into Israeli war crimes.
Why journalists are killed Israel hates truth, which is why it kills journalists at every opportunity and blocks them from entering Gaza. This is because truth tends to have a marked anti-Israel bias.
We saw this illustrated recently when Israel announced that there is a secret Hezbollah bunker underneath a hospital in Beirut, so the press simply sent a bunch of reporters to go and investigate because Israel can’t block the press from entering Lebanon like it can in Gaza.
Even Western outlets like the BBC and Sky News entered the hospital and interviewed medical staff, reporting that they found no trace of evidence supporting Israel’s claims and that the hospital staff all denied the existence of any Hezbollah bunker on the premises.
And you may be sure those outlets would have eagerly reported any sign of Hezbollah if they were given the opportunity.
Criminal institutions need to function in the dark. They cannot function in the light of visibility and critical journalism and inconvenient video footage.
That’s why the mafia murders witnesses. That’s why the inner workings of the US war machine are shrouded in government secrecy. That’s why Julian Assange spent five years in a maximum security prison.
And that’s why Israel does everything it can to kill and obstruct journalists who tell the truth about its crimes.
Biased media coverage on the Gaza genocide and decolonisation. Cartoon: Patrick Gathara/The New Humanitarian
COMMENTARY: By Steven Cowan
Stuff declined earlier this month to publish a full-page advertisement accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
In his 1994 memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, US historian Howard Zinn explains that when events are moving in a certain direction, to be neutral means to meekly accept that. The world is a moving train, writes Zinn, and none of us can be neutral passengers. To pretend that we can is to perpetuate a myth.
But it is a myth that the New Zealand mainstream media continues to perpetuate. Its devotion to the cult of objectivity has been thoroughly exposed by its woefully inadequate coverage of events in the Middle East.
For the past 12 months the media has insisted that Israel is at war in Gaza and not engaged in the indiscriminate killing of helpless, exhausted children, women, and men. It is not genocide, says the New Zealand media, even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already ruled that Israel has a case to answer.
The PSNA genocide ad rejected by Stuff after earlier acceptance. Image: ATC
It should come as no surprise that Stuff, a publisher that prides itself on its liberal views, declined to publish a full-page advertisement from the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). The advertisement was scheduled to be published in all Stuff newspapers on October 1 but was pulled.
According to Stuff it did not want to publish the advertisement “while the ongoing conflict is developing”. Whatever this means. The real reason why Stuff has pulled the advertisement is that it charges Israel with committing genocide in Gaza.
The New Zealand mainstream media, both commercial and state-owned, refuse to engage with some of the most important questions about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza: Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Is the United States and its Western allies, including New Zealand, complicit in genocide?
The silence from the New Zealand media is deafening.
The New Zealand mainstream media has been more than happy to embrace Israel’s claim that it is legitimately “defending itself”. But through journalistic tricks — including bothsidesism, and the myth of objectivity — it continues to pretend it is a neutral passenger on the moving train.
Note: It will be interesting to see whether the Free Speech Union takes up this case. Given it has remained silent while Israel has killed more than 170 journalists in Gaza, the chances are it will say nothing.
Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current. He is a former editor of New Zealand Monthly Review.
Israeli troops invading Lebanon in 1982 . . . Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a former Irgun terrorist against British authorities, vowed to “destroy” the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Image: Wikipedia
ANALYSIS: By Derek Leebaert
The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) finding in January of a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, and subsequent ruling that Israel is responsible for an apartheid system in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would not have surprised former Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, or indeed Reagan, who famously denounced Israel’s 1982 levelling of West Beirut to Prime Minister Menachem Begin as a “holocaust”.
Israel is the only US ally that has been exercising such oppression and terror for a lifetime.
For many years, consecutive American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, condemned Israel’s recurring practice of terror. Today, however, the Biden-Harris administration has been supporting these practices to the extreme.
Harry S Truman recognised Israel in May 1948, yet once re-elected in November, wrote of his “disgust” over how “the Jews are approaching the refugee problem”. Then his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, joined Winston Churchill, who had returned as the UK’s prime minister, to censure Israel in the UN Security Council in November 1953.
Paratroopers under Colonel Ariel Sharon, a future Israeli prime minister, had “shot every man, woman and child they could find,” in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of Qibya, according to Time magazine, leaving 69 dead. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion cried “anti-Semitism.”
Eisenhower had Israel censured twice more: In March 1955, after a self-described Israeli “terror unit” bombed US consulate libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, seeking to blame Egypt, followed by an attack on Egyptian-controlled Gaza that killed 38; and in March 1956 over a so-called “retaliation” against Syria that killed 56 soldiers and civilians.
“Upward of 2,700 Arab infiltrators, and perhaps as many as 5,000, were killed by the [Israeli military], police, and civilians along Israel’s borders between 1949 and 1956,” writes Israeli historian Benny Morris, “the vast majority of those killed were unarmed.” They were shepherds, farmers, Bedouins, and refugees.
Unpersuaded by ‘self-defence’ claim
Eisenhower was unpersuaded by Israeli ambassador Abba Eban’s claims of self-defence, and Israel would keep inflicting vastly asymmetric episodes of terror for decades.
In October 1956, after killing some 49 civilians in the village of Kafir Qasim near Tel Aviv, Israel invaded Egypt and immediately began massacring refugees in Khan Younis and Rafah. Eisenhower responded by declaring that the US would “apply sanctions” on Israel. When Israel still refused to withdraw from Gaza and Sharm El Sheikh, the US president threatened to block its access to US financial markets. The Israeli retreat followed.
In November 1966, Lyndon Johnson once again put “the Palestine Question” on the UN agenda to condemn Israel, this time after a massive attack on Jordan involving more than 3,000 soldiers. “The Israelis have done a great deal of damage to our interests and to their own,” concluded his National Security Adviser W W Rostow, adding that “they’ve wrecked a good system of tacit cooperation.”
All-out war followed in 1967, after which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The martial law imposed on the Arab population in Israel since the founding of the state was lifted in 1966, but Jimmy Carter described the conditions imposed on Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory after the beginning of illegal Israeli settlement there as “apartheid”.
With nothing resolved by 1982, Prime Minister Begin, a former Irgun terrorist against British authorities, vowed to “destroy” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He oversaw then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon’s killing of some 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians, in Beirut.
Belatedly, Reagan stopped the slaughter with a phone call, given Israel’s dependence. It was then that he described the Israeli onslaught as a “holocaust”.
Despite using a word with such weight, however, the White House did not demand the UN censure Israel. The US had not attempted to sanction Israel even over its illegal settlements which spawned from the 1967 war. Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren explained why in his 2007 book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present.
Impeding US official opposition
In the mid-1970s, he wrote, Israel’s supporters began to achieve “the financial and political clout necessary to sway congressional opinion” — meaning that they had acquired enough power to impede US official opposition to Israel at the UN or elsewhere. Ever since, Israel has taken US backing for granted, no matter the record of wildly disproportionate atrocities.
In 1991, Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir, who had approved the murder of UN negotiator Folke Bernadotte, tried to explain why terrorism was “acceptable” for Jews, but not Arabs: Palestinians are “fighting for land that is not theirs. This is the land of the people of Israel”.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel was distinct. It was the only time that Palestinian resistance groups were able to react to decades of Israeli terror on a similar scale.
In response to the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simply doubled down on Israel’s recurring massacre-making, now backed by starvation and disease. The US administration took no meaningful action to stop “plausible genocide”.
At this time, Israel has also become the only entity in the world that Washington allows to kill US citizens with impunity. The ever-growing list from the West Bank includes Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, Mohammad Khdour, and Shireen Abu Akleh — each killed with a shot to the head.
No sanctions or renditions followed their deaths. The White House simply suggested the sniper-killings were “not acceptable” and asked Israel to “investigate” itself. The issue was swiftly dismissed.
More needed than ‘mutterings’
As Gaza’s torment enters its second year, Israel’s killing has reached unprecedented levels in the West Bank, and Lebanon once again becomes a target of Israel’s self-described retaliation.
More is needed from Israel’s patron than mutterings to perhaps halt some arms shipments. Washington should not only stop upholding Israeli brutality, which includes apartheid but, like the UK, it can support the pending International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments which are to, finally, include an Israeli prime minister.
Past US presidents had tried to reign in Israeli behaviour of the sort that statesman Abba Eban came to describe, during Israel’s previous bombing of Beirut, as “wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations”.
Time is overdue for Washington’s decisionmakers to follow those presidents’ examples, and to rescind diplomatic protection as well as weapons exports for Israel.
Derek Leebaert is a Truman Book Award winner whose writing includes Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations. He is a founding editor of International Security and serves as an adviser to Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Republished from Al Jazeera.
As you would expect, Western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this.
White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets like The New York Timesciting US officials as their source.
“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the US response will be.
It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism.
Leaked memo
And it is here worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it is standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies and show other countries the perks of being aligned with the United States.
The memo showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line.
In a remarkable look into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponising them against nations who aren’t.
“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasising good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.
“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote.
“We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
“And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
Highlight the discrepancies
“It’s tedious going “If Group X did this Western politicians and pundits would condemn it but because Group Y did it they’re fine with it” over and over again, but it’s important to highlight these discrepancies because they show how we’re being deceived.
Westerners are indoctrinated from birth into believing they live in a society that is basically good with governments that, while imperfect, are still far superior to the tyrants and corrupt autocrats of the global south.
In reality the Western power structure centralised around the United States is the single most murderous and tyrannical force on earth by an extremely massive margin, but that obvious fact is always omitted from the indoctrination curriculum.
By pointing out the glaring discrepancies between the way the Western political-media class responds to things like Israel turning electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout civilian populations and the way they respond when other groups detonate explosives among civilians, you’re helping to punch holes in the veil of indoctrination they have cast over our collective understanding of the world.
The more you recognise that you only see your society as good and others as bad because of the way world events are framed by Western news media and politicians, the closer you get to having your “Are we the baddies?” epiphany.
Hypocrisy and contradiction are not great moral evils in and of themselves, but they often run cover for great moral evils. The fact that we are trained to think about the world by people who facilitate great evils perpetrated by their own side when they’d condemn identical evils committed by their enemies shows that they do not stand against evil, and are deeply evil themselves.
Recognising the problems in our world is the first step to solving them. That’s what the propagandists and empire managers work to prevent us from doing, and that’s what we try to do by pointing out the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies in their narratives over and over again.
Mock their denunciations
The correct thing to do when Western leaders talk about human rights or denounce abuses by enemy governments is to mock them and dismiss them. They’re not saying anything true about their actual values and beliefs; if they were there wouldn’t be so much hypocrisy in the way they denounce governments they don’t like for offences they ignore and make excuses for in governments they do like.
They’re never saying what they’re saying to stop human rights abuses or make the world a better place, they’re only saying what they’re saying to undermine their enemies so that the Western empire can rule the world and be the only one administering abuse.
And the same is true of the mainstream Western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of US-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence.
Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.
The title of the book is based on a photograph of a young ni-Vanuatu girl with a “no nukes” placard stating “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face,” which was taken by Robie at the third Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Port Vila, Vanuatu.
As such, the book is a personal account of Robie’s career in relation to the various political issues, tensions, human rights violations, and conflicts that have affected the Pacific (and the Philippines and Canada), such as the Kanak struggle in New Caledonia, the 1987 military coup in Fiji, and the Bougainville conflict.
The title of the book refers to yet another struggle and protest in the Pacific. It is based on a photograph of a young ni-Vanuatu girl with a “no nukes” placard stating “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face,” which was taken by Robie at the third Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Port Vila, Vanuatu.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face cover
The twenty-four chapters of the book are divided into six parts, dealing with: Robie’s own career and journey into the Pacific; colonial legacies conflicts; indigenous struggles; forgotten wars; environmental struggles; and media education. The broad geographical area, themes, and timeframe covered (from before 1974 to 2013), means Robie presents us with a series of snapshots detailing elements of troubling events that have happened and are happening in the Pacific and beyond.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face starts with a foreword (xiii-xv) by Kalafi Moala, deputy chair of Pasifika Media Association, who was jailed in Tonga in 1996 for contempt of Parliament. He acknowledges Robie’s journalistic work in the Pacific and, in particular, Robie’s efforts to set him and his fellow prisoners free. Robie’s subsequent introduction, titled “Trust and transparency,” discusses the interplay between journalism and political power in relation to, in particular, Murdoch. He also highlights his own position as an independent journalist, providing testimonies by third parties to indicate that he is an “impassioned chronicler of Pacific currents” (8) and events.
The first part of the book (Out of Africa), details Robie’s career, the various topics he covered and agencies he worked for across the world, and how he ended up setting his own Pacific News Agency in New Zealand (chapters 2–4). Part 2 covers an array of events and topics that are grouped together as “Colonial legacy conflicts.” It contains Robie’s work in New Caledonia on the Kanak revolt and massacre of Hienghène in New Caledonia in 1984, and the 1987 “nomadization” policy and the aftermath of the siege of Ouvèa (chapters 5, 6, and 8); the “Rise of the Flosse dynasty in Tahiti, 1986 (chapter 7); the 1987 Fiji coup (chapter 9); anti-Chinese riots in Tonga in 1991 (chapter 10); Human rights abuses in the Pacific (chapter 11); and the jailing of the “Tongan three” in 1996, which involved the imprisonment of the earlier mentioned Kalafi Moala (chapter 12). Part 3 of the book is titled “Indigenous Struggles” and covers First Nation Rights in Canada (chapter 13); indigenous people’s struggles in the Philippines (chapter 14); and the Hagahai “biopiracy” affair, whereby the US government issued a patent on the human cell line of a Hagahai (Papua New Guinea) tribesman in 1995 (chapter 15). In part 4, titled “Forgotten wars, elusive peace,” Robie covers the Bougainville conflict (chapter 16); the political instability and violence caused by rogue military leaders in the Philippines (chapter 17); and the victims of this violence and the role of the Philippine Independent Church (chapter 18). The final chapter in this part contains Robie’s reflections on the horror of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste (chapter 19).
The fifth part of the book (“Moruroa, mon amour”) focuses on climate change and nuclear refugees in the Pacific (Chapter 20); and the politics surrounding the Rainbow Warrior, which was bombed by French secret agents in Auckland in 1985 (chapter 21).
The sixth and final part of the book focuses on media education in the Pacific. The first chapter discusses the issue of freedom of speech, which is centred around Robie’s Pacific Journalism Review article on the topic published in 2002 and an article published in the same year with the subtitle “Don’t shoot the messenger” (chapter 22). The subsequent chapter deals with conflict reporting in the Pacific (chapter 23). In the final chapter (chapter 24), Robie engages with changing paradigms in Pacific journalism, exploring models of news media and news values in the Pacific, journalism’s rights and responsibilities, and that journalists covering issues such as the abuse of power and violations of human rights in the Pacific need to become more critical and deliberative, thereby “becoming part of the solution rather than being part of the problem” (340). Robie’s epilogue consists of a series of snapshots on journalists, the media, and media education in the Pacific, and the responsibilities a new generation of educated journalists have in encouraging positive change in the region.
With the exception of chapter 24, the chapters in Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face are based upon Robie’s earlier work that was disseminated in the media or elsewhere. Most of the chapters consist of earlier published media articles that are briefly introduced and updated. Although Robie’s engaged and critical journalism is very informative and illustrative, the way the book is organized also implies a lack of depth and engagement with, for example, academic work on these topics. This could have been partially addressed by adding a short bibliography to each chapter with key academic works on the issue, instead of providing a short selected biography at the end.
What Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face does offer is a great overview of troubling politics and violence in the region and Robie’s reporting of these events. As such, it is of interest to anyone who is interested in Pacific media and politics, and Robie’s work and coverage of these issues in particular.
Review by Anna-Karina Hermkens, Australian National University, published in Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, 89(4), 949-951. December 2016.
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