Blood on the Banner beat me to publication in 1989, for I had to make major changes to my original manuscript Fiji’s Racial Politics – The Coming Coup.
In the last chapter I had concluded that if the FLP-NFP Coalition [Fiji Labour Party-National Federation Party], under Dr Timoci Bavadra, win the 1987 general election, there would be ineluctable military intervention by the native Fijian dominated military. On 14 May 1987 Sitiveni Rabuka overthrew the new government.
Consequently, my original manuscript had to be drastically revised with additional chapters. It was later published by Zed Press as Fiji: Coups in Paradise – Race, Politics and Military Intervention.
Robie’s Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face, as one reviewer [John Pilger] of the book has put it, “is an extraordinary ‘secret history’ of a vast region of the world of which David Robie has been a rare expert witness”. I fully endorse the comments. The book also has a foreword by Kalafi Moala, deputy chair, Pasifika Media Association (Pasima), Nuku’alofa, Tonga.
Moala made international headlines when he was jailed in Tonga in 1996 for contempt of Parliament, together with his deputy editor, Filo ‘Akau’ola, and MP pro-democracy leader ‘Akilisi Pohiva. They were locked up for 26 days without any contact with the outside world.
But they were not forgotten. Moala recalls: “One of the main drivers behind the protest against our imprisonment was a man who at that stage I had known more by reputation than personally. He is award-winning journalist David Robie, author of nine books, journalism professor, and an analyst and Pacific news reporter for more than three decades.
Drew international attention
“Not only did he write about our story and distribute it to his network of media in the Pacific, but news agencies from outside the region picked up the stories and drew international attention…Without David’s involvement, the story and reaction to our imprisonment would not have been so widely known.”
We should not be surprised, for Robie is also a campaigner on many issues. I have always argued that an academic must also be an activist; otherwise the world will be a very dull and dangerous place.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face is divided into six parts, with an introduction: Trust and Transparency. Part One: Out of Africa; Part Two: Colonial legacy conflicts; Part 3: Indigenous struggles; Part Four: Forgotten wars, elusive peace; Part Five: Moruroa, mom amour; and Part Six: Media Education.
Again, in reviewing this book, I found another common connection. Robie opens the introduction by quoting a former Kenyan chief editor, George Githi, of the Daily Nation, with whom he once worked with, and who observed wryly about media freedom in developing countries:”‘For governments that fear newspapers, there is one consolation. We have known many instances where governments have taken over newspapers, but we have not known a single incident in which a newspaper has taken over a government.”
Githi was former press secretary for then President Jomo Kenyatta, founding father of Kenya. Githi’s comments stuck with Robie for a long time, and at one stage he (Robie) used the quote as a personal email signature. But, as Robie rightly reminds us, these days the notion isn’t quite so absurd.
As an example, he cites the Italian media tycoon and former Prime Minister Silivo Berlusconi, controlling shareholder in the Mediaset empire, and also mentions Mahendra “Mac” Patel, chairman and chief executive of the Motibhai Group, and owner of the Fiji Times and Herald Limited.
I mentioned the Kenya connection. I am currently engaged in several academic projects relating to Kenyan history, and have completed a book length biography of Justice Thacker, the judge who had convicted and jailed Jomo Kenyatta following the outbreak of the Mau Mau Rebellion in the 1950s.
The manuscript, based largely on Thacker’s private papers, is titled: A Portrait of Jomo Kenyatta’s Judge: Justice Ransley Samuel Thacker’s Journey to Kapenguria, 1891-1953. Before taking up the position as judge of the Kenya High Court in 1948, Thacker was Attorney-General of colonial Fiji. Naturally, Githi had been of interest to my study of Kenyatta.
‘Checks and balances’
In 1965, at the age of 29, Githi had become Daily Nation’s fourth editor-in-chief, promising this “newspaper will not flatter Kenyatta or the government” as an administration should not be allowed to have absolute power, “there must be checks and balances”. Journalists and media proprietors in Fiji should take note of Githi’s 1965 declaration.
In this review we will concentrate on Fiji, for others have reviewed Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face from different perspectives. In Part Two, Chapter Nine, Robie writes at length on Fiji: Countdown to a coup in 1987. Just before the coup, he had been one of only two New Zealand journalists in Suva reporting on the dramatic victory of the Fiji Labour Party led Coalition. (Robie was also in Fiji for the 2000 George Speight coup, then as a journalism educator leading a group of students covering the putsch).
In the book Robie asserts that most journalists covering the 1987 coups focused on an exaggerated racial divide instead of fundamental changes that had happened in Fiji to lead to the election upset — and then the military takeover. His reports, the first of a series for New Zealand’s New Outlook magazine, focused on the changing paradigms of political struggle and background to the coups.
It is also worth noting that Robie has recalled at length the beating of University of the South Pacific (USP) academic Dr Anirudh Singh in the chapter entitled “Human rights abuses in the Pacific”. Singh narrated his abduction and brutal torture by soldiers in retaliation for a protest burning of the discriminatory 1990 Constitution in his book The Silent Warriors. Robie reminds us of Singh’s harrowing ordeal by reproducing his Auckland Star (17 December 1990) article titled “They put a noose around my neck”.
In Part Six, Robie focuses on “Media Education”. Chapter 22 begins with “Shooting the messenger, 2002” where he quotes former FLP Senator ‘Atu Emberson-Bain: “So much for the free media in this country — the debate always focuses on freedom from government interference. What about freedom from the big [private sector] boys on the block with their vested interests?”
In spite of the rhetoric about governments pressuring the media in Pacific countries — yet this does happen all too frequently — Robie believes a greater threat to press freedom sometimes comes from a small clique of self-serving media veterans, many of whom are of expatriate palagi origin and who have disproportionate influence.
The now defunct Fiji Media Council also comes for criticism, and rightly so, for eagerly co-operating with two British media consultants in 1996 regarding media legislation. Robie states: “Any journalists worth their salt should be resisting any attempt by governments to hinder the media. The consultants’ report was merely an attempt by the Fiji Media Council to save its own vested interest.
‘Thin end of the wedge’
“In fact, one could argue that the industry itself opened up the thin end of the wedge by collaborating in the first place with government attempts to control media.”
Robie also reminds us that the Bainimarama regime was just as critical of the media as the ousted Qarase government. Self-censorship by the media was replaced by the longest sustained censorship regime of any Pacific country, imposed when the 1997 Constitution was abrogated at Easter 2009.
Failure by the Fiji Media Council to get its own house in order led first to a deeply flawed media “review” by Hawai’i-based former Fiji academic Dr Jim Anthony arranged by the Fiji Human Rights Commission, and then the imposition of the notorious Fiji Media Development Decree 2010. Robie points out the deportation of Fiji Times publishers Evan Hannah and Rex Gardiner and Fiji Sun’s Russell Hunter.
The end result, according to Robie: “Although the Bainimarama regime never succeeded in closing The Fiji Times in a cat-and-mouse game, as it undoubtedly wished, the government did manage to force the Australian-based owner News Limited (a Rupert Murdoch subsidiary) to sell the newspaper to the local Motibhai Group in 2010. Chief editor Netani Rika, long a thorn in the side of the regime, and deputy editor Sophie Foster were also ousted and replaced with a more compliant editorship by Fred Wesley.”
What calibre of journalists are needed in the Pacific? Robie reminds us of Shaista Shameem’s call at a USP seminar marking World Press Freedom Day (WPED) on 3 May 2002, where she wanted a higher educational standard for Pacific journalists.
In her view the region’s journalists need to know far more about history, politics, sociology, philosophy and the sciences. “Anyone can learn the technical skills of journalism — that’s the easy part. The hard part is to understand the worlds that you are writing about. My definition of a good journalist is someone with such in-depth understanding of the issues that the words, though simply written, virtually leap out from the page,” she says.
One of the problems in the region, Robie points out, is that there is virtually no in-depth reportage of the media itself. While some sections of the media attempt valiantly to ensure power is accountable, there is little reflection about the power of the media.
We could go on, and on, but we will stop here, and highly recommend that you read Robie’s timely book, for we don’t want to sppil a beautiful read for you!
Fijileaks: Lots of reviews have been published in other countries about DSMBF yet there has been a strange silence in Fiji . . . self-censorship no doubt (apart from the student press Wansolwara and a piece by then head of journalism Pat Craddock also in Wansolwara).
Victor Lal is the founding editor-in-chief of Fijileaks and former general secretary of the now defunct Journalists’ Association of Fiji. A former Fiji journalist, he is a University of Oxford-based researcher and the author of Fiji: Coups in Paradise: Race, Politics and Military Intervention (1990) and From Reporter to Refugee (1997). This review was first published by Fijileaks.
She had the most enchanting smile, even though she had lost her baby teeth. Her toothless grin turned out to be perfect for the role.
The cover photo on David Robie’s book Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face.
The five-year-old girl had her face painted with a black anti-nuclear symbol – different motifs on both her cheeks.
Beside her was a neatly sketched poster: “No nukes: Please don’t spoil my beautiful face”.
This was the scene in Port Vila’s Independence Park in 1983 during the region’s second Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Movement conference.
It was during the heady days of nuclear-free activism with Vanuatu, the world’s newest nation only three years old and founding Prime Minister Walter Hadye Lini leading the way.
I was there that day as an independent journalist taking many photographs for my series of articles for Pacific and international media.
One person who really stood out was the little girl with the beautiful smile. But I never knew her name back then.
33 years on
Thirty-three years have passed since then and my wife, Del Abcede, and I have just visited Aneityum (“Atomic”) Island in Vanuatu this week to meet that girl – June Keitadi and her family.
She is now June Warigini, mother of three, grandmother and a Salvation Army volunteer living on her home island. And she still has that stunning smile.
Not only June, her mother Annie Keitadi is featured there too. Her father, Jack Keitadi, was deputy curator of the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta at the time and he later became curator.
It was a delight and a privilege for Del and me to be able to visit the family on Aneityum and to be treated to a “royal” welcome by the community and tribe.
June remembers that day in 1983 really well. It left a deep impression on her in later life.
“They wanted someone young who could go on their behalf to the French Embassy and present a petition calling on France to halt its nuclear tests in the Pacific – so they chose me,” she recalls.
Symbolic of N-ravages
“But the ambassador left in a hurry out the back. I don’t know why he was afraid of a little girl.”
She remembers her toothless smile was regarded as symbolic of the ravages of nuclear testing in the Pacific, not only by France, but also the United States and Britain.
Faced with persistent protests in the Pacific, France eventually ended all nuclear testing in 1996, thirteen years after that rally. But the campaign for full compensation for the victims of nuclear testing continues.
June feels that her experience at that young age helped give her an inner strength for the challenges of life today and inspiring her in her desire to help others in her church work.
Del Abcede and David Robie in ceremonial headdress – “usually reserved for chiefs” – at the welcome feast on Aneityum Island. Image: Café Pacific
Ironically, both Del and I met her by chance on Christmas Day at the end of last year, but had no idea at that time of her connection with my book.
While visiting Aneityum for a day, we shared in an “olden days” traditional food and customs exposure in a model 18th century village on the island.
When we eventually discovered her identity – after my appeals on my blog Café Pacific and an NFIP network had failed and Vanuatu Daily Digest came to the rescue earlier this year – and we saw photographs of her, my wife exclaimed:
“That’s her, the June we have met.”
We realised that the guide “June” we had met that day on the island was indeed June Keitadi now Warigini.
Idyllic island
Aneityum, the southernmost island in Vanuatu, currently has a population of 1740. It is not part of Vanuatu’s electricity grid and islanders rely on solar power. The island has no cars, or even a road.
The air connection is only two return flights a week from the Tafea provincial capital on Tanna. There is also no doctor, although a dispensary is now operating with two nurses and a midwife.
On the other hand, for visitors like ourselves, island life seems idyllic, a byword for “paradise”.
Aneityum has a wonderful healthy lifestyle for youngsters, remote from the world’s conflicts and problems.
There are three primary schools and a boarding secondary school – one that attracts students from other outer islands whose parents want an education where the traditional way of life is important and free from the urban ills of Port Vila.
June is assistant bursar at Teruja secondary school.
She tells a delightful story about a recent excursion for students from Aneityum who went on a “field trip” adventure by island cargo ship to Tanna to visit the famous Mt Yasur volcano.
The island’s micro economy is self-sustaining and is augmented by occasional cruise ship visits and tourism days on Mystery Island. It appears that Aneityum is remote from government services or assistance and the support of cruise shipping companies, such as P&O, is crucial for the islanders.
University of Papua New Guinea's Emily Matasororo ... in the background, images of heavily armed police shortly before they opened fire on peaceful students. Image:" Del Abcede/APR
Surprising that a conference involving some of the brightest minds in journalism education from around the world should be ignored by New Zealand’s local media.
The range of diversity alone at the Auckland University of Technology hosted event was appealing, but it was the heady mix of ideas and contributions that offered an inspiring backdrop.
Topics included strategies for teaching journalism for mobile platforms — the latest techniques; “de-westernising” journalism education in an era of new media genres; transmedia storytelling; teaching hospitals; twittering, facebooking and snapchat — digital media under the periscope; new views on distance learning, and 21st century ethical issues in journalism are just a representative sample of what was on offer.
Keynote speakers included Divina Frau-Meigs (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) with a riveting account on how “powerful journalism” makes “prime ministers jump”, the Center of Public Integrity’s Peter Bale (a New Zealander) on the need to defend press freedom, and Tongan newspaper publisher and broadcaster who turned “inclusivity” on its head with an inspiring “include us” appeal from the Pacific,”where we live in the biggest continent on planet Earth”.
But for me, the most moving message of all came not from those who spoke about “reporting dangerously” (such as Simon Cottle) or the very future of journalism, but from a young quietly spoken Papua New Guinean woman who has “lived” through a freedom of speech and the press struggle while facing live bullets.
University of Papua New Guinea’s Emily Matasororo … background image of PNG police attacking university students. Image: Del Abcede/APR
Emily Matasororo, leader of the Journalism Strand at the University of Papua New Guinea, was on campus that fateful day last month (June 8) when heavily armed PNG police in camouflage fatigues opened fire with tear gas and live rounds on the peaceful students. She was actually in the crowd fired on.
Emily’s testimony
Matasororo gave her testimony at a WJEC16 panel on journalism education in the Pacific chaired by me, with the presence of the panel members being sponsored by the NZ Institute of Pacific Research.
Explaining how the two months of student unrest began across Papua New Guinea’s six universities – but mostly centred on UPNG in the capital of Port Moresby, and the University of Technology in the second city Lae – she said it was an irony that protests were triggered on World Press Freedom Day (May 3).
“The Journalism Strand was preparing to celebrate freedom of the press that day. However, this did not eventuate because the academic space was taken up by a student forum.
“This was the beginning of an eight-week stand-off by the students who demanded that the Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill, step down from office and face police over allegations of fraud. However, the prime minister said: ‘I will not step down.’”
Matasororo said O’Neill had challenged the issue of an arrest warrant against him, saying this case was now before the courts. Under the Papua New Guinea Constitution, O’Neill could be removed by a no-confidence vote, or on criminal charges. But the former option was shut down this week when O’Neill survived a no-confidence vote by 85 to 21 votes.
Among other issues that spurred the students into organising class boycotts and protests was the O’Neill government’s actions in dismantling the police fraud squad [National Fraud and Anti-Corruption directorate] – the very office that would investigate the prime minister. But, as Matasororo pointed out, the squad was later reinstated.
Another O’Neill move was adjourning Parliament until November to stave off the possibility of the no-confidence vote. (A Supreme Court ruling forced the reconvening of Parliament and the vote).
Violating the Constitution
Students became convinced that Prime Minister O’Neill was acting in violation of the Constitution and they saw themselves as defending the rule of law on behalf of all Papua New Guineans.
Earlier in the protests students at UPNG had set on fire 800 copies of the two national dailies being sold at the Waigani campus front gates in frustration over what they perceived to be the news media taking sides and promoting the O’Neill government’s agenda.
“The burning was an indication that they disliked the papers’ coverage of events leading up the [first] protest. Why should the Student Representative Council go as far as preferring certain media outlets over others?” Matasororo asked the forum which was syndicated globally on livestream.
“The Post-Courier, The National and television station EM TV were banned covering student activities on campus. The UPNG is a public and government-run institution and is a public space open to everyone, including the media. If students reacted that way, it brought up issues of credibility and integrity of the freedom of the press in Papua New Guinea.
“Which brings to light the question of ethics.”
Matasororo quoted from a Loop PNG report bylined Carmella Gware, who talked to a student leader in spite of the ban on local media:
“We saw the newspapers and saw that the reports were very shallow and biased.
“They were not actual reports of what we students are portraying at the university. That’s why, to show our frustration, we went out to the bus stop and burnt those papers.
“What we displayed in the morning shows that we have no trust in the media,” the student leader stated (sic) said.
— Carmella Gware – Loop PNG
Investigation needed
“While I acknowledge and appreciate the tireless efforts of the media’s coverage of the student protests,” said Matasororo, “for me this is a very strong statement that needs to be investigated.
The burning of newspapers at the University of Papua New Guinea. Newspapers were also set on fire at Unitech. Image: Asia Pacific Report
“This needs to be done by all stakeholders concerned to promote fair and just reporting and the essence of good ethics and good journalism.
“The stakeholders must include, but not be limited to he following: the publisher and managements of the papers, the Media Council of PNG, Transparency International, Ombudsman Commission and the journalism educators of the UPNG and the Catholic-run Divine Word University.
“For the publishers, credibility is questioned; for the Media Council it is a threat against the profession; and for the educators – where are we going wrong in teaching ethics, are we giving enough prominence that it deserves?
“These are questions that need to be answered, in order to promote a robust and conducive environment in which journalists should operate in.”
On June 8, said Matasororo, the protests –until then peaceful – “took an ugly turn”. Several students were wounded, some news reports saying as many as 30. But there were no deaths.
“Social media was running hot with images and comments uploaded in real time. Some of what was coming from social media was emotional reporting.
“Information was distorted with some news stations reporting casualties.
“An Australian-based media outlet reported four deaths and isolated reports on radio, television and social media that day created a new level of fear, confusion and anxiety among residents.
“For me that day, I saw how powerful the media was, and when it is not applied correctly, it can be tragic.”
Professor David Robie, former head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific, talks human rights at the Pacific Community's Human Rights and Media Forum in Suva in 2016. Also pictured are Kalafi Moala (Tonga), Stanley Simpson (Fiji) and Belinda Kora (PNG). Image: Pacific Community
Pacific Community
Professor David Robie, a prominent journalist and director of Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre, shared his experiences of human rights coverage in the region and stressed the role of news media as watchdogs at a Human Rights and Media Forum held on 13–15 April 2016 in Nadi, Fiji.
Professor Robie, former head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific (USP), was chief guest.
Senior journalists and government communication officers from 13 Pacific countries participated in the forum, which had the theme: “Enhancing a human rights-based approach to news reporting”.
“Human rights-oriented journalism is more focused on global rather than on selective reporting, with an emphasis on the vulnerable and empowerment for the affected and marginalised people — a voice for the voiceless,” said Professor Robie.
After the forum, he said in an interview “journalists ought to be human rights defenders and bear witness to Pacific human rights violations.
“This forum was remarkably successful in providing the tools for a wide range of Pacific media people to bring accountability to offenders against human rights. I congratulate the Pacific Community’s Regional Rights Resource Team (RRRT) on organising this important forum.”
The forum, which was supported by the Australian government and European Union, released an outcomes document, reaffirming the vital role the media play and recognising the importance of strengthening news reporting, using a human rights-based approach.
Strong relationship
The outcomes document also acknowledges the importance of building a strong relationship between government communication personnel and journalists in sharing information and the roles they play in disseminating information.
This document is being formatted into a poster for newsrooms in the region.
Romulo Nayacalevu, SPC’s Human Rights Adviser, said: “The media have a powerful voice in highlighting human rights issues and concerns, and this workshop provides the opportunity for journalists to dialogue on human rights and the media.
“The SPC is delighted to work closely with the Pacific media to support their work in human rights reporting and we are excited about the outcomes document, which provides them with tips on how to do that.”
Giving a Pacific journalist’s perspective, Stanley Simpson, managing director of Business Melanesia Ltd, stressed that journalists in the region were frequently victims of human rights abuses while reporting on human rights in the region.
“Pacific journalists are often young and almost always broke, some have very little life experience, they are underpaid and overworked, they get threatened and intimidated regularly, and they endure a high pressure environment,” he said.
“People like to see journalists as instruments of change, but sometimes journalists just feel that they are being used by different sides with different agendas.
‘Day-to-day slog’
“So often they are going through the day-to-day slog of getting a newspaper or news bulletin out — it is easy to forget that they have the potential to influence change. It is important that this is addressed and journalists understand their roles as agents of change.”
Belinda Kora, news director of Papua New Guinea FM, agreed that journalists could influence change but said their reporting must be responsible.
“I keep reminding my reporters that when it comes to reporting about human rights, if your story does not impact on the lives of victims or anyone else for that matter, you are only taking up space,” she said.
She added that, importantly, journalists needed to know their rights to be able to report responsibly.
“How can we journalists in the region report effectively if we don’t know our rights?” Kora asked.
The three-day forum strengthened media capacity in rights-based reporting to reflect the aspirations of Pacific Island communities for equality, development and social justice, said RRRT team leader Nicol Cave.
Marian Kupu of Broadcom Broadcasting Limited, Tonga, said: “I found the three-day forum very encouraging because I learnt about my country’s human rights commitments and I see my role as a journalist to report on the gaps in order to encourage decision makers to prioritise and address the issues.”
“Giving voice to the voiceless” and “championing the rights of all peoples” were key messages highlighted at the forum.
The forum was organised by the Regional Rights Resource Team (RRRT) of the Pacific Community in partnership with the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Journalism Programme of the University of the South Pacific.
Alistar Kata, an award-winning journalist with Tagata Pasifika, made a 15 minute mini-documentary about the work of the Pacific Media Centre, founded by Dr David Robie in October 2007, and its dedicated crew.
At the time, she was the Pacific Media Watch freedom project contributing editor and chief storyteller.
Eyes of Fire is an updated version of the account of the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, first published in 1986. No New Zealander old enough to have been around then will be unaware of the incident, but this is a timely reminder for a newer generation of the day when terrorism reached Waitemata Harbour.
Terrorism is supposed to be the last resort of alienated young men from places we know nothing of, but the bomb which blew up the Rainbow Warrior in downtown Auckland was detonated by men and women employed by the Government of France.
If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose that some time before the attack France had suffered a traumatic event, because how else might such an odd barbarism be explained? France surely is a modern and agreeable place which merits our sympathy as the target of terrorism, not its perpetrator.
Not really. France is the same place with the same public institutions as it had in 1985, its current President being from the same party — the Socialists for heaven’s sake — as the President back then. Neither, in essence, has its global circumstances changed.
France regarded Greenpeace as ‘terrorists’ Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.
Not in the eyes of the French State. Their problem was that the Rainbow Warrior was due to sail towards Tahiti and the French islands in the south-east Pacific, where they were testing nukes. If, for the rest of us, it was bad enough that the Russians and Americans were in a perpetual nuclear confrontation which had the potential to wipe us all away, that tension was at least understandable, given the circumstances at the time.
But France had as much reason to want to join the nuclear club as it would have if it started to do so now. That is, zero. It was pure folly.
Being primarily focused on environmental issues, Greenpeace was protesting the very real and obvious threat to marine life. The French of course said that their tests were clean. Which prompted the obvious response that they should, therefore, test their bombs in mainland France. Rainbow Warrior had just arrived from the Marshall Islands, where the US had long polluted (and where areas are still uninhabitable) with nuclear bombs.
By 1985, France had conducted 193 tests in the Pacific and it wasn’t done yet. France (still) pretends to believe that its overseas colonies are no different politically from Paris or Marseilles, so it felt able to treat the New Zealand government, then beginning to respond to Greenpeace’s campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific, as an ally of its activities, which France labelled terrorism.
Staked out on watch
So it was that one winter’s night on Tamaki Drive boat club members, who had been the target of thieves, were staked out on watch when a speedboat landed. Two people got out, dumped the boat’s engine in the water, and were then picked by a car driven by someone in a frogman suit. The yachties noted the car’s plate number.
A later search of the water came up with water bottles made in France. NZ’s petty criminals had enabled the police to arrest France’s state terrorists.
A Frenchwoman who joined the open activities of Greenpeace in Auckland apparently expressed hostility to the idea of independence for New Caledonia and support for France’s bombs, both opinions being the last things you’d expect to hear around Greenpeace. She advanced the rationale that nukes were needed as otherwise “we risk becoming like Finland, which is so influenced by Russia”.
Hearing this ingénue, an experienced observer who knew European history would have intuited that she had been indoctrinated by an older and nostalgic extremist as no-one else had worried about Finnish sovereignty since about 1940. She turned out later to have been a spy.
While it might not be surprising that no local NZ activist would have suspected her, it is surprising that an agent of the French secret police was so gauche.
It seems that the French didn’t know enough of their own history to have created a convincing persona for their agent, who would have been detected had she operated in a more experienced milieu.
Operationally, too, French tactics were clumsy. Twice before they had sunk ships, and both times they achieved nothing beyond discrediting the activities they were hoping to defend.
And just as its secret police have been amateurishly incompetent, so has its political class. David Robie tells us in Eyes of Fire that theories from the political elites in France included the assertion that low-tech Greenpeace was about to advance on French Polynesia with an armada so loaded with the latest gadgets to thwart the tests that the nuke programme would have to be abandoned.
It was said that Greenpeace was financed by BP to maintain its oil interests, that the UK’s MI6, the South African secret police and the Soviet’s KGB had infiltrated Greenpeace. The latter, an old favourite, was picked up a naive NZ media and across the Tasman in the Australian. This detail is significant in that, as a “quality” Tory broadsheet with sophisticated journalists, the paper must have known the claim was suspect. Ideology trumps truth every time.
The rhetoric did not often reach eloquence. One letter to the Greenpeace office after the bombing warned of the traitors ready to deliver the country to the commies. They included “pacifists, hooligans, hippies, trade unions, PLO, Khomeinists, Labour terrorists – all the same riff-raff, all KGB agents.”
No wonder the correspondent concluded with: “Revenge. Better dead than Red. No more Vietnams”. For years serious and educated people had been debating this dilemma of whether they would prefer to be crimson or expired.
Exact opposite of intended result You’d think that the combined resources of the French elites would have come up with something better than these childish conspiracy theories, but perhaps the greatest of the many asinine calculations of the French State was its assumption that blowing up a Greenie ship in an allied country on the other side of the world would help it to carry on poisoning the South Pacific.
Instead, inevitably, international outrage raised Greenpeace’s profile enormously. It is no coincidence that the peace and environmental movements around the world became increasingly popular from the mid-1980s.
Only one man was killed, a Portuguese-born photographer, Fernando Pereira, but there could easily have been a high death toll. The frogmen who placed the bomb timed it to detonate just before midnight when normally there would have been many others in their cabins, but most happened to be on shore that night.
Robie himself had been on board when the ship docked in Auckland, having sailed from the Marshall Islands.
Even after the event, after the terrorists were caught, President Mitterrand’s France knew no shame, and the dirty tricks continued. Now perhaps there’s some resolution, some (in the irritating vernacular of the day) closure.
In 1987 – after Robie’s original account came out – the Rainbow Warrior was sunk off Matauri Bay in Northland as a likely future marine habitat for divers to explore. And in 1996 France signed the nuclear test ban treaty.
Robie’s professional life has been devoted to the peoples of the Pacific. A journalist and university teacher, he’s written a series of investigative accounts of the struggles of the island nations against big power politics.
Eyes Of Fire is an excellent production, thorough and informed with a restrained passion, with interesting photographs. French politicians, by and large, might now be behaving in a more acceptable fashion, but the global issues that Robie has analysed – of pollution and violence and the stupidity and corruption of power – still demand our witness.
This review of Eyes of Fire was written for CAFCA’s Foreign Control Watchdog 141 magazine April 2016 and has been republished with permission on Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day. The publisher Little Island Press’s companion website for the book, Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On, features articles and a photo gallery by the author David Robie; an article by French journalist Pierre Gleizes; author of Rainbow Warrior Mon Amour; and more than 40 video interviews and stories featuring the protagonists by AUT University student journalists.
So the mystery is finally over. In 1983, I took this photo below of a young ni-Vanuatu girl at a nuclear-free Pacific rally in Independence Part, Port Vila. She was aged about five at the time.
She was just a delightful painted happy face in the crowd that day. But her message was haunting: “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face” had quite an impact on me. When monochrome and colour versions of this photo were published in various Pacific media and magazines, a question kept tugging at my heart.
“Who is she? Where is she from and what is she doing now?”
June Keitadi — as a five-year-old — in the 1983 Huarere video “Nuclear Free”. (She is seen at 1m08).
2016: June Warigini (Keitadi) at work at Teruja secondary school yesterday. Image: Shirley Loughman
I would have loved to have named her in the book with the cover image of her. So this spurred me onto to more determined efforts to discover her identity.
First of all I posted the photo – and a Hawai’ian solidarity video that also showed the little girl, discovered by Alistar Kata – on my blog Café Pacific late in 2015. More than 1000 people viewed the blog item, but there were no tip-offs.
Then it was reposted on other blogs.
Finally, friends at Vanuatu Daily Digest reposted my appeal – and voila, there she was discovered on the southernmost island of Aneityum (traditional name “Keamu”). And curiously, my wife Del and I were on that island at the same village, Anelgauhat, where she lives, on last Christmas Day 2015 – but didn’t realise who she was.
In fact, we have only recognised her as “June” our village guide that day now that we have seen her photo sent from the island. After all, this was 32 years after I had seen her fleetingly when she was a child in Port Vila.
She is June Keitadi (Warigini) daughter of Weitas and Jack Keitadi, then curator of the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta with Kirk Huffman. Her sister, Shirley Loughman, says June is the assistant bursar at Teruja secondary school on Aneityum.
According to Selwyn A. Leodoro, Anglican regional secretary of Port Vila and New Caledonia, one of the many VDD readers who have responded and identified her, June was very “surprised” about the search for her and keen to meet up. All going well, Del and I hope to visit Vanuatu again later this year, and we would love to personally give her a copy of the book with her cover photo.
Today June is married to Ruyben Warigini and they have three children, Letisha (21), Alphonse (13) and Ray (8), and a grandchild.
June Warigini (Keitadi) with her husband Ruyben and family, Letisha (with baby) and Ray, on Aneityum Island, Vanuatu. Alphonse is not in this photo.
Spasifik Magazine cover with the Pacific Media Centre Fiji elections article, Summer 2015. Image: Spasifik screenshot
Spasifik Magazine
After the Fiji military coup of 5 December 2006, caretaker Prime Minister Jona Senilagakali announced that elections would take place “hopefully in 12 months, two years”. Later it was made clear to the Fijian people that none of the ministers in the interim government would be allowed to contest the elections.
Fast forward eight years and Fiji’s first general elections since 2006 were finally held on 17 September 2014 to select the 50 members of the new Fiji Parliament.
The new constitution signalled a new era for Fijians; for the first time in eight years they felt they had a say in the direction the country would take over the next few years. The new constitution lowered the voting age to 18 and gave the right of multiple citizenship to Fijians for the first time. Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, this time standing for the FijiFirst Party, was elected Prime Minister.
For a group of AUT University Asia-Pacific journalism students, the elections presented an opportunity for them to delve deep into the world of Pacific political journalism and uncover many untold truths about life in Fiji during this new era of political freedom.
They were also the first New Zealand university student journalists to cover a general election in the Pacific.
As this article was going to press, the students were told they had been awarded the Ossie Award for Best Use of Convergent Media for their Fiji coverage at a ceremony in Sydney organised by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa).
The AUT student news bureau comprised of student journalists Alistar Kata and Mads Anneberg, who reported on the elections through a Fiji-based internship with local media, while coordinating editor Thomas Carnegie (abive), based at the Pacific Media Centre and Pacific Scoop in Auckland, managed the publication and distribution of their stories.
Professor David Robie: “This was a great opportunity for New Zealand-based student journalists to experience an historic election coming eight years after the 2006 coup.”
Kata was based at the University of the South Pacific’s student journalism newspaper Wansolwara and Radio Pasifik, while Anneberg was based at Repúbika magazine in Fiji.
“This was a great opportunity for New Zealand-based student journalists to experience an historic election coming eight years after the 2006 coup,” says Professor David Robie, director of AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre.
“It follows the tradition of having students from our Asia-Pacific Journalism course reporting on the Pacific Islands Forum over the past four years.”
Anneberg says covering the elections was an “amazing experience”.
“As a young reporter in Denmark, I had never reported on anything where the stakes were even as remotely as high for the readers.”
Spasifik Magazine gets a detailed account of what covering the Fiji general elections was like from student journalist Alistar Kata’s and Mads Anneberg’s viewpoints. Image: Screenshot Spasifik
Professor Sudesh Mishra, head of the University of the South Pacific’s School of Language, Arts and Media, says the USP-AUT partnership was significant.
“We were thrilled to be hosting graduate journalists from our sister university in Auckland. Cross-institutional exchanges and attachments are a vital part of what we do since our students stand to benefit from working with their counterparts from abroad.”
Ricardo Morris, editor of Repúblika, adds it was a great opportunity for journalists-in-training from a close major neighbour of Fiji to observe the country’s transition back to parliamentary democracy after eight years of rule by decree.
“Not only will it be a new experience for our New Zealand colleagues, very few local journalists left in the industry have covered the previous or any other election.
“For all of us, the electoral system was completely new and for the first time voters were not compelled by law to vote along ethnic lines,” says Morris.
The new proportional representational system required voters to make only a single choice from a field of almost 250 candidates for 50 parliamentary seats. To explain the changes in Fiji’s electoral system to voters — or an audience back in NZ — required a thorough understanding of the system and the tallying of votes and distribution of seats.
‘Blue wash’, elections and Fiji’s reborn democracy. Video: Alistar Kata (Pacific Media Centre)
“Alistar and Mads took on the challenge with relish, and it was refreshing to hear their take on the democratic processes,” says Professor Robie.
Kata described the situation in Fiji as “real and tentative”.
“For me, it was a golden opportunity to use what I have been learning through the course this year,” she says.
Carnegie is aiming for a career in political journalism in the Asia-Pacific region.
“This was a great opportunity for me to develop my knowledge and understanding of the political system,” he says.
Under the Fiji government’s media decree, the student journalists were required to register with the Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) and gain permission to report on the elections.
A profile on the Asia Pacific Journalism course and the Fiji elections coverage project, Professor David Robie. Image: Screenshot Spasifik
Republished from Spasifik Magazine, Summer 2015, issue No 63, pp. 42-43.
Book review and interview with the author David Robie by David Blackall
Introduction
David Robie’s latest book is incisive and autobiographical. Kalafi Moala, a courageous publisher and pro-democracy campaigner in his own right, attests to this in the book’s foreword. For many years, Moala was exiled by the kingdom of Tonga and was involved in the celebrated case of the ‘Tongan Three’ — he and his colleagues are the only people to have been jailed for ‘contempt of Parliament’ in the Pacific.
Informed by his articles and notes, this long-form narrative documents David Robie’s journalism and educational work over 40 years. The book covers his vast experience in journalism, education and travel. He has worked in and travelled through Africa, worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Paris in the 1970s, then in Australia and lastly, his specialty, in the Asia-Pacific region. David Robie is politically astute, promoting a journalism education that delivers peace and political independence in the Pacific region, freeing it of what he calls ‘colonial legacy conflicts’. His environmental concerns and his striving for truth for Indigenous peoples create opportunities for public debate.
David Blackall’s interview with author David Robie, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 2015. Image: Screenshot
In 1979, he covered the French nuclear accident, which killed workers on Moruroa Atoll. ‘The bunker was flushed out with a film of acetone, a solvent capable of absorbing plutonium, a deadly radioactive substance’ (Robie, 2014, p. 47). Plutonium may be recovered using Sc-CO2 (supercritical carbon dioxide in a fluid state), and this is modified with acetyl acetone (Sujatha, Pitchaiah, Sivaraman, Srinivasan & Rao, 2012). Acetone is highly volatile, and when a ‘six-man decontamination squad was sent into the bunker, and an electric drill switched on, an explosion killed one man instantly, another was crushed by a hurtling door and four others were badly burnt’ (Robie, 2014, p. 47). These sorts of accidents, and the resultant pollution, are often absent from corporate news because the corporations responsible strive to keep them secret. Since the time of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, Robie has written about these tragedies and the ensuing deception by the US and French militaries. He has reported these events extensively, almost single-handedly, while immersed in the story. On one occasion, he was aboard Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior when it rescued the Rongelap Atoll refugees after they were exposed to nuclear contamination.(1) Three days after returning to Auckland, after his 10-week voyage, French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. He was lucky not to be on board that night.
Edited transcript of interview with David Robie:
David Blackall (DB): In 1969, you were chief subeditor at the Sunday Observer in Melbourne, the first newspaper with a reasonably large circulation (100,000 plus) to ‘campaign vigorously against Australian involvement’ in the Vietnam War (Robie, 2014). The newspaper published a selection of photographs taken by Ronald L. Haeberle of the My Lai massacre in 1968:
Between 340 and 500 unarmed civilians were murdered in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son My village on 16 March that year by US Army soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment.
(Haeberle in Robie, 2014)
The Sunday Observer supplied Haeberle’s photographs to the Australian Federal Parliament to help end the war. This was a brave act, David Robie, in standing up to a political correctness at the time in Australia; where there was a belief the war was justified. We find ourselves in a similar predicament today in many theatres of war throughout Africa and the Middle East (Epstein & Welch, 2012). As chief subeditor, you — and then editor Michael Cannon — decided to do something because you both understood it to be an issue of conscience.
…‘journalism of attachment’ proposes a form of journalism that ‘cares as well as knows’. …this phenomenon is in opposition to the traditional model of what [is] coined
as ‘by-stander journalism’. (Ruigrok, 2010)
Can you comment please, David?
David Robie (DR): Ironically, during the period that you are referring to, when I was chief subeditor, and shortly after editor, of the original Sunday Observer (it later became the Nation Review), I had been grappling with these very issues about journalism of accountability.
At the time I was 24 and already a metropolitan editor. I had had a reasonably conventional start to my journalism career, first with New Zealand’s capital city morning newspaper The Dominion, then The New Zealand Herald, followed by the Melbourne Herald. Our chief Southeast Asian correspondent at the Observer was none other than Australia’s enigmatic Wilfred Burchett who paid a high price for exposing the Hiroshima ‘atomic plague’ and reporting war from the ‘other side’ (Burchett & Shimmin, 2007). Burchett had to contend with the Cold War, being an Australian, and the mass ignorance about the Vietnam War (although one wonders whether we have learnt anything from history given our propensity to fall in with ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and now the ‘Levant’).
As you suggest, military photographer Ronald Haeberle’s documentation of the My Lai atrocities was a form of journalism of accountability. You have cited Nel Ruigrok’s paper, on journalism of accountability, rather than ‘activism’. Although this paper is a compelling argument about activist journalism in Bosnia, Kosovo and in the ‘embedded’ invasion of Iraq, and it is particularly draws on examples in the Netherlands media, it is fairly applicable in a global context. There are many Pacific examples too, where activist journalism prejudges some situations and totally excludes others. A classic example of this is the shoddy Australian and New Zealand journalistic ‘consensus’ for the past six years on Fiji — a military regime after 2006, a dictatorship, or at least a military backed government.
There is plenty of evidence that the contemporary Indonesian atrocity in West Papua (perpetuated since paratroopers dropped into the one-time Dutch colony in 1962 and the so-called ‘Act of Free Choice’ in 1969 legitimised a sham). This is a non-story with virtually this same Australian and New Zealand journalistic ‘consensus’ committing editorial hypocrisy. The problem that I see in recent years is that the so-called ‘journalism of activism’ is most often deployed as an extension of power of the political elites, whether in Canberra or Wellington, or their ringmasters in Washington or Whitehall. ‘Activism’ and ‘journalistic consensus’ often revolves around the parliamentary press galleries and media political insiders, so devastatingly exposed by Nicky Hager in his Dirty Politics (2014). The political manipulation seems far easier these days with the massive public relations and political minder machinery at the disposal of governments.
As a journalist, and more recently as a media educator, I have tried to work outside that manipulated zone and seek a journalism of accountability and a synergy with those who suffer and [are] the victims uppermost in my mind. Much of my book provides case studies in the Asia-Pacific region from my personal experience, but the final sections also examine the critical development journalism, deliberative journalism (Romano, 2013), human rights journalism and also peace journalism models (Dixit, 2010; Freedman & Thussu, 2012). In some cases, I have developed strategies such as with the notion of Talanoa journalism (taking into account Indigenous cultural values for cross-cultural reporting) that I have applied to Fiji and other Pacific examples (Robie, 2013).
I have also argued for closer collaboration in the Pacific between journalists and non-government organisations because the latter often have the investigative or research skills missing in most smaller media groups.
The frame of peace journalism being developed by people such as Shaw, Lynch and Hackett (2011) is also rather intriguing and certainly applicable in an Asia-Pacific context. I have been drawn to some of these ideas in recent years as they provide a more robust framework for journalism of accountability when confronted with societies and media dominated by neoliberal discourses and infotainment.
In a world where the so-called ‘war on terror’ impacts so heavily on politics and media, ‘violence-victory-oriented’, ‘propaganda-oriented’ and ‘elite-oriented’ coverage (Lynch & Galtung, 2010) needs a counter-narrative. What is so often missing in journalism of accountability is context and interpretation. As Lynch and Galtung argue:
Media and journalists should be well enough organised to stand up for democracy against censorship and, in spite of censorship, try to get the story nonetheless. They should give a contextual background to understand the conflict. They should report the truth and suffering from all sides.
(2010, p. 94)
DB: Agreed. One only has to look to the Pacific, as you have shown, to see how the West ignores news that does not serve the desired outcomes for the hegemony of multinational corporations. As you say, another of the many Pacific-based stories that your book covers is that of West Papua, its troubles, particularly concentrated around the security required for the US-owned Freeport (McMoRan) mine near Grasberg, West Papua. It is the largest gold mine and the third largest copper mine in the world (Australian Council for Overseas Aid, 1995). For decades, allegations from reliable sources, like the global Free West Papua Campaign (FWPC), tell of torture, assassination and massacre.
The [Indonesian] military’s reaction to security disturbances around resource projects was often indiscriminate. …given its vested interests in providing security to resource companies, rumours regularly emerged that the military were covertly triggering conflict as a pretext for demanding additional funds or justifying the maintenance of its role. (McGibbon, 2006)
West Papuans are under extraordinary levels of surveillance and are basically at war. I note you advocate on page 315 the concept of journalism education that includes peace studies and conflict sensitisation. There is an imperative for teaching non-corporate and sceptical peace journalism, as conducted by you over a lifetime, for journalists working independently, or with non-elite interests like Amnesty International and the global Free West Papua Campaign. Can you comment on this please?
DR: I try to instil in my students a strongly independent, but careful, stance and autonomy for their actions. This is a much easier approach as an independent or freelance journalist, which is probably why I was motivated as an independent for a decade in running my Pacific news agency out of my backyard, before moving into academic and campus-based independent journalism. However, it is easy to take this lofty stance from an armchair, but it is not easy for independents to make a living. They are always vulnerable without media organisation support. Negotiation and survival skills are part of the teaching mix. I would
really like to see universities step up to the mark and take more of a leading role in ‘independent journalism’. The Conversation alliance between academics and journalists is already making its mark — a pointer in a small way to how things
could be different.
I have had many skirmishes as a journalist. One of these saw me arrested as an alleged spy and detained in New Caledonia by French soldiers for six hours (and handed over to the gendarmerie), and also arrested for photographing bogus voters under a corrupt proxy voting system (also in New Caledonia). I was also on the run from security forces in the Philippines because of my reportage on Indigenous Lumad activists that embarrassed corporate loggers and exploiters.
And I have reported in conflict zones without necessarily being in wartime frontlines. The experience tends to shape one’s judgement and alertness to possible dangers. This in turn is very helpful for briefing students on dicey assignments — such as my team that covered the George Speight coup in Fiji, 19 May 2000.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face cover
It depends on which side you are embedded, how the political struggles look. For example, during the height of the Kanak uprising for self-determination in New Caledonia in the mid-1980s, I did a series of pictures on both sides of the picket lines. On one side was the French CRS riot police, in a Kanak urban area in Nouméa’s Montravel district. Another was from the Kanak side, looking out from the urban quarter at the foot of Montravel, where protesters faced the heavily armed French security forces. This was Indigenous land and the Kanaks were the First Nations people. The difference between the two worlds was dramatic. Too often, the media are safely embedded with the forces of control, and don’t necessarily get to see the world from the other perspective of the desperate ordinary people.
The global West Papua Campaign and Amnesty International are both effective in raising issues that are being lost from public consciousness. Benny Wenda and the West Papua Campaign can be thanked for bringing back the West Papua human rights to the negotiation table — Benny made a huge impression a couple of years ago when visiting New Zealand and the Parliament made the inexplicably stupid decision to ban him from making a statement. This immediately put the West Papua cause in the spotlight. Prior to that, most journalists never gave a damn. This coupled with the tremendous media-savvy tactics of Benny — always wearing a traditional Highlands headdress, for example — meant that he was visually appealing as a political player.
Conclusion Media Mayhem demonstrates that the best journalism education derives from the first-hand independent journalism experience, travelling and learning to survive, applying diplomatic skills and resources rather than attempting to rely on confrontation. As journalism educators, we must therefore ask ourselves, how do we best introduce this concept in times of extremist propaganda?
The New York Times’s journalist Judith Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for her inaccurate series of features in 2003 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were non-existent. Her stories assisted the US and the UK case for war (Boyd-Barrett, 2010). In Media Mayhem, David Robie delineates differences between peace and war journalism. He shows the distinction between corporate media like The New York Times and independent news agencies that work for peace. Noam Chomsky’s 1988 five-filter propaganda model provides tools for using scepticism to identify areas where researchers and journalists can look for evidence of collaboration (whether intentional or otherwise) between corporate media and the propaganda aims of the ruling establishment. The controversy surrounding Miller in particular ‘helped elicit evidence of the operation of some filters of the propaganda model, including dependence on official sources, fear of flak, and ideological convergence’ (Boyd-Barrett, 2010).
On the negative side, Media Mayhem occasionally lacks flow and meanders into asides, a characteristic of French journalism, and one that makes it difficult to read. Perhaps this lack of flow is due to the author’s French connections. Occasionally, there are annoying typographical errors. One, for instance, on page 39, has the Black Mountain Pass in Lesotho at 16 metres elevation! That pass is at least 2,876 metres above sea level, depending on the point of reference. Despite this, Media Mayhem conveys a passionate commitment to journalistic activism and to something more important — accountability. A sample of the
book’s chapter headings testifies to this commitment: ‘Indigenous struggles’, ‘Forgotten wars, elusive peace’ and ‘Moruroa, mon amour’.
As Rosen says, ‘journalism can in certain cases intervene in the service of broad public values without compromising its integrity’ but needs proactive neutrality (1996, p. 13). However, despite (or perhaps because of) Robie’s commitment to neutrality, Media Mayhem lacks colour and detail, important in an autobiographical work to hold the reader’s attention (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). For me, this was a lost opportunity to express himself and describe journalistic culture, in the context of a career of incisive, alternative and sceptical journalism that, as journalism educators, we must advocate.
Robie’s unique and committed examinations of the vast and secret histories, ignored by corporate news, are essential reading, if only for utilitarian purposes. However, narrative theory suggests that he may have improved Media Mayhem by using the techniques of fiction writing, in particular dialogue and descriptive prose. Perhaps it is his discipline in left-wing reformist public journalism that positions his storytelling, through his referencing, ordering and framing, and this requires a degree of neutrality for veracity purposes (Woodstock, 2002).
In addition, despite its author’s career being devoted to exposing nuclear contamination and the corruption that enables it, Media Mayhem makes no mention of the ongoing and serious nuclear contamination of the Northern Pacific by Fukushima’s Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FNPP). This occurred after the massive earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011: ‘. . . large amounts of water contaminated with radionuclides, including Cesium-137, were released into the Pacific Ocean. With a half-life of 30.1 years, Cs-137 has the potential to travel large distances within the ocean’ (Rossi, Van Sebille, Sen Gupta, Garçon & England, 2013). Contaminated water in 2013 reached the US coastline, where radioactive iodine levels were up 200-fold. Signature FNPP caesium-137 is now in mushrooms and berries around the world; bird deaths have risen, while, in Alaska, sockeye salmon populations are declining (Corley, 2013).
Exposure to radiation dramatically increases the probability of cancers such as leukaemia and thyroid cancer (Mangano & Sherman, 2013). Some of the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan, anchored near the FNPP meltdown, are now blind and have developed cancers. The crew is filing a lawsuit against the nuclear power company TEPCO (Burke, 2014). ‘Cesium-137 (137Cs) with a half-life of 30.1 years causes the greatest concern because of its deleterious effect on agriculture and stock farming, and, thus, human life for decades (Yasunaria, Hayanoc, Burkhartb’d, Eckhardtb & Yasunarie, 2011). ‘Numerical simulation results show that the higher caesium, observed in the western North Pacific one month after the FNPP-AC, was transported not only by diffusion and advection of seawater but also via the atmosphere as an aerosol’ (Honda, Aono, Aoyama, Hamajima, Kawakami, Kitamura, Masumoto, Miyazawa, Takigawa & Saino, 2012). Dr Helen Caldicott (2014) adapted/compiled Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe. The book was adapted from a symposium, in 2013: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima, held at the New York Academy of
Medicine in 2013.
Despite these shortcomings, Media Mayhem is a detailed and wonderful account of important and overlooked events and issues in the news media, and so it outlines the imperatives for journalism education, which provide learning opportunities to skill journalists in resisting political and corporate agendas. Students must learn to use independent sources that reflect unbiased realities, rather than simply following the well-trodden corporate news media paths.
Note
1. Since this interview, Dr David Robie has republished Eyes of Fire, marking the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. Dr Robie, some 40 student journalists at AUT University and Little Island Press collaborated in publishing an independent Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On , a microsite
with more than 20 video stories and interviews published in the public interest.
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Author’s bio-sketch: Dr David Blackall is a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. He is a documentary filmmaker and also produces television material for current affairs programmes like ABC 7.30. He conducts research in ethical and legal areas; his recent academic publications overlapping and complimenting his television investigation of the Trio Capital fraud in Australia. This article is republished from Asia Pacific Media Educator.
Green Planet FM’s Lisa Er talks to Pacific Media Centre’s David Robie on the state of the media in NZ and the Asia-Pacific region. Image: Del Abcede
INTERVIEW: Presented by Lisa Er
Freedom of the press describes the right to gather, publish, and distribute information and ideas without government restriction.
This right encompasses freedom from censorship, but does our media really have complete freedom in New Zealand? We need to ask this question when we see the government’s response to Nicky Hager’s investigative journalism, and Channel 7 is removed from TV in spite of having half a million viewers.
A journalist was recently no longer required by the New Zealand Herald after writing an honest critique of the TPPA, and what happened to Campbell Live and why?
David Robie, professor of communication studies and Pacific journalism, director of the Pacific Media Centre, journalist and author answers these questions and more.
Are journalists part of a movement that merely holds up a mirror to society with all its cynicism, or are they part of a process of empowerment and action for a better world?
Why are certain topics ignored? Perhaps the headings would not be sexy enough. Perhaps sport and tabloid news are appealing to the masses more than educated comment on important events in this country and around the world.
Have the corporations bought the larger media outlets? How do economic issues affect the impartiality of the media?
Optimistic view
In spite of all this, David Robie is optimistic about the work of “our last TV public broadcaster” – Maori TV.
However, he is concerned for his students as to what sort of career they can expect in New Zealand’s media.
Political crises and indigenous issues throw a spotlight on a region’s news media and its role in democracy.
David Robie champions media scrutiny in the Pacific and believes more research will contribute much to the communications industry. This is an area where young journalists can go and experience stories that need to be reported, but they might be dangerous assignments.
For example in West Papua people are being arrested and detained for taking part in peaceful activities.
The victims of security force harassment and violence in West Papua are predominantly those who have publicly expressed their support for self-determination or independence.
We hear little about this in New Zealand, although Māori Television did a story recently. The journalists were escorted by the Indonesian authorities, however.
Embarrassing Indonesia
Perhaps if the world’s mainstream media reported on this it would embarrass Indonesia into modifying their behaviour somewhat.
Also “Understanding our neighbours is vitally important and researching and publishing on the media is an important goal for good governance for the region,” says Professor Robie.
Having been a journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior on the voyage leading up to the bombing in 1985, David has always had an interest in peace.
He talks on how peace journalism can challenge “war voyeurism”.
Is a peace keeper keeping peace peacefully when carrying a gun, for example.
Peace journalism explains conflicts and the reasons for them in some depth. It gives all parties a voice, whereas war journalism is propaganda oriented and is mainly concerned with victory.
“The idea of peace journalism troubles some journalists – mostly due to a lifetime of relying on ‘conflict’ as a core news value. This is surprising, because in this era of ‘infotainment’ and super-hype in news media, this peace notion is much more about reasserting basic news values such as truth, context, fairness and depth.”
Reporters and editors have the choice to create opportunities for society to consider non violent responses to conflict.
This is an example of where journalists can be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.
