Like governments and editors elsewhere, those in the South Pacific regularly trade accusations about press freedom. But the arbitrary detention of a Tongan journalist for publishing pro-democracy letters has shocked the region.
By DAVID ROBIE in Port Moresby
Concern about press freedom in the South Pacific has been growing following the suspended jail sentence for a journalist in one country and alleged moves to muzzle the media in three others.
International protests followed Tonga's recent detention for 26 hours of Filo 'Akau'ola, deputy editor of the weekly newspaper Taimi 'o Tonga, for publishing pro-democracy letters. Two letter-writers were held for even longer, and the journalist was eventually charged with angering a civil servant. All three were given suspended prison sentences in April, but 'Akau'ola says he will appeal.
Meanwhile, in Vanuatu, a gagging order was placed on the media by former Prime Minister Serge Vohor to stifle press reports about moves to oust him from leadership. Vohor held the premiership briefly after the recent general election, but was replaced by Maxime Carlot Korman after a split in the ruling party.
In Fiji, the government has denied it plans to muzzle the press following claims by Opposition Leader Jai Ram Reddy, who told the public that members of a cabinet faction "don't want you to know all the details about the scandals in government".
And in Papua New Guinea, a hastily constituted Media Council, representing the country's leading news organisations, staged a two-day public seminar in March involving leading politicians, judges, academics, an archbishop, journalists and grassroots activists in an attempt to defend press freedom.
As part of a constitutional review, expected to steer Papua New Guinea towards eventually becoming a republic, Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan's government is seeking to introduce legislation which could fetter a traditionally free press.The Constitutional Review Commission has been given a directive to produce a draft law by June.
Just two transnational media conglomerates control all the major circulation newspapers in the South Pacific. Through their subsidiaries, Murdoch's News (South Pacific) Ltd - acquired in 1987 - and French media magnate Robert Hersant's Groupe Pacifique Presse Communication (1988) in the French territories own five of the nine dailies in the South Pacific.
The 10th daily in the region, Guam's Pacific Daily News, has been owned since 1970 by the Gannett newspaper group based in Rochester, New York.
The most recent - and most controversial - daily, The National, began publishing in Papua New Guinea in November 1993. It is owned by a subsidiary company of former Malaysian Senator Datuk Tiong Hiew King's family timber group Rimbunan Hijau which dominates the logging industry in PNG and has provoked a series of controversial Australian and New Zealand television documentaries. At least one, TVNZ's Frontline report "The Tiongs", has drawn legal threats.
Just two independent, relatively small circulation, locally owned dailies compete in this far-flung environment - the Cook Islands News and the Fiji Daily Post. But in spite of the monopolies in the daily press, the Pacific has a diverse and vibrant mass communications industry.
Ranging from the Post-Courier and Fiji Times to the fortnightly Tuvalu Echoes and monthly Madang Watcher; from EMTV's region-wide broadcasts via the Indonesian Palapa B2P satellite to Niue's tiny television unit, the news media caters for an audience and readership scattered over thousands of islands and atolls.
In French Polynesia, for example, the radio and television stations broadcast to 190,000 people spread over an ocean territory as large as Europe. Niue has a population of 2,000; PNG has more than four million.
The weekly church-owned Independent (formerly The Times of Papua New Guinea) has established a niche for itself as arguably the region's most influential publication for debate of serious development and social issues.
The style of radio stations is mostly state-owned, public service as adopted from former colonial nations. The style of the press which has become predominant is free market but with a strong public watchdog tradition.
Media coverage of Fiji businessman Tony Stephens and an aborted F$10 million out-of-court settlement led to a commission of inquiry which eventually forced embattled Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka to call a snap election in 1994.
In Papua New Guinea, too, newspapers have in recent years highlighted concerns over politicians and national policies - such as the attention paid to former Deputy Prime Minister Ted Diro and a "corrupt and corrupting" timber export industry.
One regional news magazine, Pacific Islands Monthly, has noted that journalism in the Pacific is "coming of age" as more and more independent publications and broadcast stations emerge.
The magazine adds that there is a distinctive shift away from government-run or controlled media with management of the media being taken over from expatriates by Pacific islanders.
Another example of this development of Pacific news media has been the establishment of Pacnews, a regional radio news cooperative, in 1987.
Originally based in Fiji, Pacnews was expelled by the post-coup regime in 1990. It now operates from Vanuatu.
Tongan philosopher and media critic Futa Helu is cautious about the prospects of media freedom in the region.
"The important point is the media is an institution with a distinct morality and set of values of its own," Helu says. "These values are a part of the morality of liberal democracy, for modern media culture is an institutional embodiment of freedom of expression and the right to be well and truly informed." It is this character that has grated on local Pacific cultures whose values are opposed to media values.
The major print media in the South Pacific in the four key mass communications countries or territories in the region - Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea - have largely been dominated by foreign ownership. Murdoch, of course, has been the best-known player.
Less known, but also very powerful and influential, is the French media baron Robert Hersant. Owner of the conservative French national daily Le Figaro and several big regional newspapers which command more than half of the daily readership in France, the Hersant group expanded its empire into the French overseas territories and departments: in the Caribbean, first with Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guyana, and then into the Pacific with New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
Hersant's California-based Groupe Pacifique Presse Communication, which owns television and press interests on the West Coast of the US, now controls all the French-language dailies in the Pacific. The group is also said to have come close to publishing an English-language daily in Fiji after the coups when an associated company made a bid for the publishing press and plant abandoned by the closed Fiji Sun.
Hersant owns Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes in New Caledonia (bought in 1987 from a group of businessmen which included anti-independence politician Jacques Lafleur), and La Depeche and Les Nouvelles de Tahiti in French Polynesia. At the time of acquiring the papers there was a "cleansing" of editorial staff - journalists regarded as too liberal or too sympathetic to Kanak independence were removed from the staff. All three papers have a conservative French perspective of the region.
According to Claude Marere, news editor of the Tahitian radio station Radio Tefana: "As part of the Hersant scenario, Polynesia must stay French, independence is tabu, and silence must be kept about the corruption involved in the main political parties for the reason that they are pro-French."
In the case of Murdoch, News (South Pacific) Ltd subsidiaries own the paper with the biggest circulation daily in the South Pacific, the Post-Courier (South Pacific Post Pty Ltd) in PNG, which sells some 32,000 (it peaked at 43,000 in 1994) copies daily. News Ltd also owns the Fiji Times, the largest selling Fiji daily, and the regional news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (part of the Fiji Times Ltd group) which was uprooted from Sydney and moved to Suva in 1989.
By comparison, Guam's Pacific Daily News sells fewer than 20,000 copies and Pago Pago's Samoa Daily News fewer than 3,000.
Fiji and the Cook Islands have the only independent, locally owned, daily newspapers in the South Pacific - the Daily Post, founded by a group of small Fijian businessmen after the closure of the Sun, and the Cook Islands News.
However, late in 1993 the thrice-weekly Samoa Observer, owned by a Samoan matai, Fata Sano Malifa, moved to publishing daily. The rival Samoa Daily News, owned by an expatriate American businessman, closed down the other major Apia paper, Samoa Times, in mid-1994.
Copyright © 1996 David Robie and Asia-Pacific Network
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