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Pacific Island journalism |
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Foreign minister Phil Goff has scrapped the Papua New Guinea leg of an eight-day Pacific tour after rioting in the capital.
What you wouldn't have read is that a fourth student had just died as a result of police handling of those protests. The Dominion, meanwhile, has been closely following the Vanuatu leg of Phil Goff's tour, telling us that:
The gratitude to New Zealand is on the smiling faces of the impoverished people of Vanuatu.
They're grateful for our annual aid payments, it seems. But the Dominion hasn't mentioned that an official report released on the same day has recommended that Vanuatu set up a Leadership Tribunal to prosecute corrupt leaders, though the story touches on allegations of corruption levelled at past governments.
Nor could you have heard or read - in any mainstream news programming in New Zealand early last week - about a typhoid epidemic that's killed six people in Papua New Guinea, or about a row that's brewing in the Marshall Islands over a compensation payment from the US government for its nuclear testing, or about a Human Rights Watch report slamming the Indonesian government for human rights abuses in West Papua where, incidentally, mediation efforts over two Belgian hostages apparently seized by a separatist group seem to have stalled.
People in the Pacific always regarded NZ as a Pacific Island country. But when I came over here and saw how little it was covered, I was quite shocked. Very disappointed.
That's Jale Moala, the former editor of Fiji's Daily Post and Fiji Times, who moved to New Zealand a year ago. He also worries that our coverage of the Pacific plays up the dark side
The only time NZ people get to hear what's happening in the Pacific - when there's something bad happening. There's a civil war in the Solomon islands, there's a rioting in PNG, or there's a coup in Fiji.
... and he says it's ill-informed too:
Like the recent murder of the Red Cross leader has suddenly become a political issue in some NZ news circles. I don't think people understand the issue.
He's not the only one who makes that sort of criticism. Agent France Press's Michael Field is scathing about the quality of New Zealand's Pacific journalism.
There's a lack of respect in every aspect of how NZ covers its own Pacific Island people and how we cover the Pacific.
Field has been reporting on the Pacific for more than 20 years.
Frequently when I go into the field to do these stories, if in the extremely rare event that there's another NZ reporter on the scene, it's usually some johnny-come-lately who really knows nothing, is expecting something that doesn't exist and often doesn't even know the fundamentals of who runs the place, how it operates, where things are, and this kind of thing.
He says most NZ journalists don't take the time to get to know the complexities Pacific Island societies.
You have to build up contacts, build up expertise, try and understand the background. And the simple fact of the matter is that the Pacific gives us this mythical expectation of the beaches and the palms and the friendly smiling natives and all this stuff but once you've been there, once you've lived in these places, you find that it's far far more complicated than that and those initial views of what was going on have no credibility at all.
Jeli Moala agrees.
It's very hard for journalists just to hop on a plane from Wellington and be told "come on, there is something happening in the Solomon islands and run over there and do a story" because you can't just do that, you'll be looking at the issue from a totally foreign perspective.
Michael Field scoffs at the way our journalists parachute in when something big happens, clutching their copies of the Lonely Planet tourist guide book, write endless stories with headlines like "Trouble in Paradise" and gutlessly flee when they think the going gets tough. Or else, as the editor of Pacific Magazine wrote recently, they simply tag along on Ministerial junkets.
New Zealanders come rushing in only when there is a crisis or a disaster or a free flight with a touring politician like Goff.
Jeli Moala:
When Helen Clark goes to the Cook Islands, the interests of the papers is mainly focussed on what she is doing. There's very little coverage of what the other people are doing.
Field says that NZ news organisations, unlike their Australian counterparts, don't take their coverage of the Pacific seriously enough to give their journalists regular, first-hand experience of the region.
The only thing that you can be certain that a NZ journalist will be in attendance at is a major rugby match.
Small outposts in the New Zealand media do a much better job of covering the Pacific, particularly Radio New Zealand International, which provides bulletins and features inside and outside the country on a shoestring budget.
What they do with the resources that they've got is a model for how the rest of the industry should cover the Pacific - they take it seriously, they've got respectability, these people down in Wellington can pick up a phone and speak to a prime minister at the drop of a hat, because they're respected.
As well, Kim Hill's show has a regular Pacific affairs slot often featuring Michael Field, and Radio NZ's Pacific coverage generally is a cut above the rest. TV1's Tangata Pasifika offers an oasis of Pacific coverage, though surely it's the only programme in the history of commericial television to be screened when almost its entire target demographic is away at Church.
Does poor Pacific reporting matter much? Field thinks so. Take the Fijian coup.
The coup was very explicitly written up as an indian vs Fijian thing. It was obvious to those of us who had for years before been to Fiji that this was not at all the issue.
Jeli Moala also thinks the coup is a good example of the lack of depth in our reporting.
The NZ people don't really understand how little support Speight had and the interim government probably didn't get as much sympathy as it should have had because it was really trying to do to bring the country around again.
Field has written that a good way to bug the international media during the coup was to run through the hotel lobby carrying a notebook. He thinks the media generally and even our officials are constantly taken by surprise by what's happening in the Pacific.
He thinks it's starting to look as if New Zealand is embarrassed to be part of the Pacific. And worse than that:
The problem is that when things go bad, as they have in the solomons, Fiji, png, the world actually does expect NZ to go in and help clean up, help take care of these things.
Dr Melani Anae, a lecturer at Auckland University's centre for Pacific Studies, also worries about the way Pacific islanders are covered inside and outside New Zealand.
We're at the bottom of the heap according to all demographic indices and the media remind us of that on a daily basis.
She says the images of Pacific Islanders in the media affect the way they and others see them.
That's what really gets me mad, is that because of the extreme telling of the news and very monocultural type of news articles, it's making the Pacific and the populations of the Pacific look like they're just pawns and just reactive rather than just some of the positive things in themselves.
Dr Anae says that for a start, we need to start distinguishing between different Pacific Island peoples, and not just lump them all together.
So people in NZ have taken on that kind of homogeneous Pacific person, whereas they come from diverse, complex, really unique lifeways, different histories, different languagess, a whole raft of differences. While there are certain commonalities, the differences far outweigh the commonalities.
She and Michael Field and Jale Moala all think we also need more coverage of the Pacific Islands, a wider range of stories, and more commitment to understanding their lives - and not just more stories about coups, cyclones, crime and corruption.