Pacific Journalism Review (Pacific Media Centre, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology)
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Pacific journalism education and training - the new advocacy era
Get PDFFor years, journalism education training in the Pacific has relied on donor funded short courses and expatriate media educators but in recent times this has been changing with the growth of more journalism schools at both universities and technical institutes and a more home grown actively qualified staff and proliferating research programmes. These changes can be reflected with the establishment of the new advocacy group, Media Educators Pacific (MEP). This is chaired by Misa Vicky Lepou, the president and she is also the head of journalism at the National University of Samoa. This body has a mission to promote and deliver the highest professional standards of training, education and research in media and journalism education relevant to the Pacific and beyond. In a region where the news media and journalism education have been forced to confront major hurdles such as military coups, as in Fiji; ethnic conflict, as in the Solomon Islands; and two rival governments and the ruthless crushing of student protests in Papua New Guinea in June 2016, major questions are faced. Along with critical development issues such as climate change and resources degradation, what are the challenges ahead for teaching contemporary journalists? These were some of the issues explored by this panel at the Fourth World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) conference in Auckland in July 2016. The panel was chaired by the Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie. Speakers were Emily Matasororo of the University of Papua New Guinea, Shailendra Singh of the University of the South Pacific, Misa Vicky Lepou of the National University of Samoa and Charlie David Mandavah of the Vanuatu Institute of Technology. Eliki Drugunalevu of the University of the South Pacific provided a summing up
REVIEW: Maintaining the climate struggle
Get PDFAn Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, directed by Bonni Cohen, John Shenk. Produced by Richard Berge. Actual Films & Participant Media. Documentary. 2017. 98min.An Inconvenient Sequel picks up a decade after the powerful and passionate An Inconvenient Truth introduced us to Al Gore’s crusade to make people behave responsibly over climate change
REVIEW: More than just a naughty boy
Get PDFKim Dotcom: Caught in the Web, directed by Annie Goldson. Produced by Alexander Behse. Monsoon Pictures. Documentary. 2017. 107min.THE question about Kim Dotcom that nobody seems able to resolve is whether he’s just been a bit naughty and the authorities are over-reacting, or whether he has in fact been very bad
EDITORIAL: Pacific media advocacy
Get PDFIN SAMOA during July 2015, a new Pacific journalism education and training advocacy era was born with the establishment of the Media Educators Pacific (MEP) after a talkfest had gone on for years about the need for such a body. A draft constitution had even been floated at a journalism education conference hosted at the University of the South Pacific in 2012. The initiative created unity of sorts between the Technical, Vocational and Educational Training (TVET) media institutes from Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and the regional University of the South Pacific journalism programme. Founding president Misa Vicky Lepou of the National University of Samoa pledged at the time to produce a vision with a difference
'There’s no media for refugees': Information and communication in camps on the Thai-Burma border
Get PDFThis article uses the example of camps on the Thai-Burma border to highlight the exclusion of refugees from the common world and subsequent omission of their voices from news coverage. Moreover, the article argues that this exclusion weakens the supposed protection offered to refugees by impeding the media in its role as protector and promoter of human rights. While there has been considerable literature examining the reporting of humanitarian crises to a global audience, in contrast there has been little in the way of research—and practice—concerning strategies to effectively communicate with refugees affected by such crises. Fieldwork conducted in three of nine official Thai-Burma border camps involved interviews with 81 participants, including refugees, humanitarian practitioners and journalists. Participant accounts show that a range of factors inhibit the production of news media coverage relevant to refugees interned in the Thai-Burma border camps, thereby preventing refugees from accessing vital information and voicing in common public space their experiences of violence, corruption and discrimination. A handful of exiled media groups provide poorly funded exceptions
Can Peace Journalism be transposed to Climate Crisis journalism?
No full textThis commentary briefly outlines characteristics of Peace Journalism (PJ), and then summarises ways that PJ could inspire justice and crisis-oriented climate journalism, including ethical moorings, audience orientation, journalism practices, self-reflexivity and scepticism of the practices of ‘objectivity’. While there are also important disjunctures between them, particularly around advocacy, partisanship and conflict escalation, both paradigms have liberal and radical variants. The author concludes with a note on structural media change as a corequisite of either paradigm’s implementation
Mainstreaming climate change issues: Challenges for journalism education in Indonesia
Get PDFThis article aims to explain the challenges of journalism education in Indonesia on the issue of mainstreaming climate change. As the world’s largest archipelago, Indonesia has to deal with some climate change impacts such as rising sea levels, extreme weather, floods, drought, and forest fires. Climate change is a real serious threat, but public awareness of this issue is low in Indonesia. Mass media have a capacity to mainstream climate change and increase public awareness. The data for this article has been collected through qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, interviews with communication lecturers and scholars, and document reviews. Some of the important findings are: 1) The climate change issue in the Indonesian mass media is less popular than other issues such as corruption, elections, terrorism and refugees; 2) Journalism education in Indonesia does not contribute enough to mainstreaming climate change on mass media; 3) There are three levels of problem in macro, messo, and micro level of journalism education in Indonesia to mainstreaming climate change issue. At a micro level, the problem is related to the lack of lecturers with competence in climate change. On a messo level, journalism education has failed to connect with the problem of climate change through curricula. At a macro level, the problem is related to the popularity of journalism than other subjects in general socio-political environment. Systemic theory by Niklas Luhmann was used as tool to analyse these problems. From this perspective, Indonesian journalism education as a system faces plenty of challenges to reduce the complexity of problems to optimise its role in mainstreaming climate change
Watching this space, West Papua
Get PDFCOMMENTARY: President Joko Widodo’s announcement in May 2015 that Indonesia would allow foreign journalists to have access to West Papua was widely, but cautiously, welcomed. Some journalists decided to have another attempt at getting into this region, long cordoned off to outside access. The labyrinthine process of applying for a journalist visa was a warning that change does not happen overnight for West Papua media freedom. On the ground, it is a risky business for a journalist covering West Papua. Local independent journalists, especially, face regular threats. The attackers are empowered by the knowledge that there is no formal accountability processes over intimidation and the murder of journalists or media workers. However, there appears to be a genuine hope that President Jokowi’s term in office represents a small window of opportunity for improvement for Papua. The handling of journalists and media freedom in West Papua is very much a test case for this. Watch this space
New Caledonia and Vanuatu: Differences defined in a student reporting venture into the Pacific
Get PDFA reporting field trip by Australian journalism students to New Caledonia and Vanuatu in mid-2014 produced markedly differing impressions of the neighbouring island societies, linked to their ‘independence’ status—one as an integrated territory of France, the other as an independent state. The field trip, one of a series from the Queensland University of Technology, aimed at developing reporting skills through work in unaccustomed territory, especially different cultural settings. Over 17 days, six students and the coordinator, and author of this article, generated 18 feature-length reports for online outlets and a radio documentary. The article synthesises the collected work from the field, producing a thematic statement of findings. It records broad consensus in New Caledonia in favour of enacting the Matignon and Noumea Accords on independence, while noting an undercurrent of unresolved conflicts. It characterises public life in Vanuatu in terms of a democratic spirit, and the invocation of traditional ties within society, as the country grapples with problems of development and impacts of the outside world. This work is interpretative, concerned with identifying processes underlying events in daily news. It is proposed as a first step towards a scholarly construction of meta-analyses of the interpretative and informative power of journalistic reporting
Improving HIV and STI responses through media and community engagement
Get PDFHIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Western Australia are at their highest in 20 years. In response to this worrying escalation and the public need for accurate and balanced information about these diseases, the journalism department at Edith Cowan University, in partnership with the WA AIDS Council (WAAC), developed a pilot project that consisted of a series of media training and education programmes to enable WAAC staff to share information and stories with the media on HIV and STIs in a more confident and proactive way. The project offers a model framework for media and community engagement that can be applied to a broader range of health promotion and disease prevention issues