Pacific Journalism Review (Pacific Media Centre, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology)
Not a member yet
1090 research outputs found
Sort by
Running on the spot: NZ’s record in news media gender equity
Get PDFThis article reports New Zealand’s performance in the latest, 2010 round of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) covering 108 countries. Using quantitative and qualitative content analysis the GMMP measures the representation and participation of women in the news media. The findings demonstrate that gender inequality remains a defining characteristic of daily news content around the world. It is concerning that in 15 years of the GMMP, New Zealand has generally stood still while overall GMMP results show a continuing steady increase in the number of women featuring as news subjects and reporters. Indeed, despite more women working as reporters in New Zealand, the lack of progress was evident in the number of female news subjects. The picture emerging from data in 2010 is of increasingly feminised newsrooms in which women’s experiences and views are still seen and heard much less frequently than male voices in almost all news topics. Worse, women are virtually absent in sports and politics, areas dominating the Kiwi news agenda. We ask why women remain so consistently under-represented in mainstream news and review some suggested solutions to that under-representation
REVIEW: Old abortion law still holds sway
No full textReview of: Fighting to choose: The abortion rights struggle in New Zealand, by Alison McCulloch, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2013, 329 pp. ISBN 9780864738868.Fighting to Choose is a fascinating, meticulously researched history of the struggle to liberalise New Zealand’s abortion laws. It examines why there is still no right to have an abortion in a progressive country like New Zealand, which has a strong record of promoting women’s rights, and why it is that an unsatisfactory abortion law, that was passed 35 years ago, is still on the statute books
Responsible conflict reporting: Rethinking the role of journalism in Fiji and other troubled Pacific societies
Get PDFThis article moots the idea of ‘responsible conflict reporting’ in Fiji and the South Pacific. Prolonged conflict, including three coups since 1987, has resulted in a pattern of social and economic decline in Fiji. In Melanesia as a whole, internal conflict is seen as a major security threat. The proposed responsible conflict reporting framework can be seen as a response to these longstanding trends and concerns. The framework is informed by various concepts in conflict resolution, peace-building, peace journalism and development journalism. By fusing the appropriate themes from these related but disparate frameworks, responsible conflict reporting goes beyond typical media interventions that focus mostly on current ‘hot conflicts’ without adequately addressing their long-term, structural causes
‘We look after our own’: The cultural dynamics of celebrity in a small country
Get PDFUnlike the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, where celebrities are often subjected to derision in the tabloid media, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the country’s longest-running women’s magazine, respects and values its local celebrities. A content analysis of cover lines on the magazine over the past eight decades reveals that although the magazine has adhered to a steadfast formula of celebrating mothers and wives, there has been a steady shift to a focus on the love lives and scandals of foreign celebrities. More recently, however, the magazine has turned its attention to well-known New Zealanders and developed its own brand of celebrity news
COMMENTARY: A trauma shake-up: Are NZ graduates being prepared for the real world?
Get PDFYoung journalists today are highly likely to cover traumatic incidents early in their careers, with many confronting trauma day to day. This pressure is exacerbated in the current economic climate and fast-paced changing world of journalism. New Zealand graduates are no exception. Few are prepared by their journalism schools to deal with trauma. Should they be taught these skills during their training or should they wait until they are in the workplace? Research has recommended the former for at least two decades. Perhaps it is time New Zealand caught up with many American and Australian journalism schools and introduced changes to the journalism curricula to ensure graduates are equipped with skills to recognise signs of stress in themselves as well as victims. The workplace can support this training with recognition and support, which has been shown to improve productivity and resilience
REVIEW: Pacific journalists and frontline freedom
No full textTwelve countries feature in the new Fragile Freedom, Inaugural Pacific press freedom report, a publication concerned with strengthening press freedom and the rights of media workers in the Pacific. When read alongside a monograph from the Pacific Media Centre, Pacific Media Freedom 2011: A status report, published the previous year as the region’s first media freedom dossier (and republished as a monograph in May 2012), these two documents shed insight into the interacting tensions between journalists and the power structures they work alongside and within
Peace and war journalism in the New Zealand media: Reporting on ‘the arc of instability’ in the Pacific
Get PDFThe Fourth Estate role of the media in a democracy is to inform its citizens and to be a forum for debate about political issues so that the citizenry is able to make informed decisions about the role its government plays. New Zealand portrays itself as a leading democracy in the Pacific, but how much do New Zealanders know about what is happening among the country’s neighbours? This article is an exploratory study on media coverage of four countries in Melanesia which have experienced conflict to assess the degree to which a peace/conflict journalism approach as opposed to a war/violence journalism approach is used. A content analysis of Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report programme was conducted between June and July 2012 to assess the reporting on the four Melanesian countries: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. According to Pilger (2011) war journalism is reporting on what those in power say they do, whereas peace journalism is what those in power actually do. Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) state that peace journalism ‘is when editors and reporters make choices—of what stories to report and how to report them—that create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict’ (p. 5). The framing of New Zealand media reporting as either war journalism or peace journalism will be an indication of how information about conflict in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu is presented to a New Zealand audience
REVIEW: Bearing witness in 40 years of Greenpeace chronicles
No full textReviews of: Rainbow Warrior Mon Amour: Trente ans de photos aux côtés de Greenpeace, by Pierre Gleizes. Paris: Glenart, 2011, 379 pp. ISBN 978-2723484558; Warriors of the Rainbow: A chronicle of the Greenpeace movement from 1971 to 1979, by Robert Hunter [40th anniversary edition]. Perth: Greenpeace and Freemantle Press, 2011, 451pp. ISBN 978-1921888809.My dog-eared yellow-covered copy of the late Robert Hunter’s Warriors of the Rainbow still has pride of place among my bookshelves. It was inspirational in many respects before I embarked on Rainbow Warrior I’s journey to the Marshall Islands in May 1985 which led to the bombing in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour two months later and my own book Eyes of Fire about that ill-fated humanitarian voyage, so very different from most Greenpeace campaigns
REVIEW: Noted: Democracy and the price of silence
No full textReview of: Shoot the messenger: The report on the Nuku'alofa reconstruction project and why the government of Tonga dumped it, By Teena Brown Pulu. Auckland and Nuku'alofa: Taimi Publishers. Investigative journalism is critical to good governance in evolving South Pacific democracies, particularly the youngest, Tonga, which embarked on the biggest democratic reforms in a century in 2010. This is the view of Auckland Tongan anthropologist, social commentator and now author of a suppressed-then-exposed report about post-riots urban development
Murdoch’s flagship: The Australian newspaper two decades on
Get PDFCommentary: The power of the print media lies not simply in its capacity to attack opponents, but in its unwillingness to grant timely or sufficient right of reply in its Op-Ed pages. Perhaps the greater regulation advocated by Finkelstein would begin to change this. Amid all the restructuring and the rivalry, the opportunity for a more comprehensive review of journalistic regulation, broached by Finkelstein, may well slip away in the cross currents of the Convergence Review, the prospect of new media mergers and acquisitions, precarious federal parliamentary politics, and the turmoil of the broadsheets themselves. Yet it is a debate that we have to have; like our protracted debt crisis, it cannot be postponed indefinitely