Mailbag
Mailbag
Robie Attack: Hypocritical, Misleading and Self-Serving
Your magazine regularly runs misrepresentations of the University of the South Pacific journalism program, so it is hardly surprising to read yet another attack. But the double page spread, "New Zealand academic stirs up Pacific storm" (February), must rank as one of the most self-serving and dishonest pieces of "journalism" I have seen.
Readers are entitled to know the author of this article so that they can see for themselves the conflict of interest involved. Your own editor-in-chief, Peter Lomas, was a prime protagonist in this affair, stirring the pot with relish and with little regard for facts.
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Your managing editor (South Pacific), Laisa Taga, also has a credibility problem. As editor of the Daily Post in November 1997, she was editorially responsible for a series of anonymous and distorted attacks against me when I was appointed as journalism coordinator at USP. Her newspaper, after she had moved to Islands Business, publicly apologized for the misrepresentations on 30 November 1998, admitting that the articles were "published outside the accepted standards of fairness, accuracy and balance."
Last October, I filed a complaint with the Fiji Media Council over misrepresentations by Islands Business over our award-winning journalism Web site Pacific Journalism Online. This latest article has plenty of grounds for another complaint. Pacific magazine downloaded a copyright photograph of me without my permission from our Web site to illustrate this article.
Your final quotes from Fiji Times editor-in-chief Russell Hunter claiming academic freedom is "not under attack" are hypocritical and misleading. He is referring to an editorial published on 31 August 1998 and that appeared in his newspaper after I had written a formal complaint about bias.
The only reference by the Fiji Times in the newspaper itself to my academic paper that apparently led to this so-called storm, "Coup coup land: The press and the putsch in Fiji," was one sentence published on the front page on 20 December 2000: out of context in a completely different story about the university. And this was untrue and defamatory.
The storm was in fact a nasty campaign of abuse by Internet and e-mail against me by three local self-serving media personalities because I had dared write an independent media analysis. Their opinion hardly constitutes the "Fiji media." There was no rational debate, or any attempt to canvas the views of independent media or political commentators as any professional media ought to do.
USP Journalism sets high standards, as demonstrated for the past two years in Australia’s Ossie Awards for student journalism: two major awards in 1999, and two major awards again in 2000 (for our Fiji coup coverage) plus four highly commended awards. No other Pacific journalism program has achieved anything like this.
I suggest that both Lomas and Hunter should resign and then there might be an improvement in professional and ethical journalism standards in Fiji.
David Robie
Senior Lecturer and
Journalism Coordinator
Journalism Program, University of
the South Pacific Suva, Fiji
Monopoly Won’t Deliver Telecom Needs
The article in Pacific Magazine’s January edition titled "Fiji’s Broadband Future‚" suggests to me that FINTEL should not be the master of that future. Now having access to the Southern Cross fiber optic cable, FINTEL’s Deputy General Manager Timoci Ledua questioned whether they could take advantage of this extra bandwidth. He said, "The whole of communication from Fiji to the rest of the world, we’re talking about a maximum of 40 Mbit/s".
My experience as a technical adviser to broadcasting organizations in the Pacific tells me there is a huge pent-up demand for international telecommunications access that cannot be met because costs imposed by organizations like FINTEL are much too high. More recently, conversations with "would be" Pacific-based Internet service providers reveal the same problem. All the while, we are told of the benefits that the World Trade Organization-inspired telecommunications reforms will have in the development of a Pacific information economy (see 1999 Forum Communications Policy).
Quite frankly, I cannot see how the trend from government monopolies to semi-government/private monopolies heralds anything new except for a new way to "milk" the telecommunications "cow". Can I suggest that the Fijian government would be doing everyone a service by directing FINTEL to sell the extra capacity they now have to a few competitors at cost. Let’s see what a bit of competition will do to get an information economy in Fiji humming.
William Tibben
School of Information Technology
and Computer Science
University of Wollongong.
NSW, Australia
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