Upfront
Cow Flap And A Privy Council
Preserving the Eyes and Ears of the Governed
World Press Freedom Day is the 3rd of this month. At a party I attended recently, a woman from a South Pacific country, which I shall not name, mentioned that the government newspaper had closed down. She seemed shocked when I smiled and said that was good news. This is not just rah-rah on my part for American-style free enterprise. It has more to do with what keeps governments accountable, in big places or small—and government media are not about accountability.
As I write this, I’m just off the phone with Kalafi Moala, publisher of the Taimi o Tonga. After a prolonged court battle in the Pacific’s only monarchy, the Tongan government’s attempt to prohibit the distribution of his paper was quashed in a well-reasoned, 39-page decision written by Tongan Chief Justice Gordon Ward.
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But not an hour later, an attorney for the Privy Council, the monarchy’s administrative arm, stated that a new law had been invoked to ban the Taimi from being distributed in the realm. Moala says he faces having to shut down his Tonga offices and pull back to a New Zealand operations base.
Earlier this year, Iremeia Tabai, former President of Kiribati, was battling the government of President Teburoro Tito’s efforts to reign in his privately-owned newspaper, the Kiribati NewStar.
Journalists in the Pacific, as elsewhere, often pay a high price for reporting what they believe to be true. They have been threatened, beaten and had their houses burned down. Mike Field, whose feature on Fiji appears on page 14 of this issue, has been banned or detained in at least three Pacific countries for his reporting.
Now Radio Australia reports that the PNG Parliamentary Privileges Committee is threatening to draw up new legislation prohibiting anyone from publishing news the MPs do not like. The committee summoned retirement fund chief Rod Mitchell, demanding to know why he told an Australian journalist that his family was not safe in PNG. Mitchell, who uncovered the looting of the country’s superannuation fund by government insiders, told the MPs that he had received death threats weekly and had no apologies for his investigation, nor for his comments to the media.
Even superpowers need the media from time to time. The Bush administration wanted to get word out about the support they had for their Iraq war—a group of countries they called the Coalition of the Willing. Media wags immediately dubbed it the COW List. The 40-something pro-Iraq war countries included, predictably, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. The Solomon Islands was also on the list, but Prime Minister Kemakeza denied that his country supported the war. I was in D.C. at the time and asked a group at the State Department what happened. “We had a letter,” one of them said. Everyone in the room nodded in assent, but no one could remember who had sent it. There was another COW List blunder when Slovenia was mistaken for Slovokia, or vice versa.
Like some politicians, there are journalists who are lazy and venal and stupid, but unlike politicians, we can pay a very high price when the best of us try to serve as the eyes and ears of the governed. Several journalists died covering the Iraq war.
