Dawn Gibson
SUVA (The Fiji Times / Pacific Media Watch): Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) chairman Ashwin Raj has criticised some reporting of alleged discrepancies in Fiji’s election results and has called for more balance.
Raj said it was discouraging that some media stories about the election counting process seemed unbalanced.
“I’m particularly concerned that they’ve taken the statements of a few political parties and gone ahead with [these] without necessarily attaining the views of the Supervisor of Elections, the Electoral Commission or the MOG [Multinational Observer Group],” he said.
Given the sensitivity of this year’s election, it was important that reports were balanced, Raj said.
“This is a particularly sensitive time for our history and our political history and you would have thought they would be a lot more sensitive to this.”
Raj also pleaded with members of the public not to believe everything they read and heard on social networking sites.
The authority could not control the flow of comments on Facebook but advised people not to take their issues to the social media but to seek legal avenues to address their concerns, he said.
He also said he was considering revoking media accreditation for foreign media companies covering the election because of a “lack of adherence to good reporting ethics”.
Pacific Scoop/Pacific Media Centre Fiji elections coverage
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Pacific Media Watch
