BRISBANE (ABC Correspondents Report/Pacific Media Watch): ELIZABETH JACKSON: The Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting took place in New Zealand last week, but there was one regional leader who was not there.
Fiji's military commander and prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, is banned from travelling to New Zealand and Fiji was suspended from the forum. According to the heavily censored Fiji media, Commodore Bainimarama's continued undemocratic rule has the support of nine of the 15 countries who attended the Forum in Auckland.
However, as Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney reports, those who oppose Bainimarama are not allowed any media coverage in Fiji.
SEAN DORNEY: If you lived in Fiji and your only source of information was a single local national newspaper, the Fiji Sun, you would soon believe that Commodore Frank Bainimarama was about the most popular person in the world, an anti-corruption crusader universally revered for his wisdom and for his firm but enlightened rule.
The rest of the Fiji media is not quite as sycophantic as the Fiji Sun but no criticism of Fiji's dictator is allowed by the government censors, while criticism of Australia and New Zealand is heavily promoted by Fiji's propaganda ministry, the Ministry of Information.
"Thumbs Up For Fiji's Roadmap" was one of the headlines on the ministry's web page on Friday. It was a report stating that Commodore Bainimarama's plan to stay in power for at least another three years without elections has won the enthusiastic support of most Pacific Island countries. The Fiji Sun ran the line that "Australia and New Zealand" were "the front runners in further punishing Fiji".
Commodore Bainimarama's government has crushed all opposition. First it was the political parties then the great council of chiefs. The media was an early target as was the Methodist church. Now the Methodist church is not only banned from holding its annual conference, it is not allowed to hold any meetings at all except Sunday church services.
A letter from Fiji's military council directs that all nine meetings under the church's constitution, including the monthly, quarterly, standing committee, financial and divisional meetings, are all forbidden.
Revelations by Bruce Hill from Radio Australia's Pacific Beat program that Bainimarama's so-called Independent Commission Against Corruption has targeted opponents of the regime with trumped-up legal prosecutions, got scant coverage in Fiji itself. And a recent decree aimed at crippling the trade union movement has been reported inside Fiji as though the unions are happy with the development.
Felix Anthony, the general secretary of the Fiji Trade Union Congress vented his spleen on Pacific Beat.
FELIX ANTHONY: Reporting by the media and in particular the Fiji Sun and Radio Fiji and, of course, the TV News has totally ignored statements by the trade unions and has gone onto a propaganda mode; just simply promoting statements by the regime.
People in Fiji are simply getting one side of the story, the reporting is not balanced. It's absolutely biased.
BRUCE HILL: What is it specifically you want the media to do?
FELIX ANTHONY: To report fairly and if they are not allowed to report the trade union perspective on issues, then they should either mention that or try their level best not to give misleading news and programmes to the public.
SEAN DORNEY: One of Fiji's best journalists, Stanley Simpson, is now the editor of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation.
He told Bruce Hill there were censors in every newsroom and under the public emergency regulations, the notorious PER, there were severe limits on what the media in Fiji was allowed to report.
STANLEY SIMPSON: All media organisations in the country as you know Bruce, and as Felix knows, we are working under the public emergency regulations. The PER is the one that really stops us from reporting some of these issues. It's a well known fact that people like Felix, some of their stories or some of the interviews that been done with him, we're not allowed by the ministry of information to run them.
SEAN DORNEY: The censorship is often random. Just recently Fiji's Ministry of Information, which is headed by an Australian, Sharon Smith-Johns, who has never been a journalist, sent out an email to all the Fiji media that they had to send in all their news headlines to the censors at her ministry at least half an hour before those headlines were aired.
The directive said: 'This will enable us to effectively monitor the coverage for each day'. However, somebody must have informed the ministry of the nature of radio and television news and how impractical that would be. So that afternoon there was a second email from Sharon Smith-John's ministry saying "Please ignore previous email ... Any inconvenience caused is regretted".
Sometimes even the Fiji Sun must blush at what it puts in the paper. It quoted Commodore Bainimarama the other day as saying his government had "over the past year embarked on major reforms to empower citizens'".
This has been Sean Dorney for Correspondents Report.
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