REGION: Fiji journalist condemns PINA radio ‘media revisionism’

AUCKLAND (Pacific Media Watch): An award-winning Fiji-born investigative journalist has attacked a Radio Australia news item about last month’s PINA Pacific Media Summit in Fiji, describing it as the “biggest crack at revisionism in recent Pacific media history”.

Australian-based Graham Davis, who publishes the independent blog Grubsheet (www.grubsheet.com.au), challenged RA’s Pacific Beat reporter Bruce Hill and the University of the South Pacific head of journalism, Dr Marc Edge, a Canadian, over their version of events given a month after the event.

Davis and other commentators had earlier described the summit – controversially held in Fiji in spite of the military-backed regime’s pressure on news media - as “peaceful” and a contrast with past stormy Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) conventions, especially the last one in Port Vila, Vanuatu, in 2009.

But in the RA interview with Bruce Hill broadcast on Thursday, Dr Edge said PINA managed to “keep a lid on discussion on all the dissension” at the week-long conference at Pacific Harbour on Fiji’s Coral Coast.

PINA managed to do this because “many of the dissenters were not there, and those who were dissenters were either trying to act as conciliators or were not able to make their voices heard”, he said.

Dr Edge also condemned the PINA organisers for not giving enough attention to media freedom and giving donors too much influence on the programme for allowing “topics which were largely propaganda; things like non-communicable diseases” to dominate the agenda.

Davis criticised both Dr Edge and interviewer Bruce Hill for their version of events in his blog yesterday. The column was also published today in the Fiji Sun.

“Our recollections of what took place are so vastly at odds that I wonder if we were on the same planet, let alone at the same venue in the same country,” Davis wrote.

“I’d cast it – based on comments by eminent Pacific journalists, such as the Tongan publisher Kalafi Moala – as peace returning to the regional media after a period of tumult over how to respond to Frank Bainimarama’s 2006 Fiji coup.”

'Increasingly exasperated'
Davis wrote that reporter Hill had “seemed to become increasingly exasperated that the PINA gathering was so, well pacific.”

“All week, we’d heard dire predictions of the Fiji summit ending in conflict.  It was all going to happen in the final session on the final day.

“Where were these predictions coming from? Well, strangely enough, from precisely the same Radio Australia reporter – Bruce Hill – who has now given Marc Edge the biggest crack at revisionism in recent Pacific media history.”

Davis wrote that Hill complained at one point on air that it was “like attending a vicar’s tea party”.

“How frustrating when you’ve come all the way from Melbourne and the stoush you’ve promised your listeners - and your editors to justify all the expense – simply doesn’t materialise.”