Vijay Narayan, Dhanjay Deo and Sarah Vamarasi
SUVA (FijiVillage.com / Pacific Media Watch): Over the past few weeks, comments have been made by some individuals that the Fiji media is practising self-censorship and everything is not being covered although there is no proper survey done on this huge claim.
One of the people who has made these claims is University of the South Pacific’s journalism discipline coordinator, senior lecturer Marc Edge.
He has made comments here and abroad that Fijian journalists are "afraid, uncertain and reluctant" after the lifting of the Public Emergency Regulation (PER).
He also said that they were not asking probing questions and may not know what to do after the lifting of PER.
Fijivillage has questioned Edge what is the basis of his claim.
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When questioned on whether Dr Marc Edge has spoken to all the media outlets and all Fijian journalists, he said that he had spoken to some and our radio station needed to check with the media outlets.
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We also questioned Dr Edge whether he had evidence to prove his claim based on a survey and assessing coverage on a daily basis.
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Senior lecturer Dr Marc Edge refused to answer further questions based on the fact that no recent surveys had been done on the claims being made.
He also said that we were rude and thinks that we are running a newsroom like BBC Hardtalk.
We are currently trying to speak to the media outlets about claims of self censorship.
* Communications Fiji Limited, which runs Legend FM, FM96, Viti FM, Navtarang and Radio Sargam, stressed that there was no self-censorship by its journalists and Dr Edge had never spoken to our journalists about this matter.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Pacific Media Watch
