Cultural media identity - the ‘journey of the mind’

OPINION: There are many reasons why conferences are great events to attend. They provide a platform to present your work and debate issues among your peers; they are also good for networking with others and building contacts.

At a personal level, they help you to voice your concerns and dilemmas to seek answers that keep eluding you again and again.  

For Canadian Ken Clark, it was the question of being “one of them” as he voiced his thoughts at the Media and Democracy Symposium held at the University of South Pacific, Fiji, earlier this month.

He was imploring other participants to help him understand during one of the Q and A sessions. “How many miles do I have to travel before I stop becoming a Westerner and become one of them?”

Clark has been living in Fiji for much of the last 13 years. He has worked in the television industry for several decades beginning in Canada, and then TV3 in New Zealand, before joining Fiji TV as chief executive in 1999. He is vice-president of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and a former president of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA).

Currently he is broadcast consultant for Bradford Enterprises Ltd.

Familiar scenario
As broadcast executive, Clark is all too familiar with the socio-political scenario in Fiji. But he still feels that he is seen as a “Westerner” -  an outsider and not as “one-of-them”. Of course, nobody had an answer.

Some thought it was something that remained with you always. Perhaps the differences in our physical appearance are stronger than the similarities of our experiences.

But perhaps it should be looked at from the other side. Perhaps, it is not the “journey of the miles” but the “journey of the mind”. Perhaps, the distance lies not on the minds of the locals but in the minds of the journalists.
 
Mostly, foreign journalists enter a new and troubled country with a pre-set mind that already has the division of “me vs them”. They are there to tell the world how the local communities are falling short of the “Westernised” ideals of democracy, human rights, tolerance.

Or they are, like Dr Marc Edge, head of the journalism school at USP, working to “raise the standards to an international level”. They may sympathise or even empathise with the locals but always from a distance - they never connect, never become one with them.  

In order to be accepted by the people, one needs to belong to them. In turn they are owned by people.

One example is Professor David Robie, a Kiwi journalist-turned-academic, who is professor in the School of Communication Studies at AUT University and director of the Pacific Media Centre. He has been referred to by many Pacific Islanders as being “one of us”.

Understanding complexities
Not only because he understands the complexities of socio-political context of the Pacific countries, but because of the way has he identified himself with their people. 

Many of the participants at the Media and Democracy Symposium saw him leap forward to defend the calibre and efforts of the students and staff of USP journalism school, when Dr Edge said he had come to the USP to “increase the standard of journalism not just in Fiji but across the Pacific”.

Dr Robie argued that the journalism schools at USP and at the University of Papua New Guinea had achieved a lot on the international stage, particularly with USP’s success with their award-winning newspaper Wansolwara.

“At that stage, in the mid-1990s, no New Zealand journalism course had a regular newspaper. We [at AUT University] do have today Te Waha Nui, which I and a colleague started after joining USP, on the basis of the experience at USP.

“So I think it is hats off to USP - and UPNG in the past - and so on. Wansolwara has received quite a lot of awards. This paper (he said, showing a copy of Te Waha Nui) has also been an award-winning paper, but it hasn’t won nearly as many awards as Wansolwara.”

Former Fiji journalist and media educator, Shailendra Singh, hit the nail on head as he reminded Dr Edge that there had been great achievements in the past.

'Not Year Zero'
“It is not Year Zero, and you need to understand the local context ... If you come with the wrong attitude you put a lot of people off, and then it’s a very bad start.”

Another example is that of Mark Tully, BBC correspondent in India for almost five decades, who became the "voice of India" for the people. 

Rome Tempest, a reporter of the Los Angeles Times, who worked in India for 20 years and teaches courses on foreign corresponding at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his article “Being Mark Tully” how Tully had become the most trusted voice for the local people. 
    
“In their minds, Tully was the one omniscient foreign witness to all the events affecting one-fifth of the world’s population. In crowds, most of us in the foreign press corps quickly gave up trying to explain our own names and affiliations. All that was necessary was to quickly assess whether “Being Mark Tully” would get us through the next checkpoint or flaming roadblock. Since Tully was immensely popular, it was usually easier to go with the flow.

“I remember one mid-80s trip to Darjeeling, the tea plantation region in India’s upper Bengal State that was then under siege by Nepalese insurgents. While traveling with some American and French colleagues, my vehicle was stopped by some knife-wielding rebels.

“Once they determined we were from the Mark Tully tribe of foreign correspondents, their deadly kukri knives were sheathed, replaced by broad smiles and promises of safe passage.

“A similar encounter with Tamil Tiger gunmen in Sri Lanka had the same result for a British colleague and me.

“BBC. Mark Tully!” we said to our putative captors, pointing to our short-wave radio set. Release followed immediately, with apologies. And they didn’t even take our radio!” (Global Journalist, 2002).

At this point, Ken Clark is right to point out that his work has not gone unacknowledged. The government of Fiji has appointed him an Officer of the Order of Fiji and a press release issued by the prime minister’s office acknowledges “his immense contribution to the development of Fiji Television Limited and the television industry in both Fiji and the Pacific”. 

At a time, when the Fiji media has been subjected to the government’s Public Emergency Regulation and Media Decree, is it really surprising?  

This is by no means a criticism on any foreign journalist; rather it is a reflection on the role of journalists who venture into the far-lands in times of stress and struggle.

Often the people and the governments are put on the same side of the scale. Foreign journalists need to be cautious about the sensitivities and loyalties of the local people and their culture, their relationship with the government, and their perceptions of and in the Western world.

And in order to do that, journalists first need to destroy the barriers in their own minds.

Disclosure: Professor David Robie is one of Rukhsana Aslam's doctoral supervisors but had no role in this article. This is the personal view of the author.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.