Siobhan Keogh
AUCKLAND: The headlines in New Zealand were sensational. Several newspapers called it a “crackdown on media freedom” in Fiji.
News Ltd, a company owned by the biggest media mogul the world has ever seen, was being forced by a Fiji government decree to sell at least 90 percent of the newspaper to locals.
The message was clear – foreign interests were to get out of the Fiji media.
The military-backed government, led by self-appointed Prime Minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who took over with a military coup in December 2006 in response to what he believed were racist policies being pursued by the elected Laisenia Qarase government, had many reasons for imposing its sell-up edict on the Times.
But it was more upfront with some reasons than others.
Why sell?
In June, when the Media Industry Development Decree gave News Ltd (and other foreign interests) three months to find a local buyer or close down, Fiji’s then Secretary for Information said it was necessary because local people better understood what was in the best interests of the country than foreigners.
Pacific affairs academic Professor Crosbie Walsh calls this the “patriotic reason” for the enforced sale, although he says there are several others.
Dr Walsh, retired director of development studies at the University of the South Pacific, believes the Fiji government meant to make the paper more responsive to and supportive of the political situation, and to send the message to other media outlets.
He says the government also intended to exert greater control over the media and to crush the Fiji Times – which has the largest circulation of an English-language newspaper in the Pacific island countries – for being “unsympathetic” and “disrespectful”.
For some time, the fate of the Fiji Times hung in the balance. There was uncertainty over whether local buyers would be interested in the paper at all, but the sale to Fiji businessman Mahendra Motibhai Patel was announced on September 15.
Motibhai, who was for many years on the board of directors for the paper, hired Australian Dallas Swinstead as publisher. Swinstead had previously been publisher at the Fiji Times between 1976 and 1980 and, Dr Walsh says, has a good understanding of Fiji politics.
Siobhan Keogh is a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.
* Read the full article at Pacific Scoop:
http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2010/10/fiji-times-a-newspaper-or-political-activist-new-publisher-pledges-cheerful-criticism/
- Pacific Scoop/Pacific Media Watch
Pacific Media Watch
