OPINION: SYDNEY (Pacific Media Centre Online / Pacific Media Watch): Vijendra Kumar – a long-serving editor of The Fiji Times who left the country 21 years ago disillusioned with its direction – has surged back into the public eye with an optimistic piece on Fiji’s future.
It is noteworthy that the article doesn’t appear in the Times – Fiji’s oldest newspaper - but in its rival, the Fiji Sun, where my Grubsheet is also a columnist.
This is bound to raise eyebrows in media circles.
When Kumar was inducted into the Fiji Media Council’s FAME Awards Hall of Fame four years ago, the then Fiji Times publisher, Rex Gardner, spoke of the “reverence” in which he was held at the paper. Yet his sober endorsement of the course that Frank Bainimarama has set for Fiji now sits much more comfortably in the opinion pages of the Fiji Sun, which broadly supports the government’s reform agenda.
The Times, by contrast, has long been the "Eeyore" of the Fiji media. Like the famous donkey in AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, it seems chronically unable to see a silver lining in any cloud, let alone a brighter horizon. It seems locked in a mindset that whatever the failings of the Qarase government, the 2006 coup was “illegal” and turning back the clock is the only proper attitude for any right-thinking Fijian to take.
That stance may be understandable when one proprietor – Rupert Murdoch – is forced out of Fiji and his successor – “Mac” Patel – serves time in jail for corruption.
Yet when a “revered” former editor expresses an opposing view – and argues it so cogently – let’s hope that every Fiji Times journalist sets aside time to read it.
Read the full article here: http://www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/articles/journalistic-legend-returns-fiji-newsprint-rival-daily
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Graham Davis
