SUVA (The Fiji Times / Pacific Media Watch): People's Democratic Party leader Felix Anthony has called for media freedom in Fiji ahead of the elections in September.
Anthony told The Fiji Times newspaper that the media was being made to "balance" stories about his party with responses from the government, while pro-government stories were not always balanced out with comment from the opposition.
"I have always maintained that we should have a free media and there should be no restrictions on the media by the government to say that you can't report anything that we can't respond to," he said.
The media had failed to cover many of his party's press releases, he said, implying that journalists were self-censoring.
Meanwhile, Fiji Media Watch celebrated its 20th birthday recently by calling for more media education for students.
The Fiji Times reported communications specialist and chief guest at the celebration, Mary Rokonadravu, as calling for more media education to help young people "to be able to navigate the media to glean truth".
"We have done next to nothing to build into ourselves the skills for analysis of information and the approaches used to influence our thinking and behaviour," Rokonadravu said.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Pacific Media Watch
