National editorial - Boost foreign news coverage
Title -- 5382 PNG: National editorial - Boost foreign news coverage
Date -- 18 March 2008
Byline -- None
Origin -- Pacific Media Watch
Source -- The National (PNG) 18/03/08
Copyright - The National
Status -- Unabridged
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The National editorial:
BOOST FOREIGN NEWS COVERAGE
www.thenational.com.pg/031808/lead_editorial.htm
PORT MORESBY (The National Online/Pacific Media Watch): We don’t often have reason to praise the Australian media or its representatives in today’s Papua New Guinea; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and their long-serving correspondent Sean Dorney are exceptions.
The role of the ABC in establishing credible news coverage in our country is now a matter of history; first to have a residential presence here, the ensuing years have shown their coverage remains the best.
Not that their hard-pressed resident journalists have not had to fight the ABC hierarchy every inch of the way; Mr Dorney when ABC representative in PNG, provided one of the best examples.
Aunty ABC has always had one eye on quality and the other on the balance sheet and in pursuing the latter, she has committed multiple global sins.
But the PNG correspondents have battled on through official cynicism, apathy and outright hostility; Mr Dorney’s successors have joined him flying an often-tattered Aussie flag and the corporation today remains the most reliable overseas funded source of in-depth news coverage in our country.
Last Wednesday night the veteran PNG correspondent, whose backyard is now the South Pacific, gave another of his charismatic addresses to a Holiday Inn audience as part of Australia Week.
In the manner of such long-standing correspondents, he made no attempt to hide his disgust with Australian media managements that have almost totally withdrawn from PNG.
Quick to acknowledge the continuing Port Moresby-based presence of the ABC and of the long-standing wire service Australian Associated Press (AAP), Mr Dorney noted that no Australian media correspondents have been based in PNG since the late 1980s.
In the sixties of the past century, we can recall legendary journalists such as Gus Smales from the Melbourne Herald and a series of correspondents for The Sydney Morning Herald.
He made reference to another celebrated resident journalist active in the region, Mary-Louise O’Callaghan, winner of Australia’s highest journalistic award, the Gold Walkley, for her outstanding coverage of the Sandline affair in her book, Enemies Within. The gifted journalist and The Australian that employed her as Pacific correspondent parted company soon afterwards.
The media coverage of the region remains the poorer for another silenced voice.
We agree wholeheartedly with Mr Dorney that the helicopter journalism practised by the bulk of the Australian media is completely unacceptable, and as he says, indicative of that country’s abdication of its self-declared role as a watchdog over Pacific affairs.
We acknowledge that technology has come a long way since the flying boats drenched pedestrians in Cuthbertson St, Port Moresby, and the ABC correspondent occupied a two bedroom house perched on a precipitous hill above Airvos Avenue downtown.
Yes, there are significant costs involved in establishing resident journalists in our capital but there are even higher costs in funding Australian media correspondents in Asia, the Americasand Europe.
Young Australian journalists and their grizzled managements appear to have little knowledge and less interest in the Pacific; many seem to find the intricacies of our way of life beyond their limited comprehension and therefore, dismiss it, taking the easiest way out.
We suggest that the Australian media coverage of events in this country, in Fiji and in the other island states of our region is too often superficial, inaccurate and an insult to our governments and peoples.
As Mr Dorney noted, many Australian journalists and media managements acknowledge the differences between their own culture and ours; they know the differences exist but find the greatest difficulty in understanding what they are.
Not so many days ago, when giving the new Australian PM a cordial welcome to our country, we noted that any return to the combination of ignorance and arrogance that too often distinguished the Howard administration – and muddied its often positive attempts to assist PNG – would collapse the new PNG-Australian rapprochement like a house of cards in a sharp wind.
That’s where resident overseas media representatives still have a role in PNG.
By exposure to the workings of our country with both its virtues and faults and through an understanding of our diverse peoples, the Oz media could help steady the new and tenuous relationship between our country and its southern neighbour.
PACIFIC MEDIA WATCH is an independent, non-profit, non-government organisation comprising journalists, lawyers, editors and other media workers, dedicated to examining issues of ethics, accountability, censorship, media freedom and media ownership in the Pacific region. It is now published by the Pacific Media Centre at New Zealand's AUT University. Launched in October 1996, it has links with the Journalism Programme at the University of the South Pacific, Journalism Studies at the University of PNG (UPNG) and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ), Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. The website is hosted by the Association of Progressive Communications (APC).
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