Informing citizens, Oz way
1 May 2007 Comment: originally published by Pacific Media Centre
by Jason Brown, editor, Avaiki Nius
Report review: Informing Citizens: Opportunities for Media and Communications in the Pacific
5 fab bits
5. Slice-of-life struggles of pacific islands media, including quotes.
4. Academic research into media challenges and commonalities - a first.
3. Country reports assessing needs in 364 interviews from 14 Forum members.
2. Strong commentary on public broadcasting.
1. Regional action plan.
5 sad bits
5. University research standards venture to far frontiers of postcolonialism.
4. Lack of transparency and accountability from "communications" facility.
3. Logic gap in asking why 'small countries can't solve small problems'.
2. Barely half a dozen updates in three years.
1. No big picture.
* small resources, possibly?
"Informing citizens" is the concept behind a 400 page plus page report funded by taxpayers of Australia aimed at creating a "confident and well informed" news media across the region.
Released in late 2005, the report is praised even by critics of Australian foreign policy as an honest attempt at providing some solid base data for what is a widely scattered, mostly unconfident and ill informed industry.
Regardless of merits, some journalists will be alarmed that the report was coordinated and written in something akin to a report farm, cloning, growing, and fine tuning surveys, under companies owned by the family of the late media mogul, Kerry Packer.
GRM International is worth about half a billion in taxpayer dollars a year.
Unlike the better known Rupert Murdoch, an American convert, Packer died an Australian, his family press business leveraging news media titles into multimedia multinational conglomerates with fingers in multitudes of pies.
Against such a backdrop, PMCF, the $3 million Pacific Media and Communication Facility, is at best whipped cream on the side of some very fat aid contracts or, more accurately, chocolate sprinkle.
Awareness is correspondingly low.
As close as can be found to a reference to Pacific Islands media in Australia is the chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade asking - “wasn’t there a Pacific media initiative or a similarly-termed concept operating a few years ago? I wondered what its status was now, particularly reflecting on your observations about engaging with media?”
First Australian regional media project
PMI, the Pacific Media Initiative was the first Australian project aimed at the regional media, with PMCF being mark II, starting in 2004 and ending this year.
Created as an umbrella for the first comprehensive survey of regional media across 14 country members of the Pacific Island Forum, the PMCF facility is a partnership with facility partners, AusAID, and MRI, the Melbourne Research Institute, a "wholly owned subsidiary" of GRM International, part of a group of Packer companies that won contracts for half a billion or more in Australian aid money by the middle of 2006.
Aid Watch, by comparison, is a small NGO with a “backbone” of volunteers who raise questions about Australian aid programmes, criticising apparent inconsistencies and inefficiencies.
Daily commentaries may not result in immediately better aid performance, even if long term pressure does result in policy reform. Australia recently announced untying of aid, a major departure from an official policy of favouring Aussie contractors.
Too late for PMCF, the Pacific Media and Communication Facility. The facility does not exist in bricks or mortar, or even have its own street address, being an umbrella idea that started off from a Melbourne university. Staff used academic emails and a website link to initiate contact with country researchers, including this writer.
As the facility evolved into its current entity, more than 350 interviewees responded to an academically drafted questionnaire across 14 Pacific Island countries, the largest sampling ever taken of regional media.
No input was sought from organisations like Aid Watch, raising questions about critical analysis from outside academic and political machinery tied to decades of Australian aid.
Instead, profit maximisation at GRM International, parent of the academic-sounding but limited liability Melbourne Research Institute. For example, country researchers were sent one printed copy of the report, rather than the 10 promised in a covering letter, some months after the official launch date, itself delayed. There were also 10 copies of the report on CD, some of the CDs crisply stamped, others looking like they came from a home office CD labeller.
Low spending on in-country research
Possibly more compelling, researchers were paid $2500 per country, including expenses, meaning one percent of total facility funding was spent on in-country research.
Not an especially impressive amount, nor did the questionnaire reflect small island realities, asking how many paid information officers each NGO employs – and what kind of qualifications they had!
Strong demand from island NGOs for salary funding from aid donors led to one of few comments from the PMCF staffers – questioning why tiny media companies cannot coordinate themselves in small countries, and whether salaries would make any difference.
Certainly in the past many aid dollars have been thrown down a seemingly bottomless pit of central budgeting. But equating small with easy betrays a major logic flaw based on big-country blind spots. Yes, Pacific Islands are small with small, closely proximate organisations. But, no, issues facing these time, money, staff and resource poor organisations are not any less complex than those handled by much bigger, better funded efforts.
Most illogically of all, PMCF staff seemed also to ignore the fact that smaller countries with small numbers of information workers have access to far fewer humans than bigger countries – Australia for example.
Nearing the end of the second multimillion dollar media project to be funded by Australia, Pacific Islands media remain beyond crisis.
Regional cooperation is nonexistent and national media associations remain in disarray, splintered by industry conflict.
Big picture context missing
Missing from the PMCF survey is any big picture context or blue sky mining.
No mention of the fact that New Zealand and Australia have to triple their aid spend by an OECD target date of 2015, meaning a billion or so more needing to find a home.
Or the fact that information is a last order priority across the region, when globalisation demands that it become a first order priority – possibly an area where resources and demand make a neat fit.
Island radio stations could previously be picked up on the other side of our world. Now some are lucky to be heard in their own country. Managers literally dial down transmitter strength to save power costs, under free market corporate models.
In the Cook Islands, a satellite network of FM earth stations have only just restored radio links with the distant northern group atolls, after a decade's near total absence. AM remains neglected despite cyclones cleaning buildings to their allegedly hurricane-proof cement floors.
Such are the realities reflected in the Informing Citizens report.
All the usual culprits of isolation, small market size and lack of capacity are ably identified, but, as usual, few of the latent strengths in community, national, regional and international linkages.
Discussion is almost entirely absent when it comes the explosive web 2.0 sector involving online tools ideal for remote communities. To this day, the PMCF fails to feature a single weblog – or blog.
An ugly sounding word, for sure, but who really felt comfortable saying "fax" when the facsimile first came out?
Weblogs nothing new
Your IT geeks are right when they say weblogs are nothing new. Technically at least.
Viewed from a news-media-governance-information perspective, however, blogs and other social networking tools (think hotmail if you're old school, flickr if you all up with that) are the new Gutenberg: an utter flood of new information, some biblical, a lot not.
Such tangents need urgent exploring at regional and national levels, like, yesterday. However the two regional bodies, PMCF, and PINA, the much loved and loathed Pacific Islands News Association, are masters if anything of the minimalist art of understatement.
PMCF has issued maybe half a dozen updates in three years, while the PINA website has not been updated since 2005. An online forum seems to be haven for more than 3000 spammers, unvisited even by the PINA moderator.
Requests for annual accounts and recommendations from previous conventions, for updating and review, have been met with apologies but not much else by successive executives. Email inquiries to the micro-management unit of one at PINA usually go unanswered except for pleasant courtesies.
Against this derisory backdrop, public service managers across the region, as they say, scrabble for funding, training and equipment. Some groan inwardly every time a reporter offends an advertiser, aid donor or government official - nearly every day in other words.
As an industry snapshot, Informing Citizens remains a significant contribution to media development in the region, one that aid critics acknowledge as a valuable resource.
There is no limit of insights to be gained from even casual study of the report. Authors and advisors leverage insights into “commonalities” between nations - what they see as the issues - what some solutions might be - and plans of action.
Zero feedback generated
All well and mostly good. In more developed regions, release of such a report would have welcomed industry feedback, no doubt generated some controversy and generally fed into forward impetus.
So far, however, the PMCF SANA has generated zero feedback, either from the industry, or the region, other than one or two random comments.
Any other commentary has been kept strictly under wraps. Updates from the PMCF have been maybe half a dozen since the report was released in late 2005 - the latest slipped onto the facility website without announcement - not emailed as a Word document like earlier newsletters.
Weblogs are well established now as a means of social networking. The facility does not run one. Or any other means of allowing commentary to increase transparency and accountability, the T&A of the governance world, deemed important by aid powers that be.
Deep problems exist:
The oft-whispered "secrecy" of the facility itself, an allegation wrapped up in cross-sectoral mutterings about the academic nature of PMCF staffers - and their all-Ozzie makeup.
The lack of any big picture painting, much less blue sky mining.
The most fundamental is a commonality among all journalists - an obsession with objectivity as the founding stone of ethical codes of conduct, an ideal that has been achieved only by painting ourselves into a corner.
With deep doubts about money from sponsors and advertisers, some media have gone to the extreme of only accepting donations of limited amounts from private citizens.
Slash-and-burn ethics
Fantastically ethical, but journalistically suicidal.
In achieving ethical perfection, journalists risk cutting themselves off from valuable contact and, yes, compromise with societies they allege to represent. Such seems the experience in the Pacific, where decades of Western training sees highly motivated reporters head home, swords of independence burning bright, proceeding to slash and burn their way through sleepy communities, alarming not just ruling elites but profit-starved media managers as well.
Is it just the Pacific, though?
All around the globe, journalists are in retreat. In record numbers, journalists are being killed, wounded, kidnapped, tortured, raped, jailed, beaten, sacked, exiled, threatened, isolated and starved of even the basics of reporting.
Survivors and media stars alike keep their heads down in less conflicted zones, hoping to avoid whatever restructuring their corporate lords decide is in fashion next.
Maybe it's just a population thing. Our global headcount now stands at six and a half billion. More people means more journalists suffer, like anyone else.
Whatever. Objectivity and her gorgeous twin sister impartiality should be admired, pursued even, but not stalked.
Especially not stalked ineffectively. Of late, journalists look less alarming than a fading ram, watching on in frustration as loud bleating signals the latest departure of shaggy lambs to corporate slaughter.
In the three decades since Watergate, journalism has been in constant retreat, to the point where a beacon of fairness and impartiality, the BBC, suffers through a minister-of-the-day announcing a new focus on "entertainment" soon after news reporters exposed high-level corruption far worse than anything Nixon imagined.
Lack of Pacific uptake
It is a mark of just how far journalism has been hobbled when the most effective piece of reporting on the insanity in Iraq comes from a right-wing Vietnam veteran who blogged on military.com about tons of new one hundred bills disappearing without trace.
The authors of Informing Citizens talk about lack of uptake by Pacific Islands media when it comes to creating and maintaining professional organisations but reject island requests for aid funded salaries.
It is a matter of logic to note that if a country is “small” then it will only have a “small number” of people it can draw from. Where there might be 20 million in Australia, for example, Kiribati has only 60,000 people.
So a much smaller pool of talent to draw from.
Talented, trained people are generally in high demand on small islands. They generally have limited time and energy for volunteer efforts, which is why small countries frequently suffer from a lack of coordination between and within NGOs.
In fact, in the size-does-matter stakes, it can be argued the opposite applies – that smaller populations face challenges as complex as big counties – ethics for example – but have far, far fewer people to deal with them.
Size may matter, but it’s also how you use what you got.
New Zealand media union officials recently declared the industry in “crisis” after the latest round of journalistic sackings – and Australian media have complained for years about cutbacks.
LINKS:
Pacific Media and Communication Facility
(site now dead)
Jason Brown: Behind the Pacific media freedom award controversy
Let's start with a free market of ideas
PINA website on, but nobody home
Informing Citizens report (2.5 mb pdf file) can be found in the PIJO group
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