Up Front

with the Editor

There are, according to Fiji Minis ter without Portfolio, Ratu David Toganivalu, special requirements of the Press in a developing country.

The Press, he submits, is an alien concept in the Pacific Islands, having been developed most often to serve the interests of the traders, the colonisers, the teachers and all the other members of the expatriate population.

Furthermore, the Press in those territories that have been under British rule has continued in the British tradition, just as the Press in the American Pacific territories has followed the American tradition and that in the French territories has followed the French tradition.

Ratu David asks whether there is not now room for a concept of a Press in a Pacific tradition?

It’s a good question, and he asked it in the course of a constructive and well-balanced address to the in augural session of the Pacific Islands News Association in Suva at the end of June. That session was called to get the association started—an as sociation open to newspapers, broad casting organisations and government information offices in the South Pacific Commission area. Its aims are to promote and protect freedom of expression in the Pacific Islands and to foster responsible journalism and professional standards in the Pacific news media.

Taking part in this important get together were editors from Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, Norfolk Island, Tahiti, the Cooks, the Gilbert and Ellice, Micronesia, Australia and New Zealand. I turned out to be the Australian delegate.

The association has got off the ground because of a heck of a lot of work by Jim Richstad, Research Associate at the East West Com munications Institute, Hawaii, and Len Usher, former publisher of The Fiji Times, and because of some immediate cash grants by the Papua

New Guinea Post Courier and The Fiji Times. Widely experienced Ten Usher, appointed by the conference as the organising director, now has the big job of following up the de tails, and as he will certainly do that as competently as he organised the big Suva conference, there is no doubt about the future of the Pacific Islands News Association.

But back to Ratu David and his concept of a Press in a Pacific tradition.

Ratu David sees this tradition as revolving round a concerted effort by governments and the Press in the Islands to examine, together, those areas where national interest can take priority over sectional interests.

In Fiji, for example, the minister sees Press responsibility—and he’s referring to Press in the broadcast sense, to include radio—as the need to heighten awareness of modern methods of farming and land use, as the need to generate enthusiasm for self-help schemes and rural develop ment, to inform people who may not be aware of the importance of financial management, of such things as birth control, and education. The Press has the responsibility of ex plaining the complexities of political processes, of inflation and the balance of payments.

It has, in a sentence, he feels, the responsibility to help in the creation of a sense of national unity and pur pose, and it must keep in mind that when it criticises, its criticism will be read by people who might react in a different way from the newspaper readers of Sydney or Auckland.

As one way of achieving some of these objectives, the Fiji minister would personally like to see an ex tension of the sort of combined operation seen in wartime Britain, with the government and editors get ting together for off-the-record exchanges about national problems and aims.

Ratu David Toganivalu is an en lightened cabinet minister with a

good working relationship with the Press. One could say that his concept is one that should ideally be shared by the Press everywhere and no< merely in the Pacific Islands. But i is particularly applicable to the Islands, for anybody with any ex perience of these emergent nations knows that what might, in the Western tradition, be a bright waji of treating events and utterances; might be viewed there in quite r different light.

A different approach is required, and I should think will certainly be developed, as indigenous journalists take control of their own newspapers and radio and produce the kind of Press they think best suited to their needs.

But there are, I believe, dangers in government and Press working too closely together if this means the Press gives up some of its independence.

About two years ago in these notes I said that with the emergence of self-government and independence in Papua New Guinea the Press there could expect new pressures from the bureaucrats—a new kind of intoler ance. more dangerous to the Press freedom because it will have as its base a nationalistic fervour with the dedication almost of a religious cru sade.

That is, the belief by newly emergent governments in newly emergent nations that they have a divine right to be excused from pub lic criticism because they are trying so hard to govern in the best interests of the people. They have a belief that the Press cannot be both friend and critic in developing countries where, allegedly, democracy is so fragile.

Democracy so fragile that it can not stand the light is of course not democracy at all. Freedom of speech is a basic freedom in the Pacific Islands as anywhere else, and any attempt to restrict it, using the argu ment that the Islands are “different”, that the Pacific way means suppress ion of public debate, has to be re sisted.

Stuart Inder