It has been a year since the violent end of the illegal occupation at Parliament in Aotearoa New Zealand. If you thought you had seen it all at the time, you should think again.
Boiling Point, a new documentary from RNZ, includes previously unseen footage of clashes at Parliament on 2 March 2022, when police broke up an illegal occupation of the area.
It is the first feature broadcast to provide a straightforward account of the final day of one of Aotearoa’s most infamous protests.
The documentary, produced and presented by RNZ Morning Report host Corin Dann, was released today.
Previously unseen footage gives fresh insight into the rage that overtook some people. And eyewitness accounts take us back to the chaos, confusion and shock of it all.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The three local female researchers who were kidnapped with Australia-based New Zealand professor Bryce Barker are being kept in a safe house and banned from speaking to news media.
According to their families, the women were being kept in an undisclosed location for their safety with their mobile phones taken away from them by authorities.
The family also told The National that they had also been restricted from talking to the media as well.
The online photo from Prime Minister James Marape’s Facebook post . . . Professor Bryce Barker and another released hostage. Image: PM James Marape FB
The female researchers were doing field work with Professor Barker researching the history of human migration to Australia in a remote part of Mt Bosavi, Southern Highlands, when they were kidnapped on February 19 and held hostage for seven days.
Their captors were reported to have sought a K3.5 million (NZ$1.6 million) ransom.
One of the women was released on Thursday while the other two were released with Professor Bryce on Sunday afternoon after K100,000 (NZ$46,000) had been paid.
Made available by third parties
However, Internal Security Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr clarified that the money was made available by third parties to assist with intelligence gathering and to support the negotiators, who secured the release of the hostages.
“In the course of these briefings, it was agreed that the state could not be the party to negotiate a financial settlement, as it recognised the risk of setting a precedent,” he said.
“It is important that members of the public understand the sensitive nature of what occurred in what was an act of terrorism and that the government was not directly involved with the negotiations.
“Negotiations were deliberately undertaken by third parties, through an agreed operational strategy, so as to not compromise the state’s position on law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, 16 of the kidnappers have been identified and their pictures have been provided to police.
Marape said that phase one of the process was completed and a combined PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) and police investigations would continue.
‘No stone left unturned’
“No stone will be left unturned, all those involved will be arrested and charged accordingly and will face the full force of the law,” he said.
Tsiamalili added that security forces would continue to work to bring those involved in the kidnapping case to justice.
“The full weight of the law will be brought to bear on the captors,” he said.
“The actions of the hostage takers were abhorrent, causing significant distress to the captives and their families.
“We will not tolerate those who seek to take the law into their own hands, and all necessary resources will be deployed to ensure that those responsible face the full weight of the law and are held to account.”
Rebecca Kukuis a reporter with The National. Republished with permission.
I just got back from the Lincoln County courthouse. Supporting a victim of BWS, battered wife syndrome, also called domestic abuse, spousal abuse. The punk was arrested Nov. 12, 2022, and he is still in county jail, on $750K bail.
All cases of women who are in a relationship — my friend was in this abusive marriage almost 5 years — who return to the abuser (in his case, verbally and economically abusive, to the point of triple woman hating and keeping bank accounts in his name, including keeping the vehicles and house in his name) are different on many nuanced levels, but they all have that case of Stockholm Syndrome, that case of once being full of chutzpah, but something inside them has caused them to not see the destruction of a killing inside their boyfriend or husband.
The case is meandering in the judicial system. The public defender (my money, tax payers’ money) can get extensions on this case. More discovery. The grand jury indicted the guy three days after the attempted suffocation and other charges. He’s not out, and the DA forwarded a 5 year prison plea (down from a lot more time if convicted by 12 member of a jury and the book thrown at him). However, this guy is such a narcissist and know-it-all, he is probably conjuring up all sorts of machinations.
In the end, the victim, my friend, is in hyper-vigilance even though both of them have no family or friends or any roots at all in Oregon. He’s in jail, and while his mother hired a private investigator to go fishing for character witness statements, the bottom line is what happened Nov. 12 is on the criminal justice record.
Yet, today, more crap, more bogged down systems. Over 26 cases heard by one judge from 9 to 11 am. Many have been given extensions for more time to have paperwork and evidence forwarded. It is a bogged down system of judicial inertia and lawyer lagging.
She’s divorcing him, so that is a separate case, again, heard today, but forwaded on for more extension, and because this guy is in jail, things get slowed down.
She got a restraining order approved with a measley $1000 payment to keep the hous in order, but the previous judge failed to initial that section of the Protection Order, and so she is back filing another one. He did not contest the first one, but now he is contesting this exact same one, under the orders of his mother, or someone. The judge warned that if he gave any statements in this protective order that it could have some bearing on his criminal case.
That’s messed up, this judge giving this fellow legal advice. Told him to plea the Fifth.
So, here we have a divorce, civil protection order and criminal trial.
She’s got her green card, and she finally has a counselor working with her on domestic violence with C-PTSD as the main issue. Her father from Canada visited and so too did her sister. For years my friend did not tell them about the full extent of this guy’s abuse.
I know the judicial system, but each new year, the system gets further bogged down, and the public defenders as a group are in crisis — not enough money made and absolute triple the caseload which should be allowed.
Broken broken broken. Remember Ross Perot, and NAFTA and that famous (among other things) statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two-way street, it would create a “ giant sucking sound ” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico?
Think of Capitalism as that broken broken broken sound. As in broken down to our bones broken by over policing, over taxing, over burdened, over worked, and under represented to include that tearing sound of social services safety nets frayed and almost immolated. Broken!
So here we are, no, with May 3 set for a settlement conference? This is something initiated some 26 years ago, since the court systems are broken and clogged, so now, this guy did not accept the plea, and so the judge stated that she will schedule the criminal case for trial, but a settlement conference is possible, so the ADA and the PD agreed to meet. The courtroom would be a neutral one (sic) and a judge would hear the strengths and weaknesses in both the prosecution’s and the defense’s cases. The defendent would be there in orange jumpsuit and shackles, and my friend would be there too.
A bargaining game, a sort of please settle (plea dice throwing) theater between the DA’s office and his Public Defender. Imagine that. All this time, all the time deputies came out, served a warrant on him, all the jail paperwork, the court paperwork, all the money paid for judges, clerks, ADAs, support staff, all the cops and all the infrastructure keeping this dance going.
Very hard indeed for someone, my friend, who is getting counseling now, after having one counselor who just stopped answering phone calls (that’s medical abandonment, but that’s a civil matter, yet another labyrith to course through).
Healing is a singularly tough thing in Capitalism when money buys power, representation, creates all the bells and whistles, etc., for the rich.
Ahh, broken criminal justice system 101.
Here, from Cindy Sheehan, an example of the criminal injustice system and the medical injustice system killing an elderly woman who was having a stroke. This is what needs defending, this broken, corrupt, polluted society? If you do not hate the thought of Zelensky in yet another photo op, yet more trillions to that country, then you are subhuman, like the Ukrainian leadership and Nazified military. Here, read this an weep:
I really don’t have too many words for this horrid event.
This poor lady apparently had a stroke and broke her ankle, and she was asked to leave the hospital, but she couldn’t.
So, what happened then? The compassionate (Nazis) workers at the hospital took pity and decided to treat her? Nope, they called the gestapo, I mean police, and she died in their custody.
Wait, I do have words—-remember during the past three years when we, the ones who rejected the Devil Juice, or rejected the dirty face nappies—were told that we were going to “kill Meemaw,” even if we were those Meemaws?
Remember when we were told that we could not go see our loved ones in hospital, or nursing facilities, so they had to die alone to prevent us from killing them? Or, grandparents and grandchildren were separated, not by miles, but by government diktat?
We live in Garbage Land where the Garbage People’s hospitals don’t heal, they kill, and where law enforcement doesn’t protect us, it protects the killers!
Don’t go to the hospital? We know that thousands of people were killed by stasi-protocol during the “pandemic” and counted as Covid deaths.
What if we lived somewhere other than Garbage Land and this poor woman could have been the one to call law enforcement and they would have come to help her and force the ER to treat her? Fuck.
I am distraught over this, but how many times does something like this happen off-camera? (Sheehan)
Oh heck, I can end this short diatribe with the end of the English Major. Sure, I got a couple of those degrees. Sure, not all in these humanities departments are stalwarts, but compared to STEM folk, who will do any Eichmann thing to make bucks, to have job stability, to keep in the slipstream of the American Dream, they are not bad. Drugs, chemicals, applications, drones, rockets, surveillence tools, missiles, propaganda, all those amazing things that have intended and unintended consequences, so making bank means keeping silent, so STEM are the quiet ones, the scientists and technologists and engineers who for the most part keep their mouths shut — for a price, a Bargain, Faustian Bargain!
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. (source)
“Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? by Nathan Heller
Imagine, forever chemicals in all living things. Science. STEM!
A new analysis finds that more than 330 species of animals across the globe – from polar bears to squirrels – carry in their bodies a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS.
Known as “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down as many others do, the substances have been linked in humans to risks for cancer, low birthweights, weakened childhood immunity, thyroid disease and other health problems.
Research has already shown that 99% of Americans have PFAS in their bodies. But this report released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group shows more than 120 different forever chemicals were found in the blood serum or bodies of birds, tigers, monkeys, pandas, horses, cats, otters and other mammals.
Over 12,000 products have this shit in them. And the diseases? Studies have linked PFOA to kidney and testicular cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments in highly contaminated communities such as Parkersburg, West Virginia. Very low doses of PFAS in drinking water have been linked to immune system suppression including reduced vaccine efficacy and an increased risk of certain cancers, studies have found. PFAS are linked with reproductive and developmental problems as well as increased cholesterol and other health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You will not see some efficient, for-by-with-because of We the People judicial system holding to account these monster companies, again, companies that depend on, well, S.T.E.M. students. The humanities? Well, it is more than “just” English lit majors. In fact, if done right, the entire college and K12 systems would be integrating languages, arts, history, writing, literature, anthropology, and of course music, dance, theater and philosophy and ethics and so much more into an across the curriculum template, but instead, we have this sickness for more more more to keep the engines of capitalism going, a predatory and casino capitalism which is now bio-security, security, surveillance capitalism going. Until we have this disjointed and bizarre religion of science and engineering and technology as some panacea for the crumbling American empire.
Without the “A” in STEAM, all we have are Eichmanns from a different mother. Arts.
And it all comes down to those in STEM who don’t give a shit about discourse, debate, history, knowledge outside their fucking field of intended and unintended dirty consequences. I have said this a hundred times in hundreds of articles, it all comes down, now, to that Freudian slip, that dirty man, Edward Bernays:
It’s not like they even hide their intent. The notorious World Economic Forum has been forthcoming about their plans for the rest of us. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, even wrote a book about it, titled “Covid-19: The Great Reset.”
Within his vision of how society should be engineered going forward, Schwab’s stand on “stakeholder capitalism” sounds altruistic at face value. But what he doesn’t mention is that his vision includes the same group of elites controlling even more aspects of our lives. Envisioning themselves as “trustees of society” they will continue to profit from the results of that expanded control. He recently publicly stated at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:
“What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” explaining how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”
This concept does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling…
These elite decision makers don’t hide their hypocrisy either. When these elite groups meet to discuss (our) future, they often talk about how we (the Masses) need to reduce our carbon footprints. No mention that they arrived to their mountaintop retreat meetings individually, in their own private jets, (no jet-pooling for them!) wasting more resources in one event than the average person ever could or would in their day to day lives..
Like it or not, or believe it or not, social engineering is not new. For those who don’t believe in or understand the concept of social engineering, I suggest watching the 2002 BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” about the life of Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995).
It’s fascinating, enlightening and to be honest, more than just a bit creepy.
Bernays, the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was almost single-handedly responsible for re-purposing the concept of “propaganda” in America into “Pubic Relations.” Sounds much more innocent, doesn’t it?
In his first campaign, he was recruited by President Woodrow Wilson to Wilson’s Committee on Public Information created in 1917. Wilson tasked Bernays with intentionally using propaganda to influence the American population to willingly engage in World War I. (source)
Until we are here, where judges still wear black robes, and where the systems deem us as children, or as sheep. This courtroom was with a judge who treated the people on the other end of the phone line (it gets phoned in now, injustice) like imbeciles or children. Bernays is the monster of the century. That 2002 documentary is rough and out of favor now, but telling.
Students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know what they need to know.
— Gregory Petsko.
STEM will do shit for humanity. Truly. Listen to my interview of Gregory Petsko, “Science and the Arts/Humanities: A Marriage Made in Heaven” — scroll down:
We talked about this essay, “Save university arts from the bean counters” by Gregory Petsko Nature volume 468, page1003 (2010) Scientists must reach across the divide and speak up for campus colleagues in arts and humanities departments, says Gregory Petsko.
Two separate groups of media organizations sent letters to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-California) over the weekend, demanding access to thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, which have so far only been released to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. McCarthy gave Carlson access to more than 44,000 hours of security footage from the January 6…
A Pacific journalism academic has warned proposed amendments to media laws in Papua New Guinea, if “ill-defined”, could mirror the harsh restrictions in Fiji.
Prime Minister James Marape’s government is facing fierce opposition from local and regional journalists for attempting to fasttrack a new media development policy.
The draft law has been described by media freedom advocates as “the thin edge of the web of state control”.
PNG’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Department released the Draft Media Development Policy publicly on February 5. It aims “to outline the objectives and strategies for the use of media as a tool for development”.
The department gave stakeholders less than two weeks to make submissions on the 15-page document, but after a backlash the ICT chief extended the consultation period by another week.
“I recognise the sensitivity and importance of this reform exercise,” ICT Minister Timothy Masiu said after giving in to public criticism and extending the consultation period until February 24.
ICT Minister Timothy Masiu . . . “I recognise the sensitivity and importance of this reform exercise” Photo: PNG govt/RNZ Pacific
Masiu said he instructed the Information Department to “facilitate a workshop in partnership with key stakeholders”, adding that the Information Ministry “supports and encourages open dialogue” on the matter.
“I reaffirm to the public that the government is committed to ensuring that this draft bill will serve its ultimate purpose,” he said.
The new policy includes provisions on regulating the media industry and raising journalism standards in PNG, which has struggled for years due to lack of investment in the sector.
But media leaders in PNG have expressed concerns, noting that while there are areas where government support is needed, the proposed regulation is not the solution.
“The situation in PNG is a bit worrying if you see what happened in Fiji, even though the PNG Information Department has denied any ulterior motives,” University of the South Pacific head of journalism, Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, told RNZ Pacific.
“There are concerns in PNG. Prominent journalists are worried that the proposed act could be the thin edge of the wedge of state media control, as in Fiji,” Dr Singh said, in reaction to Masiu’s guarantee that the policy is for the benefit of media organisations and journalists.
“If you look at the Fiji situation, the Media Act was implemented in the name of democratising the media, ironically, and also improving professional standards.”
Dr Singh said this is what is also being said by the PNG government but “in Fiji the Media Act has been a disaster for media rights”.
USP’s Associate Professor Shailendra Singh . . . “In Fiji the Media Act has been a disaster for media rights.” Image: RNZ Pacific
“Various reports blame the Fiji Media Act for a chilling effect on journalism and they also hold the Act responsible for instilling self-censorship in the Fiji media sector,” he said.
“If the PNG media policy provisions are ill-defined, as the Fiji Media Act was, and if it has harsh punitive measures, it could also result in a chilling effect on journalism and this in turn could have major implications for democracy and freedom of speech in PNG.”
The Media Industry Development Act (MIDA) 2010 and its implementation meant that Fiji was ranked 102nd out of 180 countries by Reporters without Borders in 2022.
Earlier this month Fiji’s Attorney-General Siromi Turaga publicly apologised to journalists for the harassment and abuse they endured during the Bainimarama government’s reign.
But Dr Singh said PNG appeared to have been “emboldened” by the Fijian experience.
Media freedom a Pacific-wide issue He said other Pacific leaders had also threatened to introduce similar legislation and “this is a major concern”.
“Fiji and PNG are the two biggest countries in the Pacific [which] often set trends in the region, for better or for worse. The question that comes to mind is whether countries like Solomon Islands or Vanuatu will follow suit? [Because] over the years and even recently, the leaders of these two countries have also threatened the news media.”
A major study co-authored by the USP academic, which surveyed more than 200 journalists in nine countries and was published in Pacific Journalism Review in 2021, revealed that “Pacific journalists are among the youngest, most inexperienced and least qualified in the world”.
Dr Singh warned the research showed that legislation alone would not result in any significant improvements to journalism standards in Pacific countries, which is why committing money in training and development was crucial.
“Training and development are an important component of the Fiji Media Act. However, our analysis found zero dollars was invested by the Fiji government in training and development,” he said.
“If we are to take any lessons from Fiji, and if the PNG government is serious about standards, it needs to invest at least some of its own money in this venture of improving journalism.”
This is a sentiment shared by Media Council of PNG president, Neville Choi, who said: “If the concern is poor journalism, then the solution is more investment in schools of journalism at tertiary institutions, this will also improve diversity and pluralism in the quality of journalism.
“We need newsrooms with access to training in media ethics and legal protection from harassment,” Choi added.
Dr Singh said that without proper financial backing in the media sector “there is unlikely to be any improvement in standards, [but] just a cowered down or subdued media [which] is not in PNG’s public interest, or the national interest, given the levels of corruption in the country.”
APMN calls for ‘urgent rethink’
The publisher of the Pacific Journalism Review, the Asia Pacific Media Network, has also condemned the move, calling for an “urgent rethink” of the draft media policy.
The group is proposing for the communications ministry to “immediately discard the proposed policy of legislating the PNG Media Council and regulating journalists and media which would seriously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea”.
The network also cited the 1999 Melanesian Media Declaration as a guideline for Pacific media councils and said the draft PNG policy was ignoring “established norms” for media freedom.
The statement was co-signed by the APMN chair Dr Heather Devere; deputy chair Dr David Robie, a retired professor of Pacific journalism and author, and founding director of the Pacific Media Centre; and Pacific Journalism Review editor Dr Philip Cass, who was born in PNG and worked on the Times of Papua New Guinea and Wantok newspapers.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Various stakeholders have warned that the draft National Media Development Policy released by Papua New Guinea’s Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on February 5 could undermine media freedom if approved by the government.
The draft policy lays the framework “for the use of media as a tool for development.” The state emphasised that “it includes provisions for the regulation of media, ensuring press freedom and the protection of journalists, and promoting media literacy among the population.”
A controversial proposal in the draft is to transform the PNG Media Council into a body “that will have legal mandate that covers an effective and enforceable regulatory framework.”
According to the draft policy, the new PNG Media Council “will ensure press freedom, protect journalists, and promote ethical standards in the media sector”.
At present, the council is a nonprofit group promoting media freedom and the welfare of journalists. The draft recognises that “its primary role has been to promote ethical journalism and to support journalists in the pursuit of their professional duties.
The Media Council of PNG working with Transparency International PNG in 2021 . . . community collaboration. Image: TI-PNG/FB
Journalist Scott Waide underscored that “over three decades, its role has shifted to being a representative body for media professionals and a voice for media freedom.” He pointed out the implications of re-establishing the council with a broad mandate as defined in the draft policy, suggesting that the government hopes to gain control over the media sphere:
The government’s intention to impose greater control over aspects of the media, including the MCPNG [Media Council], is ringing alarm bells through the region. This is to be done by re-establishing the council through the enactment of legislation. The policy envisages the council as a regulatory agency with licensing authority over journalists.
The regulatory framework proposed for the new media council includes licensing for journalists. Licensing is one of the biggest red flags that screams of government control.
The draft policy proposes to grant the media council powers to offer licences and accreditation to journalists and media outlets, handle complaints and sanctions, among other powers:
Licensing and Accreditation: Requirements for media outlets and journalists to be licensed or accredited, including provisions for renewing licenses and for revoking licenses in cases of violations.
Complaints and Sanctions: Mechanisms for the resolution of complaints against the media, including procedures for investigations and sanctions for breaches of ethical standards.
Media Council PNG president Neville Choi, who is also co-chair of CCAC, reminded authorities of another way to improve journalism in the country:
If the concern is poor journalism, then the solution is more investment in schools of journalism at tertiary institutions, this will also increase diversity and pluralism in the quality of journalism.
We need newsrooms with access to trainings on media ethics and legal protection from harassment.
My view is the government should stay away from the fourth estate completely. This is a sinister move with obvious intentions.
Government should not be regulating the media in any form as it infringes on rights to free speech. It can run media organisations to bring its own message out, but it should never exert control over the entire industry.
Media agencies and agents must be left alone to their own ends, being free from cohesion of any sort, and if media reporting does in fact raise any legal issues like defamation, then the courts are the avenue for resolution. There is no shortage in Common law of such case precedent.
While the abuse of social media platforms is a new issue that is given as justification for the media policy, there are already existing laws that address the issue without undermining media freedom.
News about the draft policy also alarmed media groups in the region. The New Zealand-based Asia Pacific Media Network Inc. said that “media must be free to speak truth to power in the public interest not the politicians’ interest.” Adding:
In our view, the ministry is misguided in seeking to legislate for a codified PNG Media Council which flies in the face of global norms for self-regulatory media councils and this development would have the potential to dangerously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea.
Australia’s media union also tweeted their concern:
The International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders asked the government to withdraw regulations that restrict independent journalism. Susan Merrell, a lecturer at Sydney University on cultural studies and communication, commented that “instead of the media being the government’s watchdog, the government is trying to become the media’s watchdog.”
Reporters Without Borders on PNG . . . “The policy’s most alarming measures concern the Media Council, which is currently a non-governmental entity representing media professionals.” Image: RSF screenshot APR
The government insisted that it is committed to upholding media freedom.
Scott Waide sums up the state of media in the country:
While the PNG media has been resilient in the face of many challenges, journalists who have chosen to cover issues of national importance have been targeted with pressure coming directly from within government circles.
Enga Governor Sir Peter Ipatas has told the Papua New Guinean government and national leaders to allow the media to carry out its role “unfettered” and accept public criticism.
“You are in a public office. As leaders, we must be prepared for anything. If they write negative reports, let’s learn to build on criticisms,” Sir Peter said.
He was responding to a government statement last week saying that a proposed national media development policy circulated to all stakeholders for comment was not meant to control the media or the freedom of expression.
Sir Peter said: “The government needs to understand that the office we hold is a public office, and we are answerable to the people. The media’s job is to hold us accountable.”
He questioned why the government was wasting money and time on a draft media policy when it had bigger issues to worry about.
Detrimental for democracy
Sir Peter warned that the Constitution provided for a free media and any attempt to put restrictions on that crucial role would be detrimental to a democratic society.
“Do not look at today only. Look at the future too because you will not be in office forever,” he said.
“There are also avenues provided for in the Constitution to address issues.
“If you have an issue with a news report, take it to court and get it sorted out there.
“I’ve been a politician for over 20 years. I don’t care what the media reports — positive news or negative news so long as it’s not [lies],” he said.
“It is the media’s job to report facts as it is. Let the media do its job and let’s do our job.”
Rebecca Kukuis a reporter with The National. Republished with permission.
Two countries. A common border. Two hostage crises. But the responses of both Asia-Pacific nations have been like chalk and cheese.
On February 7, a militant cell of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), the armed wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) — a fragmented organisation that been fighting for freedom for their Melanesian homeland from Indonesian rule for more than half a century — seized a Susi Air plane at the remote highlands airstrip of Paro, torched it and kidnapped the New Zealand pilot.
It was a desperate ploy by the rebels to attract attention to their struggle, ignored by the world, especially by their South Pacific near neighbours Australia and New Zealand.
Many critics deplore the hypocrisy of the region which reacts with concern over the Russian invasion and war against Ukraine a year ago at the weekend and also a perceived threat from China, while closing a blind eye to the plight of the West Papuans – the only actual war happening in the Pacific.
Phillip Mehrtens, the New Zealand pilot taken hostage at Paro, and his torched aircraft. Image: Jubi News
But they also want the United Nations involved and they reject the “sham referendum” conducted with 1025 handpicked voters that endorsed Indonesian annexation in 1969.
Twelve days later, a group of armed men in the neighbouring country of Papua New Guinea seized a research party of four led by an Australian-based New Zealand archaeology professor Bryce Barker of the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) — along with three Papua New Guinean women, programme coordinator Cathy Alex, Jemina Haro and PhD student Teppsy Beni — as hostages in the Mount Bosavi mountains on the Southern Highlands-Hela provincial border.
The good news is that the professor, Haro and Beni have now been freed safely after a complex operation involving negotiations, a big security deployment involving both police and military, and with the backing of Australian and New Zealand officials. Programme coordinator Cathy Alex had been freed earlier on Wednesday.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape shared this photo on Facebook of Professor Bryce Barker and one of his research colleagues after their release. Image: PM James Marape/FB
Prime Minister James Marape announced their release on his Facebook page, thanking Police Commissioner David Manning, the police force, military, leaders and community involved.
“We apologise to the families of those taken as hostages for ransom. It took us a while but the last three [captives] has [sic] been successfully returned through covert operations with no $K3.5m paid.
“To criminals, there is no profit in crime. We thank God that life was protected.”
How the PNG Post-Courier reported the kidnap on Tuesday’s front page. Image: Jim Marbrook/APR/PC screenshot
Ransom demanded
The kidnappers had demanded a ransom, as much as K3.5 million (NZ$1.6 million), according to one of PNG’s two daily newspapers, the Post-Courier, and Police Commissioner David Manning declared: “At the end of the day, we’re dealing with a criminal gang with no other established motive but greed.”
A “colonisation” map of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. Image: File
It was a coincidence that these hostage dramas were happening in Papua New Guinea and West Papua in the same time frame, but the contrast between how the Indonesian and PNG authorities have tackled the crises is salutary.
Jakarta was immediately poised to mount a special forces operation to “rescue” the 37-year-old pilot, which undoubtedly would have triggered a bloody outcome as happened in 1996 with another West Papuan hostage emergency at Mapenduma in the Highlands.
That year nine hostages were eventually freed, but two Indonesian students were killed in crossfire, and eight OPM guerrillas were killed and two captured. Six days earlier another rescue bid had ended in disaster when an Indonesian military helicopter crashed killing all five soldiers on board.
Reprisals were also taken against Papuan villagers suspected of assisting the rebels.
This month, only intervention by New Zealand diplomats, according to the ABC quoting Indonesian Security Minister Mahfud Mahmodin, prevented a bloody rescue bid by Indonesian special forces because they requested that there be no acts of violence to free its NZ citizen.
Mahmodin said Indonesian authorities would instead negotiate with the rebels to free the pilot. There is still hope that there will be a peaceful resolution, as in Papua New Guinea.
PNG sought negotiation
In the PNG hostage case, police and authorities had sought to de-escalate the crisis from the start and to negotiate the freedom of the hostages in the traditional “Melanesian way” with local villager go-betweens while buying time to set up their security operation.
The gang of between 13 and 21 armed men released one of the women researchers — Cathy Alex on Wednesday, reportedly to carry demands from the kidnappers.
PNG’s Police Commissioner David Manning .. . “We are working to negotiate an outcome, it is our intent to ensure the safe release of all and their safe return to their families.” Image: Jim Marbrook/Post-Courier screenshot APR
But the Papua New Guinean police were under no illusions about the tough action needed if negotiation failed with the gang which had terrorised the region for some months.
While Commissioner Manning made it clear that police had a special operations unit ready in reserve to use “lethal force” if necessary, he warned the gunmen they “can release their captives and they will be treated fairly through the criminal justice system, but failure to comply and resisting arrest could cost these criminals their lives”.
Now after the release of the hostages Commissioner Manning says: “We still have some unfinished business and we hope to resolve that within a reasonable timeframe.”
Earlier in the week, while Prime Minister Marape was in Fiji for the Pacific Islands Forum “unity” summit, he appealed to the hostage takers to free their captives, saying the identities of 13 captors were known — and “you have no place to hide”.
Deputy Opposition Leader Douglas Tomuriesa flagged a wider problem in Papua New Guinea by highlighting the fact that warlords and armed bandits posed a threat to the country’s national security.
“Warlords and armed bandits are very dangerous and . . . must be destroyed,” he said. “Police and the military are simply outgunned and outnumbered.”
‘Open’ media in PNG
Another major difference between the Indonesian and Papua New Guinea responses to the hostage dramas was the relatively “open” news media and extensive coverage in Port Moresby while the reporting across the border was mostly in Jakarta media with the narrative carefully managed to minimise the “independence” issue and the demands of the freedom fighters.
Media coverage in Jayapura was limited but with local news groups such as Jubi TV making their reportage far more nuanced.
West Papuan kidnap rebel leader Egianus Kogoya . . . “There are those who regard him as a Papuan hero and there are those who view him as a criminal.” Image: TPNPB
An Asia Pacific Report correspondent, Yamin Kogoya, has highlighted the pilot kidnapping from a West Papuan perspective and with background on the rebel leader Egianus Kogoya. (Note: Yamin’s last name represents the extended Kogoya clan across the Highlands – the largest clan group in West Papua, but it is not the family of the rebel leader).
“There are those who regard Egianus Kogoya as a Papuan hero and there are those who view him as a criminal,” he wrote.
“It is essential that we understand how concepts of morality, justice, and peace function in a world where one group oppresses another.
“A good person is not necessarily right, and a person who is right is not necessarily good. A hero’s journey is often filled with betrayal, rejection, error, tragedy, and compassion.
“Whenever a figure such as Egianus Kogoya emerges, people tend to make moral judgments without necessarily understanding the larger story.
‘Heroic figures’
“And heroic figures themselves have their own notions of morality and virtue, which are not always accepted by societal moralities.”
He also points out that there are “no happy monks or saints, nor are there happy revolutionary leaders”.
“Patrice Émery Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malcom X, Ho Chi Minh, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Arnold Aap and the many others are all deeply unfortunate on a human level.”
Indonesian security forces on patrol guarding roads around Sinakma, Wamena District, after last week’s rioting. Image: Jubi News
Last week, a riot in Wamena in the mountainous Highlands erupted over rumours about the abduction of a preschool child who was taken to a police station along with the alleged kidnapper. When protesters began throwing stones at the police station, Indonesian security forces shot dead nine people and wounded 14.
West Papua breakthrough
Meanwhile, headlines over the pilot kidnapping and the Wamena riot have overshadowed a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough in Fiji by Benny Wenda, president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a group that is waging a peaceful and diplomatic struggle for self-determination and justice for Papuans.
West Papua leader Benny Wenda (left) shaking hands with Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough. Image: @slrabuka
Wenda met new Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, the original 1987 coup leader, who was narrowly elected the country’s leader last December and is ushering in a host of more open policies after 16 years of authoritarian rule.
The West Papuan leader won a pledge from Rabuka that he would support the independence campaigners to become full members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), while also warning that they needed to be careful about “sovereignty issues”.
Under the FijiFirst government led by Voreqe Bainimarama, Fiji had been one of the countries that blocked the West Papuans in their previous bids in 2015 and 2019.
The MSG bloc includes Fiji, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) representing New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, traditionally the strongest supporter of the Papuans.
Indonesia surprisingly became an associate member in 2015, a move that a former Vanuatu prime minister, Joe Natuman, has admitted was “a mistake”.
However, many West Papuan supporters and commentators long for the day when Australia and New Zealand also shed their hypocrisy and step up to back self-determination for the Indonesian-ruled Melanesian region.
More than 50 years on, it’s easy to wonder what went wrong with the
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the legislation that created public media as we’ve come to know it in the United States. Despite the popular understanding that a healthy democracy requires a free press, the U.S. Congress remains reluctant to offer public subsidies for any journalism that doesn’t operate under the dictates of the commercial marketplace.
Nowhere is this more evident than in news from earlier this week that
NPR plans to cut 10% of its staff to make up a budget shortfall of $30 million. The reason NPR‘s chief executive gives for the layoffs is not the routine failure of Congress to fund public radio journalism at the level it needs, but a “sharp decline in our revenues from corporate sponsors.”
Say what?
“Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the United States impoverishes its public media infrastructures,”
writes professor Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality, and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania (and Free Press’ board chair). This has left nominally public media outlets to fend for themselves in the marketplace. Outlets like NPR and PBS—as well as the many local stations affiliated with them—receive the “bulk of their funding in the form of private capital from individual contributors, foundations, and corporations,” he adds.
The net effect of this private sector dependency is a public media system that is by definition
not noncommercial. And that affects not just the future of journalism in the United States but our democracy as well.
The Public Broadcasting Act is very clear on the matter: It amends a section of the 1934 Communications Act by inserting the word “noncommercial” to describe the type of radio and television outlets that would receive public funding from the newly created Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
It’s an insertion that underscores the act’s goals: to set up a free and functional noncommercial media sector that could counterbalance the market-driven media that dominated the public sphere then as it dominates it now.
The poor antidote
The CPB was supposed to fund this antidote to profit-driven news and information. In the words of President Johnson, who signed the Public Broadcasting Act, this was about offering public support for media that serve “great and not the trivial purposes.”
But such greatness is hard to achieve with Congress’ paltry annual offering to the CPB: At $465 million in FY 2022, the public allocation boils down to a little more than $1.40 per capita in the United States.
By comparison, the United Kingdom spends more than $81 per person, and France more than $75. Head further north and the numbers head north as well: Denmark’s per-person spending is more than $93, Finland’s more than $100, and Norway’s more than $110. And it isn’t just a European trend: Japan (+$53/capita) and South Korea (+$14) show their appreciation for publicly funded media at levels that put the U.S. outlay to shame.
This bleak math is all too familiar to those who follow public media policy in the United States. Lawmakers here continue to believe that publicly funded media should remain subordinate to its corporate counterpart—and that the work of journalism is best suited to the private sector.
That doesn’t make sense. Commercial journalism has been in crisis for decades now, as popular news consumption habits have changed and advertisers have had to find new ways to reach these consumers—including ways that don’t help fund the sorts of journalism democracies need to stay healthy. Between 2008 and 2020, more than 1,000 U.S. newspapers ceased printing, and the number of newspaper newsroom employees shrank by more than half.
As the commercial model for news production falters, the last thing we should be doing is funding public interest journalism at levels that force noncommercial outlets like NPR to mimic the for-profit news business. “Allowing our public media to become so dependent on advertising revenue (and other sources of private capital and ‘enhanced underwriting’) was always bad social policy,”
Pickard wrote in response to my online comments about NPR‘s current dilemma.
A 2021 study co-authored by Pickard and professor Timothy Neff of the University of Leicester finds that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy—with increased public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage, and lower levels of extremist views.
Conversely, the loss of quality local journalism and investigative reporting has far-reaching societal harms. Josh Stearns of the Democracy Fund (and a former Free Press staff member) has cataloged the growing body of evidence showing that declines in local news and information lead to drops in civic engagement. “The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market,”
Stearns writes. “They are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.”
Innovations in noncommercial media are poised to help fill the massive local news-and-information gap that the collapse of market-driven news models has created. But these innovative outlets require help via local, state, and federal policies.
Global policies, local examples
As a start, Free Press Action has called for a quadrupling of public funds for noncommercial news and information. This kind of congressional commitment would recognize that depending on the private sector and emulating commercial models isn’t a viable approach for the longevity of local news and information. To get there at the federal level, Free Press Action has proposed a
new tax on digital advertising to fund the kinds of innovative news production that are now needed. A tax of 2% would generate more than $2 billion annually, enough to support new noncommercial media models, and lessen any dependence on corporate underwriters for revenue.
Dramatically increasing public investment in locally engaged reporting would help support the wide array of new nonprofit outlets that are focused on meeting the information needs of communities that commercial media too often ignore. Many of these new models are profiled in
The Roadmap for Local News, an actionable plan to ensure that every U.S. community has access to necessary public interest news and information.
Co-authored by Elizabeth Green of Chalkbeat, Darryl Holliday of City Bureau, and Mike Rispoli of Free Press,
The Roadmap expands journalism’s forms into new and previously underserved communities while sharpening the definition of what it is for. It calls on lawmakers to cultivate and pass public policies that support the expansion of civic information while maintaining editorial independence.
In New Jersey, Free Press Action helped conceive and create the
New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, an independent nonprofit funded by a state budget appropriation. The consortium, whose board includes representatives from public colleges and universities across the state, supports inventive local news projects like the Newark News & Story Collaborative and the Bloomfield Information Project, which train local residents to report the news from their own perspectives.
In California, Free Press Action supported state legislation that
dedicated $25 million to fund local reporting in underserved and underrepresented communities statewide. The money will be distributed through a fellowship program housed at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. (Free Press’ Rispoli will serve on the program’s Advisory Board).
More than 50 years after the Public Broadcasting Act, Free Press is also looking 50 years into the future. Through the work of the
Media 2070 project, Free Press envisions ways the media can serve as levers for racial justice. This includes engaging policymakers in the repair and reconciliation needed to redress centuries of harm news outlets have inflicted on Black communities.
As NPR struggles to find the revenue to keep its reporters on their beats, it shouldn’t see the problem as a failure to raise advertising revenue from corporate underwriters. It’s a failure to advocate for policies that would increase the public funding it and other noncommercial media outlets need to thrive.
If we’re serious about the future of journalism and civic information in the United States, we need to look locally for innovations in not-for-profit news production, and abroad for examples of more robust ways to fund it.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on Papua New Guinea’s government to immediately withdraw a draconian draft media “development” policy that has been drawn up without any real consultation and poses a major threat to journalistic independence.
The Paris-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement that “in what may be an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, the government has produced a ‘Draft National Media Development Policy’ with the declared aim of turning the media into “a tool for development” including “the promotion of democracy, good governance, human rights, and social and economic development.”
Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, said: “It is entirely commendable for a democracy to want to encourage the development of a healthy and dynamic news and information environment.
“But, as it stands, the policy proposed by Port Moresby clearly endangers the independence of the media by establishing government control over their work.
“We call on Information and Communication Technology Minister Timothy Masiu to abandon this proposal and start again from scratch by organising a real consultation and by providing proper safeguards for journalistic independence.”
The policy’s most alarming measures concern the Media Council of PNG, which is currently a non-governmental entity representing media professionals, said RSF.
It would be turned into a judicial commission with the power to determine who should or should not be regarded as a journalist, to issue a code of ethics and to impose sanctions on journalists who stray from it.
‘Regulatory government body’ “These are disproportionate powers, especially as there is no provision for ensuring the independence of those appointed as the new Media Council’s members,” the RSF statement said.
“There is also no provision for journalists and media outlets to challenge or appeal against its decisions.”
RSF also quoted from a recent DevPolicy article by Scott Waide, a blogger, media producer and analyst who was formerly a deputy regional head of news at EMTV News based at Lae:
“The policy envisages the media council as a regulatory and licensing body for journalists, which means, hypothetically, that it could penalise journalists if they present a narrative that is not in favour of the government.”
“The re-invented media council would be nothing more than a regulatory government body.”
The government’s new policy seemed all the more ill-considered, said RSF, given that, in the event of disputes with the media, there were already avenues for redress through the courts under the 1962 Defamation Act and 2016 Cybercrime Code Act.
Several journalists have been subjected to covert pressure from the government in recent years.
They include Waide himself, who was suspended from his EMTV News job in November 2018 over a story suggesting that the government had misused public funds by purchasing luxury cars.
EMTV’s then news chief Sincha Dimarasuffered the same fate in February 2022 after three news stories annoyed a government minister.
Staffers at NBC and MSNBC walked off the job last week to protest the networks’ massive layoffs of employees. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Staffers at NBC and MSNBC walked off the job last week to protest the networks massive […]
The new media development policy being proposed by the Papua New Guinea Communications Minister, Timothy Masiu, could lead to more government control over the country’s relatively free media.
The initial deadline for feedback has been extended by another seven days from today. However, the Media Council of PNG (MCPNG) has requested a consultation forum with the government, as it seeks wider input from research organisations, academia and regional partners.
The government’s intention to impose greater control over aspects of the media, including the MCPNG, is ringing alarm bells through the region. This is to be done by re-establishing the council through the enactment of legislation.
The policy envisages the council as a regulatory agency with licensing authority over journalists.
The MCPNG was established in 1989 as a non-profit organisation representing the interests of media organisations. Apart from a brief period in the earlier part of its existence, it has largely been unfunded.
Over three decades, its role has shifted to being a representative body for media professionals and a voice for media freedom.
The president of the council, Neville Choi, says there are aspects of the media that need government support. These include protection and training of journalists. However, the media is best left as a self-regulating industry.
According to Choi:
“Media self-regulation is when media professionals set up voluntary editorial guidelines and abide by them in a learning process open to the public. By doing this, independent media accept their share of responsibility for the quality of public discourse in the country, while preserving their editorial autonomy in shaping it. The MCPNG was set up with this sole intent.
“It is not censorship, and not even self-censorship. It is about establishing minimum principles on ethics, accuracy, personal rights while preserving editorial freedom on what to report, and what opinions to express.
The regulatory framework proposed for the new media council includes licensing for journalists. Licensing is one of the biggest red flags that screams of government control.
Communications Minister Timothy Masiu . . . Licensing is one of the biggest red flags that screams of government control. Image: PNG govt
While the PNG media has been resilient in the face of many challenges, journalists who have chosen to cover issues of national importance have been targeted with pressure coming directly from within government circles.
In 2004, the National Broadcasting Corporation’s head of news and current affairs, Joseph Ealedona, was suspended for a series of stories on the military and the government. The managing director of the government broadcaster issued the notice of suspension.
In 2019, Neville Choi, then head of news for EMTV, was sacked for disobeying orders not to run a story of a military protest outside the Prime Minister’s office in Port Moresby. Choi was later reinstated following intense public pressure and a strike by all EMTV journalists and news production staff.
Two years later, a similar scenario played out when 24 staff and EMTV’s head of news were sacked for protesting against political interference in the newsroom.
For many within the industry, licensing just gives the government better tools to penalise journalists who present an unfavourable narrative.
On paper, the government appears to be trying to remedy the desperately ailing journalism standards in PNG. But the attempt is not convincing enough for many.
Fraser Liu, an accountant by profession and an outspoken observer of national issues, says the courts provide enough of an avenue for redress if there are grievances and that an additional layer of control is not needed.
Liu said: “Media agencies and agents must be left alone to their own ends, being free from coercion of any sort, and if media reporting does in fact raise any legal issues like defamation, then the courts are the avenue for resolution. There is no shortage in common law of such case precedent. This is clearly an act by government to control media and effectively free speech.
“Government cannot self-appoint itself as a referee for free speech. Free speech is covered under our Constitution and the courts protect this basic right. The policy talks about protection of reporters’ rights. Again, what is this? They already have rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Coming back to poor journalism standards, Minister Masiu, a former broadcast journalist himself, has been challenged on many occasions to increase investment into PNG’s journalism schools. It is a challenge he has not yet taken up despite the abundant rhetoric about the need for improvement.
The energy of government should be put into fixing the root problem contributing to the poor quality of the media: poor standards of university education.
Scott Waide is a journalist based in Lae, Papua New Guinea. He is the former deputy regional head of news for EMTV and has worked in the media for 24 years. This article was first published on the DevPolicy Blog and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.
“Keep listening to the radio. You guys have done a great job updating people and it’s very much appreciated,” the Civil Defence Minister Keiran McAnulty told Newstalk ZB’s last Sunday afternoon as Gabrielle was just beginning to wreak havoc.
Barely two weeks earlier, sudden and catastrophic flooding in and near Auckland caught the media off-guard, but some commentators claimed the heavy warnings about Gabrielle were oppressively ominous — and risked “crying wolf”.
Gabrielle ended up as a national emergency and sparked non-stop rolling news coverage. There were few flat spots on TV and radio, and live online reporting around the clock also give a comprehensive picture — and pictures — of what was going on.
It stretched newsrooms to their limits, but news reporters’ work was skillfully and selectively supplemented with a steady stream of vivid eyewitness accounts.
Forestry slash flood
Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker’s description on RNZ Nine to Noon of yet another inundation at her place with added forestry slash was among the most confronting (and sweary).
Checkpoint’s emotional interview on Wednesday with a couple that owned a house in which a friend “disappeared under water” was compelling — but also chilling.
RNZ’s Kate Green arrived in Gisborne on Monday with the only means of communicating that worked — a satellite phone.
“You can’t even dial 111. Everything that can break is broken,” she told RNZ Morning Report listeners, quoting the local mayor.
RNZ’s Māni Dunlop, who managed to fly in on Tuesday, told listeners that from the air the East Coast looked “buggered”.
Gisborne is a city and Tairawhiti a region not well covered at the best of times by New Zealand’s national media, which have no bureaux there. It is a bit of an irony that in the worst of times, it was so hard to get the word out.
But the locally-owned Gisborne Herald stepped up, somehow printing editions every day distributed free to 22,000 homes — with the help of NZDF boots n the ground on some days.
Proud news day
“I’m proud to be working on this paper today,” reported Murray Robertson said, signing off an eye-opening video of scenes of the stricken city posted online once power came back and a fresh Starlink unit kicked in.
On Wednesday, ZB’s Mike Hosking pleaded on air for diesel to keep their signal up in Hawke’s Bay, while the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today Chris Hyde — only months into his job — found himself literally powerless to publish when the rivers rose, cutting the electricity and cutting him off from many of his staff.
“The first day I was in a black hole. In a big news event, the phones ring hot. This was the biggest news event in Hawke’s Bay since the Napier earthquake . . . and my phone wasn’t ringing at all,” he told Mediawatch.
“Wiped out” – the Hawke’s Bay Today’s first (free) edition after the cyclone news “back hole”. Image: Screenshot APR
Hyde, just 32 years old, was a student in Christchurch when The Press stunned citizens by publishing a paper the morning after the deadly 2011 quake.
Hyde said NZME chief editor Shayne Currie and The New Zealand Herald’s Murray Kirkness were instrumental in putting the Auckland HQs resources into getting NZME’s upper North Island dailies promptly back in print and available for free.
“Just keep supporting local news, because in moments like this, it really does matter,” Chris Hyde told Mediawatch.
On Wednesday, Hyde had the odd experience of seeing Tuesday’s edition of the paper on the AM show on TV before he had even seen it himself.
Cut-off news focus
On Wednesday, RNZ switched to focus on news for areas cut off or without power — or both — where people were depending on the radio. RNZ’s live online updates went “text-only” because those who could get online might only have the bandwidth for the basics.
Day of ‘danger’
This is the first copy of Tuesday’s @hawkesbaytoday that I’ve seen. It never made it to my home, to our offices, to our subscribers. When I wrote that headline had some idea of what was coming, and yet we had no idea. pic.twitter.com/57PmhoeyYr
Media analyst and former New Zealand Herald editor Dr Gavin Ellis . . . “Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent.” Image: RNZ News
But Gavin Ellis said earlier this week he couldn’t get a clearer picture of Gabrielle’s impact without mainstream media.
“Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent, both in warning people about what was to come – although that wasn’t universal – and then talking people through it and into the aftermath, And what an aftermath it’s been,” he told Mediawatch.
“This is precisely why we need news media. They draw together an overwhelming range of sources and condense information into a readily absorbed format. Then they keep updating and adding to the picture.” he wrote.
Retro but robust radio
“If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on.” Image: Flickr/RNZ News
“It’s even more pressing if you haven’t got electricity, and you haven’t got those online links. That was when radio really came into its own,” said Ellis.
“Organisations like the BBC,and the ABC (Australia) are talking about a fully-digital future and moving away from linear broadcasting. What happens to radio in those circumstances if you haven’t got power? If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on, he said.
“We need to have a conversation about the future of media in this country and the requirements in times of urgency need to be looked at,” Ellis told Mediawatch.
RNZ’s head of news Richard Sutherland’s had the same thoughts.
NZ head of news Richard Sutherland . . . “It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster.”
“It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster. This will also sharpen the minds of people on just how important ‘legacy’ platforms like AM transmission are in civil defence emergencies like the one we’ve had,” he said.
“With the Tonga volcano, Tonga was cut off from the internet. and the only thing getting through was shortwave radio. In the 2020s, we are talking about something that’s been around since the early 1900s still doing the mahi. In this country, we are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces of broadcasting infrastructure,” he told Mediawatch.
“Everyone was super-aware of the way that the Auckland flooding late last month played out — and no one wanted to repeat that,” said Sutherland, formerly a TV news executive at Newshub, TV3, TVNZ and Sky News.
“Initially the view was this is going to be bad news for Auckland because Auckland, already very badly damaged and waterlogged. But as it turned out, of course, it ended up being Northland, Coromandel, Hawke’s Bay have been those areas that caught the worst of it,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.
News contraction
“Over the years, and for a number of reasons, a lot of them financial, all news organisations have contracted. And you contract to your home city or a big metropolitan area, because that’s where the population is, and that’s where the bulk of your audience is,” he said.
“But this cyclone has reminded us all as a nation, that it’s really important to have reporters in the regions, to have strong infrastructure in the regions. I would argue that RNZ is a key piece of infrastructure,” he said.
“This incident has shown us that with the increasing impact of climate change, news organisations, particularly public service lifeline utility organisations like RNZ, are going to have to have a look at our geographic coverage, as well as our general coverage based on population,” he said
“We are already drawing up plans for have extra boots on the ground permanently . . but also we need to think where are the regions that we need to have more people in so that we can respond faster to these sorts of things,” he said.
“We are at a moment where we could do something a bit more formal around building a more robust media infrastructure . . . for the whole country. I would be very, very keen for the industry to get together to make sure that the whole country can benefit from the combined resources that we have.
“Again, everything comes down to money. But if the need is there, the money will be found,” he said.
Now that the government’s planned new public media entity is off the table, it will be interesting to see if those holding the public purse strings see the need for news in the same way.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cyclone Gabrielle death toll rises to 11 after two deaths reported today https://t.co/ifMjC2wFsc
An anti-corruption NGO in Papua New Guinea has criticised the haste with which the government is conducting consultation on a draft National Media Development Policy that could undermine media freedom.
The Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) has called on the Department of Information and Communication Technologies to extend the time and breadth of consultation on this proposed national policy.
“Extended and broader consultation is required for this as media freedoms are vital to our democracy,” the coalition said in a statement.
Minister for Information and Communication Technology Timothy Masiu responded quickly and extended the deadline by one week from February 20.
In his capacity as co-chair of the coalition, Transparency International PNG chair Peter Aitsi said: “The two weeks given for consultation is not sufficient to consider the national and societal impact of this media policy and whether it is actually required.
“For instance, while the abuse of social media platforms is a new issue that is given as justification for the media policy, there are already existing laws that address the issue without undermining media freedom.
“This month, when we commemorate the legacy of the Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare, we recall his personal stance when Prime Minister opposing the regulation of PNG’s media when a similar bill was proposed in 2003.”
Editorial independence ‘cornerstone’
Another senior media spokesperson also said the government had failed to provide adequate time and conduct meaningful consultation over the draft National Media Development Policy 2023.
The draft PNG National Media Development Policy 2023.
Media Council PNG president Neville Choi said in his capacity as co-chair of the coalition: “The editorial independence of newsrooms is a cornerstone of a functional democracy.
“Undermining media freedom, diminishes the role of the media as the mouthpiece of the people, holding those in power to account.
“Failure by the government to provide adequate time and conduct meaningful consultation, will ultimately undermine confidence in the government and the country, both domestically and abroad.
“If the concern is poor journalism, then the solution is more investment in schools of journalism at tertiary institutions, this will also increase diversity and pluralism in the quality of journalism.
“We need newsrooms with access to trainings on media ethics and legal protection from harassment.”
The media policy was initially released by the Department of ICT on February 5 and the public was only given 12 days to comment on the document, with the original deadline for feedback being February 17.
The policy includes provisions for the regulation of media and establishment of a Government Information Risk Management (GIRM) Division within the Department of ICT to implement measures to prevent the unauthorised access to “sensitive information”.
The coalition is a network of organisations that come together to discuss and make recommendations on national governance issues. It is currently co-chaired by Transparency International PNG and the Media Council.
Papua New Guinea’s new media draft policy would put a stop to reporting news not regarded as “positive” for the country’s image, says former PNG Media Council director Bob Howarth.
Howarth, who was director from 2001-2005, said that the national government needed to seriously look at the way the media scene in Timor-Leste had thrived from next to nothing in 1999 when its violent emergence from foreign occupation became full democracy.
“The small nation has the highest press freedom ranking in the region and has a very active press council supported by the UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] and several foreign NGOs,” said Howarth, who as well as advising Timor-Leste media has helped editorial staff on several newspapers.
“[The Timor-Leste Press Council] has a staff of 35 and runs professional training for local journalists in close co-operation with university journalism schools.”
“Visiting foreign reporters don’t need special visas in case they write about ‘non-positive’ issues like witchcraft murders, tribal warfare corruption or unsold Maseratis.”
University input
Howarth said that with easier online meetings, thanks to Zoom PNG’s new look, the media council could include input from the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) and Divine Word journalism schools plus a voice from critical regions such as Bougainville, Western Highlands and Goroka.
“And Timorese journalists can easily contact their President, José Ramos-Horta, a staunch defender of press freedom and media diversity, without going through government spin doctors,” he said.
Howarth said the PNG government could look into the media scene in Timor-Leste to do their media policy.
Meanwhile, in Brisbane the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) — Australia’s main union representing journalists — has passed a resolution endorsing support for the PNG Media Council.
“MEAA supports the [MCPNG] concerns about the possible impact of the government’s draft National Media Development Policy on media freedom; regulation of access to information; and the restructuring of the national broadcaster, including proposed reduction in government funding,” said the MEAA resolution.
Cenk Uygur discusses corruption and Russia on The Young Turks. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. All right. Everybody knows how much I dislike Russian disinformation, right? So we’re pretty well known for that. And I’ve gotten into giant battles with right wingers and left […]
Media is not a tool of government to promote its agenda — however altruistic that agenda may be, says media academic Dr Susan Merrell of Sydney University.
Dr Merrell said this in response to the Papua New Guinea government’s new draft national media development policy.
The deadline for submissions has been pushed back a week from 20 February 2023 after protests that the consultation on such an important policy has been “too rushed”.
Dr Merrell said the first two paragraphs (under “purpose”) of the media policy draft dated 5 February 2023 which stated, “the purpose of this policy is to outline the objectives and strategies for the use of media as a tool for development, such as the promotion of democracy, good governance, human rights, and social and economic development,” said it all.
“The only media doing that, should be their own (government) public relations department.
“Newspapers are not to be mixed with public relations departments.
“In fact, the role of media, acting as the Fourth Estate is to keep the government honest,” she said.
Dr Merrell said that according to the draft, if approved, mainstream media would not be able to publish anything regarded as “anti-government” or anything “detrimental” to the country’s good image.
“Instead of the media being the government’s watchdog, the government is trying to become the media’s watchdog,” she said.
“What the policy maker must understand is that the media is concerned with the ‘public’ interest not the ‘national’ interest.
“It’s not the same thing. For example: the Australian media reported on the Australian government spying on Timor-Leste and Indonesia although this story and revelation was embarrassing and not in the national interest.
“It was in the public’s interest to know this was how their government had conducted itself.”
Rebecca Kukuis a reporter for The National. Republished with permission.
The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese “spy balloon” we’ve been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all.
The article is titled “U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path,” and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms “suspected spy balloon” and “suspected Chinese surveillance balloon” and the US government’s terms “spy balloon” and “airborne surveillance device”. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage; the Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course, and the Pentagon’s own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not “create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”
What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing’s assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course, yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a “spy balloon”. Here’s an excerpt, emphasis mine:
By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.
U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam. But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S. officials, who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device.
The balloon floated over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands thousands of miles away from Guam, then drifted over Canada, where it encountered strong winds that appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.
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That 1st balloon seemed designed to spy on US assets in Guam, maybe Hawaii — but weather currents sent it way north to Alaska & beyond.
The article really reads like someone trying to reconcile two contradictory narratives, claiming that although China didn’t intend to send the balloon over the United States, it decided to seize the opportunity to surveil US nuclear sites while it was there anyway.
“Its crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and its hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident, officials said, raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland, Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence,” write the article’s authors Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, and Jason Samenow.
“Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental, but are confident it was intended for surveillance, most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific,” they write.
No mention is made of the two weeks of hysterical shrieking from the western political/media class about China’s outrageously brazen intrusion into US airspace, or the claims from conservative China hawks that it proves Biden has failed to make Beijing sufficiently afraid of American might. No mention is made of the rhetoric from warmongers like House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, who claimed the balloon is evidence that China is “a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest — in places like those that I live in.” And no mention is made of the White House’s recent admission that the three unidentified objects that US war planes shot down over the weekend were most likely benign balloons.
“The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” the National Security Council’s John Kirby told the press on Tuesday.
So it’s entirely possible that the American political/media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more cold war escalations over four harmless balloons. It’s entirely possible that the world’s mightiest air force just spent two weeks waging kinetic aerial warfare on random pieces of junk in the sky. And that this is being used to manufacture consent for more aggressions against China.
— Find Us @FAIR at Mastodon.World (@FAIRmediawatch) February 10, 2023
In a recent article titled “Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks,” Fair.org’s Julianne Tveten documents the ways the western media have been committing journalistic malpractice with their obedient regurgitation of US government slogans about a “Chinese spy balloon” despite a complete lack of evidence for this claim:
Despite this uncertainty, US media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon’s conjecture as fact. The New York Times (2/2/23) reported that “the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon,” only to call the device “the spy balloon”—without attributive language—within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC, where the description shifted from “suspected Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23) to simply “Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23). The Guardian once bothered to place “spy balloon” in quotation marks (2/5/23), but soon abandoned that punctuation (2/6/23).
Given that media had no proof of either explanation, it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility—spy balloon vs. weather balloon—equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the US’s official narrative than to that of China.
And of course getting lost in all this is the obvious fact that it’s no big deal for major governments to spy on each other; they all do so constantly, and the US does it more than anyone else. To suddenly treat increasingly flimsy claims about Chinese spy balloons as some kind of incendiary existential threat is ridiculous.
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The US shot down the Chinese balloon and other mysterious "objects," claiming that they were a threat to our airspace.
When Cuba did the same thing in 1962 — and Iran more recently — the US nearly started a war for its right to spy on foreign countries.https://t.co/CTBmzfFNWL
As commentator Matthew Petti recently observed on Substack, the US has historically been so insistent on its right to fly surveillance aircraft over foreign countries that it has repeatedly come close to war with nations who’ve shot down its spy planes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, then-attorney general Robert Kennedy issued a red-line threat to the Soviet ambassador that if the Cuban military didn’t stop shooting US spy planes, the United States would launch an invasion of Cuba. Just in 2018 the US came close to the brink of war with Iran when its military shot down a US surveillance drone, and was only averted because Trump was talked out of it by TV pundit Tucker Carlson.
If the US insists on its right to conduct aerial surveillance on foreign nations, it’s a bit silly for it to throw a tantrum when foreign nations return the favor. It would be even sillier to throw a tantrum over a surveillance mission its own intelligence says was accidental. It would be even sillier for the news media of the western world to assist it in doing so.
Sometimes I think American media should abandon its whole “free press” charade and just switch to publishing the news straight out of the Pentagon. This is definitely one of those times.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
The Owen Wilkes book Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, was due to be launched in Wellington today after earlier launches in Auckland and Christchurch. Here Buller conservationist Peter Lusk reflects on his mahi with Owen.
COMMENTARY:By Peter Lusk
I worked closely with peace researcher Owen Wilkes in 1973 and 1974, writing stories for the student newspaper Canta from files of newspaper clippings and hand written jottings that Owen had collected over a period of years.
These stories covered quite a range of subjects. For example, an American millionaire named Stockton Rush who purchased a beautiful valley near Te Anau from the Crown and built a luxury lodge. There was controversy over this. I can’t remember exactly why, probably the Crown selling the land when it shouldn’t.
Then a file on Ivan Watkins Dow who were making Agent Orange or similar at their plant in New Plymouth. They were releasing gases at night and the gases would drift over the city wiping out home vegetable gardens.
The company’s CEO described objectors as “eco-nuts”.
Owen’s biggest file was on Comalco. I went to the Bluff smelter and Manapouri power station and met activists in the area. Also interviewed Stockton Rush while in the area, namely Southland.
Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press
Another file was on a self proclaimed millionaire who had been in the media over his proposed housing development in Governors Bay on Lyttelton Harbour, with a new tunnel to be built through Port Hills. This guy turned out to be a conman and we were able to expose him.
I wrote up the story, we printed it as a centrefold in Canta, then used the centrefold as a leaflet to assist the action group in Governors Bay. This was very successful at exposing the conman whose name I cannot recall.
There were a few other files of Owen’s that I turned into stories, and the sum of the stories were the basis of a 4 page leaflet we printed off for the South Island Resistance Ride held at end of 1974.
I never got to write up the files on Stockton Rush and Ivan Watkins Dow which was a personal disappointment. From memory it was due to Owen suddenly getting the peace research job in Norway [at SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute].
“The only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy.”
I found Owen very good to work with. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy. Far more than me, and I was a full-on activist along with others in our little group like Canta editor Murray Horton and graphics/layout man Ron Currie.
I worked alongside Owen at Boons bakery for a single night. It came about when one of my flatmates, who regularly worked there, needed a night off and convinced me to cover his shift.
So I turned up at Boons at 8pm or whenever it was. The foreman was none too pleased, but he showed me the ropes. I was taking cooked bread out of one oven, while Owen was doing the same from a bigger oven beside me.
The bread was coming out fast, in hot tins, and it was very easy to get burned on the tins, specially for a novice. I got several burns in the course of the shift. Looking over at Owen, I couldn’t help notice how he revelled in the job, he was like a well-oiled machine, banging the bread out of the tins, and oiling them up.
Very competent, no burns for him because he was a regular at Boons and had everything well worked out.
Something else. Owen was living at a commune at Oxford at the time. They had two pigs needing to be slaughtered. I’d killed and dressed a few sheep in my farm worker days, so offered to help.
Owen had never done such “home-kills”, but in typical Owen fashion had got hold of a book on butchering and he took it with him to the pig sty. He’d previously read-up on how to “stick” a pig, stabbing it between the ribs and slicing its heart, all in one motion.
He accomplished this very successfully. One pig, then two pigs, then haul them over to a bath full of hot water to scald, then scrape. After that we gutted them and hung up the tidy carcasses to cool.
Yes, I had great admiration for Owen.
Photo of Owen Wilkes
About the picture at the start of this article: This photo is from the 1974 Long March across Australia against US imperialism and the Vietnam War.
We overnighted in all sorts of places and this was the campground at Mildura in Victoria.
I like the photo because it typifies Owen with his steel box of files — so heavy and awkward to handle. But it was strong and, from memory, lockable.
Having the files with him, meant Owen could immediately provide evidence for media if they asked for verification on something he said. Even though the Long March was organised from Australia, Owen was still the onboard authority on what the US was doing over there.
The Wellington launch scheduled for today, 14 February 2023, at Minerva Handcraft Bookshop has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled. Guest speaker: Nicky Hager
Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations after DirecTV dumped Newsmax. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations after DirecTV dumped Newsmax. I think you and I will agree on this. I hope we do, […]
The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.
But was that really what the nation was relieved about? If football fans had been so invested in the health and safety of the players, why were some 23.8 million of them watching that game in the first place?
By now, everybody should be aware of the incremental deadly damage inflicted on players’ brains in any game, so why will 200 million or more of us be watching the Super Bowl tonight?
That may be one of those unanswerable “Why do fools fall in love?” questions, but just thinking about it seems like a worthwhile exercise in everyday sociology. So here are my questions in response: Is it because we’ve evolved into people indifferent to the pain of others? Or maybe because many of us, as part of an evolutionary survival response, are hardwired to enjoy violence?
And while I’m at it, let me ask you one other question: Should we do something about it — like cancelling football?
Jacked Up
I think most of those who saw the Hamlin hit and heard the news about his recovery were sighing with relief not for him but for themselves, given the guilty pleasure of watching someone “jacked up” — an old ESPN phrase all but banned these days but still descriptive of one of football’s major thrills and horrors. I doubt anyone was rooting for an actual kill shot. Still, I suspect that, however unwittingly, many viewers were longing for the sensation that might accompany one, followed quickly by the usual cathartic release of a player lurching back onto his feet and being helped off the field, while giving his teammates a thumbs-up. (I’m okay, bros, so you’re okay, too!)
But is everyone really okay, especially us spectators? And what, if anything, happens next? A day after the Hamlin hit, a talk-show host asked me what I thought might result from Americans’ viewing the prospect of death in such an up-close-and-personal fashion on their favorite TV show.
Just more talk, I replied, and then added, perhaps a little too quickly and glibly, “Ask me again after the next school shooting.”
I heard a reproving grunt, but there was no time left to unpack that remark. Now, weeks later, it seems obvious to me what I meant. As with mass shootings, whose aftermaths are similarly riveting to TV viewers — by the time you read this, there will have been more than 50 of them since Hamlin went down that day — nothing meaningful is ever proposed to truly diminish the violence.
And I do wonder what erosion of the spirit takes place when nothing is done time after time after time, whether we’re talking about those never-ending all-American slaughters (and the guns that go with them in the most weaponized country on the planet) or football’s endlessly commercialized brutality. I also can’t help wondering what normal has come to mean to us? Little surprise, then, that the war in Ukraine is beginning to seem like a distant geopolitical video game rather than an immense human tragedy.
Whatever righteous chatter went on after the Hamlin hit, it mostly had to do with chastising the sportscasters of that Monday Night Football game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals because they kept wondering aloud whether it would resume or be rescheduled. Granted, they weren’t exactly sensitive to the immediate crisis, but beating up on those particular barkers seems unfair. After all, what message has the National Football League (NFL) ever broadcast other than the game über alles, whether it came to assassinations or brain injuries?
It took NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell an hour even to announce that he was postponing that game (which was, in fact, never resumed). By that time, it seemed obvious that the players and coaches had made their own decisions: they were too gutted to keep playing.
Turning Point?
I’ve also wondered if that specter of sudden death could become a turning point in the history of what’s arguably America’s most popular and perilous pastime. Might it serve as a “wake-up call” that could lead the game toward safer conditions or, as we head into the latest Super Bowl, will it simply confirm three already existing lines of thought: that we accept football as inherently dangerous; that its danger actually enhances its reality as more than a game (and the thrill of it all); and that we need to embrace that danger or risk the loss of football’s importance in a society in which so many men increasingly feel they’re losing ground to women?
The obvious fact that few women play on male high school or college teams and none in the NFL is critically important to its allure. Count on one thing: there will be female Seal team snipers before a woman will be allowed to take a televised Hamlin hit on a football field.
That the Hamlin hit itself was not spectacular only added to the aftershock. In fact, it looked all too routine. The 24-year-old safety had just positioned himself to stop Tee Higgins, the Bengals ball carrier, when Higgins ran into him, ramming his helmet into Hamlin’s chest. That hard hit, doctors have since speculated, triggered commotio cordis, a rare event in which the heartbeat cycle is knocked off rhythm. Oddly enough, such a result would be more likely in baseball or lacrosse if a struck ball directly impacted someone’s chest wall. Commotio cordis can indeed be fatal in rare cases if the blow lands precisely in the vulnerable instant between heartbeats, which is what seems to have happened here.
Hamlin fell backward, got up, then collapsed like a broken toy.
Medical personnel quickly swarmed onto the field and started administering CPR. His Bills teammates and then the Bengals, too, began to close ranks, embrace, hold hands, pray, even cry. They knew it was serious and were undoubtedly reminded that it could have happened to any of them. It surely brought their worst fears to the surface, the ones they normally are in denial about.
As Sally Jenkins of the Washington Postpointed out soon after that hit, such violence is, in fact, baked into the game in a way that’s almost too routine to pay much attention to most of the time. As she vividly described it:
“You want to feel what NFL players do on an average play? Run full speed into a wall mirror. “And while you’re lying on your back trying to regain your senses, consider the following math problem: Two large NFL players, who cover 40 yards in less than 4.5 seconds, collide, causing each to decelerate to zero. Roughly how much force do they — their skin, their bones, and their organs — endure on just a single such play?”
The college and professional players willing to endure such regular pain and damage for love and/or money, understand that possible injury or even death underpins the very reality of football. In fact, in some gruesome fashion, that’s what makes football seem authentic. It transforms players into valiant avatars of manhood instead of glorified stuntmen or, as in most sports other than the martial arts, merely entertainers who might still get hurt if they didn’t watch out.
Does Football Equal Manhood?
In fact, that very connection of football to manhood, whether you’re talking about the toxic masculinity critics decry after every varsity-related rape allegation or the mythical traditional heroism trumpeted by the sport’s boosters, has been critical to its success. The NFL sells the sport as a symbolic, vicarious version of warfare, something particularly significant for a male population that no longer faces obligatory military service (at a time when that same military has become at least slightly more welcoming to women). And don’t forget the way the sport helps contain the nuclear energy of millions of teenage boys. The image of them running loose through the slums and small towns of America has surely helped facilitate the approval of so many high-school football budgets. In later years, those tamed youths never seem to lose their sentimental attachment to the father figures who taught them obedience to authority and the supposed values of inflicting and absorbing pain on the field.
You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football?
Such feelings were evident among the millions of fans who followed Hamlin into intensive care and thrilled to his first reported words to his doctors when he regained consciousness (written because he was intubated): “Did we win?” And they were no less satisfied when he could again speak to his teammates, even if from his hospital bed. “Love you, boys,” was what he said — the perfect words for the hero of the story. It was a week before he could be moved from Cincinnati back to a hospital in Buffalo, nine days before he could go home with internal damage that will require a long rehab. In the weeks that followed, his popularity became monetized and his personal charity, which reportedly had raised only modest thousands of dollars, soared into the millions in a few weeks.
Too bad that money wasn’t for him. Like many players who get seriously injured in their first years in the NFL, Hamlin’s contract undoubtedly isn’t set up to cover long-term benefits or a pension, which means he may be way underinsured for what could lie ahead.
The Inspirational Narrative
Damar Hamlin had been a fringe second-year player on the Bills who blossomed when he suddenly replaced an injured starter. His emergence coincided with the team’s spectacular season. It ended three weeks after that hit with the spectral presence of Hamlin waving and making a heart with his hands from a snow-dusted luxury box window as the Bengals beat the Bills in the playoffs, sinking their Super Bowl dreams.
Nevertheless, the narrative remained inspirational, focusing on the NFL’s quick medical response and Hamlin’s “miraculous” recovery.
As the Nation‘s Dave Zirin noted in his Edge of Sports column, however, this is anything but
“a feel-good story. It should be an opportunity to discuss how players are often treated as expendable extensions of equipment and not as human beings. It should be an opportunity to debate the sport of football itself and whether it is safe for human beings to participate in it… Instead, they want us to discuss how inspirational Damar Hamlin is for his teammates and for fans across the country. But a near-death experience should never be seen as joyous, and it is a revelation of the NFL’s nihilism that this is the product they are expectorating back at us.”
Okay, so where do we go from here? Has the time finally come to make a choice, as you should have done with your other indulgences? You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football? Or would you prefer to “man up” and leave any qualms about its violence in the dust of (all too recent) history. Will you embrace it as who you are and what you want?
I know which way I’m heading — I’ve been heading there for a long while. In all honesty, I think there’s no middle way, no way to keep watching the game as a witness with reservations or to pretend to be a concerned sociologist rather than one of its enthusiasts. Sorry, it really is time to either get over it or get out.
These will, of course, be individual decisions because there’s simply too much money involved in the sport to expect positive public-health decisions by the government (local, state, or federal). After all, entire cities are held hostage by stadium deals; international media companies are under contract for years to come; and the interlocking business and personal relationships of several dozen billionaire Republican team owners rule the roost. Perhaps the most telling proof of football’s long-term power is the way it’s made its financial peace with the gambling industry. Sixty years ago, several of the league’s biggest stars were suspended simply for betting on games. How quaint that now seems, as the NFL has bedded down with that industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
So, calls for the banning of football would be a distinctly quixotic gesture designed to make us feel righteous and nothing more. Skip it. Even demanding radical reform by softening the game through rule tweaking to turn it into the equivalent of flag or touch football is now unimaginable. Besides, the NFL is ahead of you on that. In its support for the no-tackle game of flag football lies the same capitalist foresight that alcohol and tobacco brands showed when investing in the marijuana industry.
But all is not lost. If we’ve learned anything from football, it’s that trying harder, playing hurt, and never giving up is the essence of the sport. The game, they like to say, is never over till it’s over. Beyond turning your back on football, the single most significant thing you can do is to keep your kids from playing the game, not just to protect them but also to pinch off the pipeline of more fungible bodies, even as the far safer alternative of soccer waits on the sidelines. (Forty years ago, I wouldn’t allow my son to play high-school football and he’s still not happy about that. Tough.)
Otherwise, you can just accept the seeming consensus that football reflects American values of aggressive domination as surely as America refracts football into a model of muscular Christianity — and (as indeed I will) without significant shame or guilt enjoy the Super Bowl, sometimes a great game, but never one to die for.
America’s Lawyer E39: Ron DeSantis could end up being sued by high school students for blocking an AP African American studies class. We’ll explain why the move to block the class could hurt DeSantis’ political ambitions. DirecTV dumped the conservative news channel Newsmax, and now they could face the wrath of Congress. And Democrats in […]
Veteran Fijian journalist Netani Rika and his wife were resting in their living room when he was suddenly woken, startled by the sound of smashed glass. “I got up, I slipped on the wet surface,” he recalls.
He turned on the lights and a bottle and wick were spread across the floor. It was one of the many acts of violence and intimidation he endured after the 2006 military coup.
Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.
No news at 6pm, no news at 10pm Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.
He vividly remembers the time his car was smashed with golf clubs by two unknown men — one he would later identify as a member of the military — and the day he was locked up at a military camp.
“We were monitoring the situation . . . once the takeover happened, there was a knock at the door and we had some soldiers present themselves,” he said.
“We were told they were there for our protection but our CEO at the time, Ken Clark, said ‘well if you’re here to protect us, then you can stand at the gate’.
“They said, ‘no, we are here to be in the newsroom, and we want to see what goes to air. We also have a list of people you cannot speak to … ministers, detectives’.”
Rika remembered denying their request and publishing a notice on behalf of Fiji TV News that said it would “not broadcast tonight due to censorship”, promising to return to air when they were able to “broadcast the news in a manner which is free and fair”.
“There was no news at six, there was no news at 10, it was a decision made by the newsroom.”
Organisations like Human Rights Watch have repeatedly criticised Voreqe Bainimarama, who installed himself as prime minister during the 2006 coup, for his attacks on government critics, the press and the freedom of its citizens.
Fiji’s media veterans recount intimidation under the former FijiFirst government . . . they hope the new leaders will reinstall press freedom. Image: ABC screenshot
Fear and intimidation Rika reported incidents of violence to Fiji police, but he said detectives told him his complaints would not go far.
“There was a series of letters to the editor which I suppose you could say were anti-government. Shortly after … the now-honourable leader of the opposition (Voreqe Bainimarama) called, he swore at me in the Fijian iTaukei language … a short time later I saw a vehicle come into our street,” he said.
“The next time (the attackers) came over the fence, broke a wooden louvre and threw one (explosive) inside the house.”
The ABC contacted Bainimarama’s Fiji First party and Fiji police for comment, but has not received a response.
The following year, Rika left his job to become the editor-in-chief at The Fiji Times, the country’s leading independent newspaper. With the publication relying on the government’s advertising to remain viable, Rika said the government put pressure on the paper’s owners.
“The government took away Fiji Times’ advertising, did all sorts of things in order to bring it into line with its propaganda that Fiji was OK, there was no more corruption.”
Rika said the government also sought to remove the employment rights of News Limited, which owned The Fiji Times.
“The media laws were changed so that you could not have more than 5 percent overseas ownership,” Rika said.
Rika, and his deputy Sophie Foster — now an Australian national — lost their jobs after the Media Act 2011 was passed, banning foreign ownership of Fijian media organisations.
‘A chilling law’ The new law put in place several regulations over journalists’ work, including restrictions on reporting of government activities.
In May last year, Fijian Media Association secretary Stanley Simpson called for a review of the “harsh penalties” that can be imposed by the authority that enforces the act.
Penalties include up to F$100,000 (NZ$75,00) in fines or two years’ imprisonment for news organisations for publishing content that is considered a breach of public or national interest. Simpson said some sections were “too excessive and designed to be vindictive and punish the media rather that encourage better reporting standards and be corrective”.
Media veterans hope the controversial act will be changed, or removed entirely, to protect press freedom.
Retired journalism professor Dr David Robie, now editor of Asia Pacific Report, taught many of the Pacific journalists who head up Fijian newsrooms today, but some of his earlier research focused on the impact of the Media Act.
Dr Robie said from the outset, the legislation was widely condemned by media freedom organisations around the world for being “very punitive and draconian”.
“It is a chilling law, making restrictions to media and making it extremely difficult for journalists to act because … the journalists in Fiji constantly have that shadow hanging over them.”
In the years after Fijian independence in 1970, Dr Robie said Fiji’s “vigorous” media sector “was a shining light in the whole of the Pacific and in developing countries”.
“That was lost … under that particular law and many of the younger journalists have never known what it is to be in a country with a truly free media.”
‘We’re so rich in stories’ Last month, the newly-elected government said work was underway to change media laws.
“We’re going to ensure (journalists) have freedom to broadcast and to impart knowledge and information to members of the public,” Fiji’s new Attorney-General Siromi Turaga said.
“The coalition government is going to provide a different approach, a truly democratic way of dealing with media freedom.” But Dr Robie said he believed the only way forward was to remove the Media Act altogether.
“I’m a bit sceptical about this notion that we can replace it with friendly legislation. That’s sounds like a slippery slope to me,” he said.
“I’d have to say that self-regulation is pretty much the best way to go.”
Reporters Without Borders ranked Fiji at 102 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom, falling by 47 places compared to its 2021 rankings.
Samantha Magick was the news director at Fiji radio station FM96, but left after the 2000 coup and returned three years ago to edit Islands Business International, a regional news magazine.
“When I came back, there wasn’t the same robustness of discussion and debate, we (previously) had powerful panel programs and talkback and there wasn’t a lot of that happening,” she said.
“Part of that was a reflection of the legislation and its impact on the way people worked but it was often very difficult to get both sides of a story because of the way newsmakers tried to control their messaging … which I thought was really unfortunate.”
Magick said less restrictive media laws might encourage journalists to push the boundaries, while mid-career reporters would be more creative and more courageous.
“I also hope it will mean more people stay in the profession because we have this enormous problem with people coming, doing a couple of years and then going … for mainly financial reasons.”
She lamented the fact that “resource intensive” investigative journalism had fallen by the wayside but hoped to see “a sort of reinvigoration of the profession in general.”
“We’re so rich in stories … I’d love to see more collaboration across news organisations or among journalists and freelancers,” she said.
Lice Movono is a Fijian reporter for the ABC based in Suva. An earlier audio report from her on the Fiji media is here. Republished with permission.
For many vegan entrepreneurs, ABC’s hit reality show, Shark Tank, has become more than just a source of entertainment—it’s a significant source of income. Thanks to vegan-friendly “Sharks” such as billionaire investor Mark Cuban, the deals made on this show have been pivotal to these plant-based endeavors. Even those who walked away from a deal have benefited from the show’s exposure, such as that of vegan fried chicken sensation Atlas Monroe and cookie dough queen Sabeena Ladha of DEUX. Based on a significant amount of binge-watching and interviews with these vegan companies, plus Cuban himself, here are the 14 best vegan Shark Tank deals of all time (in no particular order).
Vegan Investing
In today’s economy, you need to spend money to make money. There’s equipment to purchase, packaging and ingredients to buy, marketing dollars to consider, food safety and certifications to obtain, and so much more that requires funding. Even the smallest step into the business world—such as a single stall at a local farmers’ market—costs a few hundred dollars.
This financial hurdle is why many brands look to investors. Starting a business is a lot to shoulder financially, and some startup costs are impossible to front using personal credit cards, life savings, or generous friends and family.
Some vegan brands look to crowdsourcing campaigns like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Start Engine; others cold-email vegan venture capital firms like Stray Dog Capital or Blue Horizon; and others pour over pitch decks for individual investors.
An appearance on Shark Tank is a truly unique opportunity to secure not only a valuable investment, but a key marketing opportunity unparalleled by other forms of fundraising. Here are 14 vegan brands that made it to the screen.
Chef J. Jackson
1 Everything Legendary
We’ve all heard of Beyond and Impossible burgers, but Everything Legendary convinced the Sharks that there is still space in the plant-based beef market for fresh new products. Everything Legendary perfected a patty “made in a kitchen, not a lab” that’s infused with non-dairy cheese. While originally striving to compete in the frozen food sector, Cuban suggested a cloud kitchen model. In lieu of selling straight to consumers, the company would teach chefs how to create its product and sell through a delivery service. The team settled with Cuban and accepted $300,000 for 22 percent equity. Eighteen months after appearing on the show, the brand has expanded into retailers including Sprouts and Target.
Co-founder Duane Myko told VegNews, “We chose Shark Tank for funding, because Shark Tank is every entrepreneur’s dream. I was a business major at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, and Shark Tank is something that we talked about all the time. There are very few places where you can pitch your idea in a room full of billionaires. Making the deal is a dream come true.”
Project Pollo
2 Project Pollo
Lucas Bradbury of Texan-born vegan chicken chain Project Pollo appeared on the season finale of Shark Tank in May 2022. The ambitious founder received an email from Cuban himself suggesting he appear on the show. Bradbury prepared the pitch for months, but his swiftly growing plant-based chicken empire caused concern for the sharks, citing that kind of growth was “like a cyclone.” With over a dozen locations in Texas and several in the works, Bradbury isn’t ready to put on the breaks, even to catch a shark. He’s seeking investments elsewhere while continuing to manage scaling operations of Project Pollo’s addictive vegan chicken sandwiches.
Numilk
3 Numilk
A vegan milk machine was the beneficiary of Cuban’s largest vegan investment at the time. In an episode that aired on March 29, 2021, the vegetarian investor agreed on a $2 million deal with Numilk founders Ari Tolwin and Joe Savino with a projected 10 percent of the company. The product has evolved from its original inception as a ready-made-milk kiosk in grocery stores to a smaller countertop professional unit made for coffee shops. The Shark Tank funds enabled the duo to launch production of its latest concept—a more compact, sleeker countertop machine meant for home use that can produce fresh plant milks, lattes, protein drinks, and more. A waitlist is available on the company’s website for Numilk Home which is set to ship in late 2023. Numilk Pro is currently available for foodservice accounts.
The Mad Optimist
4 The Mad Optimist
Vegan and cruelty-free body care isn’t always cheap, but the founders behind this compassionate body brand believe that finances shouldn’t deter anyone from making conscious purchases. The Mad Optimist’s line of sustainable body care products is priced on a sliding scale. While this scared most of the Sharks, Cuban was intrigued. The team settled for a $60,000 investment with 20 percent equity and an agreement that all sales made from their episode would go to charity.
G. Nibarger
5 Mrs. Goldfarb’s Unreal Deli
The tired adage may have some truth to it—the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, particularly if that man has an affinity for corned beef. Founder Jenny Goldfarb set out to veganize the classic New York-style deli meats she grew up with, and the result was good enough to secure a deal with a Shark. In 2019, Cuban offered $250,000 for 20 percent equity. Business soared until the pandemic hit, as at the time, Unreal corned beef was only available through delis. Cuban stepped in and suggested a pivot. By switching from wholesale to retail and developing a new vegan turkey product, the business survived and is now going strong. Customers can now find the original corned beef along with turkey and steak slices in retailers and some food service operations.
Goldfarb explained, “I chose to pursue funding via Shark Tank because one Shark dollar is worth five regular dollars. Between the vast media exposure, having a Shark as a partner, and getting this gift that keeps on giving with re-runs, update segments, and the lifetime pass I’ll get to carry, the equity I gave away is tiny in comparison.”
Snacklins
6 Snacklins
Pork rinds, anyone? Don’t worry, they’re vegan, and they’re unbelievably healthy for something akin to a pork rind (only 90 calories per bag). Cuban was sold. When asked about his vegan investment streak, he told VegNews, “I like to invest in products that are healthy and that I would eat, because I love how they taste. I’m a vegetarian and all these products fit that description. Healthy and really, really tasty!” Founder Sam Kobolsy received $250,000 in exchange for five percent equity and five percent advisory shares.
@girleatsnyc/Instagram
7 Umaro Foods
This Berkeley-based California food tech startup decided to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in the industry: perfecting vegan bacon. The brand appeared on Shark Tank in April 2022 and secured a whopping $1 million from Mark Cuban, luring the Shark in with its seaweed-based, super crispy plant-based bacon.
Since the show aired, Umaro has secured dozens of food service accounts across multiple states and key cities including San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Denver. Diners are enjoying Umaro bacon in exciting new applications that extend far beyond a side with their pancakes such as vegan bacon-egg-and-cheese and truly satisfying bacon bits on fully loaded salads.
Pan’s Mushroom Jerky
8 Pan’s Mushroom Jerky
If omnivores can make jerky out of whatever animal they care to slaughter, vegans can certainly make jerky out of plants. This mushroom rendition sparked a feeding frenzy among the Sharks, and founder Michael Pan received multiple offers. After considering a dual venture with Lori Greiner and Blake Mycoskie, he decided to team up with Cuban who agreed to a smaller equity share. Pan walked away with $300,000 for 18 percent of the company. Since the show aired, Pan’s can be found in retailers nationwide including Kroger, Fresh Thyme, Whole Foods, and Foxtrot market.
MUSH
9 MUSH
This plant-based company makes overnight oats even easier. No prep required, just peel back the film and dig in. Prior to their appearance on Shark Tank, co-founders Ashley Thompson and Kat Thomas were working the farmers’ market circuit. After sealing a deal with Mark Cuban for $300,000 with 10 percent equity and an unlimited line of credit, MUSH has expanded into over 3,500 locations nationwide—including Whole Foods.
Thompson told VegNews, “Shark Tank set us on an incredible trajectory, and we wouldn’t trade the journey for anything. The show and Cuban certainly helped us get to where we are today! We are so grateful for the experience.”
Wanna Date
10 Wanna Date?
It’s not a nut butter and not a jam—this sweet spread is in a silky smooth category all on its own. The thick, date-based spread was brought to the Sharks by young entrepreneur Melissa Bartow. Cuban melted for this healthy treat and offered $100,000 for 33 percent equity. Today, the range of products have expanded to include addictively good and surprisingly good-for-you Date Dough—date-based vegan cookie dough. It’s not meant to be baked (although you can). Because we all know cookie dough is the best part of baking.
Deux
11 DEUX
DEUX makes cookie dough you can eat by the spoonful—and not get reprimanded for consuming raw batter. Not only are the flavors vegan, but they’re also “enhanced” with functional ingredients such as essential vitamins and minerals, pea protein, maca, and ashwagandha. The dough can be enjoyed straight from the container or baked into cookies, if you have the patience. Or, you can aim for the middle ground like us and microwave a generous scoop of DEUX in a mug for a warm, gooey, cookie dough treat. While flavors like Peanut Butter Cup, Brownie Batter, and Birthday Cake seem impossible to pass up, the Sharks ultimately did not bite, and founder Sabeena Ladha walked away without a deal.
That’s not stopping her, though. DEUX continues to crank out new products (hello, Enhanced Hazelnut Butter) well after the Shark Tank episode aired in 2021. “We saw really great sales and awareness after airing, but it was really our social marketing after the fact that put it over the top. After Shark Tank, we created viral TikToks and Instagrams about the episode and were able to not only tell our story more deeply, but broaden our reach and audience,” Ladha told VegNews.
Cinnaholic
12 Cinnaholic
Who wouldn’t throw money at a vegan bakery dedicated to massive, fresh-baked cinnamon rolls? Cinnaholic essentially combines Cinnabon with Coldstone—not only do you get a giant, gooey cinnamon roll, you’re encouraged to top it with over a dozen goodies. Cookie dough, peanut butter, fresh strawberries, crumbled brownies … you get the idea. Shark Robert Herjavec bought in at $200,000 for 40 percent of the company. That’s a pretty sweet deal. As of January 2023, the franchise boasts just over 70 locations across the US and Canada.
@BulldogStuf/Instagramf
13 Wild Earth
Shark Tank’s vegan investments aren’t limited to human goods—vegan dogs benefit as well. Ryan Bethencourt, Wild Earth’s founder, stood up for our four-legged friends when he appeared on Shark Tank in 2019. Cuban came in, once again, with a generous offer. Bethencourt secured $550,000 for 10 percent of the company. Since the episode aired, Wild Earth has expanded its line of vegan dog products to include supplements for joint, digestion, and skin health.
Nutr
14 Nutr
Entrepreneurs and husband-and-wife team Alicia Long and Dane Turk appeared on the hit television show with their plant-based milk maker Nutr. They stood before the sharks hoping to secure a $500,000 investment in exchange for 5-percent equity. While guest shark Daniel Lubetzky was impressed by Nutr’s ability to easily create creamy, plant-based milks, he, along with the rest of the sharks, let Long and Turk walk away without a deal. Cuban noted his prior investment in Numilk, a direct competitor to Nutr, as his reason for not investing. Today, Nutr is focusing its efforts on upping its social media presence and has introduced bundled products to increase affordability and accessibility for its customer base.
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed today what pundits have predicted for weeks: the plan for a public media entity has been scrapped — before they even settled on a name for it.
It is the second time in five years Labour has backed away from its public media policy, leaving RNZ and TVNZ in limbo again — along with less-heralded overhauls of the media.
The assumption the government would drop its plan for a new public media entity to be launched on March 1 was sparked by the then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last December.
She signalled reforms diverting ministers from the cost of living and post-Covid recovery would be shelved. She told Newsroom the so-called RNZ/TVNZ was “not number one on the government agenda”.
Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson had already made a mess of explaining the policy in a now-notorious TVNZ interview, which also amplified sideline concerns about possible political influence.
Earlier in the year on Mediawatch, Jackson dismissed criticism of the proposed legislation, some of it coming from strong supporters of public broadcasting.
That came back to bite him last month when the parliamentary committee scrutinising the Bill rewrote important parts of it. Recent opinion polls revealed both low levels of support for the merger and little understanding of it, while rival media lobbyists called the new entity “a monolithic monster bad for the country”.
‘Reprioritised spending’
The formerly non-committal opposition leader declared it, not just bad but mad, repeatedly labeling the policy “insane”.
This year Ardern’s successor, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, also spoke of the urgent need to “reprioritise spending” while recent reporting has almost universally described the merger as “on Chippy’s chopping block”.
Today the axe fell, finally and formally, putting a policy five years in the making out of its misery after millions of dollars and years of effort.
He said RNZ’s funding would increase in the short term “around the $10 million mark” and this could be done before the next Budget process.
RNZ put out a statement welcoming the “clarity” and the prospect of more funding. TVNZ was also “pleased to now have clarity . . . and a clear path forward for TVNZ”.
MediaWorks CEO Cam Wallace said he was pleased but too much had been spent on this proposal “at a time when the industry was dealing with decreasing advertising revenues.”
Watch live: Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed the TVNZ/RNZ merger will be scrapped https://t.co/tgagvtE68v
What was the plan anyway – and what went wrong? When Kris Faafoi took over as Broadcasting Minister in late 2018, Labour junked its previous policy (launched in 2017 by then opposition leader Jacinda Ardern) of boosting RNZ with $38 million a year to become a truly multimedia public media platform — and ignoring TVNZ.
The government — through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage — launched a Strong Public Media policy instead.
Consultants who kicked off the project in 2019 concluded “the status quo is not an option”.
They said TVNZ and RNZ in their current form were not sustainable, given rapid digitally-driven changes in the media.
Covid-19 stalled the policy’s progress, but Cabinet finally agreed in 2021, greenlighting the creation of a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ.
They insisted it was not merely a merger of the two, but the enabling legislation unveiled last year was effectively just that.
Budget 2022 allocated $109 million a year until 2026 to fund the new entity’s operations, but Kris Faafoi, Willie Jackson and the PM never gave any clarity about what new services the new entity might offer.
They said yet-to-be appointed executives and governors would decide that, not ministers.
Similarly, no-one in charge convincingly addressed the fear that a hyper-commercial culture at TVNZ would clash with the charter-driven, public service MO of RNZ.
The entire process was carried almost entirely behind closed doors — and without a proper business case — until the public and other media agencies got a fortnight to make submissions on the legislation late last year.
So what next? Effectively it will be business as usual for RNZ and TVNZ — both of which can pause plans to launch things like admin and IT services as a single system less than a month from now.
RNZ will carry on as a fully-funded bonsai-scale (by international standards) public broadcaster operating on radio and online under its existing charter (which is currently under review) with a yet-to-be announced increase in funding.
TVNZ will carry on as a possibly the world’s only commercial state-owned TV company doing news and entertainment online, which dominates the free-to-air TV market, but makes no significant money for the nation.
At all stages of the merger proposal, TVNZ has reassured advertisers it would still be open for their business. (Last year Willie Jackson chided TVNZ for dragging the chain, a claim denied by chief executive Simon Power on Mediawatch).
RNZ’s board, its chair Jim Mather and chief executive Paul Thompson, strongly backed the plan for a new entity from the early stages.
New Zealand on Air was notified last year around $80 million of its budget would be re-allocated to the new entity, forcing it to urgently pull apart its own funding plans and priorities. Today the PM also announced NZoA could expect an increase in funding.
The long-term plan There is no long-term plan yet — beyond the status quo, which consultants and Cabinet eventually agreed was “not an option”.
But the Broadcasting Minister — who retained his portfolio in the recent reshuffle — has much to confront.
The collapse of the so-called merger goes beyond RNZ and TVNZ into other overhauls that were supposed to run in parallel with the new media entity’s creation.
Willie Jackson is also Minister of Māori Development, overseeing Māori broadcasting. He secured $80m over the past two years in extra funding for programming. But this was tied to a twice-undertaken Māori media sector shift, which was held back for — and meshed-in with — the new public media entity plan.
Jackson is also in charge of the legislative backstop to ensure tech titans Google and Meta cough up for news media content they share, a significant stream of income for under-pressure news outlets for the future.
And then there is the ongoing overhaul of the oversight of the media designed to better “protect Kiwis from harm”.
The media and online content regulation review has been run by the Department of Internal Affairs under Jan Tinetti, recently promoted to other portfolios.
This is supposed to overhaul four separate overlapping pre-digital agencies regulating the media, but is also unlikely to be “bread and butter” business for Labour in 2023.
The public media entity policy has finally been put out of its misery, but there will be consequences for kicking the can down the road again in a public media system that is still operating on 30-year-old foundations and swallowing a sizable budget for limited public returns.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It seems like no government or senior public servant realised the Robodebt scheme was illegal. But the idea that the Coalition government didn’t know exactly what it was doing is preposterous, argues Zane Alcorn.
In a recent address, Professor Thalia Anthony discussed colonisation through a Marxist framework, including the ongoing impacts on First Nations people in Alice Springs. Niko Leka reports.
A few days ago, BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman spotted a stunning iInternet campaign, designed to “Correct the Internet“, allowing female elite athletes to take their rightful places in the history books.
To quote from the campaign:
Many of the world’s best athletes are women. And many of the world’s sporting records are held by women. But due to human bias, our search engines have learnt to prioritise sportsmen in our search results, even when the facts put sportswomen first.
We want to change that.
By using each search engine’s inbuilt feedback function to send feedback whenever we find something wrong, we can get the inconsistencies in our search results logged and fixed.
Ginger had a chat with former New Zealand elite footballer, Rebecca Sowden, about the campaign.
In a few sentences, tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I’m a former New Zealand Football Fern who has spent 20 years at the intersection of sports, media and entertainment. Nearly four years ago I founded Team Heroine, a women’s sport sponsorship and marketing agency after I was watching the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France and felt that brands still weren’t unleashing the opportunity around women’s sport.
What’s the “Correct the Internet” campaign all about?
It’s a social cause initiatve to tackle the gender bias that occurs on the internet against sportswomen in hopes of giving sportswomen their rightful place on the internet and ultimately increasing the visibility of women’s sport.
A group of like-minded people came together after finding we were incurring the same problem that when we searched online for information or statistics pertaining to sports or sportswomen we were often getting served the incorrect factual information.
So we joined forces and in true women’s sport fashion have garnered support across the board, be it from athletes like Australian swimmer, Tasmin Cook, Perth Glory footballer Tash Riby, the United Nations, Women’s Sport Australia, Women in Sport WA and more.
Former elite footballer Rebecca Sowden wants human bias to stop stealing glory from female athletes. Picture: Supplied
How have human biases (AI and algorithms) learned to replicate off-line societal biases?
This internet is simply a reflection of our human biases and it’s simply reflecting what it thinks we want to see as we have as humans have created this problem by teaching search engines our inherent bias.
What do you want to see done about it?
We’re not only hoping to raise awareness around the incurraices around sporting information and sportswomen on the internet but actually correct the incorrect stats. We’ve identified around 30 incorrect existing statistics that people can help correct by heading to www.correcttheinternet.com and following a few simple steps to provide feedback to the search engines and help us get these corrected. Alternatively people can also submit incorrect statistics they have found and we can also add them to our list.
What kind of response have you had – especially from female athletes of all ages? Have the tech companies responded?
The support globally has been phenomenal and better than we could have ever hoped which really goes to show it’s a universal problem that is resonating around the world.
We’ve had support from athletes like US Soccer star Alex Morgan and the US Women’s National Soccer Team Players Association to leading bodies like the United Nations and media companies supporting with free ad spots. We’re confident tech companies also want to see the correct factual information around sports and sportswomen conveyed on the internet.
What do we do if we find a mistake online?
Head to www.correcttheinternet.com and get in contact with us to let us know so we can add it to our on-going list which people can support. Alternatively if you find something moving forward online you can easily submit feedback directly to that search engine by following the simple steps outlined on our website.
Longer term, what do you hope this will achieve? What would a perfect internet look like to you, when it comes to women’s sport and representation?
We want people to receive the correct factual information around sport no matter who they are or where they are searching from.
We want sportswomen to be recognised for their achievements and we want to inspire the next generation.
Anything else you’d like to say?
We created this problem, but we can all fix it. Get correcting now!
So, Donald Trump is back on social media. What a perfect moment to grapple with our nation’s crisis of trust.
A 2022 Gallup poll found that less than 30 percent of us have “a great deal (or quite a lot) of confidence in U.S. institutions,” and that’s “as low as it has ever been.” Among 16 institutions tested, 11 registered decline. And the steepest drop? Trust in the presidency “fell off a cliff,” reported CNN.Eight in 10 of us believe our democracy is threatened.
On trust in government, we now rank 26th worldwide between Greece and Hungary.
Such findings are ominous, for the very bedrock of democracy is trust—including trust that political and economic rules are fair so that our voices are heard. And it’s hard to imagine many of us feel heard when wealth and income continue gushing to the top, generating economic inequality roughly on par with Haiti’s and more extreme than in 121 countries. Plus, most of us express reluctance to share our views for fear of offending others.
How many among us would choose this path?
At the same time we experience concentrated private power undermining our wellbeing, as, for example, fossil fuel giants use their vast profits to thwart action on our climate emergency.
All the above is made more threatening by the spreading disinformation disease. It pits citizens against each other and distracts us from focusing on underlying economic unfairness and undemocratic rules, including those suppressing the vote.
“Fake news” has been harming people for centuries, scholars tell us. But in today’s instant-info world, disinformation—a nice word for “lies”—is literally killing us. Four in ten Americans still believe the 2020 “stolen election” lie that triggered an unprecedented insurrection attempt and death.
If you are among this 40 percent, check out reporting by the Heritage Foundation. Considered a conservative center, it has long tracked voter fraud, and our analysis of its data reveals no significant problem.
Our legal system typically limits “freedom of speech” only in cases of libel and defamation—regardless of potential for wider social harm. If this interpretation holds, it is frightening: In November, for example, California lawyers defending doctors “spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments” argued their clients’ free speech rights were being violated.
Around the world, however, a range of democratic nations are taking a nuanced, citizen-driven approach to combat disinformation.
To guard their citizens’ free speech rights as well as protect against dangerous lies, some are creating transparent public processes, which evolve in response to experience. In Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies, a report just released by Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, we share highlights of five national efforts—New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden.
New Zealand’s approach seems especially useful, as it has been evolving over decades. Note that in the quality of its democracy the country ranks fourth worldwide, according to Freedom House, founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and colleagues in 1941. And the US? We come in a sad 62nd.
Since 1989 the New Zealand Broadcast Standards Authority (BSA) has offered a transparent, public platform in which citizens can flag what they believe to be dangerous disinformation. Hate speech is also covered, as the country strives to protect the interests of its Māori people. An independent board then investigates. If it deems the material both false and harmful, the offending media must be removed or corrected. Complaints and decisions are visible to all on the BSA website.
Overall, the agency appears to exercise caution, requiring removal or correction in response to about 7 percent of complaints. An example of the BSA’s action? A daytime entertainment program airing false Covid information was required to provide correct information in the same program at a similar time of day.
Initiatives of several highly ranked democracies to counter disinformation reflect alarm not primarily about a single lie that could cause great harm—although our own “stolen election” lie certainly qualifies. Rather, they focus on the drip, drip, drip of false messages in our media-saturated lives.
So, is it possible to turn the tide toward truthful exchange? Yes, if we take immediate responsibility as well as carefully embrace long-term strategies.
We can each resist directly; and in taking on this challenge the Global Disinformation Index is a helpful tool. As a society we can learn from specific strategies of nations, such as those mentioned above, protecting freedom-of-speech while creating guardrails against disinformation’s poison. Long-term solutions, however, require our building a more accountable democracy generating greater economic and political equity so that Americans feel trust in government is warranted and are less susceptible to lies.
May the shock of registering our true standing, as well as inspiration and practical lessons from highly regarded democracies, motivate courageous action here.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Deux
Nutr
