dreaded word culture ‘like a newsroom hand grenade’

190 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 12 (1) 2006

CONTEMPORARY GENDER ISSUES

NOTED:

Dreaded wordculture ‘likea newsroomhand grenade’

Silenced: International Journalists Ex-pose Media Censorship, edited by DavidDadge. New York: Prometheus Books,2005, 295 pp. ISBN 1 59102 305 X.

THEY TRY everything, to gnawat us, to bury us, to electrocute

us, to drown us, to drain us,’ saidHaitian broadcast journalist JeanDominique. He was an enormouslypopular ‘Mr Truth’ to his grassrootslisteners. ‘It’s been going on for 50years, and why should it stop?

‘They can still try to crush us; tomachinegun us; to ignore, slander,bully and seduce us; to deflate, emptyand distort us.’

On 3 April 2000, ‘they’ finallysilenced Dominique.

He had arrived for work at hisRadio Haiti Inter office at 6am thatmorning—as usual. His daily newsprogramme Inter-Actualités, whichhe jointly hosted with his wife,

Michèle Montas, was due to go onair in barely an hour. As he left hisparked car, a gunman walked up andshot him in the head and chest. Awatchman was also gunned down(p. 274).

The assassination shook Haitiansand became a global cause célèbre formedia freedom groups protestingagainst this brutal execution intendedto intimidate outspoken journalists. Apolice and judicial investigation waslaunched into the killings but washalf-hearted. ‘They’ were too power-ful.

On the first anniversary of theassassination, widow Michèle

PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 12 (1) 2006 191


Montas broadcast an ‘open letter’ toher husband, lambasting the ‘greedy’politicians behind the killings and de-manding an end to corruption(p. 291).

On Christmas Day 2002, gunmentried to assassinate her too and shother security guard instead. Twomonths later, she was forced to closeRadio Haiti Inter, saying she had re-ceived one death threat too many.

The couple’s extraordinary andtragic story, recounted with a graphicportrayal by Caribbean politics andmedia specialist Charles Arthur ofsinister political intrigue and corrup-tion in Haiti, is one of 14 chilling con-tributions in Silenced, an exposé ofglobal media censorship.

This book is a reminder of howharsh and dangerous reality often isfor journalists who challenge the sta-tus quo in oppressive developingcountries. Frequently there is no jus-tice for the news people’s survivors.

The stories range from JasperBecker, former Beijing bureau chiefof the Hong Kong daily South ChinaMorning Post, who fought—and lost—a battle against the paper’s ownerstrying to soften coverage of China toprotect their mainland interests (p.173), to The Guardian’s AndrewMeldrum, forcibly tossed out of Zim-babwe for daring to criticise sadisticdictator President Robert Mugabe(p. 101).

Even established democraciessuch as the US come under attack asTexas City Sun city editor Tom Gut-ting, sacked over a column criticis-ing President George W. Bush, andKOMU-TV news director StaceyWoelfel, who challenged blind patri-otism, critique the rampant post-Sep-tember 11 self-censorship. Surprisingthough that there are no contributionsdealing with Iraq (86 journalistskilled in three years) and the Philip-pines (seven murdered last year alone,mostly investigating corruption)—thetwo countries currently with the high-est death rates of journalists.

All this media murder and may-hem may seem rather remote from theSouth Pacific, but Auckland-basedformer Agence France-Presse corre-spondent Michael Field provides apoignant chapter about being ‘clue-less in coup coup land’—Fiji andother island suspects.

While admitting that the regionhas been spared the excesses of theworst journalist oppression, Fieldnotes that the region has its own brandof intimidation. Although some re-porters have been roughed up anddeported, ‘death and injury have yetto be a consequence’ of a story.

Still, the dreaded word culture some-times feels like a hand grenade in anewsroom and creates tension amongjournalists themselves (p. 255).



And with a backdrop of coups, eth-nic conflict and riots, that relativelysafe record is now seriously at risk.—DAVID ROBIE, an associate pro-fessor at AUT University.

A valuable industry resource

The Electronic Reporter, by BarbaraAlysen (2nd edn.). Sydney: University ofNew South Wales Press. 2006, 293 pp.ISBN 0 86840 495 0.

THE ELECTRONIC REPORTERgives the reader valuable insight

into the medium that has moved onsignificantly since the good old daysof 16mm mute film and sound car-tridges.

Electronic news is about deliver-ing facts in a way that is easy for itsviewing audience to digest. The Elec-tronic Reporter explains how this canbe achieved. However, this is not abook on ‘how to be a reporter’.Rather, it assumes journalism is yourcraft, and introduces you to the ap-plication of that craft to an electronic,visual medium. This is achieved in afriendly and informed style whichgives a comprehensive account ofeverything you need to know fromday one in the job, but were afraid toask.

Author Barbara Alysen, broad-cast journalism lecturer at the Uni-versity of Western Sydney, acknowl-edges there have been difficultiesdrawing boundaries around the vasttopic of electronic journalism. Andbecause of this, it has value beyondthe obvious mantle of news and cur-rent affairs, and into the realms of thenon-fiction and documentary genre.

We are reminded the electronicmedia is not just radio and television;it also encompasses the internet. Yes,‘television journalist’ is gone; ‘videojournalist’ is the term we should nowall live by. A chapter dedicated to‘online news’ no doubt will be taggedfor expansion in future editions.

The Electronic Reporter is a valu-able Australasian industry resource,both as a teaching tool and a worth-

PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 12 (1) 2006 193


while reference book in the library ofany electronic newsroom.— DANNIMULRENNAN, lecturer in televi-sion journalism, AUT University.

Scandals at The NY Times

Hard News: The Scandals at The New YorkTimes and their Meaning for AmericanMedia, by Seth Mnoonkin. New York: Ran-dom House. 2005, 340 pp. ISBN 0 81297251 1

THE JAYSON BLAIR debacle atThe New York Times in May

2003 is often portrayed in the mediaas a brave experiment in affirmative

action gone sour. That Blair was somekind of ethical rotten apple that hadtainted what is arguably the world’sfinest newspaper. That Blair was abizarre aberration, hardly reflectiveof journalism at large and certainlynot of the 152-year-old newspaper.

In fact, he was the tip of an ice-berg. A catalyst for a stunningmeltdown in a newsroom that hadbecome dysfunctional and whosechecks and balances had failed.

It was the collapse of an ill-fatedand short-lived dynasty founded bythe brilliant but flawed leadership ofthe imperious executive editorHowell Raines whose team had wona record six Pulitzer prizes for theircoverage of September 11 less thantwo years earlier.

The gripping intrigue and insti-tutional politics of the Times are su-perbly unravelled by formerNewsweek senior writer SethMnookin. In this newer paperbackedition, Mnookin adds an afterwordtracing the two years since the resig-nations of Raines and his deputyGerald Boyd. The author notes thatthey have been difficult years for themainstream media, ‘which has seenits reputation go from occasionallydodgy and unreliable to fundamen-tally untrustworthy by an even larger(or more vocal, anyway) segment ofthe American population’.


CONTEMPORARY GENDER ISSUESLess than a year after Blair’s serialdeceptions at the Times, USA Todaywas forced to admit that its top for-eign correspondent, Jack Kelley, hadapparently been frabricating his re-ports for years, on everything fromCuban refugees to Palestinian suicidebombers! (p. 261).

In 2004, there were revelations of thefailure of the press in its coverage ofthe hunt for the non-existent weap-ons of mass destruction—the pretextfor the invasion of Iraq. AnotherTimes reporter, Judith Miller, wasunmasked over the deception.

And then Dan Rather’s CBS ca-reer ended abruptly after he broad-cast a report about President Bush’sVietnam-era war record based, unwit-tingly, on forged documents.

But one bright sign amid thegloom has been the media industry’swillingness to ‘come clean’ in the end.The Times’ investigative story onJayson Blair’s journalistic fraud wasdevastating—7102 words (or two fullpages) in the Sunday edition of 11May 2003. Plus another couple ofpages detailing Blair’s errors and fab-rications.

It is hard to imagine a New Zea-land newspaper being so upfront anddetailed about its shortcomings. Infact, the Herald on Sunday’s handlingof the John Manukia serial fabrica-tion case in 2005 was remarkably

opaque by comparison. The only rea-sonably detailed and insightful reporton the findings of both the Herald onSunday and Fairfax ‘audits’ on theaffair appeared in an industry publi-cation on the other side of theTasman, Panpa Bulletin (Page, 2006).And even this was rather under-re-ported.

Long-term media credibility hassuffered as a result. However, in spiteof the damage suffered by the NewYork Times in the wake of the Blairand other disinformation debacles,Mnookin insists the paper is ‘unques-tionably the gold standard in Ameri-can journalism’. And in a worldwhere the Fox News model of ‘fairand balanced’ propaganda is rampant,this old-fashioned value of a vigor-ous and free press is essential for de-mocracy.—DAVID ROBIE

ReferencePage, W. (2006, April). NZ publishers

react to Manukia scandal, Panpa Bul-letin, p. 6.

dreaded word culture ‘like a newsroom hand grenade’

Documents