We join the region’s media and the world’s journalist fraternity in strongly condemning last month’s brutal attack on Marc Neil-Jones, publisher of the respected Vanuatu Daily Post newspaper in his office allegedly by prison officers of Vanuatu’s corrections department.
Clashes between the different pillars of government and the media are not uncommon in the developing world and are actually on the increase in the Pacific Islands region.
Well aware that in every democracy, no matter what its hue and shade, the Fourth Estate draws all its power and sustenance from the people at large, the other three arms of government—the legislature, the judiciary and the executive—regularly try their best to put obstacles in the path of the media’s basic duty: to inform, educate and stir debate.
The latest attack on the publisher of the Vanuatu Daily Post is one such act by members of the executive branch of government reacting to criticism in the newspaper of the repeated failures of Vanuatu’s prison system that has not just seen prisoners escape, but also a corrections facility destroyed under controversial circumstances.
The newspaper was only doing its duty as an established and responsible member of the Fourth Estate in keeping the public informed not just with its reports and editorials but also with pictures. In this case, it was a tell tale one of the prison gates left open and unattended in broad daylight. A picture, as it is wisely said, is worth more than a thousand words and this picture said it all.
It is as unbelievable as it is inexcusable that members of the government’s executive arm could even conceive of such a blatant attack on the head of the media outlet—and that too when he was alone and defenceless at the very place of his work. Most people in Vanuatu would have known that the man is a severe diabetic and insulin dependent besides being highly hypertensive.
There is not an iota of doubt that this action had the silent sanction of higher up officials who could not stomach the aftermath of the newspaper’s expose of their failures.
Past incidents tell us in no uncertain terms that the publisher was a marked man. In a similar instance of administrative intolerance, the country’s police was unable to come to terms with the newspaper’s previous editorials demanding the suspension of a police officer who had attacked the paper’s sports journalist during a rugby match between the Police team and the University of the South Pacific’s Port Vila campus team. In that instance, the publisher was hauled to the police station and jailed.
When released, Marc Neil-Jones wrote a series on the human rights violations that routinely took place in the confines of Vanuatu’s jails.
Earlier he was even deported at the insistence of former Prime Minister Barak Sope on the grounds that he had published so-called state secrets. These were the very stories that later led to the conviction of Sope by the country’s courts a few years later, vindicating the newspaper’s role as a guardian of the public’s interests most emphatically.
If this was a case of the executive arm of government interfering with the duties of the Fourth Estate, there have also been incidents of the other two arms of government trying to curb media freedom both with draconian laws and appallingly high fines.
Several countries, notably Samoa and Tonga, still have in force antediluvian laws that would be seen as impinging on liberty, the freedom of expression and the right to information of both the media and the public at large.
 In Samoa, for example, there have been instances when the Publishers and Printers Act of 1992 or the Laws of Criminal Libel have been invoked to silence the dissenting voice of the media.
Then again, the Fijian judiciary fined the Fiji Times a whopping F$100,000 and passed on suspended prison sentences to the publisher and the editor for a reader’s letter published in the paper’s Letters to the Editor column.
Apart from the merits of the case, the fine has been seen as being overly excessive with inevitable rumblings from many quarters that it does smack of an intention to drive home a message that a dissenting voice could have very expensive consequences.
The International Federation of Journalists, representing over 600,000 journalists from 120 countries, said that it “is alarmed that the publication of a letter to the editor has resulted in such a heavy penalty against the newspaper and its editor.
The court’s decision has serious implications for Fiji’s media and the right to free expression, in an environment where freedom of the press has been sorely tested over the past year.”
This brings up the extremely important but much ignored issue of the media’s own professionalism in the developing world—particularly for us here in the Pacific Islands.
Media outlets have tended to pay lip service toward the need for professional training for journalists.
Journalists throughout the region barring very few exceptions are underpaid, inadequately trained and poorly equipped to carry out the onerous tasks the Fourth Estate demands of them.
This makes them and their outlets sitting ducks for the infinitely more powerful levers of power wielded by the other three estates of government.
The predicament that Fiji journalists find themselves in—especially last month’s instance of the huge fine—is an excellent illustration of this unfortunate state of affairs.
There have been far too many instances where media outlets in the Pacific have had to eat their words after having found that some of their controversial stories were either poorly researched, based on rumour and hearsay or were a plain misrepresentation of the facts.
Nothing compromises the media’s position and the trust that people have in them as these unfortunate incidents.
Media owners must not point an accusatory finger at the powers that be without putting their own house in order.
Be that as it may, there is no excuse whatsoever for the kind of attack that was inflicted on the publisher of the Vanuatu Daily Post. In no circumstances can violence be justified as a response to a dissenting voice raised against the powers that be.
It reeks of arrogant bullying, cowardice and extreme unreasonableness. It must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Having said that, the best way for the region’s media to hit back is with greater professionalism and rededication to the defining role the media is meant to play in any democracy.