Media, a Destructive or Constructive Force in Peace and Development? Lessons from Tonga *
By 'Eakalafi Moala
By 'Eakalafi Moala
CEO, Taimi Media Network
(with a concluding note by Baroness Onora O'Neill)
(with a concluding note by Baroness Onora O'Neill)
" I believe in media freedom, but I also believe in media responsibility and media accuracy and commitment to truth. I also believe that Pacific Island media is under no obligation whatsoever to follow a Western format, as in politics, of media coverage based on conflict."
force in peace and development? Lessons from Tonga.”
The destructive or constructive force of media essentially depends on its primary purpose of existence. There is a pronounced convention in regards to the purpose of media, for those who believe that media must have a purpose. But the purpose for any particular media is dependent on that which is designed or set by ownership, which is why media ownership is an important issue in the Pacific region today. Who owns the media is ultimate responsible for the performance of that media.
If the primary reason or purpose of a media is to make money, then the content and how its
message is delivered is going to be geared to that purpose to make money. Quality in this case
is defined by the bottom line. It does not really matter whether the content and how it is
delivered yields a destructive or constructive effect on society. As long as it is making money...
lots of it...this kind of media feels fulfilled in its purpose.
If the primary reason or purpose of a media is to contribute to positive changes to society, then
we are talking about media with a purpose for social development. It is media that tells the
stories of people, of the events affecting their lives, and of the issues that arise from those
events. The real stories we must tell are the stories about the human condition, about the
environment, and what is being done to improve human condition, socially, economically, and
environmentally.
Our problem in the Pacific region is that media has been so parallel with the democracy
everyone seems to love and worship - like it is the god that will serve all our needs. I contend
that democracy has been wrongly touted in our region as the panacea that will solve all our
problems. We engage in media taking on form and and format of Westernisation that is pinned
to this ideology and practice we call democracy. We simply swallow lock-stock-and-barrel the
Western ideological and methodological concepts of democracy, and have to adopt a Western
media framework to serve that strange machinery we call democracy. We say that Western
media practice is the oil that drives democracy.
Democracy has often been practised and expressed throughout the world in oppositional
political frames, where the existence of conflict is a battleground where the will of the majority
is given the victory. In the same way, modern Western media thrives in the arena of
oppositional politics and the promotion of conflict. And we call this check and balance. We fail
however to recognise that more things get done for a society when there is consensus politics,
an alternative we fail to adopt in our island nations; and we do not develop media as a tool for
creating peace rather than conflict. We think if the outcome of our service to society is peace,
then we must be doing something wrong, because we only know how to report and propagate
conflict. If the other party likes ice cream, then we must hate it, for that would be the politically
correct thing to do. It does not matter whether ice cream is good for us or not; we must create a
conflict by taking the opposite sides. That is "oppositional politics" and thus we must have
"oppositional media”. We hardly report about resolving of conflicts, we are too busy looking
for the next conflict.
The story of media in Tonga needs to be told parallel to the story of our development into a
democracy. We've just finished a high turnout and tremendously peaceful and orderly election...
for our first democratically elected Parliament. After the first two nights of our "honeymoon" in
this supposedly "great victory for the people" and for democracy, we've begun to realise that
we've just changed from the rule of one minority group to another minority group, a group we
call "the people" - not all the people; just some of the people.
It's like changing a partner. You were sleeping with one person the night before, and then you
had a democratic election. You wake up the morning after the election and you are on the same
bed, same room, but you now have a group in bed with you, and they start telling you that they
can screw you better than the guy you've lived with all these years. And don't worry; they've
amended the Constitution to make it legal. And so the message for this Christmas for Tonga is
"Happy screwing for the future."
What is amazing of-course in all of this is that the media, especially foreign media have been
celebratory in their reporting of Tonga, at least this one time. They are jumping with joy,
especially in New Zealand and Australia, saying that now Tonga's problem is solved.
We've finally joined all the "free nations of the world." We are now a democracy. Most of them
came to Tonga with stories already written; scripts in place, and they were just looking for
some kind of evidence to fill in the gaps of their stories. If they cannot find the evidence, they
can always get a friendly coconut to say something...give him a can of coke and a kilo of
mutton flaps, and he will tell you what you want to hear. This is the nature of the destructive
force in media. I give you an example:
One prominent New Zealand newspaper, and I don't want to mention any names, other than the fact this mainstream heavily palangi-cultured newspaper, often Herald their news as factual. Did I say Herald? Well, in one of the lead reports about the Tongan election, they incorrectly said that the Democratic Friendly Islands Party led by ‘Akilisi Pohiva won 70% of the votes. This relayed the message to their readers that the overwhelming majority of the people of Tonga voted for Mr Pohiva and his group.
They were setting up people to expect and, in fact demand, that the next Prime Minister and
Cabinet Ministers be from the Pohiva group.
This was a gross inaccuracy. In fact Mr Pohiva and his colleagues only won 31% of the votes.
The other 69% voted against Pohiva and his pro-democrats. The voter turnout was of 90%. In
other words the majority of Tongans voted for independent candidates, it’s just there were too
many of them and they split the votes every which way among themselves, leaving 11 of the 17
people's representative seats to be won by pro-democrats.
But what foreign journalists also failed to recognise is that there were also 9 noble
representatives elected to Parliament. That means there are 9 noble seats, two less than the 11
seats won by the pro-democrats. But six seats of the total 26 Parliamentary seats are held by
independents, and they will be controlling whom they will side with to elect the next Prime
Minister and consequently the next government.
I wish Mr Pohiva and his group all the best as Tonga awaits the election of a Prime Minister.
But, that is not the subject of what we are talking about here. It is most unlikely they will have
the numbers to form a government.
Another foreign reporter, among other things, claimed Tonga to be a Roman Catholic country,
and that I had a conversation with the King of Tonga, and he was making tea for me, a
commoner. Tonga is a Methodist a country, and I've never had tea with the King of Tonga.
Trouble is when I tried to correct these inaccuracies this reporter’s lawyer wrote me a letter
claiming I had defamed the reporter by trying to correct her facts.
Inaccuracies are not easy to correct, and harder to correct is the agenda, hidden or otherwise,
that media organizations and journalists have. There are diversities of media, and it is apparent
which media have a defined purpose in national social development, and which media are only
looking for sensational stories in order to sell more newspapers and to solicit more listeners and
viewers. Many have also used the cloak of media freedom to hide behind in their hate journalism
of Pacific Island countries.
I believe in media freedom, but I also believe in media responsibility and media accuracy and
commitment to truth. I also believe that Pacific Island media is under no obligation whatsoever
to follow a Western format, as in politics, of media coverage based on conflict.
There are two brief stories from Tonga I want to conclude with:
The first one has to do with a TV station called OBN that played a role in inciting people to
anger against the Government of Tonga, resulting in riots and the burning down of the Central
Business District in November 2006. It's what we call 16/11 for it happened on the 16
November 2006. This TV station was used by the pro-democrats to go from village to village,
and simply assemble supporters, giving them "a voice" Unedited raw content in which a
microphone was given to an angry man or woman, and a camera focused on them. There were
personal hate accusations against Government leaders, allegations that were far from the truth,
and fee people of Tonga were fed this information night after night.
A few weeks later, a drunken meeting at a central park in Nuku'alofa, led by oppositional
politicians, instigated mobs of youth who broke out of the crowd and destroyed the businesses
in the CBD. In fact they urged people to gather together and protest. 16/11 was a result. The
meetings conducted daily for several days were broadcast on OBN TV.
Let me also share a story about a TV programming my organization has been running in Tonga
for the past 2 years. We broadcast 6 hours daily from Monday through Sunday. It's called TMN
-TV2. We made a deliberate choice when we started that we will focus on telling the stories of
the Tongan people, of the events and issues affecting their lives. Our most popular program is
called "The Village of the Week". We go to a village and tell the story of that village - who are
their leaders, what is the main thing in the history of this village, the families m this village,
how (they organise themselves in agriculture/fishing, handicraft making). What are the needs in
this village, and how are they going about solving those needs? We find out about schools,
churches, and other institutions in this village etc.
There is a key lesson we can learn from our Tonga situation. Media freedom and purpose driven
journalism are not opposed to each other. They are part and parcel of the same thing to
do whatever you want, but it is the unrestricted ability to do what is right And what is right is
always good for society. What is right always build up rather than tears down.
* International Human Rights Day address at the “Role of Media and Civil Society in
Strengthening Democracy and Social Cohesion” Symposium, University of the South Pacific,
Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji Islands, 10 December 2010
Pacific Media Watch.
| www.pacmediawatch.aut.ac.nz | creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/nz/
Baroness Onora O'Neill was in NZ recently. She is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest moral philosophers to emerge in Britain in living memory.
Here are extracts of what she had to say on media freedom as reported in the NZ Listener Dec. 11th:
Writing of the Danish editor who published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, she said, "His position is fairly typical of those who construe press and media freedom as analogous to individual freedom of expression." She went on to say the two are very different because of their effect. The freedom exercised by the media "communicates with audiences that vary greatly in the way they will read what is said and written. Many people thought the publication of the cartoon was "unacceptable because it was not merely offensive but dangerous."
She warned: "There are good reasons not to accord powerful organisations unconstrained freedom of expression themselves, and to constrain their communication in order to limit their capacities to harm others."
The Baroness was particularly concerned about the new electronic media and its lack of standards. Citizens in democracies, she said, need a press that is free to report to them but with a caveat – it must inform them intelligibly, accurately and in ways they can judge and assess."
Finally, she noted that "any serious search for truth needs structures and disciplines [which can be] undermined by casual disregard of accuracy and evidence, which unconditional freedom of speech permits." In all institutions dedicated to finding out the truth, such as universities, research institutes and courts of law, speech is not at all unregulated. Justification for press freedom simply cannot "piggyback on a justification of individual freedom of expression." -- Ed. note.
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