Media— a destructive or a constructive force in peace and development? Lessons from Tonga

Kalafi Moala, one of the keynote speakers at the recent peace journalism symposium at USP in Suva, Fiji. Photo by Pacific Media Centre

– By Kalafi Moala: These are the main points in a keynote address given at the USP Symposium in Suva, Fiji on the role of media and civil society in strengthening democracy and social cohesion through peace building)

SUVA, FIJI – Media is a tool, a powerful tool that by the very nature of its existence inevitably engages in the process of social change either negatively or positively. Politicians, historians, and anthropologists are usually the ones who give judgement as to the kind of impact media has on a society. But it’s the people, the consumers of media, who must make the final judgement on the quality of media they choose to consume. Unfortunately journalists and media practitioners are too often trained to do their job without being responsible to the kind of social outcome their performance produces.

It’s like saying, “I’m not responsible to how people respond to my message and method of delivery. I toss it out there, and people do with it what they want.” But when media engagement contributes to positive changes, there is an inevitable forward movement in regards to development of peaceful relations as well as construction of a healthy, harmonious, and prosperous society. At the same time, media can also be a tool of destruction. A wave that can be harnessed to produce electricity to help people, yet at the same time can become a tidal wave that destroys villages.

I guess the fundamental thing I am saying here is that media is not an indifferent and ambiguous tool without any defined purpose or links to all the other sectors and spheres of society. It is an inevitable part of that society. It can be a partner in achieving the socio-development goals of a society, or it can be a pest that eats away the strengths and good things in that society.

Tools are created for a purpose. Tools are not created for themselves, or just for display purposes. Tools are high on utilitarian value. All tools are mechanisms of purpose, to perform a task outside itself. That’s what tools are for. We create tools for eating, for transportation, for communication, etc. Media is a tool created for information delivery, and essentially the nature of the message and method of delivery can either aid or hamper social development.

That notion constitutes the subject of my talk today – “Media: a destructive or a constructive force in peace and development? Lessons from Tonga.”

The destructive or constructive force of media essentially depends on its primary purpose for 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 ultimately 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 content and how its 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 developed too closely in tandem with the concept of democracy, which everyone seems to love and worship like it’s 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 that takes on the form 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 wrongly 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, for example, then we must hate it, for that would be the politically correct thing to do. It does not really matter whether ice cream is good for us or not; we must create a conflict by taking the opposite position. That is “oppositional politics” and thus we also have “oppositional media.” We hardly report about resolving of conflicts, because we are too busy looking for the next conflict.

The story of media in Tonga needs to be told in parallel to the story of our development into a democracy. We’ve just finished a high turn out 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 partners. 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 “Are you happily screwed 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 islander 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, a mainstream heavily palangi-culture newspaper, got their facts really wrong. In one of their lead reports about the Tongan election they incorrectly say 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 come 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 turn out was over 90%. In other words, the majority of Tongans voted for independent candidates – it’s just that there were too many of them and therefore 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 also reported that I had a conversation with the King of Tonga, and that he made tea for me, a commoner. Tonga is a Methodist 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. Individual journalists also have their own ego trips, wanting to make a name for themselves as “oppositional journalists.” 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 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 package. Freedom is not the unrestricted ability 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 tear down.