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While considerable academic attention has been paid to the effect of industry turbulence on journalists’ perceptions of their professional identity and the normative values of journalism over the past two decades, there has been less focus on how transformations wrought by digital incursion, corporate economising, and the rise of neoliberal ideologies might have injured journalist’s industrial agency. This article argues that journalists’ willingness to assert or advance their industrial rights at work has been diminished in Australia by the increase in precarity that has arisen as a result of shifts in the media landscape. It argues disruption has created precarious working environments in which uncertainty and fear drive an unprecedented and almost universal sense of self-preservation that has detached journalists from industrial engagement and the mechanisms that support safe and secure working conditions—to the detriment of the journalism industry and the public it serves.

Stripped of Myanmarese citizenship in 1982 and persecuted for three decades, stateless Rohingya have long found precarious refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. This study explores the framing of the Rohingya in Bangladesh’s largest circulating English language newspaper The Daily Star, to examine how one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers of record framed refugee migration into the country. Analysing two distinct random samples of news stories published on The Daily Star website between 1 December 2011– 31 November 2012 and 1 August 2017–31 October 2017, this article argues that The Daily Star’s press identity, defined though a nationalist frame, failed to successfully deliver human rights-based journalism though a globalist Fourth Estate imperative.

This survey of NZ journalists completed in late 2015 shows the impact of the rapid move to a digital news environment. Journalists are more educated, but working longer hours and feeling more pressure, both ethically and resource-wise, than they were only two years ago. Technological changes are felt acutely, particularly the use of social media and user-generated content. Journalists are concerned that advertising and commercial pressures are stronger, while overall standards are weakening. This study also shows, for the first time, that women are seriously disadvantaged in pay and promotion despite making up the majority of the workforce. Despite these challenges, overall job satisfaction remains at similar levels to previous surveys, and journalists’ own commitment to ethical standards and journalism’s Fourth Estate role remains strong.

This article examines how the fundamental right of freedom of expression for news media in Pakistan continues to be threatened both by the government and conflicting parties, an issue that is compounded by the threat to the journalists’ safety and survival. Giving examples of three Pakistani journalists who lost their lives after their investigations during the America’s so called ‘War on Terror’, the article gives an account of the nature of the dangers and threats that are faced by the journalists in Pakistan who report on armed political conflicts. Drawing on the experiences of five other journalists, who were interviewed during research visits to Pakistan in 2012 and 2014, the author also reflects on the role of journalists in the light of the social responsibility theory and explores some of the factors that contribute towards making conflict reporting a dangerous business in Pakistan. Pictured: Figure 1: The Press in Stress report in 2012. Shown in the cover image is a curbside radio-seller in Quetta. FM radio is hugely popular in Balochistan. Image: Aurangzazib Khan

In more ways than one, the political events in Fiji since that fateful day have had a profound effect on political journalism in the Pacific. Many contemporaries, who worked as journalists in Fiji at the time, paid dearly for defending the Fourth Estate. They were unified in their views and they vehemently defended the right to call things as they saw them - a spade was a spade, black was black and white was white.

The Fourth Estate role of the media in a democracy is to inform its citizens and to be a forum for debate about political issues so that the citizenry is able to make informed decisions about the role its government plays. New Zealand portrays itself as a leading democracy in the Pacific, but how much do New Zealanders know about what is happening among the country’s neighbours? This article is an exploratory study on media coverage of four countries in Melanesia which have experienced conflict to assess the degree to which a peace/conflict journalism approach as opposed to a war/violence journalism approach is used. A content analysis of Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report programme was conducted between June and July 2012 to assess the reporting on the four Melanesian countries: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. According to Pilger (2011) war journalism is reporting on what those in power say they do, whereas peace journalism is what those in power actually do. Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) state that peace journalism ‘is when editors and reporters make choices—of what stories to report and how to report them—that create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict’ (p. 5). The framing of New Zealand media reporting as either war journalism or peace journalism will be an indication of how information about conflict in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu is presented to a New Zealand audience.

Review of Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Community Media, by Susan Forde. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011, 214pp. ISBN 978 0230243576 (pbk) Ironically, alternative and independent media were not always marginalised. Less than two centuries ago, they were the ‘mainstream’. They being the radical and working class media of Europe and the new world colonies. This is a central point made in Susan Forde’s Challenging The News in her search to find a refocused critique of the Fourth Estate notions that make sense of the contemporary alternative media’s role. An essential element, she concludes, is the ‘key importance that someone is watching the watchers; that media power itself must be monitored, assessed, critiqued, and challenged. Alternative journalists provide that critique’ (p. 169).

Media freedom and the capacity for investigative journalism have been steadily eroded in the South Pacific in the past five years in the wake of an entrenched coup and censorship in Fiji. The muzzling of the Fiji press, for decades one of the Pacific’s media trendsetters, has led to the emergence of a culture of self-censorship and a trend in some Pacific countries to harness New Zealand’s regulatory and self-regulatory media mechanisms to stifle unflattering reportage. The regulatory Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) and the self-regulatory NZ Press Council have made a total of four adjudications on complaints by both the Fiji military-backed regime and the Samoan government and in one case a NZ cabinet minister. The complaints have been twice against Fairfax New Zealand media—targeting a prominent regional print journalist with the first complaint in March 2008—and twice against television journalists, one of them against the highly rated current affairs programme Campbell Live. One complaint, over the reporting of Fiji, was made by NZ’s Rugby World Cup Minister. All but one of the complaints have been upheld by the regulatory/self-regulatory bodies. The one unsuccessful complaint is currently the subject of a High Court appeal by the Samoan Attorney-General’s Office and is over a television report that won the journalists concerned an investigative journalism award. This article examines case studies around this growing trend and explores the strategic impact on regional media and investigative journalism.

The 2008 AMIC conference theme, Changing Media, Changing Societies, Media and the Millennium Development Goals, also the title of this publication, highlighted the role of media in this development process, as the editors, Banerjee and Muppidi, point out: In our globalised world, the media is more than just a watchdog. Around the world, in every society, they play important roles including creating awareness, disseminating the relevant messages at various stages of the development process, providing channels of communication between various stakeholders, and ensuring transparency in this global effort of the UN to achieve its millennium development goals (p.3).

This book Spinning Intelligence investigates this culture, the relationship that exists between security intelligence agencies and other institutions, and lays bare a solidly researched account that is as readable as it is a resource. The book explores whether intelligence agencies operate within a culture of accountability, giving special attention to the most powerful agencies in our post-millennium world.

This article, based on interviews, research and the author’s personal experience in the media for more than 30 years as a police/crime reporter, former Head of Public Affairs for the Australian Federal Police and journalism lecturer, will examine the unique challenges and role of reporting police/emergency/crime journalism—how it can work and how it can break down. It will particularly examine the mostly unequal relationships between journalists and official sources where the various emergency services, notably the police, trade on releasing selected information and avoid releasing information if it is unfavourable or inconvenient. It will cover the important aspects of sources, both official and unofficial, on and off-the-record agreements, anonymous sources, ethically and unethically obtained material and the all important overriding considerations of the law including criminal processes, defamation, sub judice, jurisdictional restrictions, pre-trial publicity and trial by the media. These stories can challenge even the most experienced journalist placing demands on almost all of their skills. If done properly, journalists can fulfil the paramount responsibility of informing the public on critical matters and maintaining the media’s role of being an effective Fourth Estate.

Review of Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, edited by Robert W. Mc Chesney and John Nichols. Forewards by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader. New York: Seven Stories Press. This book's messge has a salutary lesson for us in Oceania, half a globe away from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols have argued for an honest debate over a total rethink of policy if the media is to continue to have an effective role in demoracy, if it is to remain a genuine Fourth Estate. They present a persuasive case for building a mass movement that seeks to replace their [coporate] media with a media that serves ordinary citizens—our media.

The NZ news industry—owners, management and education sectors—has long agreed that the news media requires more Maori journalists. The industry has long recognised an imbalance does exist, whatever its characterisation. But the solution is not as simple as it seems.