Life becomes difficult for the Fiji press during a constitutional crisis. And so it has proved once again for the Fiji Times. Yesterday's edition featured some unusual page layouts, courtesy of the "khaki subeditors" - military censors placed in the newspaper offices by the interim prime minister, Commodore Frank Bainimarama.
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At least two pages had swathes of white space where stories would have been and bold text informing readers that "the stories on this page could not the published due to Government restrictions". A cartoon and a letter to the editor met a similar fate. An outraged expat reader emailed images to The Diary yesterday. A News Ltd spokesman, Greg Baxter, foreshadowed the move on Saturday by confirming the paper would be published, but that "we're at this stage making the decision not to publish anything rather than publish something that has been censored". The Fiji press are no strangers to attacks from the government. The Fiji Sun publisher, Russell Hunter, was deported last year. Two of the Times's Australian publishers have been deported in the past 18 months, and in January the paper was fined $83,000 for publishing a letter critical of the High Court. The editor, Netani Rika, was sentenced to three months' jail for contempt of court. Its offices were raided by police earlier this month.
THE BRATT PACKThe Sydney silk Bret Walker, SC, is used to being revered. So it must have been galling for the former head of the NSW Bar Association, who has been in Fiji representing the ousted prime minister, Laisenia Qarase, to be referred to as "Brad Walker" in one local paper and "Bratt Walker" in another. You'd think the ABC would've got it right. But, no, our national broadcaster called him "Bruce". Adding insult to injury, its television coverage ran file footage of three judges with a voice-over about a court decision to rule the 2006 military coup unconstitutional. Only the judges shown in the footage were the wrong ones: they voted that the coup was acceptable under Fiji law.
EGGING RUDD ONWith his good-guy image battered after he reduced a female flight attendant to tears during a tantrum aboard an RAAF jet, Kevin Rudd's office appears to have moved into public relations overdrive. First came a two-page photo spread in Saturday's Daily Telegraph detailing "a Rudd day at work". Alongside shots of the PM chatting to beaming staff and booting a Sherrin and playing cricket in the parliamentary corridors, the Tele's chief political reporter, Malcolm Farr, told readers that "Rudd uses sport as a means of communicating with staff" and that "he will recruit teams - men and women - for 15-20 minutes of sport in the corridors or in the PM's courtyard". If doubters needed more convincing, yesterday the PM produced Easter eggs from his pocket for members of the media who turned up for the usual impromptu chat after church.
HOLD THE CHOCOLATSpeaking of Easter eggs, Joanne Harris, whose novel Chocolat brought her international recognition, has revealed she has been harbouring a terrible secret all these years. It seems the author doesn't like chocolate. The Independent on Sunday reports that Harris fessed up to Paul Blezard, literary editor of the magazine The Lady, who revealed it on his blog, Libra Doodle.
IN MEMORIAMThe former Herald journalist Sandra Harvey will be commemorated with a new award for crime writing, the S.D. Harvey Ned Kelly Award. The prize will be awarded for short stories in the crime genre, an area in which Harvey excelled as a Herald reporter, and a producer and journalist with the ABC's Four Corners.
Harvey and her co-author, Lindsay Simpson, won the Ned Kelly Award for Lifetime Achievement in Crime Writing in 2007 for their book, Brothers In Arms, about the Milperra bikie massacre.
Harvey died from cancer in January last year. The Sydney Morning Herald, Four Corners and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance are sponsors of the prize.
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