Month: September 2021

On 20 December 1939, just after the start of World War II, Robert Menzies launched Radio Australia with the words: “The time has come to speak for ourselves”.Today, its international audiences are in the millions and in the regions and countries of great geostrategic importance to Australia.Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) International today operates on a budget of $11 million per year, estimated to be less than a third of pre-2014 levels. It has a staff of 38 who work mainly in media development programs for the Pacific region, and sometimes parts of Asia, and a small number who manage and administer its various international broadcast channels (radio and TV) as well as wide-ranging digital content activity.

ABC International management and staff have been committed to Australia relevant in the Asia-Pacific region, but its present resources are not enough to reach a potential audience of more than three billion people. It has the capacity to do more to reach audiences in the Indo Pacific region and needs more funding and support for needed expansion.ABC Radio has FM service in 13 of the most populous locations across the Pacific and in Timor Leste with a monthly listenership of at least 407,000.It has syndicated in-language (Tok Pisin/Solomons Pidgin/Bislama) news and current affairs program Wantok to Radio New Zealand (RNZ) on their shortwave service which is heard in the remotest locations across the Pacific.It also shares Wantok and our other daily news and current affairs program Pacific Beat with partners such as PNG’s NBC provincial services while also making the case to Government to expand Radio Australia’s FM footprint.Alongside this, its International Development team works with local media and broadcasters to build and strengthen their own transmission capacity, to take homegrown media and stories to populations in remote and urban regions.It has also commissioned the ground-breaking Pacific women’s issues program Sistas Let’s Talk, education content for pre-school and early primary students in Pacific Playtime and a Pacific focussed music show Island Music.It recently got some funding to create a new Pacific focussed sports program for ABC Radio Australia (Can You Be More Pacific). It builds on our existing bespoke programming for our Pacific radio audiences which includes comprehensive coverage of Pacific news and current affairs (delivered in English and through the in-language Wantok program) produced by ABC’s dedicated, specialist Pacific team in the Asia Pacific Newsroom in Melbourne. […]

Afghanistan continues to be a perilous place for journalists after Taliban took control of the country last month.Dozens of reporters have been killed in the last few years, and local reporters are now at even more risk as Taliban fighters conduct searches for them.News organisations and media outlets have been making frantic efforts to get staffers, journalists, stringers, translators and fixers who played a major role in their reporting from Afghanistan, out of the country.

Nematullah Hemat of the private television station Ghargasht TV is believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban, and Toofan Omar, the head of the private radio station Paktia Ghag Radio, was shot dead by Taliban fighters according to government officials. Amdadullah Hamdard, a translator and frequent contributor to Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, was shot dead on August 2 in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. Last month, world-renowned Indian photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner Danish Siddiqui died in Kandahar, presumably killed by Taliban militants.Recently, Taliban fighters searching for a Deutsche Welle journalist shot dead a member of his family and seriously injured another, while other relatives of the journalist were able to escape and are on the run. Deutsche Welle also reported that the homes of at least three of its journalists have been searched by the Taliban.“The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban yesterday is inconceivably tragic and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves,” Deutsche Welle Director General Peter Limbourg said in an article published on the broadcaster’s website.Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan has emailed White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan with an “urgent request” on behalf of his paper, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for the US military to help evacuate “204 journalists, support staff and families.”Deutsche Welle and other German news media also made a similar appeal for help for their Afghan staff.The organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the UN Security Council to hold an informal special session to address the perilous situation of journalists in Afghanistan. […]