Media and academia: the intriguing case of the Pacific Media Center

Te Amokura: Pacific Media Center (PMC) was founded at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in October 2007 at a time of great turbulence in the Pacific (Robie, 2018). Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban, at the time New Zealand’s Minister of Pacific Island Affairs before she later became Victoria University of Wellington’s Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Pasifika), launched the center and strongly welcomed the initiative (Robie, 2017). She returned a decade later in November 2017 as guest of honor to celebrate the center’s 10th anniversary. In 2007, corruption, gender violence, and other human rights violations were rife across the Asia-Pacific region. There were arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings by elements of the security services in the Philippines (but not anything like the scale during the “war on drugs” era of President Rodrigo Duterte from 2016 to 2022). In Timor-Leste, security forces carried out nine killings in 2007—less than a third of the 29 recorded the previous year—and there were human rights violations against journalists and other civilians. These circumstances were fertile ground for the establishment of both the PMC at AUT (https://pmc.aut.ac.nz/) and its Pacific Media Watch (PMW) media freedom project as one of the first research and publication initiatives established under the university’s Creative Industries Research Institute (CIRI) umbrella, also established in 2007. The PMW project had been transferred to AUT’s PMC from the University of Papua New Guinea and University of Technology Sydney where it had been founded by ABC Four Corners investigative journalist Peter Cronau and me.