Review: A riveting media chronicle of giving voice to the voiceless

Abstract

Review of: Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, by David Robie. Foreword by Kalafi Moala. Auckland: Little Island Press in association with the Pacific Media Centre. 2014, 362 pp. ISBN 978-1877484-25-4

Most journalists work to earn a decent living. Some join the profession to rub shoulders with the rich and famous, benefitting from close proximity to the powers that be. David Robie, the doyen of journalism in the South Pacific region, has pursued a different type of journalism, as this book attests. An exceptional individual, apart from being an award-winning journalist, a prolific author and a committed journalism educator, Robie has set new standards of journalism practice and politics in a part of the globe which receives scant coverage in the international media. During the early 1990s, as associate editor of the London-based and now defunct Gemini News Service, a ‘Third World-oriented’ news features service, this reviewer had the privilege to work with Robie, who regularly contributed thoughtful, well-researched but never preachy articles and commentaries from the South Pacific region, which were circulated among the agency’s more than 100 newspapers around the world.