ABSTRACT
Today, a full variety of mass media is found in PNG including newspapers, radio and television. With one exception, the media are Port Moresby-based. The two daily newspapers, Post Courier and Niugini Nius, have a circulation of 32,000 and 14,000 copies respectively. The two weeklies Wantok (which comes in Tok Pisin from Wewak) and The Times of Papua New Guinea have a circulation of 15,000 and 9,000 respectively. The newspapers have stringer correspondents in most provincial capitals. 1 Stringers are a relatively inexpensive means of gathering local news, but their news tends to be biased as the stringers are usually bound by manifold obligations in their home areas and have to take these into account before reporting a local event to Port Moresby—if reporting it at all. A peculiarity of the press in Papua New Guinea is that it can survive in an environment where the vast majority of the population is illiterate and penniless (Grynberg 1988:54). Another peculiarity is that media in PNG are controlled by foreign financial interests. However, we should not assume too hastily that they serve only foreign interests as they seem to have learned their lessons from elsewhere in the Third World, where media habitually have been brought under state control. The media in PNG support thus democracy and the nation-building process; this support possibly being augmented by the fact that profits are low, and that the possibility of expropriation always looms over them so much that they cannot be sold off for a good price. However, not all their contributions are relevant to nation-building (or to other aspects of life in PNG), for example page-long articles about driving cars in wintry conditions, a public toilet in Vienna and European film actors completely unknown in PNG.
