News In Briefs

Nobody Does It Better

We go again to smh.com.au for a follow up on the Today Tonight story from yesterday.

"IN THE depths of the Papuan jungle, there lives a six-year-old boy called Wa-Wa from the Korowai tribe, whose members are said to be among the last people on earth to practise cannibalism.
He has been marked as a target for the tribe's next act of ritual killing. But it's not his fellow tribesmen he need worry about.
The public relations machines of Channel Seven and Channel Nine were in a frenzy yesterday as they tried to put a spin on the story of Today Tonight host Naomi Robson's incarceration in Indonesia, after she travelled there to file a story on the Korowai. Robson and her crew were picked up by Indonesian authorities when they entered the politically sensitive province without the correct visas.
Channel Nine was at pains to point out that Robson was in Papua following up a story covered by the Nine network's 60 Minutes in May this year. Nine reporter Ben Fordham had travelled to film the remote tribe with Paul Raffaele, a writer for the Smithsonian Institution. During the assignment, they had met a six-year-old boy from the tribe whose parents had died. The tribe members were suspicious he was possessed by evil spirits, Fordham reported, so he faced being killed and eaten in the next 10 years. After filming finished, they left him there.
Of course, Channel Seven would never be so callous. Robson and her crew, who were travelling with Raffaele, planned to reach the boy and "save" him. Then they were arrested. Yesterday, Seven sent out a press release claiming Robson's "mission" had been "sabotaged by a rival Australian television network".
The head of Seven's news and public affairs, Peter Meakin, said his crew had secured a team of locals to help Wa-Wa "or whatever his name is".
But they suspected Fordham and other sources within Nine had tipped Indonesian authorities off about Robson's visa violations, to foil their rival's story. In doing so, Fordham was risking the child's life, Meakin said.
"I can't think of too many people who had a motive to shop us into the authorities for trying to save a child from being eaten other than them," Meakin said.
Fordham last night denied any sabotage. Earlier David Hurley, the head of news and current affairs at Nine, said the claim was "risible".
"They get off a plane and they have at least a dozen camera cases … If you try to do that in Jayapura with your hair extensions hanging off you and you say, 'We are here to write a story on cannibals', what do you really expect them to say?"
Hurley said Fordham and his crew had investigated rescuing the boy after their 60 Minutes story, but were advised that would only put him in greater danger.
And what of little Wa-Wa?
"What's going to happen to the little boy is now in the lap of the gods," Meakin said.
Robson and her colleagues were tight-lipped when they arrived at Jakarta airport late last night, repeatedly telling the Herald they had been ordered not to comment. The five were escorted by an embassy official.
The Herald understands the team will leave for Australia, via Singapore, this morning."

posted by Steve @ Friday, September 15, 2006