Vietnamese media fights against graft<\/p>\n
By Russell Heng<\/p>\n
Gone are the days when a Cabinet Minister or a Provincial
\nParty Secretary would be brought to book through the pages of the
\npress.<\/p>\n
SINGAPORE: In keeping with political and economic reforms,
\nVietnam has also liberalized its mass media.<\/p>\n
Observers often point to the frequent exposes of official
\ncorruption by the country's newspapers as one of the prominent
\nfeatures of such a less-controlled press. Vietnam's journalists
\ncan point to a few outstanding examples of having brought down
\nleaders as senior as a Provincial Party Secretary of Central
\nCommittee rank and a Cabinet minister.<\/p>\n
The concerted media effort to fight corruption, like most
\nother reform efforts, was given a fillip by the 1986 Sixth
\nCongress of the ruling Vietnam Communist Party when it officially
\nendorsed doi moi, the liberal line calling for renovation
\nthroughout the system. To strengthen editors' prerogative to
\ninvestigate and publicize official impropriety, the Party
\nSecretariat issued Resolution 15 in 1987, a decree which had as
\nits title \"Strengthening the leadership of the Party with the
\npurpose of better utilizing the press in the struggle against
\nnegativism.\"<\/p>\n
Negativism, or tieu cuc in Vietnamese, is the codeword for
\nmany things that are wrong with the Vietnamese system with
\ncorruption being one of them. The wording also underlined the
\nfact that fighting corruption should be seen within the context
\nof a Marxist-Leninist political culture, where, like so many
\nother endeavors for a better socialist future, it was regarded as
\na political struggle and, like all such struggles, it had to come
\nunder the leadership of the party.<\/p>\n
That being the case, party leadership would, on occasion,
\npraise newspapers for performing their duty of fighting
\ncorruption adequately, or reprimand them for not doing enough. In
\nother words, this has become a formal (some would say
\nformalistic) yardstick by which a newspaper can be measured. The
\nmedia too accepts that this task is to be carried out within the
\nframework of an official policy.<\/p>\n
For example, at the opening of last year's October session of
\nthe National Assembly which highlighted the gravity of the
\ncorruption problem, two journalists from the Thanh Nien paper
\nproposed in an interview with Party General Secretary Do Muoi
\nthat the party\/state should co-ordinate more with the media to
\ncombat corruption.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, call it a Vietnamese cultural trait or a
\nrequirement of the system or whatever, but there is a certain
\nattitude on the part of the media that opposing corruption should
\nnot be too confrontational and sometimes, editors\/journalists
\nmake a special effort to settle things out of the pages of the
\npress.<\/p>\n
An example would be the Petechim scandal of 1993. Petechim was
\na Ministry of Trade company whose director, that year, rejected a
\ncheaper contract to buy oil equipment for another deal which cost
\nUS$5 million more. A year later in May, the influential Quan Doi
\nNhan Dan (People's Army Daily) got wind of it and ran an article
\nwithout naming names as a warning. Meanwhile the writer got in
\ntouch with officials of the Trade Ministry but on finally
\nlearning that the Minister would not do anything to stop the
\ncontract, he wrote the full story in June.<\/p>\n
In the terminology of Western political science, the
\nVietnamese media has been co-opted by officialdom in the latter's
\nbid to be seen to solve its corruption problem or risk losing
\nlegitimacy. This begs the question: is it all a stage-managed
\nshow? To believe so would be unfair to editors and journalists
\nwho have faced great political pressure and risked career or
\neven personal safety to write stories about \"negativism\". If it
\nwere all for show, editors\/journalists would not get into trouble
\nfor what they publicized but the fact is they had.<\/p>\n
In terms of the motives of the Establishment, allowing the
\nmedia to point a finger at erring officials does help to promote
\nthe image that the party wants to fight corruption but there is
\nalso a practical need to involve the press. This is because the
\nparty could not trust its own internal system to deliver prompt
\nand honest reports about dishonest cadres. A network of interests
\nat many levels of the party frequently blocks internal
\ninvestigation into irregularities and media publicity is one way
\nto overcome such cover-ups.<\/p>\n
However, through the years, the media effort itself has also
\nbeen compromised by such vested interests within the
\nEstablishment. There is a definite sense that corruption is
\nincreasing rapidly and the press unable to stop it. The rumor
\nmill in Vietnam has many stories of people too powerful or well-
\nconnected for the media to take on. Furthermore, as the party
\nbecomes more circumspect in its enthusiasm for liberal reforms
\npost-1989 and the collapse of many socialist regimes in Eastern
\nEurope, media space for aggressive reporting also constricted
\nand, with that, the scope for investigative probes into official
\nmisbehavior.<\/p>\n
A very senior journalist, Tuan Minh, writing in 1990 observed
\nthat officials would use the following tactics to intimidate the
\nmedia:<\/p>\n
* Accuse the media of highlighting errors and deficiencies to
\nslander the regime and negate its revolutionary experience;<\/p>\n
* Argue that \"negativism\" is everywhere and so why just focus
\non those involving cadres and party members, thereby creating
\nopportunities for hostile powers to attack the Party and
\ngovernment;<\/p>\n
* Stability is the most necessary thing for present-day
\nVietnam and opposing \"negativism\" can cause instability and
\nincite a mentality of opposition.<\/p>\n
The arithmetic also makes the task of building confidence in
\nthe media \"corruption-fighting\" effort seem rather daunting.
\nNewspapers get hundreds of letters about grievances suffered at
\nthe hands of corrupt officials, of which only a handful can be
\ninvestigated.<\/p>\n
In 1993, a journalist writing in the professional magazine of
\nthe Vietnam Journalist Association lamented that some 80 to 90
\npercent of press exposes resulted in prolonged shilly-shallying
\nwith no clear conclusion and action taken. He wrote that it was
\nno wonder that in a readers' survey by the association, the
\nresults showed that many have lost confidence in anti- corruption
\nstories and they ranked sixth in popularity behind other kinds
\nof stories.<\/p>\n
Journalists, too, have spoken of fatigue or have turned
\ncynical but it must be added that the conduct of some journalists
\n(being bribed by or blackmailing the guilty) has also contributed
\nto the loss of credibility of the media campaign.<\/p>\n
Whither the future? The official anti-negativism campaign will
\ncontinue and the media will always contribute a certain profile
\nto it. Some good will come out of the stories uncovered by the
\npress. Here and there, grievances will be assuaged. A tough anti-
\ncorruption law is in place. But the prevailing wisdom, as of now,
\nis that gone are the days when a Cabinet Minister or a Provincial
\nParty Secretary would be brought to book through the pages of the
\npress.<\/p>\n
Russell Heng is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian
\nStudies, Singapore.<\/p>",
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