A Hundred Lotuses Blooming? - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 192

Sen's cabinet. The foreign press is similarly quarantined to an audience of NGO workers,
expatriates, and English-speaking Cambodians living in the cities. The Phnom Penh Post
and Cambodia Daily provide quality reporting and valuable training for young Khmer re-
porters, but they also form their own part of the mirage—a highly visible advertisement
of the government's “commitment” to press freedom. They are only given such freedom
because they have little impact. One 2003 survey found that just 9 percent of respondents
read a newspaper regularly—a function of the low levels of literacy among the rural pop-
ulation and the lack of distribution outside Phnom Penh and the major towns. 9
Most Cambodians receive their news and entertainment from television and radio,
which are accordingly subject to tighter central control. The Ministry of Information has
repeatedly refused opposition parties' requests for radio or television broadcast licenses.
The official state television broadcaster, TVK, is run by the CPP and rarely offers the
opposition airtime. (Ahead of the 2007 commune council elections, non-CPP candidates
were forced to buy airtime on TVK with Australian aid money.) 10 Bayon TV is owned by
Hun Sen's family and run by his daughter Hun Mana. 11 The remaining stations are over-
whelmingly controlled by pliant business interests.
Political coverage, unsurprisingly, offers little more than a diet of government pro-
paganda. “News” consists of footage of Hun Sen and other senior officials delivering
speeches, slicing ribbons, and handing out gifts to the poor. “Analysis” consists of praise
for Hun Sen's leadership or karaoke videos detailing Bun Rany's virtues as an advocate
for the poor. There is no coverage of opposition politicians, unless it is to denigrate them.
In the Apsara TV newsroom, a sign hangs from the wall, which reads, “Banned from
broadcasting: Stories on human rights and land disputes.” 12
It is in radio that independent voices remain the strongest. The most outspoken station
is Beehive Radio 105 FM, owned and managed by Mam Sonando, an iconoclastic former
French disco owner and devout Buddhist. After three decades in Paris, Sonando returned
to Cambodia in 1994 and obtained a radio license. Then, after a failed run in the 1998
election, Sonando dedicated himself to independent broadcasting full-time and was soon
selling airtime to the US-funded RFA and Voice of America, which had been refused their
own broadcast licenses. As an independent voice beamed into rural Cambodia, Sonando
has come under frequent attack. In May 1997 assailants looted and ransacked the Beehive
offices. Since then, Sonando has fled the country, had his radio license suspended, and
has been jailed on three occasions—the last time following the Broma village “uprising”
in 2012.
The Cambodian media, of course, have come a long way since UNTAC. Moeun Ch-
hean Nariddh, who got his start as a reporter for the Phnom Penh Post in 1992 and now
runs a media studies institute in Phnom Penh, says Cambodian reporters are now more
professional than ever, pushing the boundaries when they can and occasionally slipping