A Decade of Heated Debate

By Kevin Doyle
The cambodia daily

“The Cambodia Daily had been condemned before the first issue ever hit the streets.”

The Daily’s first editor, Barton Biggs, wrote that line several years ago in an essay recounting the atmosphere as the Daily was poised to debut in Phnom Penh in 1993.

“It seemed more as though every man, woman, and child thought they could produce a better Cambodia Daily,” Biggs wrote in “Personals,” a collection of “dreams and nightmares from the lives of 20 young writers” that was edited by former Daily reporter Thomas Beller.

The stories were too long. The stories were too short. There was too much news from the US. Not enough sports coverage from the United Kingdom and Australia. People didn’t want to be mentioned in the newspaper. Others felt grave injustice that their work and they themselves were not getting enough attention.

Reflecting on those months—when the most scathing critics were the more distinguished scribes at the bar in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Cambodia, Biggs wrote that nothing printed in the Daily, “it seemed, was too insignificant to inspire strong emotions.”

That was the feeling in 1993. But the same could have been written last weekend.

Disliked by many and respected by many, the Daily regularly finds itself mired in debates the size of which seem inappropriate to its limited circulation and small, idiosyncratic format.

As the only bilingual daily, the newspaper has over the past decade become an influential part of the political landscape for Cambodians and foreigners. It has been accused of favoring or neglecting any one of the three major political parties.

“The Daily is not recognized as an especially neutral paper,” David Roberts wrote in his 2001 book, “Political Transition in Cambodia 1991-1999.” By way of later explanation, Roberts asserts that “the Daily has a degree of sympathy for the CPP.”
Some years earlier, the Daily was being positioned by the press pundits on the opposite side of Cambodia’s political tracks.

In his 1997 book, “Cambodia Silenced: The Press Under Six Regimes,” Harish Metha devotes several paragraphs to the Daily’s relationship to the Royal Palace and asks the question, is the paper “pro-Sihanouk?” Metha quotes from an interview with Rasmei Kampuchea editor Pen Samithy, who says that rumors during the mid-1990s held the Daily as a pro-palace paper.

But political leaning was the least of the Daily’s problems in those days, wrote Metha of a newspaper he described as a “potpourri of languages” run on a shoestring budget.

“[Bernie] Krisher’s paper smacked of amateurishness. Housed in a room in the rundown Renakse Hotel fronting the Royal Palace, the Daily...was hobbled by a lack of staff,” Metha wrote.

More recently, the Daily has been accused of favoring the Sam Rainsy Party. The “Cambodia Dreary,” a satirical parody of the Daily which appears in Phnom Penh’s Bayon Pearnik, a free tourist guide, crystallized the criticism in March with an installment titled “The Sambodia Rainsy.”

Officials from the three parties in question don’t believe the Daily is as biased as the critics do—or as their parties would probably like.

CPP spokesman Khieu Kanharith, who is regularly quoted in the paper, said he spotted deliberate bias in the Daily’s Khmer-language reporting on the 1998 post-election protests.

But anti-CPP bias has not been “too bad” recently, he said, and at the end of the day, Cambodian journalism is better with the Daily than without it.

“It makes Cambodian journalism more professional, more journalistic,” he said.

Other CPP officials have not been so understanding. Not unknown is the occasional lawsuit or official letter of warning demanding an end to “obsessive hostility” toward the CPP.

But the CPP is not alone in seeing conspiracies. Funcinpec ministers have done the same, questioning phrase turns, story focus and space devoted to or omitted from stories about the royalist party.

This was particularly true when Funcinpec was beset by a leadership crisis in 2002, following a dismal showing in the commune elections. But suspicion continued through the 2003 general elections campaign, when party officials complained by telephone that the Daily failed to report on a large Funcinpec event.

Daily skulduggery was also suspected by Sam Rainsy’s campaign machine, which was infuriated by a report on the opposition leader’s pre-election visit to Pailin.

The Daily had grossly underestimated the size of the crowd in Pailin that turned out for Sam Rainsy, a senior party official complained. A member of the US-backed International Republican Institute, which heavily supports the Sam Rainsy Party, was incensed at the report, and pulled a Daily editor aside to complain.

Critics have alleged bias in favor of all three parties, the three parties have each charged the Daily with being biased against them.

At least the allegations of bias are balanced.

“You cover all and give all sides of the story,” said Moeun Chhean Nariddh, a trainer at the Cambodia Communication Institute at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

“There are more stories from the opposition, but that’s probably because of the considerations of news criteria, given the fact [that] news judgment is the basis for coverage,” he said.

Moeun Chhean Nariddh said he used Daily stories as models for his students.

The Daily contributes to more professionalism in the Cambodian newspaper industry and Khmer-language publications were following suit, as the demand for “true information” was increasing, he added.

The Daily could be improved though.

A larger Khmer-language news section is needed and a broadsheet format would give the A4 newspaper a more professional appearance, Moeun Chhean Nariddh said.

Cambodian journalism is better as a result of the Daily, Moeun Chhean Nariddh said, adding that without professional journalists, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”