poipet town, Banteay Meanchey Province – A chain-smoking career newspaperman, Oeur Bun Than makes his living off the ins and outs of this frenetic border town.
Stories are all around him. Powerful officials and businessmen are grabbing chunks of valuable land, girls stream into Thailand’s brothels, and bribes are passed in plain view.
Lamentably, he says, little of it winds up in his newspaper.
“Some of these stories are published. Most of it never goes to print,” Oeur Bun Than told fellow reporters recently, on condition that the name of his pro-government newspaper not be disclosed.
“For us and all the [CPP-] affiliated newspapers, you can’t write anything that is going to criticize the government,” he said. “The publisher will throw it out, or it will get screened at the Ministry of Information.”
Self-censorship is just one of the practices that cloud the journalistic picture in Poipet and the rest of Cambodia, where industry ethics of fair-handedness and honesty often give way to a code more akin to the rules of the jungle.
A story’s path to the front page of a Khmer newspaper can be stopped short by bribes, intimidation or confrontations with police. For reporters who engage in corruption and blackmail, a scoop at best can land him a hefty payoff; at worst, it can leave them dead or in jail, industry insiders said.
“In Cambodia, we have professional journalists and unprofessional journalists,” said Khieu Kola, a prominent freelancer based in Phnom Penh. As a board director of the Club of Cambodian Journalists, he said he had received numerous reports of reporters extorting money and taking bribes, particularly along the border.
“Don’t use the honor of journalism to extort money, or the people will not believe Khmer newspapers anymore,” he admonished.
Payments to journalists—either to maintain silence or to place a story—come from a variety of sources such as including victims seeking to publicize their grievances, politicians wanting to defame their rivals, or police hungry for good publicity.
Bribes comprise most reporters’ income, and are often unsolicited. Police in Poipet, where smugglers hardly bother hiding their cargo, routinely offer $5 bribes to passing reporters, said both Oeur Ban Than and another local reporter who works for a prominent newspaper, Pho Bun Thorn.
It’s part of an unspoken, symbiotic agreement, they said.
“I don’t ask for it. Police just give it to me,” Pho Bun Thorn said.
The fast pace of crime and corruption in Poipet have turned it into a boomtown for journalists, rivaled only by Sihanoukville and the capital. About 30 journalists are working in town, most of them hoping for a compromising photo or story that will translate into a big payoff.
“Journalists think to themselves, hey, this is a casino town,” said Pho Bun Thorn. “There’s lots of trafficking, crime, land-grabbing and corruption, so there must be a lot of money to be made.”
“But it’s really not that much money,” he said, with payoffs rarely exceeding $75. “Officials here aren’t afraid of newspapers too much.”
When police enter the equation, reporters may have even less leverage for a bribe. In a case that sent shockwaves through the local journalistic community, three reporters and a source were arrested earlier this month, accused of extorting money from a woman they had previously investigated for trafficking girls to Thailand.
Banteay Meanchey authorities say the arrests weren’t meant to target a free press, but to keep corrupt journalists in check. Sok Sareth, chief of provincial police, said this week he could not recall ever arresting a reporter prior to that case.
“I never arrested journalists before…. I don’t want to arrest journalists, but I have to arrest the people who do the bad deeds,” Sok Sareth said.
Instead of warning off extortion, however, the case only has taught local journalists to pursue payments more carefully.
“That money for reporters is like a fisherman’s hook,” said Oeur Bun Than. “If someone promises you money and says to meet up later, don’t go. It’s a trick.”
Indeed, in Poipet there seems to be little incentive to adhere to the traditional mores of journalism. Newspapers usually pay paltry sums of between $3 and $5 for a story, and publishers throw out reports that put their own patrons in a bad light.
Even when reporters go after stories in earnest, police or government officials are there to quash them. After word broke in September that police were beating squatters off land belonging to Rural Development Minister Lu Laysreng, reporters who rushed to the scene where met by bands of police who confiscated cameras and reportedly handcuffed one jouralist.
The Funcinpec minister’s troubles still got widespread publicity in CPP- and opposition-aligned newspapers. Pho Bun Thorn said he managed to get a photo published and earn a little cash.
“I was lucky,” he said with a wry smile. “I had a digital camera, and police didn’t know how to destroy the film.”
