19/12/2020
Today marks the last day at AUT for retiring Professor David Robie. During his time with us, David has achieved much. Read on at the School of Communication Studies.
Professor David Robie retires....
Today marks the last day at AUT for retiring Professor David Robie. During his time with us, David has achieved much including:
**Founding and developing a SCOPUS and WoS globally ranked research journal, PJR, with an archive at AUT of more than 1000 research articles with a collaboration from three international universities.
**Becoming the first Professor at a New Zealand journalism school in 2012
**Establishing (with Jim Marbrook) the award-winning Bearing Witness climate change documentary and journalism collaboration project.
These are but a drop in the pond of the wonderful influence David has had in the School of Communication Studies and The Pacific Media Centre. We are grateful for all that you have done, David, and wish you the very best as you return to journalism.
To mark David's retirement, please read below a piece he penned with Sri Krishnamurthi for the Asia Pacific Report.
FRONTLINE: The sociology of a pandemic: Countering a COVID 'disinfodemic' with a campus media initiative
By David Robie with Sri Krishnamurthi
Parallel with the global spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a dangerous ‘disinfodemic’ has been infecting the flow of information worldwide. Communication and media outlets have faced a new challenge with not only being responsible for reportage and analysis of a fast-moving public health emergency—the biggest this century, but forced to sift through the mass circulation of falsehoods that have spread as rapidly as the virus. Concerned about the risks for both health and public responses to disinformation, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres identified the ‘new enemy’ as a ‘growing surge of disinformation’. The UN launched a COVID-19 Communications for Solidarity Initiative to rapidly inform people about facts and science and to ‘promote and inspire acts of humanity’ globally.
New Zealand is one of the few countries in the world whose strategy of COVID elimination has been a sustained approach to ‘keep the virus out, find it and stamp it out’. Evoking a theme of ‘our team of five million’ and national kindness, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has led a remarkable campaign blending decisive action and transparency. In this context, this case study critically examines a four-month ‘Coronavirus Plus’ initiative conducted by the Pacific Media Centre at AUT in response to the pandemic, deploying the Asia Pacific Report website, asiapacificreport.nz.
https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/pacific-journalism-review/article/view/1131
