Editor’s note: On April 7, 2020, Phnom Penh police arrested Sovann Rithy, an online journalist, for something he only did as part of his job. Rithy had quoted from a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen, in which the strongman said, “If motorbike-taxi drivers go bankrupt [because of the pandemic], sell your motorbikes for spending money. The government does not have the ability to help.”
Yet the authorities charged Rithy with “stirring chaos” and “incitement to commit a felony” and ordered his detention. The information ministry revoked the license for his online broadcasting site, TVFB, on the grounds that Rithy had broadcast information “to generate an adverse effect on the security, public order, and safety of society.”
Such has been the sorry state of press freedom in Cambodia, which has been in decline since the 2017 crackdown on independent reporting. On April 29, 2020, with the passing of the state of emergency law, things took a turn for the worse. The law grants the government broad powers to “monitor, observe, and gather information from all telecommunication mediums” and control the “distribution of information that could scare the public, [cause] unrest, or that can negatively impact national security.”
In the 2020 World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, Cambodia ranked 144th out of 180 countries. The organization took note of Hun Sen’s “pre-emptive war against the media” that led to the silencing of two independent news outlets in the county: The Cambodia Daily, which was shut down due to tax issues; and The Phnom Penh Post, which was bought by a Malaysian consortium with known links to the government.
In this explainer, Alex Willemyns, former associate editor of The Cambodia Daily, gives an overview of how Cambodia’s media landscape changed following these two events. He discusses the political economy of the media; the introduction of two new players, both considered friendly to the Hun Sen administration; and the succeeding shift in the news agenda.
It was in May 2014 that Fresh News and The Khmer Times (KT) launched in Phnom Penh. The launch of the two government-friendly news sources didn’t bother the four pillars of the small but feisty independent media in Cambodia. After all, The Cambodia Daily, The Phnom Penh Post, and the U.S.-funded Khmer-language radio programs made by Radio Free Asia (RFA) and The Voice of America (VOA) had proven their agenda-setting power in their extensive coverage of the disputed July 2013 national election and the mass protests that followed.
Yet all four pillars have been silenced. The Daily was shut down over a $6.3-million tax bill in September 2017. The Post was sold in May 2018 to a Malaysian consortium with links to the government. RFA and VOA, too, were taken off the airwaves.
The state of emergency law passed in April 2020 grants Hun Sen’s government broad powers to control the “distribution of information that could scare the public, [cause] unrest, or that can negatively impact national security.”
As a result, the media landscape in Cambodia has been dominated by Fresh News in the Khmer language and the KT in English. Notably, both have deep links to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). They publish little more than pro-government propaganda—steering focus away from stories demonstrating the consequences of poverty, corruption, and abuses of state power—and instead choose to “accentuate the positive.” The result has been the complete gutting of the breadth and quality of news about the events in Cambodia.
“The Fourth Estate is gone”
“The media landscape has been totally cleansed, leaving only acolytes of the government or a captured newspaper that is merely a shell of its former self,” said Sophal Ear, the author of “Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy” and associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The result: Cambodia’s government was freer than ever before to govern as it wished.
“The authorities are now truly answerable to no one,” said Ear. “The Fourth Estate is gone.”
From the start, the two outlets made few bones about their loyalties. The masthead of the KT’s first edition, for example, proudly announced that its reporting staff included Ek Madra, who worked as a journalist at the Daily in the early 1990s and Reuters in the 2000s, but then became a spin doctor for Hun Sen’s regime as the spokesman for its Chinese government-trained “Press and Quick Reaction Unit.” A KT mission statement bemoaned that Cambodia had “been dominated by two newspapers for the past decade or so” and said it was “time for a third force”—one committed to the idea “that the cardinal business of government is to create the conditions for the efficient and profitable expansion of marketable goods and services.” One early article (which appeared without a byline) about the peaceful protests of the Cambodia National Rescue Party against the alleged fraud at the 2013 election said matter-of-factly that Hun Sen had “rightly banned demonstrations”—despite the apparent contraventions of the 1993 Constitution, “to stabilize the country’s political, social, and economic stability.”
Fresh News has become Hun Sen’s preferred news source—and seemingly the only outlet where officials would leak significant news or provide any decent interview. The KT, on the other hand, swallowed most of the Post and Daily’s most talented Cambodian journalists due to superior finances.
The media landscape in Cambodia has been so littered with seemingly similar news outlets loyal to the CPP, which has run the country in one form or another since Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, that it was impossible to imagine any independent inquiry in their content. Yet Fresh News and the KT, in the end, turned out to be much different beasts than the CPP media that preceded them—and ones with far more success.
Harbinger of change
“What changed was the near-loss or possible loss that occurred in 2013,” said Ear. He said that the coverage of the post-election protests by the two English dailies and RFA and VOA and the resulting momentum and capacity for the opposition and civil society groups to challenge the CPP on its most egregious failings meant the “authorities realized that their shenanigans could not be hidden” any longer. The authorities were at the mercy of media representations they could not control. This was a bridge too far for a regime that otherwise controlled everything in Cambodia.
Indeed, if the months of chaos after Cambodia’s disputed July 2013 national election taught Hun Sen’s long-ruling regime one thing, it was that it had lost control of local and foreign media depictions of itself and the country at large and that this was a tangible threat to its grip on power. The CPP’s successes at the 2008 election, where it won 90 out of the 123 seats on offer to the divided opposition’s cumulative 28, put it at the apotheosis of its power. As in the 1980s when the regime was a Soviet-backed international pariah, Hun Sen’s ruling party once again enjoyed complete control of every conceivable apparatus necessary for power in Cambodia: the military, police, parliament, Supreme Court, monarchy, and even the National Election Committee. It also had a near-monopoly over most of the television broadcast media as well as nearly every radio station and newspaper.
In the background, though, the independent news media flourished. Both RFA and VOA produced nightly two-hour-long broadcasts in the Khmer language that were heavily critical of the government but were allowed to be aired by the spattering of radio station owners across the country willing to carry such content. Apparently unperturbed by the critical journalism published in a language most of his constituents could not read—and seemingly encouraged by his party’s control—Hun Sen had allowed the Daily and Post near-unlimited freedom to report the news.
This led to some unwanted outcomes in the chaos after the July 2013 national election, when the new Cambodia National Rescue Party, which was the first united opposition to challenge Hun Sen’s CPP at an election, won 55 seats to the CPP’s 68 and started months of street protests calling for Hun Sen to stand down or call a new election. Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha, the leaders of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, said that the CPP had only won through vote fraud and that their party’s commanding turnaround from 2008 showed the government was on the wane after 34 years in power. At the very least, Hun Sen’s carefully constructed narrative that he was a popular leader had been pierced.
It was also being repeatedly questioned in the media. For instance, the Daily’s headline on its story (written by Colin Meyn, the Daily’s editor-in-chief from 2014 to 2017, and veteran political reporter Kuch Naren) two days after the national election was explicit: “Election Surprise Tests Hun Sen’s Popularity, CPP’s Future Plans.” It noted that Hun Sen “placed himself at the center of the CPP’s campaign platform,” and directly asked voters that if they “sympathize with me, like, love, and are satisfied with my leadership and have confidence in me, Hun Sen, for leading our country” to vote for the CPP. The poor performance, by consequence, it said “could indicate a decline in Mr. Hun Sen’s support and popularity as the country’s long-time prime minister.”
This characterization dominated reports of the post-election period. Serious questions were repeatedly raised about the prime minister’s long-term shelf life as the Cambodia National Rescue Party pressed its case that Hun Sen was not fit to govern the country.
A shift in agenda
The approach to news adopted by the two pro-CPP outlets, especially in the wake of the silencing of the independent media, has been remarkably contrasted to the ones adopted by the Daily, Post, VOA, and RFA in years before. No longer have issues such as inequitable development, poverty, inadequate access to basic health care, and education—or political repression and rampant state corruption—formed the bulk of the issues covered in the news. And it is not hard to understand why.
Both Fresh News and the KT have close links to the CPP. Kith Meng, described by the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh in an August 2007 leaked cable from Wikileaks as an “a ruthless young gangster,” works as an adviser to Hun Sen. The businessman and media mogul reportedly helped Fresh News launch in May 2014. The KT—with its publisher who used to work as a personal assistant to the tax department director who helped close the Daily and Post— himself has clear links to the CPP and the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh. In 2018, the casino posted a profit “equal to about 90 per cent of the combined net profit of all Cambodian commercial banks.”
The Phnom Penh Post was the training ground for many top editors and journalists from around the world. Its closure sounded the death knell for press freedom in Cambodia.
Leaked SMS exchanges between a son of Hun Sen, the KT’s publisher, and the NagaWorld casino’s boss exposed in March 2017, for instance, noted a request for $65,000 to help run the paper that was coming only a few months after an outlay of some $120,000. This has had obvious adverse impacts on reportage of Cambodia in recent years.
For example, the newspaper has steered clear of negative reporting about the Chinese tourists and expats in the country. About 2.18 million Chinese arrived in Cambodia in the first 11 months of 2019. Yet despite being increasingly involved in crimes such as drug trafficking, car thefts, and even murder, which have been the subject of articles by foreign media outlets, the KT has avoided such stories.
In September 2016, an article titled “Victims Allege NagaWorld Kidnapping” appeared in the KT. The report detailed how a Chinese national borrowed and lost $10,000 from “a Chinese loan company called Sai Min, based out of rooms at NagaWorld” and was then held in a casino hotel room until his family in China repaid the debt. The page-long story by a veteran former Post reporter (widely recognized as having the best municipal police sources in the city) was a major scoop for the KT.
The newspaper beat both its rivals to the story right as it was trying to prove its reporting was in fact credible and not subject to the strict oversight from its pro-government publisher. However, the glory was short-lived—the article was removed from paper’s website the next day without note.
“There is accumulating evidence indicating that leading figures in the CPP have become deeply intertwined with these organizations,” said Meyn. But he said it was the content of Fresh News and the KT that most strongly proved its leanings: “The strongest evidence that these organizations are part of a concerted effort to reframe the media narrative is in their coverage, whether it’s softball interviews with the ruling family, uncritical regurgitations of government statements, or articles and editorials justifying the crackdown on the opposition and other violations of democracy and human rights.”
Meyn said the rising influence of China in Cambodia was instructive here. “The similarities between The Khmer Times and Fresh News and Chinese mouthpieces are remarkable. You’ll find a steady mix of uncritical reports on government activities, selective crime, and corruption stories (only after government action has been taken), and editorials that parrot the ruling party line, often in a more pugnacious tone,” he said, explaining that this was no coincidence.
“It’s also worth noting that the government’s Press and Quick Reaction Unit and Ministry of Information have publicized their own trips for training in China,” Meyn said. “China has also backed an Interior Ministry TV station—and strengthened cooperation in the media sector has been included in the barrage of bilateral agreements signed between China and Cambodia in recent years.”
“One helluva big basket”
Yet it is usually subtler forms of editorial intervention in the new media environment that have led to the corruption of information flow in Cambodia. Ear said that the impact on information flows in the country “begins with no coverage of bad things happening, only good things, [and] it ends with fake news.”
So far, the notable impact of the changing media landscape had been in transforming what is no longer so fastidiously reported about Cambodia in the country’s new media. “In Khmer, there’s a saying: you can’t hide a dead elephant in a basket,” Ear said, referring to the many social and political problems once reported by the media. And in Fresh News and the KT—and their domination of the media landscape—the CPP government has found a basket about as big as it possibly could hope for.
Ear would like to believe that Cambodians can discern whether or not pro-government media is telling the truth. However, “What’s happening now is that the truth is being hidden,” he said. “The truth is like that dead elephant though; you’re going to need one helluva big basket trying to hide that thing.” ●
