Micronitor News and Printing Company founder Joe Murphy moved the goal posts of freedom of press and freedom of expression in the Marshall Islands, a country that had virtually no tradition of either, by establishing an independent newspaper that today is the longest running weekly in the Micronesia region.

Murphy’s sharp intellect, fierce independence, vision for creating a community newspaper, bilingual language ability, and resilience in the face of adversity saw him navigate hurdles — including high tide waves that in 1979 washed printing presses out of the Micronitor building and into the street — to successfully establish a printing company and newspaper in the challenging business environment of 1970s Majuro.

Murphy, who died at age 79 in the United States last week, was the original sceptic, who revelled in the politically incorrect.

At 25, he arrived in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro in the mid-1960s and was dispatched by the Peace Corps to Ujelang, the atoll of the nuclear exiles from Enewetak bomb tests that was a textbook definition of the term “in the back of beyond.” A ship once a year, and no radio, TV, telephones or mail.

Still, Joe thrived as an elementary teacher, survived food shortages and hordes of rats, endearing him to a generation of Ujelang people as an honorary member of the exiled community.

After Ujelang, he wrapped up his two-year Peace Corps stint by taking over teaching an unruly urban centre public school class after the previous teacher walked out. He rewrote what he deemed boring curriculum and taught in military style, replete with chants in English.

These experiences in pre-1970s Marshall Islands fuelled his desire to return. After his Peace Corps tour, some time to travel the world, and a brief return to the US, Murphy headed back to Majuro.

No money, but a vision
He had no money to speak of, but he had a vision and he set out to make it happen.

“He was determined to start a newspaper written in both the English and Marshallese languages,” recalls fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Mike Malone, the co-founder with Murphy of what was initially known as Micronitor.

In late 1969, they began constructing a small newspaper building, mixing concrete and laying the foundation block-by-block with the help of a few friends.

Before the building was completed, however, they launched the Micronitor in 1970, printing from Malone’s house.

The Micronitor would be renamed later to the Micronesian Independent for a bit before finding its identity as the Marshall Islands Journal.

Writing in the Journal in 1999, Murphy commented: “The 30th anniversary of this publication is an event most of us who remember the humble beginnings of the Journal are surprised to see.

“February 13, 1970 was a Friday, an unlucky day to begin an enterprise by most reckonings, and the two guys who were spearheading the operation were Irish-extract alcohol aficionados with very little or no newspaper experience.

A worthy undertaking
“They also, between the two of them, had practically no money, and of course should never, had they any commonsense, even attempted such a worthy undertaking.

“But circumstances and time were on their side, and with all potential serious investors steering clear of such a dubious exercise they had the opportunity to make a great number of mistakes without an eager competitor ready and willing to capitalise on them.”

With Murphy at the helm, it wasn’t long before the Journal earned a reputation far beyond the shores of the tiny Pacific outpost of Majuro. Murphy encouraged local writers, and spiced the newspaper with pithy comment and attacks on US Trust Territory authorities and the Congress of Micronesia.

In the late 1980s and 1990s Murphy built two bars and restaurants, local-style places that appealed to Majuro residents as well as visitors. He also built the Backpacker Hotel, a modest cost accommodation that turned into a popular outpost for fisheries observers awaiting their next assignment at sea, low-budget journalists, environmentalists and assorted consultants.

“The first thing that people think about when it comes to my father is that he is a very successful businessman here in the Marshall Islands,” said his eldest daughter Rose Murphy, who manages the company today.

“But we need to remember him as someone who wanted to give the Republic of the Marshall Islands a voice.”

“To say Joe was a unique person is a large understatement,” said Health Secretary and former Peace Corps Volunteer Jack Niedenthal.

An icon with impact
“He was an icon and had a profound impact on our country because he fostered free speech and demanded that those in our government always be held publicly accountable for their actions.”

A plaque in his office defined his independent personality and his appreciation of the power of the press. It quoted the famous American journalist AJ Liebling: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” This was followed by a three-word comment: “I own one.” – Joe Murphy.

“He fought for freedom of speech and fought against discrimination,” said Rose Murphy. “Regardless of race, religion, and even status, he befriended people from all parts of the world and from all walks of life.”

In the mid-1990s, Joe Murphy created what became the justly famous motto of the Journal, the “world’s worst newspaper.” It was a reaction to the more politically correct mottos of other newspapers.

Those three words led to wide international media exposure. In 1994, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of the world’s worst newspapers, reviewing a batch of Journals Murphy mailed.

When the Globe reporter concluded that despite its claim, the Journal not only didn’t rank as the world’s worst newspaper it was “a first-class newspaper,” Murphy’s reaction was to say, “We must have sent you the wrong issues.”

Murphy knew the key to successful newspaper publishing was not how nicely or otherwise the newspaper was packaged, or if a photograph was in colour. The most important ingredient in any successful local newspaper is original content, intelligently and interestingly written.

‘Livened up’ the Journal
He did more than his fair share to liven up the Journal, from the time of its launch until poor health after 2019 prevented his engagement in the newspaper.

“My father experienced extreme hardships on Ujelang along with his adopted Marshallese family, the exiled people of Enewetak Atoll, who were moved to Ujelang to make way for US nuclear tests in the late 1940s,” said daughter Rose.

“He shared these hardships with his children to give them the perspective of being grateful for any little thing we had. If we had a broken shoe or little food, he shared with us this story.

“Our father, to us, is a symbol of resilience and gratitude. Be resilient in tough situations.”

From growing up among eight children of Irish immigrant parents in the United States to the austerity of Ujelang Atoll to the early days of establishing what would become the longest publishing weekly newspaper in the Micronesia region, Murphy was indeed a symbol of resilience and independence, able to navigate tough situations with alacrity.

“Democracy was able to establish a toehold, and then a firm grip, in the Western Pacific in part because of a handful of journalism pioneers who believed in the power of truth, particularly Joe Murphy on Majuro,” said veteran Pacific island journalist Floyd K Takeuchi.

“He had the courage to challenge the powers that be, including those of the chiefly kind, to be better, and to do better.

“People forget that for many years, the long-term future of the Marshall Islands Journal wasn’t a sure thing. With every issue of the weekly newspaper, Joe’s legacy is made firmer in the islands he so loved.”

Murphy is survived by his wife Thelma, by children Rose, Catherine “Katty,” John, Suzanne, Margaret “Peggy,” Molly, Fintan, Sam, Charles “Kainoa,” Colleen “Naki,” Patrick “Jojo”, Sean, Sylvia Zedkaia and Deardre Korean, and by 32 grandchildren.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Described by a Guardian reviewer as “superb hate-reading”, writer and columnist Anand Giridharadas‘s latest book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World investigates the hypocrisy of billionaire “do-gooders”.

He questions how and why we have become reliant on the philanthropy of the super-rich to help solve our biggest global issues, and their role in eroding the public institutions that should be leading the way.

Giridharadas is an editor-at-large for Time magazine and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. His two previous books are India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking and The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas.

LISTEN: Kim Hill interviewing author Anand Giridharadas

He told Saturday Morning he once rubbed shoulders with the elite at Aspen Institute but had a revelation when seminar rooms there were named after some of the “worst actors in American and global life, David Koch for example and others”.

“We were discussing how to make the world better. And it occurred to me that some of these very people in the room had flown into Aspen from their jobs making the world worse.

“They worked for some of the Silicon Valley tech companies putting our democracy at risk, monopolising the economy and political power, they worked for food companies … lobbying against nutrition wavering, they worked for employers that fought against … raising minimum wages. And then they would fly to Aspen to talk about solving problems they were causing.”

Giridharadas said there was a spectrum of complicity – from the naive to the shrewd – among the richest and most powerful people in the world.

‘Shrewd’ financial crisis actions
He referred to the actions of Goldman Sachs in the global financial crisis of 2008 as shrewd.

“Tech is where the new money, the new power is.”

Tech elites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, felt privileged because of their finances and that they had mastery over a specific set of tools which they could use to change the world, he said.

“This vision is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.”

He said neoliberalism was a notion that “you should always do what’s good for money because when you do what’s good for money, people benefit somehow”.

But the money never trickles down.

“This was a fraudulent ideology from the beginning.”

‘Reputation laundering’
At the heart of the argument of “winner takes all”, he said flamboyant do-gooding around the world increased one’s chokehold on wealth and power.

“You first get rich by cutting every possible social corner you can cut – you avoid taxes if you can avoid them, you use trusts and Cayman Islands accounts, you lobby for bottle service public policies that are good for you and your rich friends and bad for most people, you avoid paying people in creative ways by suppressing minimum wage, outsourcing to contractors.”

Bottle service, he explained, was like at a nightclub, where a patron commits to spending a large sum for it.

“You now have a lot of money, but you also have a lot of resentment if these connections are going to be made by people about what’s going on.

“Then what you do is you turn around and you start donating a fraction of that money to various forms of elite do-gooding – philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, for-profit social enterprises, maybe something involving Africa even if you’ve never been.”

He called this “reputation laundering”.

Do-gooding a smokscreen
Giridharadas said a person with money and a selfless demeanour could easily reach policymakers.

He said elite do-gooding was a smokescreen so the rich and powerful could continue to have their way.

There was a need for thought leaders to combat plutocracy, he said.

“A lot of these very wealthy business people are smart enough at business to make money and keep power, they’re not intellectuals, they’re not thinkers and they’re not necessarily gifted at spinning the web for justifications for their rule, so there is a need for quirk thinkers to supply the argumentation for an age of plutocracy.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz