Spotlight on Fresh News
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Narin, who now runs the Phnom Penh Today site, said that while Fresh News had earned its reputation as the best source of state releases, its fawning over the CPP and attempts to promote scandals about the opposition left some questioning the site’s motives.
“People don’t trust that news service when it comes to political issues,” Narin said, explaining that he believed Fresh News was more interested in keeping its powerful sources happy than its readers informed. “This is contradictory to ethical journalism.”
Indeed, the site’s coverage of government officials and Hun Sen’s family tends to focus on their efforts to travel around the country and resolve crises, with coverage of opposition officials painting them as criminals and sexual deviants intent on tricking the people.
In the past week, its coverage of the CPP has included stories titled: Hun Many visits 153 families in Baseth district who were victim to violent winds, Hun Manet: ‘The reform of the education sector in Cambodia has made students strive to learn well’, and Cambodian citizens in Korea support and thank the Cambodian government, which always thinks about the wellbeing of those who migrate.
Its coverage in that time about the Cambodia National Rescue Party, meanwhile, has focused on aggressive pieces about late former prime minister Pen Sovann, including one titled: Reader’s view – the opposition is politically exploiting Pen Sovann’s corpse.
Another article, which was pinned to the top of the website for an entire day, quoted an anonymous Facebook page that accused the former premier – who became an opposition lawmaker at the 2013 election – of being a pedophile who had died because of his sexual activities.
“Pen Sovann fell into sickness and died because he had many women and young girls,” Fresh News quoted the anonymous page as saying, accusing the 80-year-old of being mostly fond of “the young girls who worked as his servants, as well as many more massage girls”.
In July, Fresh News also published a letter describing the Phnom Penh Post and the Cambodia Daily as foreigners “plunging Cambodians into a bonfire of war” after the two papers – unlike Fresh News – reported on a Global Witness report detailing Hun Sen’s family’s business empire. It was accompanied by repurposed Nazi propaganda showing the papers decapitating Cambodia.
Four months before, it had become the main news site pushing out doz- ens of recordings allegedly of deputy opposition Kem Sokha’s talking to mistresses on the phone – an issue aggressively pursued by the government until Sokha was sentenced to five months in jail two months ago for failing to appear for summonses related to the case.
Yet the site’s desire to defend the ruling party is in many ways a strange turn given the history of its co-founders, one of whom was a founder of the country’s last remaining opposition newspaper – Moneaksekar Khmer – until it folded two years ago. Soy Sopheap – now a known “fixer” for Hun Sen – has for the past 10 years also run the Deum Ampil site, where Fresh News’s other co-founder, Lim Cheavutha, served as website manager until he had the idea to launch a smartphone news app.
The pair launched Fresh News as an app for Android phones in May 2014, later expanding to Apple iOS phones. However, last November, after another news outlet described Sopheap as the “owner” of Fresh News, Cheavutha ex- not abide by government policy,” he added. “That is why Hun Sen supports me – because I dare to criticise individuals.”
Cheavutha declined to comment on the reasons for Sopheap’s expulsion but maintained that his site had always maintained independence from the CPP.
“I would like to give no comment about this issue,” Cheavutha said of