Herming, 26, participated in a two-week news-media workshop in Taiwan last month organised by the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund.

"This is my first time in Taiwan. It is a very useful workshop for me," he said, noting that with participants from around the world he had many opportunities to learn about the foreign news media.

Before becoming a government communications officer, Herming was a journalist on the Solomon Star daily for three years.

"Our media enjoys freedom. It can publish whatever it wants but the law provides conditions. The news media must have respect for responsibility," he said.

If the media ran a story that upset the government, the government would respond with an explanation, he said. There would be no political interference.

However, there was interference in the news media since the 1997 Asian financial crisis from  the private sector.

For example, there were overseas logging companies operating in the Solomons that refused to pay tax. Certain business people then had paid reporters and publishers to keep stories out of the headlines, he explained.

Media in the Solomons mostly focus their reporting on politics and economics and there was emphasis on state and private-sector corruption.

The biggest problem facing the Solomons' news media was its size

and concentration in the capital, Honiara.

With a population of fewer than 500,000 across more than 900 islands, the Solomons has only two daily newspapers.

There are two weeklies, four monthly periodicals, a television station and five FM-radio stations all in private hands. There is only one AM station nationwide run by the government.

Herming had an undergraduate degree in journalism and politics from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and a post-graduate diploma in mass-communications from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.

The islander also had ambitions of becoming a politician.

"Being a future politician or prime minister has always been my dream. I don't care whether that career is well paid or not."

"I believe politics is all about exercising power vested in a politician to administer the country for the good of its people," he said.

Solomon Island politicians were often labelled corrupt. His dream was to change that image, he said.

Somroutai Sapsomboon

The Nation

Tainan