The Fiji Times Limited will not immediately comment on the contents of the draft Media Industry Development Decree, which is asking for radical restrictions on the freedom of the media in the country.
Managing director Anne Fussell said: "It would be premature to make any comment on what action Fiji Times Ltd will be taking in response to the proposals in the draft Media Industry Development Decree particularly as we have been informed that all the points raised at the meeting by the various people and organisations who attended will now be taken into consideration.
"The document raised some critical commercial issues for us that need very careful consideration. Today (yesterday), at the discussions, we made representation on some of those issues and offered alternatives. We hope those proposed changes will be adopted," she said.
"Our company has had a very long association with Fiji and we remain 100 per cent behind the country and its people."
In New Zealand, acting Prime Minister Bill English said the Government would be concerned if there was a crackdown on the Fijian media and was seeking more information.
Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama yesterday issued a new media decree which Newspaper Publishers' Association chief executive and New Zealand Media Freedom Committee secretary Tim Pankhurst described as "highly oppressive".
It was clearly aimed at totally muzzling an already repressed media, he told the New Zealand Herald.
"We would be concerned about a media crackdown in Fiji... it does look a bit consistent with how the regime does business, but we would like to get a clearer idea of what they have actually decided before we make too much more comment," Mr English said.
Mr Pankhurst said the regime was cementing in place emergency regulations imposed a year ago that have seen censors installed in newsrooms.
Media outlets could be fined up to $F500,000 ( $344,000) and individual journalists up to $F100,000 ($69,000) and be jailed for up to five years if they failed to comply with the decree's dictates.
Offences included such "crimes" as criticising the government and even failing to run bylines, Mr Pankhurst said. Foreign media ownership was also restricted.
Officers were empowered to enter newsrooms and seize any notes, documents, or equipment.
"Soldiers overseeing the media is a characteristic of a dictatorship," Mr Pankhurst said.
"There doesn't seem to be any reasoning with an increasingly unsavoury regime that deserves to be isolated and condemned.
"Far from restoring democracy, it is heading in the opposite direction."
Mr Pankhurst said the Media Freedom Committee would continue to offer whatever support it could to colleagues working in increasingly difficult circumstances.
The Fiji Times reported that the head of the Fijian justice and communication ministries Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said censorship of the media would end once the Media Industry Development Decree 2010 was in place, though a former publisher of the Fiji Sun newspaper said the media decree was worse than expected.
Russell Hunter, the first of three Australian publishers to be deported in 2008, said Fiji's media had already suffered in the past year from the censorship rules imposed under the public emergency regulations.
He said the industry would not survive if the planned Media Industry Development Authority went ahead.
"There is no possibility whereby journalists can dispute or challenge decisions of this body. It is very clear that is cannot be challenged in court, criminal or civil."
- Fiji Times, NZ Herald, IW Online