THE signing in 2002 of a Memorandum of Understanding by President Jagdeo and a now-deceased Mr. Desmond Hoyte, on legislation to regulate broadcast programming, was widely viewed as a welcome development in bipartisan politics and the process of good governance in Guyana.
The conventional wisdom is that the legislation on broadcasting is long overdue.
Opponents will frown at any initiative emanating from government.
As far as they are concerned, everything said or done by the current administration, or by any administration run by the PPP and its CIVIC alliance, is anathema to anything and everything that the government's critics perceive or deemed to be inimical to their interests.
The government's call for people to come forward with information related to the allegations against Home Affairs Minister Ronald Gajraj is a case in point. The opposition wants the government to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate allegations leveled against Minister Gajraj by George Bacchus after the January 5 shooting to death of Bacchus's brother Shafeek. The government says it's in favour of such an inquiry. But the opposition is venomously critical of the government's call for the formal documentation of information supporting the allegations. The opposition doesn't believe that is necessary. Set up the commission, it says, and let the police do the information gathering.
Last Thursday's expression of concern about the printing of faulty migration figures from a draft USAID document is another glaring example. As far as certain media operatives were concerned, USAID Mission chief Mike Sarhan should not have publicly condemned the quoting of the faulty figures as "irresponsible journalism."
Dr. Sarhan's second mistake, it seems apparent from the remarks, action and subsequent remarks of those operatives, was not have allowed the reporter concerned to respond to his remarks.
It's a given that every media house has a policy mission and that it reserves the right to realize that mission in accordance with its interpretation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press and freedom of information. So the rhetoric of condemnation of those seeking to embrace those very rights and freedoms is revealing!
Debate on the role of the electronic media has been rife, since Prime Minister Hinds issued a statement decrying unregulated television broadcasting, about whether government could lawfully enforce restraints on TV programming in the absence of broadcast legislation.
In the run-up to the March 2001 elections, an independent media monitoring and refereeing panel found that television stations in particular distorted and misrepresented fact, intent on causing public disorder, ridiculing and demonizing people, and undermining the country's justice system.
That panel, comprising late Jamaican veteran Michael Whylie and Barbadian Harry Mayers, pointed to the absence of statutory regulations or stated programme standards and codes of professional conduct governing television broadcasting in Guyana as having "produced a free-for-all with very disturbing consequences for credibility, respect, decency, balance and fair play."
We expect to hear another round of tongue-lashing from some media operatives. But we accept that tongue-lashing as the reality of the times.
For the sake of the Guyanese people, however, we hope that the initiatives designed to transform the Advisory Committee on Broadcasting into a regulatory authority on television programming will materialize sooner than later.