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2005/2006 |
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ACM PRESIDENT – ANTI-MEDIA EPIDEMIC SWEEPING THE REGION
June 3,
2005 - President of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers
(ACM), Wesley Gibbings, has spoken of a
“looming epidemic of oppressive broadcast media laws and regulations
currently hovering over the Caribbean
region.”
The remark
was made at a meeting of hemispheric press freedom organizations at the
University of
Austin at Texas in June.
Gibbings
referred to current attempts by several regional governments to impose
new broadcasting
regulations.
“Our
governments have moved to tighten, not liberalise media laws and
regulations.,” Gibbings said.
“More and
more journalists are being brought before our courts on criminal charges
when civil remedies are
available and the field of broadcasting remains under a dark and ominous
cloud of proposed legislation and
regulation.”
He said in
Trinidad and Tobago, “even elements of the media fraternity have joined
in endorsing conditions
of prior official censorship through the designs of a broadcasting
code.”
Gibbings told
participants of the Austin Forum that the Office of the Special
Rapporteur for Free
Expression had written the government of Trinidad and Tobago on that
country’s proposed broadcasting code
but its correspondence had not even been acknowledged.
He said that
“despite earlier interventions by the ACM”, the May 5 general election
“led almost
immediately to announcement of another look at broadcasting regulations
to reel in certain elements
of the media.”
The ACM
President also cited the fine imposed on St Vincent and the Grenadines
broadcaster, Elwardo Lynch
and the suspension of the television license of Guyana's CNS Channel 6
“at the height of a national flood crisis.”
“It might be
no coincidence,” he said, “that the liberalising of broadcast media,
particularly in the
English-speaking Caribbean has marked one of the more important
developments in the democratising of public
affairs in the history of regional mass media and our societies
generally.”
“The
corridors of power are being stormed by broadcast-mediated public
opinion in ways never before
envisaged.,” he added. “In our own unsophisticated, sometimes clumsy
way, our people are taking the stage.“
Gibbings
however warned that “if we do not act now to ensure that darkness does
not shut out the emerging
light, our societies will never forgive us.”
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