ON THE NEED FOR A MEDIA WATCHDOG

May 15, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The media, the Fourth Estate, acts as a watchdog against the government. But the media, including the private media, is so powerful that it too requires a watchdog to superintend its actions.
Historically, the call by the government for a body to exercise oversight against the media has been met with firm resistance. The principal objection is that such a body will muzzle press freedom if it is established by the government. However, the media has equally failed to institute self regulation.
Now that an official of the government has once again raised the issue of the need for a watchdog for the watchdogs, it has led a similar reaction as in the past. It has also led to the repartee that it was the PPPC government which had shut down the Media Monitoring Unit of the Guyana Elections Commission. This in fact was the gravamen of the response of the Guyana Press Association.
But that response typically misses the important issue of a need for self-regulation of Guyana’s media. The media in Guyana needs self-regulation. The recent history of Guyana has demonstrated that the media in Guyana can be a force of anarchy. Anyone who has been in Guyana and witnessed the actions of sections of the private electronic media just after the 1997 elections would understand what I am referring to.
Indeed, the greatest threat to democratic rule in this country has been the private media. When you want to talk about provocation, spin and a political agenda, there is ample evidence of this within the private media in Guyana. These traits have been most conspicuous since the PPP assumed office in 1992. There are some private media operatives who are more political than our politicians.
For anyone to hold up GECOM’s Media Monitoring Unit as a model for media monitoring is to hold up a highly flawed model.  That Unit deserved to be closed; it was a waste of resources and did nothing to institute or to reinforce professional standards in the media in Guyana.
GECOM’s Media Monitoring Unit employed a highly questionable methodology of monitoring fairness and balance with the media.  For example, one of the ways in which that unit established bias in the media was by simply counting the number of pro-government or anti-government stories published or broadcast. This is based on a highly questionable premise since the State media would have been expected to have a high proportion of stories about government’s development, but does this necessarily establish a basis for bias?
This column had in the past argued that when it comes to the State media, a judgment of bias has to relate not to the degree of coverage given to developmental initiatives but rather to the extent of coverage given to opposition concerns. Thus, simply monitoring a newscast and classifying stories according to which one gives a more favorable indicator of the government or the opposition is simply going to produce statistics which are meaningless.
Oversight has to go beyond mere monitoring. It has to set standards and allow for agreement on those standards. When those standards are set, there has to be a mechanism that enforces sanctions for breaches of those standards.
I had argued in the past that if the objective is to encourage fairness and balance, what was required was more than just tabulations of media content. More important was the need to develop a professional code within the media itself in Guyana. GECOM’s Media Monitoring Unit did not address this challenge.
Instead of such a toothless unit what was needed was a permanent media oversight body that was committed to improving standards and ensuring balance and objectivity by all sections of the media.
This is not going to be easy. The media in Guyana is seriously divided. The private media in Guyana can be just as biased and anarchical as the State-owned media. Within both the private media and state there are so called professionals who are more political than the politicians themselves.
In order to promote fairness, balance and professional standards, what is needed, in the interim, is an independent media oversight body staffed by professionals from outside of Guyana, such as what we had at one stage when some professional journalists were brought in from the Caribbean to examine fairness and balance in the media in the run up to the 2006 elections.
They did an excellent job and their tenure should have been continued until such time as Guyana’s polarized media culture is reduced and thus in a better state of readiness to undertake self regulation. The media culture in Guyana is not going to change unless there is a commitment by all media houses to respect the judgment of a media observatory body comprised of respectable professionals from outside of Guyana.
The work of an MMU can support these professionals by providing some empirical measures which can be used to support the judgment of the professionals, but no one is going to take the reports of any MMU of GECOM seriously unless there are independent professionals overseeing the work of the unit.
That work of those professionals brought here in 2006 should have been continued so as to develop a professional media culture in Guyana. This may have led to the establishment even of a credible media complaints’ authority so that persons who have problems with media coverage could have had recourse including those who feel that some newspapers and electronic media houses are not balanced.

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