Maravi

Celebrating May 3 with unchanging demands

Celebrating May 3 with unchanging demands
By Editor
Saturday May 03, 2008 [04:00]

WE celebrate this year's World Press Freedom Day with more or less the same agenda, problems and challenges as those of last year. And top on our agenda is the access to information Bill. As we celebrate this year's World Press Freedom Day, we call on all our politicians, especially our parliamentarians, to reflect and meditate deeply over the issue of access to information. We urge them to explore how media freedom and access to information feed into the wider development objective of empowering the people.

There is need for us citizens and our political leaders to realise that empowerment is a multi-dimensional social and political process that helps us gain control over our own lives. And this can only be achieved through access to accurate, fair and unbiased information, representing a plurality of opinions, and the means to actively communicate vertically and horizontally, thereby participating in the active life of our nation, of our communities.

But this will not come by itself. We have to work for it, we have to make it happen. It will require us, as a nation, to create the necessary environment under which it can be realised. In order to make it a reality, a legal and regulatory environment must exist that allows for an open and pluralistic media sector to emerge; political will to support the sector and rule of law to protect it must also exist, and there must be law ensuring access to information, especially information in the public domain.

We know that our politicians, especially our parliamentarians and those in government, have been very uncomfortable with issues concerning access to information and increased media freedoms and rights.

They look at the media as protagonists who should not be made more powerful than they already are. They seem to feel that enacting access to information legislation will make the media stronger at the expense of those who govern, those in politics.

They have every right to fear the media, to be uncomfortable with it and less trusting of it given the way our media has performed. It cannot be denied that the media has not performed to the high standards expected of it. Of course there are reasons for this poor performance which don't need too much disquisition.

But whatever our irritations, our fears, our discomfort with the media, we should never use that to stifle media freedom and deny our people access to information. The cure for all these deficiencies with our media is to give them more and more access to information; and not to limit it. Limiting access to information will only worsen the situation.

Moreover, access to information is not for the media alone - it is for every citizen, including politicans themselves.
And news consumers must have the necessary media literacy skills to critically analyse and synthesise the information they receive to use it in their daily lives and to hold the media accountable for its actions.

The elements, along with the media professionals adhering to the highest ethical and professional standards designed by themselves as practitioners, serve as fundamental infrastructure on which freedom of expression can prevail. On this basis media serves as a watchdog, civil society engages with authorities and decision-makers, and information flows through the nation and between communities.

The media can fulfil a watchdog role by reporting on the activities of government, civil society and the private sector. A plurality of media outlets is key for this to occur because of the breadth of material to report on and to ensure that different opinions are heard. The media enables citizens to be informed and to participate in their society which generates real empowerment. And accurate, fair and unbiased reporting is the best defence against ignorance and uninformed decision making.

In all facets of national and community life, the media plays a central role as the conduit for information and potentially a catalyst for activism and change. For example, development issues can have a polarising effect on a community, encompassing a debate that can stretch from economic benefits to environmental impacts to overall quality of life concerns.

Through media, a non-threatening informed debate can ensue that is able to yield positive outcomes for all stakeholders. In these instances, media can ensure the voice in a community is counted as much as the financial interests of investors in any one particular project.

It becomes increasingly evident that the responsibility of accurate, fair and unbiased reporting is critical to the media's relevance and respectability in a society and to the community's ability to fulfil its role in a democracy. Without the informed participation of its citizenry, a democracy is sure to crumble. If those in power are manipulating journalists, the media become a propaganda tool for plunging the society into ignorance, indifference and despair.

But we must realise that the fuel that drives this engine, that moves all this, is information and, therefore, access to information is very critical. Freedom of information laws, which permit access to public information are essential, but so are the means by which information is made available.

Open and pluralistic media are, perhaps, most precious when they simply provide the mirror for society to see itself. These moments of reflection are instrumental in defining national and community objectives, making course corrections when the nation or the community or its leaders have lost touch with each other or gone astray.

It is clear that the communications media are powerful and far-reaching instruments for promoting awareness and consciousness. They should therefore be accorded new importance in our nation and communities. It would be difficult for us to find a more effective tool for educating, mobilising, organising and agitating the masses of our people. If we do not use these media, it is doubtful that our voice will be heard at all.

The statistics indicating the average amount of time Zambians are devoting to listening to various radio stations, watching television, reading newspapers and other publications each week leave no doubt as to their importance.

They will be of decisive importance in inculcating human values and in promoting new types of organisational and living styles that will help to create the new order we seek. For this reason, it is important that we give the media and all our people maximum freedom and adequate access to information so that they can meaningfully participate in the affairs of their country and their communities.

Labels: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION BILL, PRESS

posted by MrK @ 3:15 AM