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MECOZ must return to drawing board – Mwale

MECOZ must return to drawing board – Mwale
Written by Katwishi Bwalya
Thursday, May 07, 2009 3:42:51 PM

THE media needs to be convinced that subscribing to MECOZ is for their own good, the department of mass communication at University of Zambia (UNZA) has said. And UPND Sinazongwe member of parliament Raphael Muyanda has said there is a lot of indecent usage of language by journalists.

Appearing before the parliamentary committee on information and broadcasting on Tuesday, one of the lecturers in the department Gerald Mwale said media self-regulation must lie at the heart of the Media Ethics Council of Zambia (MECOZ) if it was to win the confidence of both journalists and members of the public.

Mwale said the benefits of self-regulation could not be doubted as they hinged on ethics and responsibility.

He noted that MECOZ needed to return to the drawing board and re-work its outreach strategy to win the confidence of society.

"The media needs to be convinced that subscribing to MECOZ is for their own good and they should volunteer to work within a set of rules agreed upon by themselves to promote and protect press freedom by operating under a mutually agreed code of ethics and the rules of natural justice," he said.

Mwale said the new MECOZ constitution, which was being scrutinised, would address the weaknesses in the old document and ensure that desires of members were taken into consideration.

He said MECOZ must support journalists who wished to unite their efforts to raise professional standards and thus strengthen the social standing of journalism.

He said the cooperation between journalists in the field of ethics was also great training ground for their cooperation in demanding their legitimate rights from government.

"...Only a fully free media can be fully responsible. Self-regulation and the promotion of quality journalism are among important safeguards of media freedom and even media power," Mwale said.

MECOZ chairperson Sr Rose Nyondo said the council would soon develop a subscription and accreditation committees for journalists in the country.

Sr Nyondo said the committees would have a strong training programme for journalists.

"What MECOZ is planning to do now is that they want to develop different committees which are not really in operation due to financial problems. We want to have a strong committee on training," Sr Nyondo said.

"One of the issues which...we want to address is that every journalist who covers an election must cover it the way we cover a football match and if you cover a football match where you are always giving yellow cards to one team, the spectators in the football match are going to call it foul because they would know that you are being biased. If you are covering a football match where only one team gets a red card and only one team gets a yellow card then everybody in the football stadium will know that you are a biased reporter.

"So we want to train our journalists in such a way that they are aware that in a football match there are those who are siding with one team and the others are siding with another team and both spectators want to have a fair coverage of the match."

She said the journalists would be accredited according to the ethics and regulations of MECOZ.

"We also want to have a committee on subscription and accreditation that the journalists who are going to be accredited to cover in the Zambian elections or Zambian government are accredited according to ethics and regulations of the body. We also want to build up other committees that are going to help journalists to build up their muscle into their training as well as reporting," Sr. Nyondo told the committee chaired by MMD Chisamba member of parliament Moses Muteteka

Sr Nyondo said more attention would be paid to community-based journalists.

"We want to pay special attention to community media because a lot of media personnel have no training at all and we want to give them training so that they are able to cover their training in a proper manner so that democracy can take its root in their own communities. They should be proper participation of the Zambian public in their community media and proper participation of the journalists in that community," Sr Nyondo said.

And committee member Muyanda wondered why the School of Mass Communications at UNZA had done nothing over the use of abusive language by some media organisations.

"In the interest of national development, has mass communication at UNZA the training ground of most of the journalists made an effort to restrain some of the most unprofessional method of reporting, calling an innocent or defenceless person ‘idiot’, stupid’? Has the University of Zambia come out and say look we cannot accept this type of language and that it is not in the interest of development?" Muyanda asked.

"Even a person who has committed murder in court, the judge will not go to extremes of using abusive language. The man is facing a trial, the judge will be polite enough in sending that person to the gallows. Of late we have seen unprecedented insults; some of us come from the days of the Times of Zambia newspaper, a proper newspaper. What are you doing about it so that this type of language, indecent language that is being used by the pressmen today be contained in the interest of national development? May I have a bit of submission so that we can come up with a recommendation to the government in the interest of national development."

In response, Mwale said as individuals in the department they were not happy with the language that was being used.

"We have debated some of the language that has been used in the media and we have generally not been happy, also as individuals and not as a department. There has been some expression of concern and this is something that we need to look at in future and see how we can address it," Mwale said.

Another lecturer, Dr Isaac Phiri said graduates from UNZA conducted themselves in a professional manner.

"Our biggest influence is in class. Once they [journalists] leave class and how they behave and conduct themselves becomes very difficult to influence. And secondly, not all practicing journalists pass through our hands so there are a lot of mushrooming journalism programmes in the country that are not regulated and are not even certified, so we don't know what kind of training they give," Dr Phiri said.

"We know that our students we drill them in ethics, we drill them through the use of language, we drill them through law. We put them through a rigorous four-year programme, so hopefully our students do not participate excessively in that kind of reporting. But at the same time we are not in total control of the whole media industry.

"There are also academic debates about what is wrong and what is right. We are always debating what is the right word to use and so on and as far as we know we teach them the law, ethics, we teach them what is wrong and right and our graduates conduct themselves professionally."

And Muteteka asked if the department of mass communication was impressed with the ethical and professional performances of journalists.

Muyanda told the department of mass communications to realise that they were not just producing journalists but manpower, which would soon be running the country

"What efforts are you making as the mass communications [department] at UNZA so that the communications industry, newspaper industry, radio they should come to a point where self-regulations system is brought to fruition, it comes to reality so that journalists can have forum where they can debate, bring colleagues that misdirect themselves or misconduct themselves to the practical point of discipline, for example. May I know how or why has UNZA not taken this initiative because at the end of the day it is national development. You are not just producing graduates, you are also producing manpower that is going to run this country one day," Muyanda asked.

In response, Sr Nyondo said, "We have held seminars but what we have not done is to call for a forum where we can have an open debate where different newspapers, different media houses are invited for this fora. It is a challenge which I feel as a department we need to accept but we can look into that."

Labels: GERALD MWALE, MECOZ, RAPHAEL MUYANDA

posted by MrK @ 2:44 PM