Electronic media urged to evolve code of conduct
KARACHI, June 18 2006: Speakers at a workshop on June 17 said that journalists of South Asia should come together for taking a joint initiative to evolve a code of conduct for reporting disaster events in the backdrop of recent experiences of covering massive natural calamities of Tsunami and Oct 8 earthquake in the region. They were speaking at the last session of the three-day South Asian electronic media workshop titled “breaking the line,” organized by the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA), here at a local hotel.
They said that’ code of conduct particularly for electronic media journalists had also become mandatory due to much recent phenomenal expansion and growth of TV and radio channels in the private sector and also to observe and honour peculiar socio-economic and cultural norms of the region. The code of conduct followed by media agencies in the West is not very much applicable in this under-developed and socially deprived part of the world. They said that representative journalistic associations from the South Asian nations should combine their efforts and deliberations for evolving a consensus code of conduct, which would be valid and useful for the journalists and editorial staff of the electronic news media organizations across the region.
Talat Hussain, noted TV journalist from Pakistan, said that he firmly believed in the inherent in capacity and ineligibility of the government in framing or proposing any journalistic code of conduct for the events of conflict and disaster. The journalists concerned only should take up and deal with the issue of code of conduct, he said.
He said that massive and large scale destruction and loss of life caused by the Oct 8 earthquake provided a unique and extraordinary opportunity of coverage for the private-sector TV channels in Pakistan, which had come into existence and started functioning
Merely a couple of years ago.
He said that post-earthquake situation from the journalistic point of view had also shed light on the unsatisfactory state of preparedness of the electronic media organizations in terms of availability of human, financial, material, and technical resources for adequately reporting natural disasters. He said the newsmen who had physically gone to cover massive devastation in northern parts of the country faced enormously challenging situation in which they were required to fulfill their journalistic obligations.
The challenging situation was mainly due to culturally different socio-economic environment and lack of any support for information, shelter, and mobilization due to utter collapse of government infrastructure in some of the worst-hit disaster areas, especially in Azad Kashmir. Talat said that highly placed government. Functionaries and officials including federal ministers had undertaken frequent visits to the earthquake-hit areas just for enhancing public relations image of the government and in fact such official frequenting hampered ongoing rescue and relief operation due to preoccupation of the helicopters that were already less in number.
Lakshman Gumasekara from Sri Lanka said that state’s response to the massive Tsunami Disaster of 2004 in his country was far much unhurried and inadequate and in such a miserable situation in terms of relief and rescue operation, non-governmental and non-state social, political, and relief organizations had quickly become responsive and reached the scene of devastation for filling in the vacuum. He said the news media organizations and journalists of Sri Lanka had also experienced for the first time coverage of natural calamity of massive scale and they had come to know vital useful information about needs of the disaster reporting.
Prabhat Dabral from India said that intense competition between TV news channels had been creating problems in achieving the desired journalistic goal of objective, balanced, comprehensive, and contextual reporting of the events of conflicts and disasters. He said the functioning of news TV channels had been relatively new phenomena in the South Asian region and journalists associated with electronic media 01’ganisations of the Saarc countries should sit together for pondering and exploring ways and means for objective and fair reporting of the events of conflict and disaster while setting aside commercial and business interests of the media organizations.
Source: The News
Date:6/18/2006
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