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T&T broadcast ‘ensurance’ policy, made in UK

Largely unruffled responses to the 2008 draft Broadcast Code suggest we have come a long way from 1997, when Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj captained the UNC’s anti-media aggression.

The then-attorney general had sought to codify the Government’s grievances into a Green Paper on media law reform.

Alarums sounded. The media threw up leadership, produced a united front, and summoned an urgent call-out to the barricades of resistance.

Hostilities never really ended, but a cease-fire took effect with the withdrawal of the Green Paper.

Rejecting the UNC project for State regulation, in favour of self-regulation, media leaders set up a body to receive and adjudicate on complaints.

Judging from such vital signs as it has lately shown, that Media Complaints Committee is in danger of finding itself in some unmarked grave, without the least last rites having taken place to celebrate its life.

As late as 2005, when the Telecommunications Authority had put out its first draft code, the self-regulation option was still available for recall and recommendation.

The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (now known as ACM) remembered the 1997 Media Complaints body and the guidelines to which the biggest media titles had sworn adherence:

“The (2005 draft) code appears to ignore the fact that there already exist guidelines for media houses which are currently administered by the Media Complaints Committee, within the framework of self-regulation.”

By 2008, State regulation looks like the only show in town. The Telecommunications Authority now wields more than just statutory power.

Like the rest of the State, its ample funding affords foreign and local consultancies, and promotional campaigns, down to the glossy flyers stuffed into mailboxes.

For an April Hilton-ballroom session, Balance on the Airwaves, the authority imported experts from Jamaica, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and the US for a one-day confab with people presumably chosen as local media experts.

Marketing for the resulting 2008 code is thus a bigger and louder operation than the 2005 exercise, which had been identified with earnest, often ungrammatical, propositions, and seat-of-the-pants advocacy, by then chairman and CEO, Ralph Henry and John Prince.

Today’s state-of-the-art draft retains authorship by the T&T public sector. So the familiar linguistic, grammatical and copy-editing misfortunes self-identify as those parts of the text that were not lifted from OfCom, the UK’s broadcast regulator.

Disappointing and confounding, at least to this T&T reader, the new draft fails to offer any pointedly declarative statement about what the broadcast sector amounts to in relation to national needs and aspirations.

Still to be found anywhere is any clarification of the national ends, to which the huge investment in broadcast media (38 radio, maybe 15 TV, plus the expanding Telecommunications Authority apparatus itself) may be dedicated.

At a minimum, the authority should find itself bound to account for its stewardship, the major outcome of which has been the unstudied, proliferating, award of broadcast licences.

Instead, what? The draft code is a promulgation of commandments, in the fine-print form of thou-shalt-not injunctions.

Not until page five of eight is it made clear that the code is a requirement of the Telecommunications Act. The statute itself says more, and in clearer language, about the dedication of the telecommunications sector than the authority ever essays:

“Toward a system that serves to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the national, social, cultural and economic well-being of the society.”

Relative confusion and clutter of thought and formulations mark the statement of “purpose” at the top of the draft. The writers cite “stakeholders,” without including that cliche among terms defined for the purposes of the code.

Nor do they try to pin down what the hell could be meant by the “maintenance of ethical and cultural standards.”

The reader who stumbles up against unexplained reference to “cultural standards” will also query the “objectives,” all stated as dos and donts, which allow only vague inferences toward a statement of ideals.

Comprising 14 injunctions all introduced by “To ensure...,” the objectives only indirectly translate into policy—one that may be regarded as an ensurance (sic) policy.

Indeed, the draft introduces a regulatory language with a vocabulary to be memorised. Consultants and consultations have evidently advised wholesale borrowing from the language and the regulatory terms of art belonging to OfCom.

Such terms will come with their peculiar roots in British and European case-law disputation. The draft code may thus entail a regulatory partnership that anticipates the signing with Europe of the EPA deal.

Another surprise is the code’s arrogation to the authority of a free-ranging and self-appointed role as the brooding, father-figure, guardian of children’s interests.

“Steps should be taken to minimise psychological trauma to children,” it tells broadcasters, elsewhere forbidding anything that “threatens a child’s sense of security.”

Almost casually, it imposes on broadcasters a mandate for knowledgeable, child-caring sensitivity that nothing in their qualifications for a licence had predicted them capable of discharging.

The authority is looking forward to setting up its own “monitoring system” to detect “harm and offence” likely inflicted by broadcasters on children under 14 .

In thus taking on the 24-by-seven policing of maybe 54 diverse broadcast channels, it will likely need comparable resources, and certainly more luck, than that other police service mandated to protect and serve with pride.