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10TH JANUARY 2006
MEDIA RELEASE
PSC COMMENDS MEDIA CODE OF CONDUCT

The Private Sector Commission (PSC) wishes to commend the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) for successfully conducting a Workshop with Guyana’s Media Houses which has led to the signing of a Media Code of Conduct on Saturday last (7th January) by Guyana’s Media Houses and to congratulate all of the Media who have signed the Code.

The Media Code of Conduct for the 2006 Elections has been developed and modeled on the Code of Conduct to which our Media signed and agreed to observe for the 2001 Elections.

As was the case in 2001, there is no regulatory provision in place in our election law for ensuring that the Code of Conduct will be, in fact, honoured by the Media who have pledged to do so.

There will be, as was the case in 2001, a Media Monitoring Unit which will maintain a record of the Media’s elections coverage and which will be used by an Independent Refereeing Panel whose purpose it will be to publicly comment on the observance or otherwise of the Code by the Media. The process in entirely voluntary and self regulating. The only sanction on the Media for violating this trust is public approbation.

At the last Elections, two eminent journalists from the Caribbean, Dwight Whylie of Jamaica and Harry Mayres of Barbados served as the Refereeing Panel. In spite of their respective exceptional professionalism and dedication to the task which they undertook and the consistent and comprehensive reports which they provided, the Code of Conduct to which the Media had committed was more often honoured in the breach than in the observance.

In their final report, the Refereeing Panel concluded that “the performance of the media in covering these elections has been disappointing.” In their reports they noted that television Talk Shows “continued to offer viewers misinformation and partisan rhetoric.”. They commented that “the State controlled media badly serves the Guyanese public” and that “some of the private media also offered unbalanced coverage of the elections”.

The Panel, in their final Report, observed that “the complete lack of regulations of television has led to a situation where the linking of broadcast licences to the need for community responsibility is completely absent in Guyana. Also, the Government monopoly of radio erects a real barrier to the free exchange of information on this important medium”.

Five years later, Guyana remains without Broadcast Legislation and with the State owned monopoly of radio and State ownership of television and the print media, albeit, in competition with privately owned media.

The Commission considers it regrettable that we enter the 2006 Elections without having sufficiently learned from the experience of the 2001 Elections and that our political leadership has failed to address the need for regulatory provisions for governing the performance of broadcast licencees.

We must hope that our media, both broadcast and print, on this occasion, will demonstrate that they can be trusted to regulate themselves and to perform in a manner which respects the standards of ethics and professionalism expected of a media who claim the right to free expression in a democracy.