IN the first place when the government’s own legitimacy is in question, the purpose of regulating press should be clear – to destroy the press freedom to pave the way for autocratic rule. The corrupt ones in the government and outside will be happy because no allegations of corruptions can be made against anybody on the ground that the truth has to be established first through a court. The regulation requires not to publish anything, any untruth. The reality in public affairs is that truth is established through clash of truth and flashed in the media.
How the press will know the truth if the government itself is not truthful. Why should the present government be trusted for telling the truth when it got itself elected through electoral lies. Under the regulation the press will be fully under the control of the Information Ministry to know the truth. The whole nation is being insulted by a government that is afraid to face the people.
Who needs to control media and why? The question has been raised since the emergence of civilisation with the outset of media. The answer frequently points fingers at the autocratic rulers adding that they need it to protect themselves from public criticism. But why they fear to hear from the public or to say to the public? Legitimacy crisis is here the ultimate answer from which the incumbent government has been suffering as it was formed through a voterless election on Jan 5. Such regulations are for controlling the media by a government that has no democratic legitimacy.
The Cabinet on Monday approved the country’s first broadcast policy. The new policy has become a subject of criticism and concern from all quarters. The demand of the media professionals was for a policy that would outline the guidelines on issuance of license of private televisions, service rules for the employees and protection of the investors. But the government has unilaterally finalised the policy brushing aside the recommendations made by the stakeholders. They termed the new policy a regulatory one aimed at controlling the press.
The government is hoping that the journalists will not be able to unitedly organise resistance. They are already divided as pro-government and pro-opposition journalists.
However, the proposed draft said, Information Ministry will implement the policy until the formation of an independent broadcast commission. After enactment of a law to implement the policy, the chairman and members of the Commission will be selected through a search committee, comprising members of mass media and other professional bodies. The ground reality tells us that this government has not allowed any Commission such as Election Commission, Information Commission, Anti-Corruption Commission or Human Rights Commission to act independently.
The great English polemicist, John Milton who in 1644 spoke for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’ opposing licensing and censorship in a speech to the English Parliament familiar in literature as ‘Areopagitica’, the history’s most influential and impassioned philosophical defences of the principle of the right to freedom of speech and expression. To uphold the dignity of civil liberty, we believe that constructive criticism is better than false flattery. Echoing with the enormous will of the mass, we ask the government to obey “the voice of reason” and to be “willing to repeal any Act” for the sake of truth and upright judgment.
No autocratic government anywhere can be trusted to listen to the voice of reason. But most importantly the press freedom represents voice of the people. The conspiracy is to stifle the people’s voice to destroy democracy altogether by those who already denied the people their voting right to elect their government.
We cannot be sleeping when all our democratic rights are snatched away and compelled to live subserviently in our own free country.
