Godfrey Washington, the proprietor of GWTV Channel 2 was declared President of the recently formed Guyana Media Proprietors Associa-tion (GMPA) when elections were held on January 27th, a release from the GMPA said.
Savitree Sharma, co-proprietor of CNS Channel Six was declared as Vice-President with responsibility for the electronic media and Nadia De Abreu of the Guyana Times was declared as Vice President for the print media. Robin St Marthe of VCT Channel 28 was elected as Secretary and Andron Alphonso of RCA Essequibo was elected as Treasurer.
Maxwell McKay, Proprietor of WRHM Channel 7, Anand Persaud, Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News and Father Malcolm Rodrigues of the Catholic Standard were elected as committee members.
The GMPA is to meet shortly to begin drafting its work programme. Of great interest is the planned presentation by the government of legislation on a Broadcast Authority and Access to Information.
The media houses represented at the election were RBS Channel 13, Dave TV, GWTV Channel 2, the Catholic Standard, WRHM Channel 7, CNS Channel 6, RCA TV, MTV Channel 65, VCT Channel 28, the Stabroek News, the Guyana Times and HBTV Channel 9.
The Returning Officer for the elections was Arnon Adams.
The release noted that In September of 2009, media proprietors and their representatives met at a conference sponsored by the Canadian High Commission and the Guyana Press Association.
At this meeting, a decision was taken to form an association to represent the proprietors of the print and broadcast media houses. The purposes of the associationwould include: speaking with one voice on matters of common concern to the industry, serving the public interest and maintaining public trust and establishing a self-regulatory code of practice and a complaints mechanism.
A steering committee was then established for the purposes of forming the GMPA with Anand Persaud, Editor-in-Chief of Stabroek News as the convenor and comprising Savitree Sharma of CNS Channel 6, Nadia De Abreu of the Guyana Times, Charles Griffith of HBTV Channel 9 and Father Malcolm Rodrigues of the Catholic Standard.