(Jamaica Observer) The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) yesterday called on the Government of Jamaica and all other Caribbean community countries to take action to erase the common law offences of criminal libel, including blasphemous, obscene and seditious libel from their statute books.
“It is a position endorsed by a Joint Select Committee of the Jamaican Parliament in 2008, following submission of the Justice Hugh Small Report that very year,” the ACM, in reference to the situation in Jamaica, said in its message to mark World Press Freedom Day being celebrated today.
It added: “Though the media landscape in the Caribbean is undergoing a measure of change, such change is not being matched by a corresponding revolution in official mindset. Despite repeated promises, the Government of Guyana persists in its refusal to award new radio broadcasting licences and has used state advertising revenues as a tool of media punishment and reward.”
ACM President Wesley Gibbings said, too, that the state media in Trinidad and Tobago still wrestle with the spectre of political control “and there is evidence that a coercive broadcast content quota system will return, courtesy state regulators, to the front burner in due course”.
The regional media group also bemoaned the fact that majority of Caribbean Community countries have also not passed access to information laws, which it regarded as a prerequisite to declaration of the bona fides of a Caribbean country as one committed to transparency and accountability. “In instances where such laws exist, it is also important to ensure they are truly providing unfettered access to official information in the way originally intended,” said Gibbings.
At the same time, he urged politicians to shun the inclination to blame media messengers in an attempt to vilify the media for stories unfavourable to them.
The Media Association of Jamaica (MAJ), meanwhile, said the country, “our democracy and our people have benefited from a relatively free press” for the entire two decades of the commemoration of World Press Freedom Day.
“Over the years, there have been some challenges and some difficulties but overall our political administrations, our civil society groups and our media have been able to cultivate an environment in which traditional and new media have grown and multiplied,” said the MAJ.
The Jamaican media, it said, must resolve today that whatever challenges that now exist cannot be too significant to resolve in the interest of freedom of expression, responsibility and democracy.
However, while saluting media workers, managers and owners as Jamaica joins several other countries around the world in marking World Press Freedom Day, the MAJ said while progress has been made in reforming the country’s defamation laws, the process is incomplete. It said, too, that progress has been made in the review of the Access to Information laws, “but the work there is incomplete; changes to the use of Government Reserved Time has been taking place, but the process is incomplete and major changes in the regulations for broadcasting have been proposed but the consultative and deliberative process is also incomplete”.
