CHAIRMAN of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Dr. Steve Surujbally, said yesterday that the media are vital to the holding of peaceful elections and expressed the sentiment that it might have been because of the work of the media and their commitment to self regulation that led to smooth polling in 2006.
The GECOM Chairman made this observation while delivering the feature address at the opening of a two-day workshop organized by the University of Guyana’s Centre for Communications Studies and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It was held at the Grand Coastal Inn on the East Coast of Demerara, and continues today, when it is expected that media owners and editors will sign on to the revised Media Code of Conduct for coverage of elections 2011.
“Your influencing the atmosphere in which this election campaign will take place is of great value, obviously. You have to help me help the public know exactly what they need to do and what the procedures are,” he said. “GECOM will stand by your side, whatever information you need, you call and you ask,” he said.
“I hope that over the next few days you will be deliberating issues, always with the focus that we stick by the Code of Conduct, that we adhere by the rules we made, and always have as the guiding light a practice that will result in an election that is not tarnished by hate propagated by media practitioners,” he said.
“The Fourth Estate is the guardian of democracy; and I hope as defendants of the public interest; that you remain that force and that you check and counterbalance all aspects of the administrative and political occurrences which can impact the elections,” he said.
The Chairman told the workshop’s participants that they had to understand the sequelae of bad reporting. “You have to have evidence. You have to be dispassionate when you observe issues,” he said.
“Emotion is counter to lucidity. It is incompatible with truth,” he said. “Don’t let [emotion] be your bedrock. Because if [it is] badly used, this power that you have will evolve into tyranny. If you carefully practice your art, you will find that society will honour you because it will be a society that will prosper and survive,” he said.
Giving a history of the genesis of the idea to have the media monitor itself, he said that in 2001, some senior journalists and consultants felt there was a need for a code of conduct for the media. “They were doing a great task and they spent time and crafted a document and put it to the media with the hope of this being used,” he said. Noting that it was not that successful in the 2001 elections, he said that it was resurrected for the 2006 elections. “I am convinced that the peaceful elections of 2006 had almost everything to do with your practice and the way you behaved yourselves, and you should take cognizance of that piece of history that you were part of. Some of you are new in the game. Follow that,” he urged.
The GECOM Chairman said that after preparing for the task of monitoring the media for what should have been the 2010 Local Government Elections, GECOM went back to the drawing board to perfect “that which for me was perfection.”
“We crafted another code that everyone then signed. And I have to tell you, it was not, in my belief, the best of things to remove the Media Monitoring Unit as a tile in that total action towards a democratic electoral process,” he said. He speculated that if the MMU was continuous in its work, “this whole nonsense of one person going on a station and making remarks that precipitated in the closure of the station might not have happened.”
He said that GECOM has found that since the closure of the MMU, about two or three months after the closure, the media were deviating from the “straight and narrow.” He said that at international conference, the Media Code of Conduct is demonstrated as what ought to be used by many countries of the world because of the simple element of self regulation in the Code. There is no law. You do it because you are professionals and you feel that you must adhere to that Code of Conduct.
“It is used in Malawi, successfully, in Nepal, in Bangladesh and in Kosovo, as they try to stabilize their own electoral process,” he said.
“At the end of this workshop, all of you will be invited to sign on to this new and improved Media Code of Conduct, as an indication of your recommitment to abide by the principles enshrined therein. In so doing you would have demonstrated your collective commitment towards the conduct of peaceful elections,” he said.