150 broadcasters and station owners from throughout the Caribbean are in Placencia tonight for the 35th Annual General Assembly of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union.
At the opening this morning, which excluded owners operators and media practitioners from all of Belize's media houses with the exception of CBU members Love FM and Channel 5, Prime Minister Hon. Said Musa used the buffer of friendly company to cast a diss at Channel 7. Allowing the digression to solipsism, we commence his remarks where the PM is taking credit for liberalizing the media by granting KREM Radio the first independent radio license in 1989.
Hon. Said Musa,
“My government fought to free the media from state control in Belize. I consider it a hallmark achievement of our administration.”
“Today in Belize the mornings from Monday to Friday are taken up with the phenomenon of talk radio and the call-in shows. Some of them are even now telecasted and if that were not punishment enough for ruling politicians we have the 6:30 TV news: Channel 5 and Channel 7.”
“In these 15 years my friends we have gone from one government monopoly radio station the famous Radio Belize, or some would say infamous, to a no government owned 25 private radio stations mostly commercial, some religious, and one decidedly and openly hostile to the government owned and operated by the opposition. Then there are the TV stations two of which are very aggressive. One of them I believe tries to be objective. [Pauses for Laughter] The other is openly hostile to my government so you see where we are between a rock and a hard place.”
With the politician's flair for hyperbole, we take the Prime Minister's description of "objective" to mean friendly and "hostile" to mean "objective." But petty name calling aside, the Prime Minister's prepared remarks did have some telling commentary on his view of the media and its freedoms.
Hon. Said Musa,
“The problem I see is when freedom of the press, and by the press of course I am including the entire media, becomes a license to vilify and scandalize when institutions and authority are so debased that cynicism becomes the order of the day. So much of the media: newspapers, radios, and televisions expect to hold politicians feet to the fire while so many of them don’t expect to be accountable to anyone. We need now to indeed to establish a consensus on content sensitivity and a code of ethics for the media in Belize. All the other professions seem to want to police themselves and to be left alone. And you know what happens if there is a vacuum and you don’t police yourself somebody else is going to do it for you.”
That tape was provided courtesy the Government Press Office since no other media was invited to the meeting.