Kingston, Jamaica
October 19, 2016
During consultations almost a year ago on
the future of state owned and operated media in Trinidad & Tobago, we had
to engage the difficult question of determining the pace and direction of reform
in a sector that had, since our independence in 1962, been relied upon to
provide a service we often referred to as public service broadcasting but were
never quite able to put our fingers on what exactly we meant by the term.
All we knew back then was that the BBC in
the UK and CBC in Canada offered some kind of operational and fiscal model to
be emulated and that a social compact of sorts was required to ensure both
financial viability and an inalienable public stake in the enterprise
established to meet what was thought to be a public service mandate.
Instead, what we have had has basically
been a co-opting of state-financed broadcasting systems, albeit to varying
degrees, by partisan political elements over the years and a perennially
contentious drain on state financing, even as there has been a recurring and
parallel insistence on financial sustainability.
There are sufficient tales of
bans on content, politically-inspired staff recruitment and costly
administrative adventures in order to secure political favour to paint a quite
grim picture of the condition we were left to address last year when the
country was forced to confront an economic reality check.
Let me remind you that the reality check I
am talking about is an economy whose primary income generator declined in price
by 70% in just about two years.
In my view, the debate we engaged last year
in Trinidad & Tobago compelled us to pay as much attention to institutional
models as to the content to drive the aspirations of a public service
broadcaster. This might not have been such a bad thing after all.
In the process, we confronted the main requirements
of public service broadcasting from the vantage point of a longstanding state
broadcaster purporting to embark on a process of reform and transformation inspired
not only by acknowledging its programmatic shortcomings but also by assessing
the prospects for financial viability.
The pillars that kept emerging time and
again included a capacity to satisfactorily engage the hopes, fears and
aspirations of the entire society, to display a high level of editorial
independence, to promote and facilitate social dialogue and democratic
participation and to meet the financial requirements of engaging these tasks on
a sustainable financial basis in the midst even of economic turmoil.
As we have been mandated to do here on this
occasion, we need to pay attention to the challenges of 2016 and beyond and to
seek out the possibilities. For one, the advent of new mass media has presented
us with a media environment that is on the one hand becoming increasingly
fragmented and siloed while on the other presenting to media eyes and ears much
greater potential for moving beyond longstanding boundaries.
James Deane of BBC Media Action argues in a
recent essay on the subject that we also need to insert into the discussion a
notion of social fragility – the fact, as he puts it, that “in many fragile and
divided societies, media landscapes (are) becoming increasingly co-opted and
polarised, often along factional lines.”
This point is expressed another way by
media development expert, Susan Abbot, who suggests that current resistance to
promoting public service broadcasting as part of media development globally
owes much to two phenomena. I would suggest these phenomena are intimately
familiar to us in the Caribbean.
As Abbot puts it: “First is a traditional
distrust - and plenty of examples to feed that distrust - of governments that
refuse to allow the independence of PSB operations and content. Second is the history
in developing countries of weak institutions that are incapable of protecting
the independence of publicly funded media, even when the government is
ostensibly committed to do so.”
Of course, we would need to make the
distinction between publicly funded media and state-owned media and everything
in-between that relies on direct state or public financing, subscriptions and
license fees and revenue generated through the sale of advertising – and any
combination of all of the above.
The Caribbean does not present us with the
best examples of where reformed and transformed state media have been able to
meet the standard of public service broadcasting best practice, bearing in mind
the multi-pronged menu of aspirations I outlined earlier.
Let’s take them one by one: It has not been
the case in the media systems I have had the opportunity to look at in the
Caribbean that sufficient efforts have been made, as I put it earlier to “satisfactorily
engage the hopes, fears and aspirations of the entire society” – everyone.
This is reflected in programming cycles
that pointedly ignore many minority voices and interests and what I consider to
be a complex relationship between governmental objectives and the absolute
requirements of the development process. Development, as I have said many times
before, is not a politically neutral concept. This conundrum is highlighted in
many instances whenever there is a change in administration.
Then, what about editorial independence? The
proof of the pudding is very often in the eating. In almost every instance, we
find that the ratings for news and current affairs programming by state media
lag behind the popularity of private and independent media if only because of
the substantially supported perception that the news and current affairs
programming of the state media does not routinely represent the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Now, because of the many new avenues
through which people now get their information there is a growing marginalising
of official information, news and views. Enlightened state media also now need
to understand that governments no longer need their own media to get their
messages out and that the loss of control over the means of dissemination means
that these messages are now even more in competition in a growing marketplace.
In essence, the democratising role expected
to be played by public media is also being supplanted by far more open
conditions that permit all ideas to contend albeit in wildly uncoordinated,
unmediated ways. Attempts by regional governments to wrest control of the means
of and platforms for communicating from the grasp of citizens have consequently
become the norm.
There is also something to be said about
the mandate to portray more images and to tell more stories about our national
and regional realities. In some instances, this is reflected through
commitments, either through regulation or moral suasion, to increase the share
of local programming.
I know in Jamaica there is a lobby to have
as much as 80% programming time devoted to local content – a goal expressed by
CBC in Barbados about 12 years ago for television, with 60% local content for
radio. In my own country, Trinidad and Tobago, there are repeated calls for at
least a 50% share and one administration went as far as threatening to
legislate a 65% requirement for radio and television.
Of course, the passage of time has proven
that such a strategy, particularly with respect to private media will not only
not succeed but makes absolutely no sense. You cannot legislate taste or expect
intrusions into private business space not to go unchallenged.
Additionally,
choice has so broadened the contest for eyes and ears that regulated intrusions
will only serve to push people further and further away from media they would
typically trust the most. Let’s see where the surveys put state media
enterprises in most Caribbean countries.
In Trinidad and Tobago, the Board of
state-owned Caribbean New Media Group is actively pursuing a 75% local content
quota on television broadcasts and is developing an innovative path to achieving
such an objective in the face of declining transfers from the state, low and
falling advertising revenues and recovery from a period of neglect during which
the popularity of the television operations of the company fell to a distant
last place in the ratings. It’s much more uneven throughout its three radio
frequencies.
I had argued some time ago that we indeed,
as media professionals, have an obligation to reflect a Caribbean aesthetic in
much more effective ways. Except that the difficulties we have had in bringing
indigenous media outputs to the broadcasting mainstream owes as much to
questions of production values as to an underdeveloped sense of self.
To cite one challenge, there appears to
have been a willingness to dismiss notions of a Caribbean paradigm. For
example, during recent discussions with government officials in Trinidad and
Tobago recently I raised the question that the attempt to regulate taste in
favour of local production had the effect of placing the music of Bob Marley in
the category of foreign content.
There was even an interpretation of this
mandate that positioned outside the cultural wall the work of
externally-located musicians that would include people such as Sean Paul and
Heather Headley and filmmakers such as Horace Ove, Menelik Shabazz and Isaac
Julien.
There are other mandates we can also spend
some time look at including the challenge of promoting higher levels of media
literacy and the impact of media self-regulation as a function of the public
service broadcasting mandate.
