The habit of media bashing must stop

Former chief justice and chief advisor Latifur Rahman, a sophisticated and sensible man, could not hold his temptation to take a swipe at the press -- the same press that gave him unstinted support when he headed the caretaker government and without whose backing he could not have carried out the sweeping changes for which he is given so much credit for -- while addressing the BFUJ conference last Saturday. He said newspapers are unable to make their expected contribution because they are not guided by a proper policy. What policy does he want to promulgate to guide us? Of all the institutions in Bangladesh, the independent media has made perhaps the greatest contribution towards the strengthening of democracy and upholding civic rights in the country.

The media has been an unrelenting voice against corruption, abuse of power, acrimonious politics, violence, hartals, extremism and mis-governance. All this has been possible because we do NOT have policy to guide the media. As reported he did not say much about strengthening press freedom. He did touch on government repression of media men and women, the criminal attacks on reporters, the many death threats that our staff regularly face, but was not emphatic enough. He did not say anything about doing away with the Official Secrecy Act which lies at the root of the lack of accountability of the government and the occasional mis-reporting by the media because no official feels it is his or her duty to tell the people the facts about an issue being reported.

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To add insult to injury the former chief justice said, "I humbly request all newspersons to prepare reports based on facts. What, if not facts, are our story based on, may we ask? Is it the learned chief justice's view that we report from our imagination, that he requests us to base them on facts? We, on our part, humbly request him to cite instances of our reports which were not based on facts. We are surprised that journalists present on the occasion did not make the same demand of him as we make today.

It is sad that one of the best achievements of Bangladesh, that of free and independent media, is so trivialised. A more serious criticism of the press is what we need, and not unthinking and reckless remarks, as we said earlier.