A legal practitioner, Sammy Bartels believes the guidelines regulating broadcasting content should be reviewed to effectively address the challenges associated with the evolution of broadcasting.
Speaking on Eyewitness News, he said the standards stated in our guidelines are very vague and have not evolved with the time.
These guidelines are anchored in the 2005 broadcasting standards guidelines, but Mr. Bartels noted that “we should begin to look at the guidelines, begin to look at where we are, vis a vis some of this content and begin to take a second look at the guidelines and ask ourselves if these guidelines are properly positioned to deal with these things.”
According to him, some of the standards have dwelt too much on moral issues as “you would look through the guidelines and you would see things that would suggest what people should portray in their content and they are very vague and not as clear as they have in other countries.”
Mr. Bartels was commenting on the decision of two broadcasters; Tommy-Annan Forson and James Kwasi Oberko, to file a complaint against three Ghanaian television stations for showing films with pornographic scenes.
The two, on Monday, presented their complaint against TV XYZ, Ice TV and Thunder TV to the National Media Commission (NMC) and the Ministry of Information.
Mr. Bartels also questioned the ability of the NMC to effectively enforce the law since per the legal regime, the National Communications Authority (NCA) gives the licenses to operate and the NMC only serves as the regulator.
“They [NMC and NC] do not have the far-reaching powers that will allow them to regulate how these things are done.”
In his view, the issue could get worse because “we just moved from analogue terrestrial television transmission and we are moving to digital and we have all these television stations that have popped up and a lot of them are not part of any particular organisation like GIBA and a lot of them, as far as they are concerned, owe no responsibility to anybody at all.”
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
