Regulating Myanmar’s press: Bad news

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

THE news-stands that share the pavements with betel-nut hawkers and tea stalls in central Yangon display an impressive array of publications feeding a market starved for decades of independent news. The political changes in Myanmar over the past two years have led to an explosive growth of the press, with seven new dailies alone. Official censorship has ended.

But the process of changing the laws that have curbed press freedom since 1962 remains bumpy. It hit a new rock on August 12th when the information minister, Aung Kyi, outlined his vision for the media. For an unspecified period, he argued, Myanmar needs “a socially responsible media code”, with the government as a regulator. He was meeting with an interim Myanmar Press Council (MPC), set up in response to pressure to consult journalists on new press laws. The MPC favours self-regulation; the government wants to call the shots. Ye Htut, a deputy information minister and spokesman for the president, Thein Sein, dismissed the differences as “normal in a democratic country”.

The dispute boiled up last month, when Parliament’s lower house unanimously approved a controversial Printers’ and Publishers’ Registration Law. It renews the government’s powers to issue and revoke publishing licences and includes strict rules on obscenity, inciting public disorder, and so on.

The MPC cried foul. It had drafted its own media law, guaranteeing press freedoms, and said the minister had promised to put both bills to parliament. Instead he produced only the government’s. The bill was rushed through Parliament. The main opposition party, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, voted for the draft, thinking it had been amended to everyone’s satisfaction, and unaware of the MPC’s bill. With hundreds of laws being written or amended, MPs simply do not have time to read them.

It has rekindled old suspicions about the ministry protecting its powers. The hope is that the upper house, still mulling the bill, will send it back to the lower chamber. There the MPC, wiser after the debacle, plans to push its own law, using an MP from a small opposition party. The MPC is at least learning the procedural ropes of how democracy in the new Myanmar is meant to work—and finding that, in media legislation as in much else, it does not, yet.

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