LAHORE: Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain has said it is highly important to converge laws and provide one smooth window operation to the media.
He said this in his online participation in a dialogue, held on the draft of Pakistan Media Development Authority (PMDA) at a local hotel on Friday. The minister said that there were seven laws in the country which were regulating media. Convergence of laws would help improve the quality of media, he added.
He said, “If we talk about implementation of laws, the Press Council addressed only two complaints in the last two years, and even those decision also could not be implemented.” He said that the ordinance which the government was going to introduce was of civil nature, in which there was no physical punishment but fines, adding that fine for an individual would be up to Rs 100 million, and Rs 200 for an organization. He said that the decision implementation would be done by two tribunals.
Ch Fawad Hussain said, “The media commission will be operative in 10 big cities of the country, and it will have five members.” He said that the media commission would make appointments, while the second commission would constitute the media tribunals.
He said that rights of electronic media workers were not protected, and added that half of the media houses were getting services of workers without awarding them any contract, and in half of the media houses, workers were not getting salaries. He said that the government wanted to evolve a mechanism so that such issues could be settled.
Later, the participants including Zulfiqar Rahat, Ahmed Iqbal Baloch, Shakeel Anjum, Khalid Qayyum, Salman Abid, Qazi Saeed and others stressed the need for holding debate on draft of the PMDA among the stakeholders to get their input. They said that freedom of press and protection of rights of journalists and the media workers was of utmost importance. The virtual dialogue was organized by the Pakistan Journalist Foundation (PJF).