Media reforms aimed to protecting press freedom: minister

ISLAMABAD: Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Farrukh Habib Thursday said that the PTI government is introducing large-scale reforms in the media sector to improve its performance, ensure the job security of its workers and protect freedom of the press.

“[The proposed] media regulatory authority is part of our agenda to introduce new media technologies and developed a state of the art effective mechanism”, he said while speaking to a news channel.

He further explained that PEMRA was no doubt discharging its responsibilities in a responsible manner but there was a need to develop a mechanism to check if the salaries were being paid on time and regularly and other related issues.

Habib said that government would not compromise on the issue of salaries of media workers and asserted it would improve the relations between the media bosses and their staffers.

While stressing the need for a digital advertisement policy and its monitoring, he observed the digital media industry is growing rapidly and the proposed policy will help improve the economy.

It will encourage the corporate sector to adopt digital media as an advertising medium, he said.

He said the government wants to digitise its departments to make things easier and it will set a criteria for the registration of YouTube vloggers and other platforms’ users because it cannot simply give advertisements to them on the basis of the number of views on their content.

The minister said there were the tech giants did not have an on-ground presence in Pakistan which should keep check and balance and run through a proper mechanism.

He said the government would expand media authority offices to address outreach issues, adding, legislation in media to ensure mandatory payments to journalists in print and electronic media that will overcome the problem of delayed payments.

Source: Pakistan Today