Partnership in censorship

Workshop participants during the workshop hosted by the Office of Censorship has at March Girls conference room

By FIDELIS SUKINA

The Papua New Guinea Office of Censorship has called on mass media to take ownership of censoring their content before being disseminated to the public.

The office which leads in classifying and censoring content for the country has embarked on a different approach in form of a new bill “The Classification of Films, publication and online services bill” will ease the burden of censoring content to PNGs population of more than 7 million.

Chief Censor Mr Steven Mala

Chief Censor Mr Steven Mala said this during a workshop at March Girls Resort in Central Province which featured  the media as a key stake holder in awareness.

“In the new bill that we are proposing, we want each industrial group to take some responsibility we don’t want it to look like we are punishing everyone when we ourselves are doing the hard work. Like in the 80’s the censoring powers were given to the Television and Newspaper but it’s the radio that we want some level of decency”.

“At the same time we don’t want that privilege to be abused again and for us to take it away, that’s why under the new bill we want the companies to have responsibility on whatever they choose to share with the public its more or less a partnership under the new act, it will be effective once we have done the code of conduct and we will all be required to work under the codes of conduct”. Mr Mala said

He added that the office was not going to trying to apply strict censorship because it would cause delay in broadcasting and printing and that would cause a lot of commotion

Media participants at the workshop taking a stroll at March Girls resort

“We cannot apply strict censorship because if we did that your news and other programs on television and radio along with newspaper content will be delayed for two to three days because we will have to screen them, the new way will allow some leeway to have the level of decency in the content”. Mr Mala said

He added that service providers like Internet Service Providers (ISP), radio and television broadcasting must have some level of responsibility and they must exercise it.