Broadcast commission

Children in Jamaica and the world at large are surrounded by opportunities to develop and use emergent literacy skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Based on a research conducted by the Sesame Street Media, “Once children get to 7 and 8 years, they are able to focus on activities for longer stretches of time. Their memory, logical reasoning, and problem-solving skills sharpen. Children at this age are also starting to form stronger, more complex relationships outside the family, especially with same-sex peers. The power of media on the society is taken as a axis that media representations are not simply a mirror of society but rather, they are highly selective and merely an example. Therefore, active decisions should be taken at every stage of the process of producing and transmitting media material, regarding what should be included and what should be omitted and how and when a content should be presented. Possible effects such as such as violent or aggressive behavior, substance use, sexual activity and decreased school performance are major issues.

In an aid to prevent this, necessary measures need to be taken in order to mitigate these potential problems. In Jamaica there are directives that electronic media, broadcast radio and television, as well as subscriber television has to follow from the Broadcasting Commission. The Broadcasting Commission role is to monitor and regulate these industries, balancing the interests of consumers, the industries and the creative community in implementing public policy and law. Ender the Broadcasting Law and Regulation Code, there is the Children’s Code for Programming. This code sets out standards for the media to rate and schedule or filter programming and provide advisories. This will assist parents and guardians to determine the types of material to which their children are exposed. The procedures in the code arise from the general principles for dealing with child audiences are detailed in the Children’s Charter for programming.

According to the code, rating is an assessment of the nature of problematic material in all programming. For the broadcast, media rating will be done of all programming including newscasts, broadcasts of sporting events, music videos, programmer trailers, songs and advertisements where as for the subscriber television services rating will be carried out on each channel. Scheduling or filtering Is ensuring that programming Is only transmitted to the appropriate audience for the type of problematic material it contains.

Therefore, the broadcast media programmer are scheduled so that potentially harmful material is not transmitted at times when children can reasonably be expected to be a significant part of the radio or television audiences. Subscriber television services material is filtered so that programming channels rated A or X are only available to subscribers who specifically choose to have that material in their homes. In an effort to do so they provide what is called a Watershed,’ established at pm daily.

This is a time each day, after which a programming might become increasingly adult oriented. Advisories are information about the nature and make informed choices about what type of programming children in their care are exposed to. For example: According to the Broadcasting Commission, on radio aired between 7:mama and 8:1 Sam, material reviewed song, “All my ladies if you got it let me know, she thick in her hips, colder than a month licking her lips; a bad ‘matchlocks’. Apple looking so right. She makes me want a piece. I give it to her all night, she doesn’t want to leave”.

They found this as being offensive sounding words, as it presents a distasteful language, sexual content and it is in Breach of Watershed, (February 6&20 2009 Directives and Children Code). Therefore, it is in the best interest of the Broadcasting Commission that obscene and indecent programming is constitutional, because of the compelling societal interests in protecting children from potentially harmful programming and supporting parent’s ability to determine the programming to which their children will be exposed to at home.

In a speech presented by Chairman of the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica, Hope S. Dunn on July 14, 2010 at the Pegasus Hotel, he stated that, “Regarding the enforcement of the Children’s Code for Programming, there has been significant progress in the quality of the output on electronic media nationally. This is evident from the Commission’s Complaints record for the period April 2009 to March 2010, the Commission received sixty-nine (69) complaints. This was a decrease of forty-seven percent (47%) when compared to the previous period.

On the other hand the Media Association of Jamaica in partnership with the Press Association of Jamaica has reduced a Code of Ethics for Journalists to create a higher basic standard of journalism across the industry and to improve transparency and redress by media houses in the public interest. There is always that time in a media practitioner’s career, when he or she would end up at a crossroads where an ethical decision has to be made between right and wrong.

Often times, ethical choices are hard to make, but at the end of the day a decision has to be made. Professionals in various fields make choices not Just in a systematic way but most importantly in an ethical manner. With that being said, the press association of Jamaica code of practice, provides requirements for media practitioners to abide by, it also deals with matters of common concern among citizen as it relates to morality and the protection of fairness.

Under the provision of the code media practitioners should not identify children under the age of 18 who are involved in cases concerning sexual offences, whether as victims or as witnesses or defendants in a trial. In any news report of a case involving a sexual offence by an adult against a child, the child should not be identified. The adult may be identified if such identification would not cause the identity of the child to be revealed. In cases of incest, for the purposes of the protection of the identification the child, the term ‘incest’, where applicable, should never be used.