'Media enjoys freedom,but not mediamen'

The media by and large is enjoying freedom, but the scenario is different for the working journalists of different dailies and electronic media, speakers at a roundtable said here yesterday.

They said the journalists in print and electronic media have little freedom to project what they perceive and experience from incidents as the owner-editors determine the ultimate fate of the stories.

The Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists (BFUJ) and the Dhaka Union of Journalists (DUJ) have nothing to do with the rights of the journalists because of the division within the forums, they said adding that basically business tycoons were holding the control of the entire media and reaping benefit out of it.

The Philosophy Department of Jahangirnagar University organised the roundtable on `Philosophy and Media' at the Jatiya Press Club marking the UNESCO Philosophy Day 2003. The department had a 15-day programme for the occasion.

Eminent columnist and intellectual Farhad Mazhar, Editor of the New Age Enayetullah Khan, Prof. Abdul Matin of Dhaka University, Prof. AFM Obaidur Rahman of Jahangirnagar University, spoke on the occasion. Chairman of the Philosophy Department of Jahangirnagar University Dr. Golam Dastagir presented the keynote paper in the roundtable.

"We see media in Bangladesh is absolutely free, but on the other hand we see a daunting picture that the journalists are not free at all," Dr. Dastagir said in his keynote paper. He also observed that the entire media was gripped by the influence of party politics and by the tycoons.

Enayetullah Khan echoed the teacher and said the journalism had experienced its glory during mid sixties to mid seventies. But over the years, things have been changed because of the division among journalists and unwanted influence on newspapers.

Khan said the press freedom that has developed over a period of at least 100 years has been destroyed during US invasion in Iraq. The `embedded' journalists had nothing to offer than writing stories about the success of the occupation forces, he said.

Farhad Mazhar said that the objective journalism was a controversial issue as no report could be objective because of many reasons. The things, a reader should expect from a journalist is that he or she should project the maximum truth.