RAPIDTVNews
Moroccan media guidelines met with opposition
Rebecca Hawkes – RapidTVNews | 23-04-2012
New guidelines for Morocco’s broadcasters, which require public television and radio stations to become more religious, have sparked debate among both the country’s media and the coalition government.
The new guidelines, introduced earlier this month by Communications Minister Mustapha Khalfi from the moderate Islamist party, include banning lottery advertisements and introducing a mandatory call to prayer broadcast five times a day.
The amount of French broadcast on state television is also to be reduced, and replaced instead with shows including a mufti, or Muslim cleric, tackling youth and social issues.
“These channels are performing a public service and so they must submit to certain minimum requirements,” the Minister told the daily L’Economiste.
The heads of the public television stations, however feel the measures will infringe on their editorial freedom.
The guidelines represent “a will to kill the programming on Channel Two,” Samira Sitail, news director for Channel 2M, told Al-Ahdath Al-Maghrebiya.
“This is not a license agreement. It is a programing list, and logic and our profession says that politics should not dictate TV programing,” he added.
Coalition government members Mohammed Ouzzine, the minister of sports from the rural Popular Movement, and Nabil Benabdellah, the minister of housing and former communications minister from the left-wing Party of Progress and Socialism, have also both expressed their opposition to the new media guidelines introduced by the Islamist party.
Observers suggest, however, the move by the newly elected government is to challenge the dominance of the king, who has traditionally controlled the country’s media.
Matti Monjib, president of the Ibn Rushd Centre, which promotes investigative journalism told AP Morocco’s public television “has never been independent. The guidelines are a way of trying through the window, rather than the front door, to take control of public broadcast media.”
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