As has been re­port­ed in the me­dia, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Min­is­ter Ja­mal Mo­hammed and oth­er gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in a meet­ing with the T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA) and the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion (MATT) have pushed to get five min­utes in every hour of broad­cast­ing for gov­ern­ment pro­grammes to be car­ried by pri­vate­ly-owned ra­dio and tele­vi­sion sta­tions.

Pre­sum­ably, these five-min­utes-an-hour slots would be in ad­di­tion to the air­time in which gov­ern­ment pro­grammes are al­ready broad­cast on ra­dio and tele­vi­sion. The Gov­ern­ment al­so has full use of the state-owned tele­vi­sion sta­tion, the Caribbean New Me­dia Group (CN­MG), and Gov­ern­ment In­for­ma­tion Ser­vices Ltd (GISL) pro­gram­ming, the lat­ter car­ried with­out in­ter­rup­tion on Chan­nel 4. This is in ad­di­tion to ex­ten­sive paid ad­ver­tis­ing in broad­cast and print me­dia.

The con­ces­sion agree­ment un­der which the Gov­ern­ment is seek­ing this ad­di­tion­al air­time was struck in 2005 but has nev­er been utilised in the man­ner now be­ing sought. Per­haps the in­ten­tion of that agree­ment was to leave a win­dow for Gov­ern­ment to utilise these chan­nels for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a na­tion­al emer­gency dur­ing which con­tact with the pop­u­la­tion on the hour would be an ab­solute ne­ces­si­ty.

Now, how­ev­er, the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to take ad­van­tage of a sit­u­a­tion that could of­fend the sen­si­bil­i­ties of lis­ten­ers and view­ers-and worse. Hav­ing five min­utes im­posed in every hour of pro­gram­ming has se­ri­ous po­ten­tial to ad­verse­ly af­fect the fi­nan­cial vi­a­bil­i­ty of the pri­vate­ly-owned 30-plus ra­dio sta­tions, the three na­tion­al tele­vi­sion sta­tions and six small­er com­mu­ni­ty sta­tions.

Gone are the days when T&T Tele­vi­sion and Ra­dio 610 were the on­ly broad­cast me­dia hous­es and view­ers and lis­ten­ers had lit­tle choice but to sit through gov­ern­ment pro­gram­ming. Not on­ly must lo­cal me­dia hous­es com­pete fierce­ly against each oth­er but they must al­so com­pete against glob­al me­dia gi­ants whose pro­gram­ming is now ac­ces­si­ble every­where.

Own­ers, man­agers and the hun­dreds of em­ploy­ees of pri­vate­ly-owned sta­tions would be hit a crush­ing blow as con­sumers, not want­i­ng to have their lis­ten­ing and view­ing habits dic­tat­ed and dis­rupt­ed by gov­ern­ment pro­grammes, switch to ca­ble sta­tions and on­line me­dia now avail­able to them.

Pri­vate me­dia hous­es de­pend on ad­ver­tis­ing in­come which is dri­ven by the num­ber of read­ers, view­ers and lis­ten­ers they have. These com­pa­nies have in­vest­ed hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in their busi­ness op­er­a­tions. Maybe the Gov­ern­ment, in these times when in­vest­ment and con­fi­dence among busi­ness ex­ec­u­tives are in short sup­ply, has not thought through this in­ten­tion and how it could neg­a­tive­ly af­fect an in­dus­try based on in­for­ma­tion and en­ter­tain­ment.

The move has al­ready been con­demned by the In­ter­na­tion­al Press In­sti­tute (IPI) and its lo­cal and re­gion­al af­fil­i­ates, MATT and the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean Me­dia Work­ers (ACM). So far, Mr Mo­hammed has not de­tailed gov­ern­ment's plans with re­spect to this in­creased time be­ing sought for gov­ern­ment pro­gram­ming. And while he has said there will be di­a­logue and con­sen­sus be­fore im­ple­men­ta­tion, the sense is that it is a "done deal."

Me­dia ex­ec­u­tives and prac­ti­tion­ers at the meet­ing did not get the im­pres­sion that the Gov­ern­ment was pre­pared to make any com­pro­mise on the is­sue, or even that gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials un­der­stood their con­cerns. In this age of in­for­ma­tion in which cit­i­zens de­pend on in­for­ma­tion to struc­ture their lives, tak­ing such de­ci­sions could have far-reach­ing im­pli­ca­tions for the sur­vival of the vi­tal or­gans of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion and could se­ri­ous­ly re­tard the de­vel­op­ment of a free, vi­brant de­mo­c­ra­t­ic so­ci­ety.