IT WAS expected that the television stations would kick up a fuss about the legislature’s decision to ban TV cameras from House committee meetings. After all, these meetings often provide great entertainment for viewers of the evening news shows, as they feature deputies rowing, shouting, gesticulating, trading insults and making allegations about most topical issues. This gives the stations the opportunity to broadcast a couple of minutes of entertaining footage plus a few sound-bites, without having to report tedious details about bills.
While the stations are perfectly entitled to do this, the presence of their film crews at committee meetings has one undesirable effect. It encourages a large number of deputies to play to the gallery, engaging in shameless populism for the sake of the cameras while competing with each other over who will come up with the best sound-bite, because this would be reported on the television news. Committee meetings have in short become a forum at which a deputy can prove to television audiences that he is the most patriotic, the most intelligent, the most caring and the most sensitive member of the legislature. This is a violation of the legislature’s regulation by which deputies at committees ask questions of those invited instead of spouting out their personal views about issues of the day.
This causes additional problems for the operation of the legislature, with deputies tabling issues for discussion at committees because these are in the news and will attract the film crews. These discussions are invariably inconclusive and of no value other than to allow individual deputies to take a populist stand about an issue which has been on the news. Consequently, bills which have to be studied at and discussed by committees are put back and when, eventually, they are put on the agenda they are not given the attention they merit, especially if TV stations do not deem them interesting enough for a film crew.
Under the circumstance the initiative of the House President to bar film crews from committee meetings is to be applauded. He discussed the matter with the chairmen of the committees and they unanimously agreed to keep film crews out of the meetings, which will however, remain open to all journalists. Any talk about the House imposing illiberal measures is both unfair and inaccurate. The decision is aimed at safeguarding the legislature’s standing rather than penalising the TV stations. As on Akel deputy remarked, the decision was taken in order to “tackle the human weakness of deputies”, and the station should accept this.
