Staff Reporter:
Abul Kalam Azad Majumdar, deputy press secretary to the chief adviser, has said that many television channels and newspapers played their biased role during the past autocratic regime, but none of them have offered apologies so far.
Many of them served as the publicity tools for the then government and actively incited violence during the July student-people mass uprising, he wrote in a post on his verified Facebook page on Friday.
The full text of his write-up is as follows:
Four days have passed since July returned to our lives, bringing with it the memories of horrific shootings and murders as well as the rekindled hopes and dreams.
July gives us a renewed hope of rebuilding the nation as our media finally started owning it. In the past four days I could see some good articles in the media on what made July inevitable. Some expressed disappointment over achievements in the past months. But that’s fine. When expectation remains high, frustration could be deep.
TVs are seen airing special programmes without being instructed about anything from anyone in the government, which is another development.
It gives them a chance to redeem themselves. They had all the information and footage of killing during the time of uprising, but they could not publish those.
Now is the time for them to revisit July and show what they could not show during the time of occurrence. The good thing is that they started doing it.
None of our TV channels apologised for their role during the autocratic regime. Some of them acted as propaganda machines of the then government. Some of the TV and newspaper bosses directly incited violence.
Those who did this will surely face the consequences. But the Interim Government always tried to protect the institutions. We did not want to harm a media outlet for an individual’s fault.
We were aware of the limitations the TV faced. Journalists shared many stories with us about how they were forced to suppress information and publish government-sponsored events from time to time.
We were careful not to indulge in such practice and give the journalists the same feelings. Ensuring media freedom is one of the core goals of the Interim Government and the change is clearly visible.
