Let’s not blame the media

THE local media should not be entirely blamed for portraying a negative perception of Papua New Guinea with its reporting of law and order issues.
The mainstream media has today taken on an undeclared competitor.
The media’s job in maintaining the balance between truth and public perception and in ensuring to always remain just and objective is now being challenged with the introduction of social media.
Thanks to social media, with the click of a button, news about murder, rape, car thefts and many more in the country are uploaded, even if it’s just rumours.
Many will say social media is a vital source of information and education.
Papua New Guineans have the qualified right to broadcast or publish and to partake in a public assembly.
But that comes with responsibility as well which is what lacks in social media.
Health & HIV/AIDS Minister Elias Kapavore on his Facebook page, alluded that the perceptions of the outside world on our country as unsafe is propagated by our own local media.
We cannot continue to destroy our country.
He was making reference to the front page picture of The National on Tuesday.
What we published was from an incident on Friday that was uploaded to Facebook within minutes of it happening.
The world saw it first on Facebook before The National published it on Tuesday.
Gun trotting criminals are seen almost every day in the country and this issue must be highlighted to hold those in authority accountable for their inaction in dealing with law and order issues which is getting out of control.
Someone has to take on the responsibility of telling the truth about public issues and controversies, and that is the mainstream media’s role to extract truth from public officials or is it incumbent upon them to provide it?
For certain people, including politicians, public perception is almost everything and heavily dependent on the portrayal by the media.
Political leaders in the past have made strong and emphatic statements but nothing concrete was established and implemented to minimise the increasing level of crime in this country.
The crime issue has tested knowledge, creativity and skill levels of academic scholars, politicians and bureaucrats across the globe.
Universally, there are no single and straight-forward prescriptions, formula or secrets to reduce this multifaceted and complicated problem.
It is not possible to remove the problem once and for all because you are talking about changing human attitude, mindset and behaviour which have been influenced by some profound biological and psychological factors within the individual or surrounded by the social environment that individual interact with.
Hence, the only realistic approach is try to develop methods, not to eliminate the issue or even drastically reduce it and to live with it, ensuring the problem is manageable and do not seriously affect the citizens, visitors and investments.
Different countries apply different approaches based on their own socio-economic, political and legal context.
Therefore, appropriate response measures must be taken from this standpoint to curtail the problem.
PNG is confronted with pressing socio-economic, political, legal and administrative issues.
Once the Government has appropriately addressed these core issues one by one, it will be in the right position to minimise the law and order concerns in this country.