Official media not up to the mark: MP

Manama : Bahrain’s official television channel needs to rise up to meet the challenges of today, MP Jamal Buhassan said at the House of Representatives yesterday.
Accusing the Information Affairs Ministry of neglecting sensitive issues in the Kingdom, MP Jamal Buhassan said that Bahrainis are getting news about Bahrain from international television channels and not from the official TV channel”.
Buhassan’s statements came while answering to a reply by Information Affairs Minister Ali Al Rumaihi on Bahrain’s media strategies during the weekly meeting of the House of Representatives.
Unhappy with the minister’s replies, Buhassan said, “The minister evaded my questions and didn’t provide satisfactory answers with regard to the country’s media strategies.”
“The current situations in our country and the region require us to have a strong media strategy to combat fallacies and allegations against our country. We call for training Bahrainis in the national TV channel to combat the systematic campaigns against the Kingdom, which is threatened by systematic foreign and internal military, terrorist and media campaigns. The only change that occurred in Bahrain TV in the past few years was changing the logo and the decoration of the studios. This isn’t what our country needs at this time,” Buhassan said.
“When we have serious developments in Bahrain, the national TV channel is busy covering documentaries on wildlife or music video clips that are not related to the reality of situations in the Kingdom,” he added.
“No government TV channels in the world display any matter except through channel. We reflect the true image of situations through the concerned authorities. For example, if there was a security related matter, we would communicate with the security authorities and wait for their official statements,” Al Rumaihi told the MP.
“Some parties are attempting to drag the Bahraini media to project some events to demonstrate that situations aren’t stable in the Kingdom. This won’t happen,” the Al Rumaihi said.
“Investors want to see the true image of Bahrain. The situations in the streets are stable. However, there are some happenings taking place in villages here and there that we cannot display on TV in a way that some could misuse to claim that situations aren’t stable in the Kingdom,” the minister clarified.