A wise man once said: “Trees are beautiful, but too many trees make a jungle.” This saying has been respected by everyone in every country, in every era. That, we believe, is normal. Any possible deviation from this course becomes a messy affair in everything we try to accomplish.
This is exactly what popped up in our minds when we read the news of more new private television channels being allowed to operate in the Bangladesh media world. And that too, in political consideration. A few businessmen did get a few licences, but most of the permissions were given to politically active persons.
It’s nothing short of a piece of good news that Bangladesh is opening up to the world as far as the media is concerned, especially the broadcast media. Anyone in this country has the right to acquire a licence for a TV channel.
Information on and about Bangladesh would be disseminated across the world. True. But when “only” ministers, junior ministers, political advisers and political workers get to succeed in acquiring licences for TV channels, questions are asked.
Here’s the question: “Why doesn’t the government issue TV licences to the professionals, for that matter, to the journalists?” The answer, perhaps, is quite simple: “Because the ‘poor journalists’ don’t have the means to make a TV channel up and running.”
“Hey, you! Poor (service holder) journalist, you wouldn’t ever have the wealth to launch a TV channel that would cost more than Tk100m! Shut up and do your job, and let us run the media business!”
This exactly would, perhaps, be the reply to journalists who’d seek a TV licence. Only a few professionals have succeeded to get such clearances: Channel i, Ekattor TV, and Shomoy TV. They, perhaps, succeeded as they got lucky and possibly had some “connections” with the political machinery.
That’s how the number of TV channels in this 55-square-kilometre area became more than one score, of which, four broadcast news, and the rest air both news and entertainment programs. There’s one more getting ready for a 24/7 news operation and one for programs in mixed nature.
But when the number of channels is about 35 or more, what would they do? Two/three more news channels, and ten/eleven program channels? What different things would the news
channels broadcast? And what would we watch on the news+program channels?
As far as airing the programs is concerned, there’s hardly anything new. When someone launches a program with a different nature, everyone keeps no stone unturned to copy it. So, we’re not showing much creativity in generating interesting stuff. The fortunate persons who are getting licences are hardly considering a new type of TV channel, say a full-time education TV or a channel on environmental issues. Specialised TV, we believe, would excel in Bangladesh.
Then comes the question of human resources in the 35+ TV channels. The existing TV channels are already struck with the human resources problem, as the number of journalists/workers doesn’t match the number of stations. Respective stations have been trying hard to keep their staff as the new channels are trying to hire them.
So, we see that creating a pool of human resources is also important along with allowing more licences for TV stations. Many would say that once they go on air, they would create their own human resources by training them up. Maybe it’s true, but in the process, the quality of broadcast materials would suffer and along with it, the audience would surely suffer.
However, apart from this restive period for our TV channels, our industry has grown to a great proportion. When we first started working for Ekushey TV about 13 years back, no one had imagined our industry would grow like this.
We’re now crossing our boyhood and we hope the TV media is likely to grow further with many more interesting things to watch on air. But we need to overcome the problem of lack of watchable content. And more channels going on air would make the situation messier.
But a friend of mine has a different view. He says this jungle will take the shape of a beautiful forest when there will be tough competition centring on content. He thinks only the ones with quality and credibility would survive, and the rest would perish, and only then, it would become a nice garden.
I also hope so.
