Senate committee directs info ministry to pay media houses' dues within 45 days

ISLAMABAD: Senator Faisal Javed on Monday advised the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoITT) to clear the media houses' advertisement dues within 45 days in order to ensure that journalists and media workers were paid their salaries.

Javed, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) lawmaker and the chairperson of the Senate Standing Committee on Information and Broadcasting, headed its meeting earlier in the day, with Senators Rukhsana Zuberi, Sajjad Hussain Turi, Pervaiz Rashid, and Rubina Khalid in attendance.

During the meeting, the Pakistan Broadcasters Association (PBA) raised the issue of the non-payment of ad dues to the Jang Group and Dawn Group, following which the senator assured them of working on resumption of ad payments to media houses. He further advised the MoITT to release a new ad campaign for the country's broadcasting companies.

In response, PBA President Shakeel Masud Hussain said if the government paid its dues to media houses, the broadcasting companies were ready to disburse their workers' salaries.

The PBA also suggested that the government and media houses set up a joint account in order to make it easier for Prime Minister Imran Khan's administration to pay what it owes to media houses, which, in turn, pay their employees.

The Jang Group's Mir Ibrahim Rahman, also a member of the PBA's Board of Directors, added that government owed Rs6 billion — which did not include dues from the government of Sindh — to the media houses. The payment should be done in full, and not in instalments, in order to clear the backlog of media workers' unpaid salaries, Rahman stressed.

Rashid, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) senator, said economic pressure was being piled on media organisations to seize and suppress media freedom.

Geo News' reporter Asif Bhatti, the general secretary of both the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and the Rawalpindi-Islamabad Union of Journalists (RIUJ), termed the non-payment of ad dues an unannounced ban on the freedom of expression.

Parliamentary Reporters Association (PRA) President Bahzad Saleemi demanded that the ad payments be tied to workers' salaries.

The federal information secretary, officials from the finance ministry, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), and the Employees Old-Age Benefits Institution (EOBI), as well as representative of the media owners' organisations PBA and APNS, and journalists' associations PRA, PJUF, and RIUJ also attended the session.