Supported by international organisations, such as UNESCO and UNOHCHR, the Horn of Africa Press Institute (HAPI) Plc, a company affiliated to Media Communications Centre (MCC) Plc, the publisher of the Amharic and English Reporter, conducted a seminar a few weeks ago at the Ghion Hotel, on the then bill on the media and right to information law. The meeting was meant to produce a document reflecting an industry consensus on the bill, to have been presented to Parliament, which was reviewing of the bill at the time.

This administration showed its disingenuousness for rushing to pass the bill into law on July 1, 2008, a day before the seminar took place. It effectively neutralised the relevance of the meeting by practitioners, whose recommendations - resolutions was the vocabulary preferred by the organisers - arrived too late to make sense for any of the MPs to espouse during the legislative process.

Interestingly, over 70pc of the opposition MPs voted against it; if it were not for the 11 abstained votes, including one from the party led by Lidetu Ayalew, who participated in the Ghion seminar, the bill introduced to regulate the media would have been the most opposed piece of legislation in the three-year life of the current Parliament. If members of the media community feel that they are let down by Lidetu and his lieutenants in Parliament, it should not be surprising because the bill passed their judgment as imperfect as it remains, although admittedly it is an improved version of several of its predecessors.

But one of the key improvements was also tampered with, confirming the mendaciousness of the architects of this bill. Parliament has accepted two motions in the final hours of the legislative process, including one that unduly favours federal and state officials over ordinary citizens.

Reads a motion inserted as Article 43 (7): “Defamation and false accusation on constitutionally mandated legislators, executives and judiciaries will be a matter of the state and prosecutable.”

This is one of the 34 provisions introduced in the motion, which qualified an earlier version that was meant to protect the media from criminal prosecutions by the state, on behalf of individual complainants. The bill that passed into law successfully undermined this element of a major improvement found in the successive bills that attempted to stop the criminal prosecution of the media.

If the media now feels insecure, it is not without grounds. One of the other motions passed by Parliament puts compensation for moral damages of up to 100,000 Br, up from the 1,000 Br the penal code offers for moral damages caused by, for instance, rape or kidnapping. Considering the fact that truth is no longer a sufficient defence - the revised penal code puts the burden of proof on the accused to establish non-malicious motive - these are provisions bound to keep the media on its toes, ensuring that it practices self censorship.

If this had been the intention all along, administration officials might have had reason to celebrate their success from a Parliament they control; close to 291 MPs voted for this bill. Sadly, little did they seem to realise that these provisions undermined the very tenet of the newly passed media law, or its predecessor of 1992, as well as the constitution, for all have anchor articles banning prior censorship. In a climate where fear is as overwhelming as it is in Ethiopia, self-censorship has no less impact in stifling the growth of the media as prior-censorship does.

The disingenuousness of the administration in inserting these two provisions at the last minute seem to prove another theory that has been held by many in the industry all along: what was wrong with the press bill was more in the form in which it was drafted than the substance it presented. The spirit held by the architects of the bill favoured control, instead of producing a legislative piece that should furnish the growth of independent, vibrant and responsible media. The spirit is one that believes the media should only serve the cause of development, in a manner prescribed by the Revolutionary Democrats.

It was clear that the bill was not meant to advance the watchdog role of the media in a society, thus making those elected to public offices accountable for their acts. In the eyes of the architects, such as Shimeles Kemal, deputy prosecutor general, this is a liberal dogma that has no place in a country with a ruling elite that struggles to build a developmental state. It seems that such is a state that attempts to do everything in its power to stop the emergence of a fourth estate, that is far from its sphere of control, as now the Revolutionary Democrats are in full control of both houses of the legislature and the executive, while they wield an enormous degree of influence on the judiciary.

If at all there is any semblance of an independent media, its being responsible is defined by the developmental state; the definition is narrowed so tight that it is only meant to practice, perhaps, a new brand in “developmental journalism”, a concept some of the Revolutionary Democrats, such as Bereket Simon, are fond of pondering about.

The trouble is no one could agree to what exactly is developmental; and there is a tendency to skew what is being reported in order to favour that which is development. It is a form of journalism, if at all it exists anywhere else in the world, that compromises the right of the public to be informed accurately, without someone screening media reports, whether or not they affect what is deemed developmental. In effect, this ideology puts the media - regardless of its ownership - as subservient to the state and its subscribed ideology.

In a rule-based society, and where there is democratic governance, those voted into office to hold state power enter into a contract with the public. There should be institutions that play the role of overseer, to ensure whether or not these people are indeed delivering their promises: Parliament is one, provided that there is a vibrant and vocal opposition; the judiciary is another, if only it is professional enough to maintain its independence and integrity; and countless entities formed in what are otherwise civil society organisations are others, the latter promote their diverse and often conflicting interests, as well as lobby on behalf of their members. You find the media as a catalyst of all these and a watchdog of all.

Indeed, who watches the watchdog is an interesting subject for debate; and it should be debated in the public domain. But it is clear that the media should be independent, dynamic, responsible and above all professional in order to serve society. And it is these ideals that laws passed by legislators should serve.

The bill that passed through Ethiopia’s Parliament on July 1st is too imperfect to serve this purpose. The provisions meant to protect society from monopoly of views and opinions are not only based on an archaic concept of cross media ownership on print to broadcasting, they also expose the failure of the architects to understand why such controls were needed in the first place, when they imposed restrictions on cross media ownership of newspapers and magazines.

There was a time when broadcasting was only possible through frequencies, which are limited national resources allocated to countries by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). States ought to use their discretion when allocating these limited frequencies to applicants. Discriminating among applicants on the basis of their ownership of other media outlets, in order not to let them control all instruments that help shape what society accepts as truth, had sounded logical. But not anymore; in this digital world, broadcasting is possible through satellite and fiber-optics. And Ethiopia could be the only country in the world that has laws banning media houses from owning several newspapers in the same market.

Nothing is as alarming and ambiguous as what is left untouched in Section Three of the law; a part that imposes obligation on the state to disclose information to the citizenry. This is despite relentless plea from the industry for clarity and certainty. To his credit, Lidetu was heard loud in Parliament pushing the administration officials to make clear whether or not what they say in Chapter Three is indeed “exemption.” He was avoided by Asmelash W. Selassie, chairman of the Legal and Administration Standing Committee of Parliament, perhaps deliberately.

What is ill-advisedly incorporated into the media law as the right to information is what the rest of the world knows as Freedom of Information Act; it is a legal instrument given to the citizenry in order to force governments to disclose information. The idea behind it is the need to ensure the function of “government on the sunshine.”

Governments are, however, exempted from disclosure on very limited subjects, such as scientific projects, national trade secrets, and defence matters with relevance to national security intelligence reports. These, they have the right to classify, until such period that (normally 30 years) they are declassified.

Unfortunately, this concept of exemption is misconstrued in the Press Bill that passed recently, and gives double meaning in its Amharic version: Judges are left to the abyss to figure out whether this specific provision prohibits the media from covering the list of things put there if they learn about them on their own, or it simply says the media is denied if it demands their disclosure. Legislators have failed, miserably, to clarify this very critical point, which is perhaps left as vague as it sounds now by the executive.

If it will be interpreted to mean prohibition with consequences of liability, the Ethiopian media should indeed kiss covering the state’s affairs goodbye, regrettably.

The power bestowed upon the general prosecutor in seizure of media products it suspects have the potential to cause damage on “national security,” and public order as well as the time it could impound them is also gratuitous. Besides giving the state undue power over the media, it only encourages self-censorship among journalists, than disciplining them to be responsible. There should be other ways of promoting discipline, largely through self-regulation.

Alas, it is not fair to put all the blame on the administration; the industry too should share from the bowl. One of the positive elements of the new Media Law is its desire to leave the business of self-discipline to the practitioners themselves, whether or not they have proven to be inept so far. It is wise that the administration is not tempted to take advantage of the ham-fisted conduct of particularly the private press over the past five years.

To its credit, the administration has travelled as nowhere before in the past to consult and engage the industry and practitioners in the legislative process of this bill: There were over five consultative meetings, preceded by each version emerging to be better than its predecessor. With the generous support and involvement of the Americans, best practices and comparative analysis were conducted by an expert from Article 19. These have to be recognized loudly and generously.

If the media industry had failed to gain as much as it ought to have, it has largely itself to blame, for it had been busy bickering over nothing. Depressingly, the prospect to lobby the administration to improve the law, and clarify some of the ambiguous provisions, is also bleak; the industry, with the exception of a few, is at large far from being interested in creating a platform for continued engagement. This is the story of the failure of the Ethiopian private press in the past 16 years, rather than of its successes.