Some media houses have breached code - monitoring team finds Guyana Chronicle January 23, 2001 A TEAM monitoring the media in the run-up to the scheduled March 19 general elections has found that some agencies have breached the code of conduct, Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Chairman, Major General Joe Singh reported yesterday. He received the first of a series of reports from Mr Robert Norris, Media Monitoring Advisor. Singh also got the report of a field test survey of the National Register of Registrants which formed the base of the Preliminary Voters List and was told the voter registration could not be out by more than five per cent. Norris, at a ceremony at the commission's office in Georgetown, said the report came from monitoring five television stations, the two daily newspapers and the radio station over two weeks. "It is our attempt to see what kind of information our voters are getting," he said. He said this first report "is not meant to make any real judgements about the adequacy of how the media really operates but to serve as a benchmark to illustrate some of the things we will be looking at in the future and we will be sharing this information with refereeing panels." The report was not immediately available. But Singh said the document refers to some recent media reports which are "clearly in breach of the Code of Conduct". "While we are not empowered at this point to impose any sanctions, we expect that when the independent Media Monitoring Panel...is established on February 1, the commission will be forwarding to that...panel any instances or incidents that we feel have crossed the line and are in breach of the media code of conduct", he said. Singh noted the importance of the document saying, "it is extremely useful and timely at this current period." "We will be sharing this not only with members of the commission but also those media houses that have subscribed to the media code of conduct," he said. "The objective here is to give them an insight into what we have been able to complete over the period that the report has been written in the hope that they will be objective in their pursuit of the truth...," Singh explained. He received the field test survey report on the NRR from Mr T. Earle, a former Commissioner of the Lands and Surveys Department. "If the recommendations contained in this report are carried out...your field exercise in terms of registration can't be out by more than five per cent", Earle told Singh. "I have found that from the test carried out, our survey accuracy is on a 95 per cent confidence band." "I am sure that from the figures we have presented here, your field exercise in terms of registration cannot be out by five per cent...I bet my bottom dollar, because of the precautions we took and the accuracy with which we have designed the exercise...," he declared. Earle also said that he had enough samples to adequately complete the accuracy of the NRR. He was in October last year commissioned by GECOM to do a field test of the NRR and said the report was completed last month. Singh said the Final Voters List is due out in about another week. Also at the handing-over were members of the Elections Commission who each received copies of the reports. Follow the goings-on in Guyana in Guyana Today