The New Nation - Internet Edition

M.T. Hussain

Openness to foreign TV media in Bangladesh is a recent development. It came quite logically along with openness in our society for pluralism and multi-party democratic order. There is now a sort of opinion here that the presence of huge foreign TV media has been creating impediments for development of our own culture. Is that so?

Wide access to reliable media for information and facts is a must for building informed and knowledge based society. Unfortunately, like many developing countries, Bangladesh's media, to my knowledge, do not have enough capital investment that it requires for wide coverage, authentic collection and sifting of reliable facts, prompt presentation of facts, figures and documents through electronic media, satisfactorily competing efficiency, and possibly above all not enough revenue generation for sustenance through posterity. On the other hand, TV like BBC, Aljazeera etc are known to have all time financial support for efficient sustenance. Thus interested persons depend on such TV media for efficiency, reliability and authenticity of facts, figures and documents that in Bangladesh are hard to come by for various weaknesses and control on the media.

However, no media can be absolutely value-free of the organization or country that provides funding for the particular media. Even so, media of rather open societies are quantitatively and qualitatively better than those of the other or of the more centrally controlled ones. But the crucial issue lies elsewhere.

The West is an open and free society. Politics, economics, culture are open providing wide range of freedom. The truth is that open market economy is, in fact, a lassie fare one or go as you like system subjected to supply and demand just as open multi-party politics in culture of openness. Lately following the industrial revolution and women's 'liberation', freedom of sexuality has added a dimension to the freedom of culture of the West that could have easily intruded in for secularization of politics and society. This is the particular area where we have issues to take care for cognizance.

Though sexuality is a natural matter between two opposite sexes and willing partners of mature age as the Muslims are bound by marriage tie having spiritual sanction of religion, the West lately has gone beyond the sacred religious bond thus making it irrelevant with religion, even if one would vaguely believe in religion. In other words, the separation of church and state relegating private religious sexual morality to naught has gone on similarly to the domain of free market having no concern for ethics and morality in business transactions except considering profit and loss in material terms. Whether the father of the Modern Economics Adam Smith who taught Ethics and Morality in a British university over two centuries ago making later on his great work, Wealth of the Nation, has been having any peace of his soul in his grave for the erosion of moral values in free market economy dominating the human world! The making of sexuality of men and women free and isolated from religious morality that has followed the free market mechanism along with secular politics, apart from creating chaos in family life and society, has, in fact, increased internal exploitative mechanism that has been perpetuating in the West. The PUB culture for the working class means not only drinking wine to get drunk to gain, as they maintain, 'fresh energy' to get to work again with renewed vigor but also along with it has viciously come sexual anarchy not only in and around the PUB culture but also elsewhere in public places in the open and in the bigger society. The social elite though do not share company in the working class PUB (Public Bar) but have their elite BAR in clubs and hotels and not in community public places or small street corner centers, for drinking wine in the company of young woman, not necessarily wife, in somewhat secluded or secret manner.

The Western TV channels maintain 'late night' movie programs somewhat away from children and adolescents' view, as they are required normally to go to bed early. Nude magazines have huge market for mainly men of perverted sexual attitudes and tastes. That sexual perversion in the West has, as well, in culture of homosexuality, same sex marriage, promiscuity etc. that caused wide spread of killer diseases like AIDS/ HIV positive etc. that infested those societies in a sort of anarchy for secularism following isolation of social attitude to sex and sexual morality from religious ethics and morality. The wide culture of nudism, strip tease etc. are all now integral part of Western culture and so they are all the most likely to figure in their programs of visual media screen. These vices and evils what the Muslims must shun in the sky culture, and not their propagation of authentic facts and figure, intellectual discourse etc that developing countries lack very much in media, both print and electronics. However, scrutiny of desirables from avoidable evils needs to be done intelligently and dispassionately for sifting grain from chaff, and not in throwing the baby away with the bath water. Neither that would be consistent with the spirit of pluralism of the Constitution of Bangladesh nor with our effort to build a well informed and knowledge based society.

The conspicuous evils of Western sky culture, apart from the rapid spread of killer diseases, like broken homes and family chaos may well be taught in planned way to the Bangladeshi children and adolescents, in particular, through both informal and formal learning materials in school textbooks. That is how if internal resistance could be built up in the psyche of the new generation the evil effects for lull of sexual permissiveness of the Western sky culture would certainly be contained.