Peter Essoka, Vice President, National Communication Council.

 What is your appraisal of the manner in which children are portrayed in the Cameroonian media and the kind of content produced for them?

It is deplorable and it is not only with television. There is also online media. Lots of things go through. And since everyone has a telephone, they are exposed to everything. Even if you control television - which is very difficult - what do you do with the little child who has all these gadgets and can focus his or her attention on pornographic material and eventually gets accustomed to the obscene language used by different media men?

Have you visited some of blogs to see what they expose to the public? It is a horrible situation. We organised the seminar to sensitise ourselves even if some participants have watched such material or not. The images we projected at the opening ceremony were horrible; yet they are shown on responsible media like Canal 2, CRTV, Vision 4, etc. Something has to be done. I don’t know what, but at the end of the seminar, we will have some guidelines on how to proceed.

What strategies are you going to put in place to adequately protect children in the media?

It is difficult. It is not the place of the National Communication Council. We organised the seminar to raise awareness and now it is left to media professionals, especially Directors of Production and Programmes and newspaper Editors. It is not only the projection, but also the vision and speech. What is written sometimes upsets people. Children’s minds are polluted by what they watch. It is insanity. We will follow up the work of media practitioners, advise where necessary, but we will also sanction those who persist in doing the wrong thing.

How are you going to ensure that recommendations from the seminar are fully implemented?

At the National Communication Council, we have a monitoring service and that is how we are able to get those images. Some of these media houses have already been warned, but there is so much defiance in Cameroon. Nobody cares anymore about anything. Nobody cares about decency. What we watched at the beginning of the seminar was indecent. You cannot show such pictures to the public. It is true that American, British or French media often come up with such stories, but they do well to hide some aspects.