KABUL (PAN): Seeking to reach out to voters through televised debates and roundtables, presidential and provincial council candidates are competing for time and space on TV, radio and in the press.
More than 40 aspirants for the presidential slot and over 3,000 for 544 provincial council seats in the electoral fray seek media coverage to explain their plans, programmes and priorities to the nation.
Afghanistan has a mass media code of conduct in place, and any voter, political party or candidate can report violations to the Electoral Media Commission (EMC), the United Nations Development Programme said on Wednesday.
Margie Cook, who heads the UNDP/ELECT (Enhancing Legal and Electoral Capacity for Tomorrow) project, said: "In a democracy the media are the eyes and ears of the public, they bring the candidates views to the voters so that they can make informed choices."
Cook observed: "If the media is overwhelmingly biased towards one candidate or another it gives them an unfair advantage. The Electoral Media Commissions task is to level the playing field."
Sidiqullah Tuwhidi, head of the Electoral Media Commission, recalled: "In the first Electoral Media Commission set up in 2005 three out of five commissioners were Afghans. This time all five of us are Afghans, and the experience gained in the first election is still with us "
At a local non-governmental organisation called Insight, supported by the UNDP, 60 Afghans are tracking the presidential campaign coverage across the country on 21 TV channels, 44 radio stations and eight newspapers. Prime-time broadcasts on TV and radio are recorded and analysed the next day.
The NGO has been monitoring the media for the Electoral Media Commission for over five weeks, the UNDP said in a statement. Its weekly analytical reports to the commission are made available to the public for greater transparency.
The most recent report found that while state-run TV favoured the incumbent president, another gave more airtime to his rival. The commission shared these findings, and the offending channels were publicly identified.
The commission has organised six roundtables that were broadcast on five television and 10 radio stations, offering a platform for all 41 presidential candidates to present their plans and priorities to the public.
Altogether, 164 journalists, from national and provincial media outlets, have been trained in the two main languages -- Dari and Pashto. They now master specific information about the electoral procedures, including electoral code of conduct, media code of conduct during elections and about the candidates and their platforms.
mud/pr
