The Publishers Association of Liberia (PAL) has expressed serious disappointment over government’s reluctance to meet up with its indebtedness with the struggling Liberian media two years after the ruling CDC government came to power.
At an emergency meeting in Monrovia on Friday, the Publishers noted that despite the government’s repeated promises to meet up with its financial obligations to the media, it appears to have deliberately refused to live up to its promises.
As a result, media institutions are going through serious financial crisis, as their advertising base remains at a low, compounded by the government’s failure to pay its debt, is the fact that the Executive Mansion website has over the past years has taken away vacancy notices and other adverts from the local media.
The prevailing situation is forcing the media into collapse, amid the daily high cost of printing, generator fuel and other logistics that the media need to pay for on a daily basis in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.
At their meeting over the weekend, the media practitioners warned that government’s continuous failure to pay its debt to media institutions would eventually lead them to taking several actions, including media blackout and possible withdrawer from the newsstands.
The media practitioners recalled that late last year during the induction of the President of the Press Union of Liberia the Minister of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP), Samuel D. Tweah, Jr. publicly announced that the Liberian Government was willing to settle all media bills.
