Give us programmes with "Asian" values, say region's media chiefs

Give us programmes with "Asian" values, say region's media chiefs

MANILA (AFP): Media executives called on TV stations yesterday to promote programming and publications with "Asian" values as they warned against the dominance of Western TV programs in Asian homes.

"My intention is to warn producers: what are they doing by buying so many imported programs? They have to be reminded that we have (Asian) values," said Naohiro Kato, director-general of the Asian Broadcasting Union in Malaysia.

Kato, along with several other delegates at the first Asian Summit on Media and Children's Rights, sought to define "Asian" values while trying to avoid debate on the widely held view that "Western" -- mostly American -- media were eroding Asian values.

"There is a tendency to equate Asian values with good values but no single culture has a monopoly over good values," said Khoo Kim Choo, director of Singapore's Early Childhood Educational Research Center.

Khoo defined Asian values as "communal", emphasizing the family over the individual, and placing importance on respect for authority, obedience, sacrifice for the greater good and filial piety.

Western values were characterized as "individualistic", focusing on equality and individual rights, and promoting frankness and permissiveness, Khoo said.

She cited Singapore's cross-cultural diversity, which has led to government efforts to promote a set of core values including the Asian value of filial piety and the Western value of openness in communication.

"This (openness) is not Asian. But it is necessary to be more effective and functional as a family," Khoo said.

She was among the 250 delegates in the Philippine capital to attend the summit, which hopes to create policies to develop indigenous, child-friendly media in Asia.

Delegates lauded a statement from Mafuz Anam, editor-in-chief of Bangladesh's Daily Star newspaper, who argued the issue was not one of Asian versus Western values, but of Asian adults who "aspire to be Western."

"Can I blame my children then for becoming Western?" he asked.

On Tuesday, Patricia Edgar of the Australian Children's Television Foundation branded four major American networks as "culturally subversive" to Asian children.

"Wherever American media has gone in the world, trade and influence follow. So many of the U.S. models are inappropriate and they do much more damage in our cultures than they do in our own," she said.

Edgar supported a Malaysian move to ban Barbie dolls, which she called "oversexed bimboes with endless legs and overly assertive mammaries... what kind of toy is this for Asian children?"

Asian countries were not, however, spared the blame for the negative influence of their media on children. Mafuz Anam also criticized India, one of the biggest producers of films, and Japan, one of the biggest exporters of cartoons.

"The bigger budgets they get, the more violence and sex there is," he said.