Minister of Family, Youth and Sports Stephen Lashley has put the local broadcast media on alert that he will be clamping down on the negative messages being heard on the airwaves. He was speaking at the National Youth Festival at Illaro Court Saturday evening. The festival was organised by the Barbados Youth Development Council. Lashley said he was looking to protect the innocence of the nation’s children from some of the content they were exposed to on television and radio.“I would readily agree with you that we do face some challenges based on the influx of a new culture in terms of our media in Barbados; particularly the electronic media. I am happy to know that young people are recognising that this is a challenge that requires us to confront it. It is important that we take a stand.“You can count on my support to ensuring that we clean-up our airwaves and that we clean up our television programming as it relates to the type of movies that are shown and during the times that they are shown,” Lashley said.He added he would be going after local artistes who played on sexual words and then pretended that they were not talking about sex, but were singing about other things.“I don’t buy that, and I certainly will be at the forefront of any advocacy to ensure that that kind of music is not played on our airwaves. Only today (Saturday) I heard on one of our radio tations a calypso which purports to be some kind of artform but all it was talking about was playing on the words of sexual activity. “I believe that if that is what that calypso is all about then it ought not to be on our airwaves. We do have some way to go to ensuring that we send a message to our artistes that Crop-Over is not about smut,” he said.Just recently one radio station parted company with a popular deejay over what it termed as inappropriate music which he had played on the airwaves.A number of calypsonians over the last few years have been heavily criticised for performing lyrics which they classified as double entendre but which others in the cultural industry dismissed as smut or poor attempts at puns.Minister Lashley also revealed that the first business meeting of the National Youth Forum would take place on Saturday at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.
