Algiers - APS
The bill on advertising will be ready in early January, Minister of Communication Hamid Grine announced Wednesday in Algiers.
Speaking at the "Hiwar Essaa" show on national television, Grine has stressed the urgent need to codify the advertising industry, becoming anarchic and disrespectful to the professional or rational rules.
Today, he said, someone who has a commercial register can open an advertising agency even if it has no relation with that industry.
Grine said his main goal is to promote creation, but the purely Algerian one.
Responding to attacks by some private newspapers accusing him of using advertising to restrict their freedom, the Minister stressed that the role of his department is monitoring, while the issue of the distribution of publicity is the prerogative of the National Agency for Publication and Advertising (ANEP), which remains an independent public company.
He added that the mission of the ANEP was to organize the distribution of advertising.
"As a minister, I apply a clear policy based on professional ethics," says the minister who openly states that "it is impossible that ANEP, budgeted by the State helps newspapers that practice defamation and insult."
"The moral criterion comes before the commercial one,” he said.
The minister has also emphasized the need for consolidating professionalism in the field of Information.
He considered that a professional journalist should ensure the credibility of the source of his information and take responsibility for what he publishes and make not to fall into the defamation.