louis kasekende : the media's role in ugandan society remarks by dr louis kasekende, deputy governor of the bank of uganda, at the 4th edition of the uganda national journalism awards ; african centre for media excellence ( acme ), kampala, 12 april 2017. * * * good evening ladies and gentlemen, i would like to begin by thanking peter mwesige, the executive director of the african centre for media excellence, for inviting me to be the chief guest at this awards gala. this is an important event for journalism in uganda and i hope it will contribute to raising standards in the profession and also inspire young people to take up a career in journalism. the theme of my remarks tonight is the role of the media in our society, and although i will focus on the worlds of business, finance and economics, i think that some of my remarks will also be relevant for journalists covering other walks of life. what are the essential functions of business and economic journalism? what are the most important services it can offer to the public and society at large? i believe that there are two critical types of services that the public should expect from the business pages or programmes of the media. the first is to provide objective reporting of the basic facts about the economy and business ; for example, what is the rate of inflation? how much profit did company x make? what alternative investments are available such as treasury bills and bonds and how can they be accessed? many citizens need this type of information to guide the decisions which matter in their working and private lives. obviously, in the age of the internet, the public could obtain much of this information themselves, for example through the websites of public agencies and private companies, but for most people that would be very time consuming. for most members of the public, it is much more practical to obtain the economic data they want through the media. that means that journalists must report these data accurately, in a manner which is easily accessible and understandable, and also, where necessary, explain what it actually means ; they must be able to put the data into the relevant context. obviously that is only possible if the journalists have a good grasp of economic concepts, their relevance and how they are presented in statistical form. on our part, we now endeavour to provide soundbites of key messages in selected local dialects ; and i would like to commend the local language media for supporting our cause of translating and interpreting these policy matters for the benefit of

deployed a number of non - standard tools. increasingly our focus here has shifted towards the financing of small and medium - sized bis central bankers ’ speeches enterprises, which heavily rely on bank financing and in many cases are struggling to retain access to credit. these companies may be small, but when they face a funding problem, it is a big problem for all of us, given that they employ around three - quarters of the euro area ’ s workforce. in june, we decided to launch a series of targeted longer - term refinancing operations – tltros – to ensure that banks have sufficient liquidity to lend to the real economy. the tltros have been designed to encourage banks to increase their lending to the nonfinancial corporate sector. in addition, we have also taken measures to underpin specific market segments that play a key role in the financing of the economy. last week, the governing council decided to start buying high - quality asset - backed securities and covered bonds in october. we will purchase both existing and newly issued abs, which are simple, transparent and real in the sense that the underlying assets consist of loans to the euro area non - financial private sector. let me respond to the concerns recently expressed about the risks posed to the integrity of our balance sheet. it is worth recalling that senior tranches of abs have proven to be highquality assets. according to the association of financial markets in europe, only 0. 12 % of european residential mortgage - backed securities ( rmbs ) outstanding in mid - 2007 have defaulted since then – compared with 22. 05 % for us rmbs. default rates for consumer finance abs and sme collateralised loan obligations have also remained low, well below 1 %, throughout the worst financial and economic crisis we have experienced. as regards covered bonds, credit quality is ensured by a double recourse ( on the underlying assets and on the issuer ), which is in fact comparable with the double protection that exists in our standard repo operations. overall, the decisions announced last week were taken with a view to underpinning the firm anchoring of medium to long - term inflation expectations, in line with our aim of maintaining inflation rates below, but close to, 2 %. we expect the two purchase programmes to effectively complement the tltros in enhancing the functioning of the monetary policy transmission and in providing further monetary accommodation given that we have now reached the lower bound. the newly decided measures, together with the tltros, will