SN could become the platform to make reconciliation a reality

Dear Editor

Your editorial in today’s edition of the newspaper (July 18) strikes a sound note in the backdrop of the national discord that rings across the country with the disease of sour distrust and disharmony.

Stabroek News, too, could be infected, and must perform surgery on itself to become conscious of its own role in this social disease.

Guyanese would look on that editorial as a statement of the role of the Stabroek News as a responsible national institution. The newspaper must assume the responsibility not just of a national media outfit, but of a professional, ethical, balanced and sensible voice for the nation.

Given the fact that, like every single institution in the country, you suffer from poor availability of skills and expertise, the citizen sees Stabroek News as a lighthouse of hope, bringing to the national table a semblance of sense and goodwill and unbiased assumptions.

You mention the role of your founder, the great David de Caires, with his passion for the letter pages.

de Caires led the Stabroek News with wisdom and that abiding belief in the tenets of professional, ethical and responsible journalism. Journalism, he believed, serves the

people, the readers, the nation, and not the owners of the media organ. Indeed journalism is a public service that comes with the powerful privilege of modelling a national role on the nation’s stage.

The citizenry looks to that platform for guidance, inspiration, motivation and a sense of self as Guyanese. When the citizen wakes up in the morning and encounters the front page of the Stabroek News, he or she wants to feel a sense of worth and self-respect. With a sober realization of how powerful the Stabroek News is in Guyana, de Caires saw how foundational its role is, and lived it, with humility of service.

When Stabroek News led the fight for free and fair elections in Guyana, de Caires remained humble, raising the journalism bar even higher, and when the government refused state advertising to the newspaper, he never decried the democratic process that saw that government elected to power.

The same must happen today. Our pressing problem is this divide that haunts us Guyanese. And the Stabroek News must take on this problem, with full journalistic integrity, never taking sides, never campaigning for or against anyone, always maintaining unbiased professionalism. Your editorial is a pleasant underlining of your role in the society.

In our nation, no one seeks to work across the divides. Everyone takes sides, and expects everyone else to be politicized, rooting for or against ‘the enemy’; the citizen who brokers, who bridges the divide, who works along with everyone, is seen as a traitor and is viewed with grave suspicion. This is how debilitating the scapegoating culture has become, denting its vicious claws into our way of being.

In my view, it is the Stabroek News that would lead the way in shaping and designing a national conversation that leads to goodwill, reconciliation, a new paradigm of unity and mutual understanding, bridging the divides that stifle our Guyanese potential. It calls for building and cultivating, with patience and goodwill and good intent, trust, for seeing each other not as enemy but as potential friend.

How could we overcome the distrust, disharmony, disunity and instinctual divide that baffle us?

Your editorial, acting on that reflex instinct that is our national psyche, pointed at the government for a solution. But the government is in the same boat, lacking a sense of how to solve the problem. But if you see, feel and think of the problem enough to editorialize on it, surely the Stabroek News could become the platform to make reconciliation a reality?

It calls for vision and responsible professionalism and journalism practice that rises above the sickness in the society’s soul. Like de Caires recognized, it calls for a well-trained reportorial staff and excellence of design, where stories become aesthetically appealing, engaging citizens. It calls for stepping up to a new way of being.

Who leads the way forward? you ask.

The answer is simple: as we can see in the history of our nation, the Stabroek News can lead the way forward, cultivating and constructing reconciliation, national unity and professional cooperation, as its editorial policy, thus standing above the fray, and inculcating a new paradigm into the national conversation and way of being.

The place to start is with a sort of mea culpa: I am responsible for the state of the society. If we want to cultivate trust, we must see the job as our responsibility. Blaming, scapegoating and seeing ‘others’ take us back to a place of no answer to the question of who gets the ball rolling for reconciliation to become a national habit.

Yours faithfully,
Shaun Michael Samaroo