In a commentary on Sunday in the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, senior journalist Irene Medina warned that “it is always a dangerous precedent when a government decides to use its power to stifle the free voice of the press, as is happening in Guyana today.”
She noted that since it is the tendency for some regional leaders to ape each other, “I want to caution both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica in particular not to go that route.”
In the commentary titled “State’s $ licks for bad news media”, Medina observed that the governments of both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica were reeling under the severe stress of crime and other social issues and since this is an election year for both, they have already begun to focus some critical attention on the media.
She said that President Bharrat Jagdeo and his PPP were “under the full glare of the regional and international media” and they were being warned to desist from the route they have taken, referring to the government’s withdrawal of ads from the Stabroek News.
Since November last year, Jagdeo’s government took a policy to withdraw all of its advertising from the Stabroek News. Editor-in- Chief of the newspaper, David de Caires condemned the move saying that the government was discriminating against the newspaper because of its political opinions and editorial positions, Medina said.
But the Government Information Agency (GINA), Medina continued, which had issued the statement to halt the ads, maintains that the government’s decision was purely based on Stabroek News “limited reach”, adding that it made good market sense to place its advertising with the other daily newspaper, Kaieteur News because it now has a larger circulation.
Medina said “As media practitioners, we know such a move could shut down a newspaper or cause it to censor expression. I remember during my early career days at the Bomb newspaper when editor Patrick Chookolingo faced an ad boycott from the Kirpalanis.”
Not one to be bullied, Medina recalled, Chookolingo ran several editions with empty spots in defiance of this boycott. Needless to say he showed that the free press would not be fettered by the agendas of other power brokers, Medina said.
She also recalled the incident of Eric Williams’ burning of a newspaper in Woodford Square; to be followed by the Mirror’s denial of newsprint; and the UNC government’s rage over a front page article entitled “Chutney Rising” in 1996 in a daily newspaper which led to the mass resignations of journalists there.
The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM), the International Press Institute (IPI), and France-based Journalists Without Borders have condemned the actions of Jagdeo’s regime, Medina wrote in her commentary.
The ACM wrote President Jagdeo, she observed, and questioned GINA’s claims about poor circulation figures in the absence of independent market findings and warned that government was in breach of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its press freedom principles and the March 1994 Chapultepec Declaration to which it is a signatory.
