Dear Editor,
As the story develops about the alleged attack on press freedom as claimed by the Stabroek News, because they say that government advertisements were withdrawn from them through an alleged political directive, we keep being told different things as time goes by.
The latest most surprising thing that we are hearing is that the Managing Editor of Stabroek News, Mr David de Caires, is stating that he did not lose all of the government advertisements.
Well he certainly had us fooled as the general impression of what he was alleging is that the government had withdrawn all of the advertisements. People can’t help feeling annoyed at being taken for another ride by Stabroek News, as Mr de Caires’ allegations of an attack on press freedom by the Guyana government have gone far and wide and have attracted local, regional and international attention.
This latest episode, taken together with the previous instances of misinformation and false allegations as when his newspaper categorically claimed that a certain person had undergone a lie detector test at the US Embassy which turned out to be completely false as the embassy denied that it had done so, or that it even had the capacity to do so, mean that people will naturally pay less and less attention to what this newspaper claims or reports, on which they can place little reliance.
Yours faithfully,
Jason Hinds
Editor’s note
Mr de Caires is the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper not the Managing Editor. From the inception it was made clear that Stabroek News had lost all ministry ads from the Government Information Agency and these are what the newspaper has classified as government ads. Some ads are still coming from entities such as GWI which would be categorized as a state-owned public utility and these should not even be defined as government ads.
That Mr Hinds still refers to a Stabroek News report on the lie detector test from several years ago shows how bankrupt and indefensible his arguments are. Surely a single report which was subsequently corrected cannot form the basis for judging any newspaper. There are a couple of inaccurate reports in other media that we could suggest to Mr Hinds for his meanderings but perhaps he should do his own homework.
