Qualfon’s unacceptable discourtesy towards representatives of our local media during last week’s tour of the company’s business premises by President Bharrat Jagdeo, presents the Guyana Press Associa-tion (GPA) with an opportunity to demonstrate its preparedness to defend and protect the interests of media workers. Official emphasis on attracting foreign investors to Guyana does not come with a licence to mistreat Guyanese and certainly does not provide them with the prerogative to insult the media and the GPA must so inform the management of Qualfon with the requisite mix of courtesy and candour.

Of course, it has to be said that Qualfon’s treatment of those media workers whose presence at its operations centre last Wednesday was by invitation, mirrors the contempt and disregard for working journalists that is sometimes displayed by some of our own public and private sector officials including, on occasion, Ministers of Government. In essence, this kind of treatment reflects a disregard for the legitimate role of the media and, among those who treat journalists unkindly, a preference for imposing controls on the flow of information to the public through the media through official pronouncements and press releases and without the intervention of the journalists.

What Qualfon appears not to understand is that occurrences of this kind do injury to what, we understand, are its noteworthy accomplishments in its particular field of endeavour. What its discourtesy also does is to raise questions – perhaps entirely unfounded ones – as to whether, its accomplishments notwithstanding, it may not have something to hide. Were such a suspicion to arise Qualfon would have, through its own fault, attracted an altogether unwanted measure of media attention.

Some of the offended media may not have made much of the Qualfon incident which, in itself, is not a good sign since the failure of media houses and media organizations to assert themselves in the face of discourtesies of this kind only emboldens those organizations and officials who are inherently contemptuous of the media and who regard journalists as intruders to be avoided or insulted. Here is an opportunity for the GPA to make its presence felt by calling for a greater measure of respect from officialdom for the role of the media  and urging a greater mindfulness of the need to treat the profession with a level of regard commensurate with its role.

The excuse that is sometimes employed by some private sector officials for their avoidance of and discourtesy to the media is that journalists’ lack of familiarity with ‘business issues’ sometimes leads to misinterpretation and, by extension, misrepresentation of information provided for public reportage. That may well be true in some instances and some months ago this newspaper supported an as yet unrealized initiative to create a media/business forum at which business issues could be ventilated, ‘on’ and ‘off’ the record information disseminated and where journalists could come to better understand business issues.  A lack of familiarity with complex business issues on the part of some journalists, however, is not the whole story. What is also true is that business houses are often reluctant to make public pronouncements about matters that have to do with their own businesses or matters that have to do with the business climate in general. While, for example, a succession of external independent reports on the Guyana economy assert that high taxation and official corruption continue to serve as deterrents to doing business in Guyana, local private sector officials – with perhaps one or two exceptions – are decidedly guarded in discussing these issues with the media, or else, do not discuss them at all. They consider those lines of enquiry by the media to be potentially troublesome and some of them display a level of paranoia that results in nothing being said to the media at all.

The ‘bottom line’ here is that business functionaries are concerned with the political correctness of what they say to the media, that is, a mindfulness of not giving offence to officialdom. Political correctness, as far as many businessmen are concerned, is best assured by simply avoiding issues like tax reform and official corruption, issues which have been known to give rise to a generous measure of prickliness among some state officials.

In the Qualfon case, while this editorial knows of no reason why the company behaved in the manner that it did, that is not to say that there is not, in fact, a reason. Certainly, it is more than a trifle bemusing and downright insulting to those journalists who attended the event that Qualfon would go to the trouble to invite media houses to visit its operations only to detain them for a wasted hour and, at the end of that period, issue them with a press release that could have been  sent to those media houses electronically, in the first place. Indeed, it appears that having initially decided to engage the media Qualfon may have simply changed its mind after  the invitations had been issued.
Qualfon’s discourtesy to media houses warrants, at the very least, a note of protest from the GPA to the company’s management and a demarche to the Private Sector Commission to express its disapproval of the incident; and even if much does not come of such action, the GPA would have at least demonstrated its preparedness to exercise part of its mandate, that is, to energetically defend the dignity of working journalists. More than that the attendant publicity  will place Qualfon in just the kind of discomfiting spotlight that might cause the company to think carefully about whether  it wishes to go down the same road in the future. Others too, might take a hint from this episode.