If President Donald Ramotar wants to represent change in and modernisation of the Guyanese political fabric, one of his first priorities must be to put a rein on the type of propaganda with which the PPP has been historically associated. All political parties attempt to project a favourable view of their policies and programmes, but in the modern world this can no longer be achieved by way of deception and the fact that such an approach continues to be attempted in Guyana speaks volumes of the state of mind of our political elite and of the condition of the reporting establishment.
Immediately preceding the last elections, I wrote two columns on the nature of propaganda, which claimed that over the decades and right up to the last elections, the PPP has been involved in the crudest form of this art, which deliberately sought – and to a large extent succeeded – to deceive the Guyanese people as to their real condition. Even if this kind of crude manipulation was acceptable in the 1960s, given developments in reporting and communications technology in our times, it should no longer be possible or acceptable. Today propaganda has become spin: a biased presentation of events in one’s own favour. Rarely is it, as it has been in the past, the barefaced denial or creation of those events.
The PPP/C’s most recent excursion into this most questionable form of propaganda has come with its claim that
