(Trinidad Express) A vicious personal attack was on Sun-day launched against Express managing editor Omatie Lyder and political reporter Anna Ramdass by someone adopting the alias “Janice Thomas”, as this newspaper continues its investigation into how Reshmi Usha Ramnarine came to be hired as director of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) with false credentials.
The attack came in the form of an e-mail addressed to editors and reporters of the Express and staff of TV6, which accused Lyder and Ramdass of a personal vendetta against Ramnarine and threatened that “their day in the sun is over”.
“This is the beginning… they will understand the consequences of their actions…,” the e-mail stated.
The e-mail was also posted on Caribbean Talk, a site for bloggers on issues of the day. However, following complaints from this newspaper, it was pulled by the moderator.
The moderator subsequently issued a warning to bloggers to desist from posting libelous entries and personal attacks.
“We haven’t been doing that (blocking posts) regularly because we have things under control, but recently there have been lot of cases where people come in with different aliases and try to use our Yahoo! Groups and Facebook pages to attack others. During the past week or so there were many attacks against the media, especially the Express. We ignored them until now,” the moderator stated.
Bloggers were told they were “free to post stuff so long as you don’t libel people or engage in personal attacks. You can even use several aliases—we don’t really care if you want multiple online identities, but don’t try to attack anyone, especially the Express and media, with fake aliases and phony e-mail addresses, etc. You can criticise the media or anyone, but no personal attacks”.
