In his contribution to the debate on the 2015 budget, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo stated that his ministry will be producing a white paper on public information policy. The rationale for this, he said was that “government should disseminate public information on what it is doing through newspaper, radio, television and social media that is not partisan but national”. He added that the government hoped to streamline the public information services which he said had been “saddled with huge debts due to political manipulation and abuse. He further said that much of the allocations to his ministry this year were for the recapitalisation of the public information media and to get it back into working order.
The preparation of a white paper is welcome though there has already been sufficient debate on these matters going all the way back to the Rafiq T Khan report of 1993 which had been done at the behest of the then PPP/C government of which Mr Nagamootoo was a part. Aside from the question of the relevance of GINA in the transformed media landscape, in its purest form public information should be exactly that; stripped of rhetoric, polemics, one-upmanship and hagiography.
As far as the citizenry is concerned, the only other matter that would have to be immediately addressed is how to protect a public information agency from being hijacked by politicians for propaganda purposes and worse. It is an affliction that Mr Nagamootoo and the new APNU+AFC government are well aware of and the canker which motivated the cuts to the GINA budget in 2011, 2012 and 2013 when the now coalition partners comprised the parliamentary majority while in opposition.
Mr Nagamootoo himself during the consideration of the 2014 budget estimates pinpointed the problem of political interference and the contamination of the public information function. He said then “The (PPP/C) government is aware that we have problems with the use of taxpayers’ money to subsidise entities used for partisan political purposes…and they have refused to democratise them…” It is this subversion that the coalition government must comprehensively address and which commitment the public will expect to be swiftly and completely discharged.
It must be noted that while in opposition, APNU+AFC spoke of GINA and NCN in the same breath even though the concerns about operations of the state broadcaster would be quite different from those about GINA. If one were to examine the output of GINA in the period since the new government has been in place, one would be hard-pressed to say that there has been significant change in its functioning. The only perceptible change has been the effortless switching of the role of the protagonist. So whereas prior to the general election, the PPP/C was presented in glowing terms it is now the turn for APNU+AFC to be treated fulsomely, allied to the infusion of doses of criticisms of the other side.
This practice is derived from a complete misunderstanding of the role of public information and the continuation of a pernicious pattern that the `new’ GINA has inherited. If the APNU+AFC government is truly desirous of leading change and transforming the malign culture of its predecessor, then it must ensure and enable this.
GINA’s role is not to discharge reams of one-sided parliamentary polemics to the media as it did during the recently concluded parliamentary debate and consideration of the budget estimates. Many of its press releases from the budget period were redolent of the PPP/C’s GINA. The arguments of the ministers and coalition MPs were reflected positively while opposition MPs who were the erstwhile favourites of GINA were reported on negatively. One particularly egregious headline underlined the problem when it declared `PPP being embarrassed at Budget debate’. Another railed that `Guyana had (dismal) health care under previous PPP led government’. Undoubtedly somewhere in recent years GINA must have issued several reports heralding the PPP/C’s stewardship of the health sector.
GINA is not a media entity in any sense of the word and its entire budget reportage would have gone to naught except for the few reports that would have been lazily carried verbatim by the state-owned media and occasionally by others. GINA should be completely employed in providing official information on government business i.e. verbatim statements by ministers, video footage of official events, the launch of government projects and programmes, reports on journeys by officials particularly those in parts of the country where media houses have little access and visits of members of the public and overseas delegations to senior officials and the whole gamut of public service announcements. It should have no role in issuing pseudo news reports. This change can be easily implemented and would immediately reflect a significant departure from the behaviour of the PPP/C.
GINA also has to exercise sound judgement on which events are to be covered in keeping with Mr Nagamootoo’s admonition of not being exploited for political purposes. Last week, GINA covered a PNCR event for the Burnham Education Scholarship Trust which was addressed by President Granger. As noble and refreshing an event as it was it was entirely a PNCR occasion and had nothing to do with the government or the state notwithstanding the attendance of the President. This is where someone in authority at GINA has to exercise discretion and ensure there is no prospect of the co-opting of the working of the state information agency for purely political work and in this case on behalf of one of the members of the coalition government.
This is also where the government has to ensure that it doesn’t unduly and unthinkingly continue this tradition of commandeering GINA and browbeating the state media. While the issue of the state media is an editorial all by itself, it is worth noting the incident where a Chronicle reporter, Mr Derwayne Wills was spoken to by PM Nagamootoo at Parliament over the headline of a news item in the state newspaper which said that the government had blundered over how the budget estimates were formatted. Leaving aside the matters of whether the headline was appropriate and whether the government had indeed blundered, it was unfortunate that the PM, who has ministerial responsibility for information and the state media, saw it fit to accost the reporter while he was in Parliament fulfilling his reporting duties. A well-experienced and noted journalist himself, the Prime Minister would be well aware that the best practice, since he said in a statement after the exchange with the reporter that he had been “very, very, very disappointed” about the headline was to contact the editorial management of the newspaper. After all, the reporter could not be held by the minister as responsible for the headline or the final product.
Mr Nagamootoo would also know that given the iron-fisted control of the state media exercised by the former PPP/C government, the spectre of the Prime Minister having, as he put it, “a friendly conversation about journalism and ethics of the profession” with Mr Wills would immediately send chills down the spines of state media reporters and raise questions in their minds about the outlook of the new government. The PM’s statement issued after the exchange with Mr Wills was also unfortunate as it described the reporter as a freelancer. That, of course, was completely irrelevant to the issue under consideration and had the effect of diminishing, no doubt unintended, Mr Wills’ standing in this matter.
Given the manner in which the state media, the Guyana Chronicle in particular, has been trampled on over the last four decades and enlisted in the most sickening attacks on individuals and institutions, the exchange initiated by the PM with the reporter had unfortunate connotations. In the coming months, as it is in the midst of crafting policies and plans for the state media, the government must ensure that nothing is done to fetter any of the freedoms that open societies bestow on media workers and media houses.
