Our politicians, as they are wont to do, can preach all they want about their commitment to media freedom. Their track records tell a different story. Every government in post-independence Guyana has sought to exert control over the media.
No government can lay legitimate claim to being a paragon of media freedom whilst using its power to interfere with the ability of newspapers to access newsprint or to otherwise target media houses and in some instances journalists for hindrance, humiliation or injury of one sort or another. Governments that ‘privatize’ state-owned media houses by turning them into political propaganda tools whilst excluding access by other stakeholders with equal entitlement, including the political opposition, are guilty of violating media freedom. Those occurrences are part of the track record of post-independence governments in Guyana.
Official persistence in exerting control over what the citizens read, hear and think, utilizing various means, has had a transformational effect on the Guyanese society though in more recent years the ability of government to control how we communicate has been curtailed by the technological evolution of mass media that allows for greater freedom of information flow utilizing means that make state intervention more difficult. Those developments, however, appear to have served as an incentive for government to redouble its efforts to do more to control and/or influence the behaviour of the traditional media and it continues to do so in various ways.
Government had also sought to control information flow between its agencies and the public by placing restrictions on some of its own high-ranking officials’ authority to make pronouncements, opting instead for media czars ‒ Roger Luncheon in the case of the previous administration and seemingly Joseph Harmon in the case of the current one. We probably remain perched atop a slippery slope once a single individual comes to be seen as the government’s ‘go to’ functionary as far as the dissemination of information on official matters is concerned.
Communication between officials of government and journalists is also restricted by the fact that some officials are either loathe to embrace the burden of engaging the media or are incapable of doing so. They routinely proffer the excuse of being busy at ‘meetings’ as a ‘get out’ from encounters with journalists when, frequently, the truth is that some of them simply do not relish the idea of being publicly accountable. Their behaviour is probably understandable, driven as it frequently is by demons fashioned out of their understanding of the state-imposed Orwellian public communications culture that has been known to reprimand them for what is loosely described as ‘wrong-talking’ to the media. They have learnt to treat the media with circumspection, being in the process, dismissive, evasive and arrogant, depending on the circumstances. In effect, they are prisoners of official restrictive rules of thumb that seek to do no more than control information flow.
Some ministers in the present administration appear inclined to be more open with the media; others, not. We have already witnessed, too, examples of the kind of official aloofness with which some upon whom political power is bestowed become afflicted.
If the recent headline brouhaha between the state-run Chronicle and the Prime Minister has been considerably played down in the public domain one can hardly ignore what Mr Nagamootoo had to say about the Chronicle being a state-owned newspaper and about the expectations that derive from the circumstances of its ownership. What is also worth pondering, perhaps more deeply, is the pronouncement by the Prime Minister regarding government’s decision “to bring in new modules for public information, where journalists working in the public media must be required to exhibit only one quality, that is, professionalism, while recognizing the fact that they are serving the government of the day…” The devil, as they say, may well repose in the details and adherents of media freedom are bound to want clarification of the Prime Minister’s pronouncement.
Then there is the disclosure made recently by the Prime Minister that government could reverse the award of radio and television licences made under the Jagdeo administration. Here the question arises as to whether the present administration can right what it perceives to be the wrongs associated with the allocation of those licences without applying equally controversial prejudices of its own in its quest to ‘right’ those wrongs.
It is not just democratic norms that have been compromised by the official stifling of media freedom in Guyana. The profession of journalism itself has been considerably demeaned by some officials who hold (and often articulate) the view that the media have no worth beyond their nuisance value. That derives from a fear of probing journalism that can be decidedly discomfiting to those officials, prisoners as they are of a culture of suppressing the free flow of information.
Ours has been a history of journalists and media houses having to work much harder than some of our colleagues in the region and beyond to secure official information on account of having to endure frustrating experiences with government officials in the course of trying to secure a comment or perhaps a piece of relevant information pertaining to some story that might be in the works. Government does this all the time. It withholds or releases information utilizing media, language and timing of its own choosing. Uppermost in its mind is how its treatment with the media impacts on its public image. The public right to know is very much a secondary matter.
Despite all of the obstacles that remain, freedom of information and the free flow of information have made some important gains in Guyana. Technological advancement in mass media no longer allows government to exert the degree of control that it previously did. Another inhibiting factor is the significant decline in global tolerance of states that suppress media freedom. In other words, countries like Guyana are, these days, under more intense international scrutiny so that government cannot afford to apply the same measure of impunity that it had applied in the past in treating with the issue of media freedom.
The privately-owned media too are fighting back. The threat of government as the final arbiter has lost its aura; we have witnessed the emergence of a more assertive media posture that reflects far less mindfulness of what the government thinks. The threat is no longer what it used to be though it would be foolhardy to say that we are, at this stage, out of the woods. There is still no reason to think that the vigil can be relaxed.
