Some things certainly pass all understanding. There was Minister of Public Affairs Kwame McCoy addressing members of the press on World Freedom Day on Wednesday indicating that a separate association which would advocate for the rights of the press would be established. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was at a Guyana Press Association reception, he went on to say that if the GPA objected it would imply that both it and sections of the journalistic fraternity thought they alone should control the fourth estate.
His remarks came in response to the unease expressed by the GPA over “creeping intolerance to the media” in its World Press Freedom Day statement. Mr McCoy responded he was unaware of any intolerance, but that many media workers felt unrepresented by the Association, and that he had received many complaints of journalists not being granted press passes. Workers in the state media were the ones who felt most unrepresented, he claimed, as they were not allowed to join the GPA. As was noted in our report, there are no restrictions on any media workers from joining the Association once they meet the criteria. As for the denial of press passes, he offered no examples, nor did he cite any cases where he had pursued individual grievances.
The Minister was equally voluble at a gala reception organised by his ministry at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, where this time he told his guests that the government would continue to facilitate the rights of the media. “My friends,” he said amiably, “you can rest assured that this People’s Progressive Party/Civic government will always be a friend of the media, particularly as it comes to the point of being able to uphold the protection and the safety of our journalists. We will always be there and we will do everything to ensure that is never interfered with.” He went on to insist that the administration would not be involved in behaviour that would endanger the lives of journalists, because they were the ones who played an integral role in advancing the government’s agenda and that of society as a whole.
And perhaps therein lies the point. Government sees the role of the media as promoting their vision of development and the direction the society should take. They already control a state newspaper, a state television channel and radio stations, in addition to being aligned to a privately-owned media house, yet that, it seems, is insufficient. No one could pretend that their newspaper, for example, is more than at best a public relations unit, but still they seem to cling to the fantasy that independent media entities can be brought into line and their critical voices stifled.
It is owing to the fact that the GPA is seen as representing the ethos of the independent media that they are being targeted by the government, and more particularly because they are being held responsible for Guyana dropping 26 points on the World Press Freedom Index this year. Prior to this, as has been reported, both the President of the GPA Nazima Raghubir, and Ms Davina Bagot, a Kaieteur News reporter had been subject to smear campaigns on social media, the content of which raised questions about safety. The anonymous Facebook operators concerned appear oriented to the ruling party.
Minister McCoy was nevertheless emphatic that the government remained open to engaging with the media. “We take phone calls. We answer questions. We’re at press conferences. We’re at other events, and we don’t dodge …” he was quoted as saying. Not all members of the government take phone calls, and this newspaper is still waiting for some officials to answer questions they have been asked long ago. As for the press conferences, where the President is concerned there are hardly any of those, and the last one he held, at Leonora, did not qualify as a press conference at all.
The one member of the government who does hold regular press conferences is Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, and he too addressed himself to the matter of the free press and the GPA. He was clearly responding to Ms Raghubir’s statements that the government was coercing media workers to engage in practices which were inimical to the Association, and that it had embarked on a two-pronged approach to pressure state-media workers as well as those in what she called the sympathetically privately-owned media to take over the GPA, and failing that, to establish a parallel organisation. In the light of Mr McCoy’s remarks, we may now, it seems, have reached the point of a parallel organisation.
Mr Jagdeo’s reply when asked about the GPA’s message on World Press Freedom Day was that the executive of the Association was attempting to garner sympathy ahead of their elections. “I believe they are campaigning now because they have long overdue elections,” he was quoted as saying, going on to reference Ms Raghubir personally, alleging she was partisan in her views and that it was reports from the GPA which had influenced this country’s latest ranking on press freedom. “Reporters are getting killed around the world, and the countries don’t drop 26 points. But we dropped 26 points because the press association, again, sent something. And know that everything they sent was used by the international organisation,” he said.
It is the kind of simplistic assumption to which the ruling party is prone: namely that there is one critical person or organisation which is hostile to the PPP/C and whose judgements are naively accepted without question by reputable international organisations. They had the same approach to Transparency International. In fact the score is calculated on a quantitative tally of abuses against the media and journalists in their work, as well as a qualitative one on the situation in the country. Scores are evaluated using five contextual indicators, says the website, which reflects the press freedom situation in all its complexity, ie, political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context and safety. And according to what they say they do not depend on one source of information.
Interestingly, when complaining about lack of balance in the private media, the Vice President referenced a World Justice Project Report which he said stated that 45 per cent of the media in Guyana was corrupt. Nothing was made public from that report he said, and this spoke to balanced reporting here. In fact there is nothing in the 2022 report which says anything about 45 per cent of the local media being corrupt. It does have an ‘Absence of corruption’ section which relates to government officers, the judiciary, the police, military and legislature with which the overall figure 45 is associated, but in any case it is not a percentage.
Like Mr McCoy the Vice President had his say about freedom of the press: “As a party, we have fought for this. We know what it was when the PNC had banned newsprint in this country … We know those days where we came from when there was only the state media, when journalists were killed or threatened to be killed … So, as a political party that fought to change all of this… we have a vested interest in ensuring that we have a free, competitive media. We don’t censor people. We will respond.”
The PPP General Secretary has a short memory. He forgets that under previous PPP/C governments this newspaper was first deprived of Bank of Guyana advertisements, and then in 2006 under his presidency, we were denied state ads for seventeen months. The objective of that seems to have been to drive us off the media terrain entirely in order to help the new, compliant Guyana Times establish itself. Subsequent to that state ads were once again denied to Stabroek News as well as other private media entities.
The PPP/C government is at best an illiberal democracy. While adhering to the notion of free and fair national elections, it does not subscribe to the normal democratic freedoms within that framework. It has an obsession to control all the spaces in a society and is particularly averse to criticism of any kind, feeling that only pro-government noises should be allowed to assail its eardrums.
Since its advent to office various critics, some of whom are specialists in their fields, as well as NGOs, human rights activists and journalists, have been subject to all forms of calumny and ridicule from official, semi-official and connected sources, and on one occasion a whole bevy of ministers indulged in verbal condemnation of a number of civil society organisations. The outlet for many of the critics’ views is the independent press, although they also have the option of social media which the government is currently looking to corral, although to what extent is not yet clear.
It must be apparent even to the government that the intimidation of critics is not working, so confining the press, beginning with the GPA by trying to make it irrelevant and creating a counter organisation which can challenge it or drown it out, has a certain appeal. Freedom House does not want to adopt direct methods of censorship and the like on account of its image, so they are casting around for more indirect routes. One imagines the Vice President’s view would be that the new association could ensure a positive ranking for Guyana on the World Press Freedom Index in addition to determining international perceptions. If indeed he does, he is likely to be disabused of the idea in due course.
To silence the press is to stifle democracy. No matter what roundabout methods the government employs against the independent media, the world will still notice.
