SN waging political war with false ads cuts claims
Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo
Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo

…PM says gov’t has widened media outlets to include, radio, social media

PRIME MINISTER Moses Nagamootoo, who holds responsibility for Public Information, has called out the Stabroek News for pushing what he called a political agenda, with false claims that the government has indiscriminately withdrawn state advertisements from the media house.

Recently, Stabroek News has complained that it has been a victim of significant state ads cuts, something that has been proven by the Department of Public Information (DPI) to be totally untrue. Recently, on Benschop’s Radio’s Straight Up Programme, Prime Minister Nagamootoo described Stabroek News’ complaints as part of a political campaign as Guyana heads into elections.

Not only did Stabroek News benefit from millions of dollars in state advertisement since 2015, but it continues to benefit, even after its complaints of not receiving advertisements. The Prime Minister alluded to a recent advertisement from the Guyana Elections Commission, of which the names of thousands of persons, who did not collect their Identification Cards, were published. This advertisement was to the tune of $15M.

Despite this, Stabroek News reported that the government did not place any ads for October and that the DPI placed a small number in November. The newspaper maintained that the DPI instituted a radical cut in state ads, in September, October and November. Stabroek News’ contention has been that the DPI slashed ads to punish the newspaper for its forthright reporting on the government and that this was in flagrant violation of the Inter-American press freedom Declaration of Chapultepec.

Editor-in-Chief of Stabroek News, Anand Persaud

The DPI, however, proved that for the period January 1 to November 18, 2019, the government remitted, to Stabroek News, the sum of GY$51,975,704 as payment for advertisements placed in that newspaper. That amount, the DPI said, was in addition to advertisements placed directly with the newspaper by various government ministries, agencies and departments. For the month of October, Stabroek Newspaper received a total of 171 ads from the government.

In this regard, the Prime Minister said that Stabroek News has no righteous cause to publish false information regarding the withdrawal of advertisements, more so that the government has ensured that all media houses, despite their political bias, are benefiting from a piece of the pie. “Nobody is using state ads either to reward or punish the media. I am not doing that, President Granger is not doing that. This government is not doing that, there is no merit in that allegation and Stabroek News has been told this repeatedly,” Nagamootoo said.

In fact, he reiterated that it is Stabroek News that decided to stop printing state advertisements, after citing non-payment. “We gave Stabroek News advertisements until, on its own, it said you owe us money and therefore we won’t publish more until you pay us. Everybody has been owed. The Guyana Chronicle was owed $70M. There is a procedure where the monies had to be processed after the publication of the ads and then sent to DPI,” the PM explained adding, “You cannot blame the government for an act of your own, you cannot blame the government for an act of commission and you cannot use your own wrong, as a crusade against the government.”

After realising there was a back-up of payments, Nagamootoo said that he would make an appeal to ministers at Cabinet meetings to have their Permanent Secretaries pay up the monies for advertisements, since it is the media houses and its staff that would suffer. The PM said that it is not the government’s policy to punish or reward any media house by withdrawing state advertisements or it is not the expectation for media houses to reciprocate to the government, because they are beneficiaries of advertisements.

He said the government has embarked on a rationalisation of advertisements, by ensuring more than just print media benefit from state advertisements and therefore radio, including the new ones, television stations and social media platforms are all benefiting from a piece of the pie. Nagamootoo opined that because the pie has gotten smaller for Stabroek News, this may also be an underlying reason why this campaign against the government was launched. “The pie is not becoming small, the pie is being shared to a larger group of people in journalism,” he said. President Granger shared this same sentiment during a recent radio interview on Kaieteur Radio.

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