A timely reminder to Jagdeo that he is accountable to the public

Dear Editor
“If you don’t want to answer leave’’, is read as an ultimatum that had been given to Leader of the political opposition, Bharat Jagdeo, after he was reported to have behaved in a disrespectful manner to a member of the media corps that is currently gathered at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, covering the recount process.

I do not want to applaud those media persons for deciding finally to let Jagdeo understand that he is accountable to the public, and where they stand on such an important principle of communication, if only because for far too long, just too long, they have been giving him a free pass, allowing him to build an aura of intimidation around his person, from which he has continued to show scant regard and gross disrespect for the media.

This has been a continuing key attribute of the leader of the opposition, even when he was president, when being asked about matters pertaining about his former government and party. Even the Press Association of Guyana must be held responsible for this seemingly disgusting line of cooperation concerning Jagdeo’s disrespectful attitude towards the press, by its dumb silence since 2015. It is instructive that sometime in April, 2019, that it was demanding an apology from a very senior coalition minister for what were fair comments made about another media house; but not attempting to hold Jagdeo to the same standards of media deportment. It is such a body that would have continued to give rise to Jagdeo’s trenchant disregard for the media.

Editor, I hold no brief for any section of the media, because they are all bounded by time-honoured principles to be truthful, fair and balanced especially when it comes to fact checking dubious claims/statements such as what the nation continues to be confronted daily from a mostly pro-opposition PPP/C media.

Maybe, there are now media workers who are aware of their principled role as asking uncompromising questions of such leaders of the ilk of Jagdeo; however, because they are mostly in the employ of a media that is now mostly pro-PPP/C, that they must have been very hesitant to assume such an aggressive course, because of fear of losing their bread and butter. There was the case of a former leading staffer from a media house who had been ordered not to write articles critical of Jagdeo and the PPP/C – she was terminated.

Then there is the recent case of what I would describe as the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Adam Harris, who decided that he had had enough of the dark descent of the Kaieteur News, a newsprint that he would have spent almost two decades of his media life, building to a professional level, only to witness its descent into the dark pits of PPP/C fake news, disinformation and all the notorious aspects that are inherent of alternative facts. Which editor that is worth his/her salt would have wanted to continue in such an environment of dangerous daily deceit and distortion? I am glad that Mr. Harris has had the courage to finally walk away from a rag, which continues every day in the mould of the Nazi Julius Schliecher horrible anti-semitic, Die Sturmer.

As the state-owned media, it is good to read that its senior reporter took the lead in posing such questions to Jagdeo. But from his answers, it would appear that Jagdeo is still in the mindset belief of a print that is publishing in the past era of his and the Donald Ramotar regimes. But times have changed, with the paper becoming the carrier of a better reportage of balanced reports than the lopsided and disgusting toadying crap that the readership can well remember during the 1992 – prior may 2015 period.

Regards
Carla Mendonca

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