ALL across this country people are expressing their frustrations about Kaieteur News. Those who complain say the same thing, that is, Kaieteur News is not only sensationalist but outright dangerous. They complain that the paper has moved from being the national tabloid to one that is now calling for disturbances and troubles on the streets of Guyana.Kaieteur News has many sleazy ways of doing this. One man there gets paid a lot for cursing East Indians on a regular basis, insulting everything from their rural orientation and religion to their party choice. Successful Afro-Guyanese are routinely portrayed as ‘house slaves’.
Incidentally, a man from a village up on the East Coast came to my office the other day to inform me that the same writer has a long record of failure and that we should highlight the fact that the writer – whom the man identified as F. Kissoon – has never produced a peer reviewed publication after a quarter of a century at the University of Guyana.
Kaieteur News goes even further. It publishes letters on a regular basis that call for the use of force, revolution, and slow fiyah- mo fiyah. The same Kaieteur News has praised voters in Trinidad and Tobago, the U.K. and the U.S. for their independence but refuse to acknowledge that no newspaper in these countries call for, or would be allowed to call for revolution or slow fiyah-mo-fiyah.
Kaieteur News has become a bastion for the worst kinds of media extremism. It preys upon the fears of Guyanese, often using dramatic but ultimately useless photos spread out on its front pages. It allows its pages to be used to curse not only the democratically elected PPP/C, but also the PNCR. The writers in the paper curse Mr. Corbin because he has refused to be bullied into a program of slow fiyah-mo-fiyah.
Once upon a time Kaieteur News was nothing other than the average tabloid that people read for their daily dose of sensationalist rumor. But that is not so any more. Today the paper has become vengeful. It appears to be hungry for power. It wants that power at any cost to this country, even if it means disturbances and troubles on the streets of Georgetown and elsewhere. Violence helps to sell newspapers, doesn’t it?