A FREE PRESS IN A FREE LAND

IT would sound like an understatement, but Guyana today enjoys a free press in a free land. While media ownership is privately dominated and outweighs the limited control and reach of the state radio, television and newspaper, the Guyana media are open and free. They are additionally, robust and vibrant, and enjoy the fullest right to exist. They are unfettered from state censorship, restrictions and political-financial pressures.

This is unlike sordid post-republican experiences, where the state media were placed inside party, political strait-jackets, and used as propaganda sledge-hammers against civil society. State manipulation, styled “Party paramountcy”, had characterised various periods of our system of governance, except for brief spells under the Desmond Hoyte and Cheddi Jagan presidencies.

MEDIA PLURALISM
President Hoyte allowed media pluralism and removed restrictions on the private press, which had suffered from denial of access to newsprint and printing equipment, under a warped state practice of MAD (maximum administrative delays) in granting licences for the importation of certain commodities. Newsprint was placed under the same import law that had banned importation of sardines and potatoes!

When Cheddi Jagan became President, I assumed the portfolio of Minister of Information. For me, it was a waste of public funds to run an over-bloated, propaganda machinery. That was why I literally shut down both the Ministry of Information and the propaganda outfit, the latter wrongly branded a “public communications” agency. I advised that the posh buildings in Brickdam that housed both the ministry and the agency, be rented out. I removed to vacant space under the Office of President Jagan, and ran a small Government Information Services (GIS) as a kind of bottom-house ministry.

It was in that period that strident efforts were made to restore professional ethics in the state media, although government engaged the privately-owned media, especially the Stabroek News, in oftentimes unfriendly relationship. It was inexcusable then, and also later, under the Jagdeo regime, to label the non-government press as “anti-national.” That relationship was underlined by an apparent ideological difference, even though the Cold War had ended.

OBSCENE OBSESSION
It is alright to step back into the past to examine what has been the state of the media. Under the Jagdeo presidency, there was an obscene obsession with using the state information apparatus to attack political opponents. Independent newspapers that were deemed “anti-government” were denied state advertisements. That was a declaration of economic war against the private press which was starved of financial resources and was being politically strangled. That was a clear violation of the Chapultepec Declaration to which Guyana had acceded.

If you were an outspoken journalist you could be chased away from presidential news conferences. You could be deemed a vulture or carrion crow; or worse, doused with excrement as in the case of the popular columnist, Freddie Kissoon.
Critics and dissidents were literally “slaughtered.” Or could have been, judging from naked and vulgar threats by the country’s Attorney General of an armed invasion against a non-government press. I was caricatured by President Ramotar as an “intellectual jackass.” For him and his handler, Jagdeo, I was a “craw” in their “throat” when they were approached to support my nomination for the post of Speaker of Parliament.

TOTALITARIAN IMPULSE
The totalitarian impulse like a macabre stage-show witnessed a “feral blast” by an impertinent minister against a diplomat. Disdainful appellations of being “meddlers” were given to others.
Even a child was arrested for showing the President his middle finger. And, a young Amerindian teacher at Aishalton was beaten by presidential goons. He was threatened: “If Jagdeo were here, he woudda slap you!”

No one justifies treacherous conduct as a response to irresponsible governance. Treason, is of course, the most serious capital offence, punishable with death. And under the previous dispensation, we had our share of criminal prosecution for alleged overt acts against the executive and state.

An ex-soldier, Oliver Hinckson, was charged in 2009 with advocating a terrorist act. Then Mark Benschop was slapped with a treason indictment in 2010, followed with incarceration of a couple, Major Bruce and Carol Munroe. They were all acquitted, but those prosecutions characterised the evolving nature of the state. When the Linden Three were shot and killed in July, 2012, the characterisation was complete: Guyana had inherited a criminal State. It had to be stopped!

So, today, when we say that the media are free, it should not be taken for granted that it was so before the change of government two years ago. This APNU+AFC Coalition, in spite of the full force of criticisms and condemnation, stood the course of not contaminating media freedom and the flow of information with the putrid interference of the past.
The attempts at discrediting the state of the Guyana media will not succeed.

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