Dear Editor
I support fully the contents of your editorial,”Stabroek News’ attack on the court”, of Mar. 27 publication, which is really a response to the piece of absolute putridity of an editorial that continues to flow from the SN’s hypocritical and insurrectionary press, all in the name of PPP/C efforts of grabbing power through any means.

Editor, you are exceedingly late in your observation and condign response to this particular media house that, since 2015, in alliance with the Jagdeo-led opposition party, which government for 23 years had reduced this country to the status of a pariah, the PSC and its allied vested interests, sections of the professional class under the deceptive guise of civil society, as well as some private media operatives, has been leading an orchestrated social insurgency against the duly-elected government of the cooperative republic of Guyana.

Though I can understand that there may be the unwritten policy of a sister media house not wanting to criticize the other, the fact is that your probable reluctance to do so, very charitable, probably gave the Stabroek News further traction to spew its daily unbalanced and jaundiced opinion pieces and malicious cartoons, designed to illustrate the coalition in very unfavourable and unfair light. And it does so, many times, couched in so-called sophisticated or intellectual language as your editorial has correctly underlined. This has been its media strategy, as part of its role in what is clearly a right-wing reactionary assault on the David Granger administration.

The Stabroek News was never a supporter of the PNC/R, so much so that it never accorded the latter party its due, even when deserved, during its years on the benches as parliamentary opposition. One should reference its criticisms of former President Hoyte, when he took a stern line against the unprincipled and shifty positions of the then newly-installed Bharat Jagdeo as president, representing the PPP/C, during their engagement on important national issues.

As far as the SN editorial columns were concerned, Hoyte had been expected to surrender to what had been clearly engagements which goal posts, when agreed on, were subsequently shifted by Jagdeo and the PPP/C. Expectedly, Hoyte was vilified for his implacable position with Jagdeo; but not the latter and the PPP/C whose deviousness and inconsistencies in the bilateral discussions had been quite clear.

Further, its support of the PNC/R as part of the coalition, only came about because it had perceived the Alliance for Change (AFC) as possible king-maker, able to control the former, thus keeping the largest party component in its place, so to speak. Its pages, throughout the years, never supported the fact that the PPP/C government had a policy of marginalisation of Afro Guyanese, driven by a policy of institutionalised racism, nor did it readily allow its letter pages to carry the concerns of citizens about the extra-judicial murders of young black men as carried out by the now disbanded, notorious Black Clothes squad. That it began doing so was because of a certain former PPP/C government minister at the time, who began to write about its frequency.

Rather than criticize and condemn Mrs Janet Jagan’s contemptuous tossing of the court order over her shoulders, it kept silent, and when pressed about its latter stance over the now infamous disrespect shown to the court, excused its deafening silence by saying that because the PPP/C party had been robbed of its right to govern for so long, it thought it best to withhold criticism so as to accord it a fair chance of settling down to do so. Such a response, clearly asinine in its attempt to insult even the man in the street, was contemptuous to what had clearly been full support to a party that had begun to heap its indignities on the citizens and country.

Thus, it was laughable, and a frantic piece of crap, when Ralph Ramkarran wrote in one of his Sunday columns which interpretation amounted to the understanding that the Stabroek News stood between the coalition government and Guyana becoming an authoritarian state. But, in its deliberate frame of misinformation, this was just another filthy lie that adorned its pages, in furtherance of its agenda primarily against the PNC/R segment of the coalition. In tow with this have been claims of rigging.

These are claims that are as dishonest and devious as the columnist and the mouthpiece of the media house that chose to publish same. But it represented just another desperate attempt to undermine a government, by giving it an unfavourable profile, while attempting to create both an inflamed climate, and disaffection with citizens.

And of course, the Stabroek News is the lead media mouthpiece of this daily smear campaign and subterfuge.
Editor, apart from the fact that the Stabroek News is a most significant part of the vested interest coup against the government, trampling on all the good held principles of proper journalistic practices to which it had once subscribed, while giving sanctuary in its pages to a cabal of political criminals – its latest descent, attacking the Appeal Court judges and their decision, is just another manifestation that reflects the extremeness of its desperate representation of the clique that it represents.

Not surprising editor, not surprising, since its historical record has always supported such actions.

Regards
Earl Hamilton