SOMEONE with the name Surrendra Dhanpaul wrote a reply in the Stabroek News of July 22 in response to my column of July 21, titled: “Who is accountable to whom? In that column, I posited that the media has to be accountable to the people of Guyana just like any other institution, including the government.”

The article was about the ironic journalistic architecture of Denis Chabrol of Demerara Waves (DM), Nazima Raghubir of the Guyana Press Association (GPA) and Anand Persaud, editor of the Stabroek News (SN).
My contention is that their journalistic horizon is both ironic and hypocritical. It is ironic in that sections of the press refuse to speak about themselves when they make the news while they seek explanations from other actors that make the news.
Chabrol and DM have made the news when it was revealed that a major investor in DM is a man who is insanely and vulgarly hostile to the ruling party. This man writes a daily opinion piece in DM.

Raghubir refused to give her take as President of the GPA on Anand Persaud’s rejection of letters sent to SN by presidential adviser, Professor Randolph Persaud. The same Anand Persaud refused to answer to the question as to who are the persons that comprise SN’s board of directors. My point in that column was that we all must be accountable.
Up comes Surrendra Persaud and publishes a letter titled “Gov’t is accountable to the people.” I never hear about Mr. Persaud, but he did state in his letter that he is a shareholder in a media outfit named, “News Talk-Radio Guyana Ink.” I never heard about that entity, so I looked it up and saw that it is a branch of DM.

Mr. Persaud reads my letter about the need for accountability in the media, lets me know he is an investor in a media house, but nowhere in his publication to SN, has he devoted even one line to the subject of the July 21 column of mine.
All I can say is that Mr. Persaud is a great evader or he doesn’t understand what he reads. When I looked at the date of Mr. Persaud’s publication on me then I understood why he barefacedly avoided the issue of media accountability. It appears he may have high friends in the media world here.

His letter came one day after my column. I have been in the media for 35 years now and the occasion is very rare for someone to send a letter the day before for publication the next day. It does not work like that.
There is always a stack of letters in the pipeline waiting to be printed. Could it be that Persaud got in his letter so quickly because he was writing on Freddie Kissoon, and the paper editor was happy to give coverage to someone who was criticising Freddie Kissoon?
The rest of this column is a lecture to Surrendra Persaud about what accountability is. He needs to start reading the works of the English philosopher, John Locke. That erudite philosopher was good at explaining what moral obligation is. Accountability rests on the foundation of moral obligation. If Persaud is an investor in a media company then I think it would be insulting to define for him what moral obligation is. He has to know what it means, so we will stick with the subject of accountability.

The title of his missive is “Gov’t is accountable to the people.” Is Mr. Persaud serious? Everybody knows that. But accountability goes beyond government. Accountability inheres in human relations, once humans form communities and live with each other. Without accountability, life will become what Thomas Hobbes once described it, “nasty, brutish and short.”
Humans are accountable to those they have power over and this includes more than the government.
It includes judges, teachers, employers, spouses, and yes, Mr. Persaud, the media too. Of these categories, the government and media are formidable sources of influence. I cannot believe that Mr. Persaud has never come across a saying that is over 200 years old? It goes like this – “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

I hope Mr. Persaud does not think I am pompous in explaining what that means. To put it briefly, it means that when you write, you can influence the thoughts of people so they can do things that a gun to their head cannot.
I hope Mr. Persaud knows that, in the US, there is no government-owned media, yet Barack Obama, a month ago, said that the media is slanting things against the goodwill of American society. And three prestigious organisations, in a poll recently, found that a majority thinks the media are undermining democracy in the US.