DECLASSIFIED documents change the way we see history because they reveal things we did not know before. Declassified documents this week compel the world to think about the possibility that Henry Kissinger should be charged for war crimes committed in Chile in 1973.
But those documents not only show the role of Kissinger and President Nixon in planning the overthrow and killing of an elected president in Chile, but the role of the private media in the coup.

The recent released documents revealed Nixon summoned the owner of the anti-Allende newspaper, El Mercurio, Augustin Edwards to Washington, DC to plan the prevention of Allende from being inaugurated. El Mercurio was hostile to Allende and was vicious in inciting violence up against Allende.

The released papers are a goldmine for those researching the praxis of Cheddi Jagan. Readers are given information on the role a newspaper played in the removal and assassination of an elected president. Edwards as part of the conspiracy requested ammunition and money from the Americans for the removal of Allende.

Can one imagine a newspaper which is traditionally accepted as one of the safeguards of freedom, liberty and justice was intimately involved in the planning of a coup?
It happened in 1970 in Chile, but 10 years before it happened in a country named British Guiana (BG) against an elected premier named Cheddi Jagan. It is possible that El Mercurio studied the modus operandi of four privately owned anti-Jagan newspapers in BG in its quest to topple Allende?

Throughout his political life, Jagan had pontificated extensively on the anti-working class role the private media had played in the disturbances of the 1960s that led to his removal from government.

But he also warned us about the dangers of reactionary newspapers in the world. Jagan carried the belief all his life that private newspapers can have their own anti-government agenda because he saw that agenda in BG from the time he was elected in 1957 to the time he was removed in 1964.

It is a nasty and sick vulgarization of political theory to assert that the media is a sacrosanct institution whose role is to safeguard society from dictatorship.
Maybe the press started out with that goal thus earning the name, the Fourth Estate. When you look at Fox News in the US, and the Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News here, it becomes a sick joke to refer to the press as the Fourth Estate.

Let’s quote Barack Obama. Asked about what keeps him late at night, Obama told CBS: “The thing that I’m most worried about is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media.

“Today what I’m most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities, right?”
Which country is Obama talking about when he referenced, “different realities?” It is the USA of course, but his reflection also applies with enormous force to Guyana.

The Stabroek News ran an editorial on the attainment of three years in office by President Ali and found that the three years were a failure with no achievements.
It was a grotesque, ugly and debauched assessment of the realities in Guyana, where a popular president has achieved more goals than any of his predecessors in the first three years in office.

A New York Times-Siena College poll published in October last year found 59 per cent of voters view the media as a “major threat to democracy,” while 25 per cent said the press is a “minor threat.”

The annual Gallup survey also published in the same month last year found only 34 per cent of Americans believe major news organisations will report “fully, accurately and fairly” on current events

Nearly three-quarters of US adults say the news media is increasing political polarisation in the US, and just under half say they have little to no trust in the media’s ability to report the news fairly and accurately, according to a new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organisation. The result of the survey was released in May of this year.

In Guyana, it seems we are returning to an evil period in newspaper history; the period in which the newspapers were in open political hostilities against the PPP government from 1957 to 1964. By some strange, twisted logic, Guyana is returning there.

But the results will be different of course. The Guyanese people will not be easy preys in the 21st century. The LGE 2023 results show that the Guyanese people will reject the El Mercurio mentality of Stabroek News and Kaieteur News.