GORDON Moseley was ordered to pay $500,000 each to Dr. Leslie Ramsammy and the Guyana Times for a libel he lost in which he claimed that Ramsammy accused him of complicity in election rigging in March, 2020. This case should be taught in the classroom not in the journalism classroom or in a law course but in a psychology lecture.
Why psychology? Because the March 2020 election provided strong evidence of how the human mind works. Moseley is not a journalist that I believe meets the rigorous standards of journalism. Moseley sued the Guyana Times and Dr. Leslie Ramsammy for $100 million for a column Ramsammy penned. The writer suggested that Moseley was complicit in election rigging.

Why Moseley would sue for that is beyond comprehension when those who were involved in analysing the election between the start of March to end of July would have seen and read what he posted. But first, let’s look at the role of Mr. Lincoln Lewis during the election. Guyana does not have a ceremonial president with a modicum of legal power as Trinidad does.
For example, if in a national election there is a tie for seats by both contesting parties, the unelected, ceremonial president has a residue of constitutional power so he/she can decide which of the two larger parties will form the government. That is what happened in Trinidad in 2001 when the titular president, appointed a prime minister of his liking.
We do not have a titular president but an executive president who is both head of government and head of state. In Guyana, the president comes from the party that has won the majority of votes among the contesting parties.

Mr. Lewis during the election tempest exhorted President Granger to cancel the March 2020 national and regional elections. He intoned: “Mr. President, it behoves (sic) you to cancel these elections. You have the power, you have the right to so do… Mr. President, for the good of Guyana, her laws and people, cancel these elections.”
With this statement in the possession of an untold number of Guyanese, Mr. Lewis accused Vishnu Bisram of lying on him when Bisram accused Lewis of attempting to rig the election. Here are the words of Lewis in response to Bisram printed in the May 29, 2021 issue of the Kaieteur News.
“Bisram continues to use the letter column to lie on me, and refuses to provide the evidence to support his claim that I, Lincoln Lewis was “condoning the rigging” of the 2020 elections; it says to me that this is a deliberate attempt to defame my character.”

What is involved here is legal comicality. When you take Lewis’ appeal to Mr. Granger made in June 2020 at a time when there was global consensus that the election was legitimate and the PPP won the poll, then there is no need to deconstruct words – Lewis’ advocacy was action designed to remove the legal results of the election. Isn’t that complicity?
Lewis cried that Bisram attempted to defame his character. Moseley noted that Ramsammy did just that. But it was hard to determine which part of Moseley’s character was damaged if his entire reporting could be questioned when one looks back at his 2020 elections coverage.

The nature of Moseley’s journalism came to national attention when in the balcony of the high court during one of the election court cases, politician, Timothy Jonas refused to answer a question from Moseley with the reason given that Moseley would not report accurately what he, Jonas, said. This was in May, 2020. The election results were officially declared in July.
All one has to do to assess Moseley’s journalistic capacity is to examine his reporting from the time of the encounter with Jonas to July 2020. The judge quoted from samples of Moseley’s reporting. One of which stated that diplomats left the GECOM command centre because of complaints by the PPP. The judge said that any reasonable person would have found that to be misleading because according to the evidence the diplomats left because of the conduct of certain GECOM officials.

Interestingly enough, the judge went back to Moseley’s journalism and declared that any reasonable person would find his reporting to be biased. Against this humongous portrait of suspect journalism, why Moseley thought that in the eyes of the Guyanese nation, Dr. Ramsammy had soiled his character? I thought the cost for wasting the court’s time should have been enormous. Moseley escaped with a mere $1million cost. A billion dollar cost would have deterred other Moseleys.