ONE of Guyana’s leading journalists told me that the reason why he thinks the Stabroek News (SN) has become insanely hostile to the government is because the newspaper sees no opposition to the government and it decided it will take on that role.
It is a thought that is worth analysing, though I would not embrace it for one fundamental reason–class analysis. I do not think the SN saw a void to be filled because of the moral and strategic decline of the PNC. Even if the PNC, WPA, AFC and ANUG were rampaging against the government in 2024, SN would still have acquired an anti-government physiology. It has to do with the loss of power by the middle-class parties in 2020.
I will touch on this, then, contrast SN’s journalism with the Kaieteur News (KN) but let’s pursue a class analysis of the media last year. Of course, 2024 saw no elevation in journalistic morality in both SN and KN. But SN’s politics goes back to 2020. The KN’s political motives are completely different from SN’s. The difference lies in the class structure of both newspapers.

But let’s return to the election defeat in 2020 of the party of the Mulatto/Creole (MMC) class, the Alliance For Change and the defeat of Mr. Granger not so much the PNC. Mr. Granger and the founder of SN, David De Caires were very close friends. When Mr. Granger’s monthly magazine, Guyana Review, failed, DeCaires bought the copyright and made it a quarterly publication in the SN.
The MCC saw the 2020 election defeat in terms of social classes. Both Granger and the AFC were seen as the embodiment of the MCC. A key component of the MCC’s attitude to the 2020 election failure was Nigel Hughes. I personally thought Hughes would have come out and denounce the attempted rigging, but he was driven by class preservation rather than democratic instinct.

DeCaires was long dead when the March 2020 loss came about, but his daughter, Isabelle DeCaires, continued his tradition. She manifested enormous hostility to the PPP government. I will stop here and look at 2024 specifically, but a note on the long-serving editor-in-chief, Anand Persaud, is necessary. Mr. Persaud is quite comfortable being the embodiment of the MCC at SN.
SN is the favourite media of the Western diplomatic mission in Guyana. Six months after the EU ambassador arrived, he gave SN the embassy’s human rights award. One contradiction and one egregious behavioural trait dominated the life of SN in 2024. Let’s deal with the egregious instinct first.
The SN has shamelessly blocked out any news about Palestinian activities in Guyana. It did not carry any item on two marches and four symposia on Palestine. It boycotted the press conferences of two visiting Palestinian ambassadors. But SN interviewed the Israeli Ambassador to the UN In contrast, KN published photographs and news of the marches.

KN is as insanely hostile to the government as SN is, but its motives do not reside in class thinking. Glen Lall does not belong to the MCC, is a practicing Hindu and does not manifest bourgeois snobbery.
Mr. Lall is against the government for personal reasons and seems to have an obsession with Mr. Jagdeo. Unlike SN, which masks its anti-government venom in sophisticated deception, KN’s anti-government instinct is crude, vulgar and gutter-like. The KN goes to sickening levels to criticise the government that has dented any respect the society should have for it.

I now return to the contradiction, apart from the egregious behavioural trait, that dominated the life of SN last year. It is a contradiction that SN has not handled well and presents an insurmountable dilemma for SN. The MCC personalities that surround SN want the government to confront EXXON and they exclaim every day that foreign powers have reduced Guyana to a vassal state.
But how can SN walk through this minefield? On the one hand, since it is Western aligned, it cannot be seen endorsing emotions that are against Western companies and Western governments. On the other hand, it needs to keep these MCC personalities alive because SN needs their acidic outpourings against the government.

It is an enthralling bind that SN is in and in 2024 it did not manoeuvre this minefield successfully. But this contradiction did not stop SN from its inexorable anti-government rampage in 2024. Some of the most poisonous anti-PPP editorials in 2024 were on the same wavelength as the anti-Jagan newspapers of the 1960s. The worst part of this sordidness is that in 2024, none of the so-called independent minds penned even one line of the moral decline of the media last year. It was a terrible year for the sacred role of journalism.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.