A journalism of verification, not a journalism of allegations

Aug 01, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor

The mass media in Guyana seem to have a symbiotic relationship with a journalism of allegations and not a journalism of verification; and it continues to plague the mass media’s modus operandi in this country.
For that reason, it was a breath of fresh air to have the National Assembly’s approval of the Broadcasting Bill. And while the Bill focuses on broadcasting and not the print media, this approval imposes a momentous presence on the mass media’s modus operandi, and compellingly indicates government’s concerns about progressively pursuing the public interest in broadcasting.
Nonetheless, sometimes this kind of progressive development is hard to appreciate, unless we examine what the media terrain was like without it; that terrain mainly refers to the pre-1992 status of the mass media operations, as Guyana has had various media codes of conduct in the post-1992 period. Just crave my indulgence for a few random pieces from mainly the print media era.
Media repression was a stubborn feature of the People’s National Congress regime from former President Forbes Burnham through former President Desmond Hoyte. Prime Minister Hamilton Green in blocking the opposition’s use of the state media against the 1978 referendum bill said that “paid advertisements would not be allowed in connection with this matter…”
Then there were the ‘libel’ harassments in the 1970s and 1980s. Burnham sued the Catholic Standard because of that newspaper’s claim that his decision to reopen the Venezuela-Guyana border matter was tantamount to either ‘a blunder or treason’. Hoyte sued the Catholic Standard four times due to its public release of materials “alleging official pressures on insurance companies to repatriate funds invested abroad and to make the proceeds available to the government as foreign exchange.” And at that time, too, the Catholic Standard published materials indicating that the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) provided funding to the PNC for the Women’s Revolutionary Socialist Movement’s (WRSM) projects.
And what would boggle today’s minds in the media world, perhaps not, is that, apparently, the PNC deified some concept that freedom of expression had an association with economic conditions. Then Attorney General Dr. Mohamed Shahabuddeen explicated, thus: “…. freedom of expression in any society is only available and exercisable within the economic potential of the country and by such methods as it could as a whole afford. It is for the state to allocate scarce resources to various competing sources as its judgement sees fit.” Then, there was then Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Ptolemy Reid telling the Mirror newspaper of “wasting” newsprint which it would not obtain until some economic crisis was no longer a crisis. There were other instances of media repression in the PNC ruling era.
As far back as 1958 and 1959, Dr. Cheddi Jagan expressed concerns about the media’s role, when he noted: “Freedom of the press implies freedom to write headlines. But I presume that freedom of the press also implies public responsibility…I am aware that sensational headlines sell newspapers. They are bad enough when they are dealing with sex and crime. But they are far worse when they are likely to cause disaffection in the public service.” Today, some print media still seem to have an aversion to upholding public and social responsibility.
And then there are President Bharrat Jagdeo’s concerns on the media; he explained the media problem, thus in 2009: “no matter how much information you give, their job is to go back, take something and distort it…some do that because of lack of understanding or to make the government look bad…They are the new opposition.” And there are numerous instances to support Jagdeo’s explanation. A good case in point is this regular columnist in Guyana who has no regard for complying with the ethics of journalism; and it appears, too, that this columnist has no content or concept except that of ‘Jagdeo’, each time the column hits the print media.
There are others who breach the public and social responsibility principle in journalism. And while the pre-1992 period was mostly about the print media, the principle of complying with a journalism of verification and not a journalism of allegations applies to both the print and electronic media.

Prem Misir