Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 22, 2014 AFC Column, Features / Columnists
Our view: By Moses Nagamootoo
AFC Vice-Chairman
The Alliance for Change (AFC) calls on Government to immediately disclose how much was spent on taxpayer-funded advertising during the Jagdeo and present regimes and how the placement of ads was distributed between the state and non-state media.
In 1995, David de Caires, (Stabroek News), Fr. Andrew Morrison (Catholic Standard) and I (Mirror) attended an Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) conference in Santiago de Chile at which governments that withheld advertisements or rationed same to the non-state media, were condemned.
Under provisions of the Declaration of Chapultepec, this was tantamount to economic sanctions and sabotage, and was just as bad as when, under the previous regime, opposition newspapers were strangled by all types of restrictions on the importation of newsprint and the rationing of foreign currency to import printing machinery and parts.
Upon our return, de Caires single-handedly carried the Chapultepec torch, and until his death. He approached the then President Cheddi Jagan to sign on, and I remember how much Earl Bousquet, Vic Insanally and I (as Information Minister) tried to convince Dr. Jagan to do so. He had reservations as, at that time, Stabroek News had been carrying out an unrelenting ideological attack on him. President Jagan relented eventually but his willingness to sign was defeated by his illness and subsequent death. But, it would be true to say, that he never penalized any newspapers for criticizing his government.
The Chapultepec accord captured and contained the Mirror story of fighting State discrimination and economic sabotage. It specifically states: “Tariff and exchange policies, licenses for the importation of paper or news-gathering equipment, the assigning of radio and television frequencies and the granting or withdrawal of government advertising may not be used to reward or punish the media or individual journalists”.
For me, it was the Ten Commandments for a free press. It says that “no news medium or journalist may be punished for publishing the truth or criticising or denouncing the government”.
Jagdeo was to ink the accord when he was handed the presidency, and he had promised not to victimize, punish or in any way target media organizations for not toeing the line. That would be “reprehensible”, he said. But, as is characteristic of him, he crudely and clumsily broke his words by rationing ads, then cutting them off all together in some cases, to Stabroek News and Kaieteur News. At least one prominent journalist from Capitol News was banned from his press conferences at his office.
In the Mirror newsprint case, Justice Vieira had famously declared that no newsprint was equal to no freedom of expression. Today, we could add, no ads equal economic strangulation of the free press.
In my time, a tiny unit was set up, to place state ads and even channel ads from non-state donor agencies to various sections of the media. Ads were never withheld from any of the mainstream newspapers, though at times I did receive complaints.
With the advent of Jagdeo, all of that was to change and lofty principles of Chapultepec were derailed. President Ramotar is now dream-walking in Jagdeo’s slim pants, doing much the same. The non-government newspapers have been blacklisted and starved of State ads. The main State-owned rag, Chronicle, the party paper Mirror, and news outlets owned by their sidekicks in private-friendly hands, hog the trough.
We condemn this discrimination as a direct State attack on the media in Guyana and to freedom of the press and of expression. We reiterate the principle that taxpayer-funded ads ought to go to newspapers in proportion to the size of circulation. An independent audit should determine this. Otherwise, we will continue to go down the old dirty road of press censorship and authoritarianism that ought to have been consigned to history.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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