Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Aug 24, 2009 Letters
Dear Editor,
In the Sunday, August 23 edition of Kaieteur News, I offered a response to Dr. Prem Misir’s letter of the same date, (“False allegations impugning the integrity of others is a ‘no no’”) looking at the role of a newspaper publisher.
In this missive, I will respond to the other contents. Dr. Misir has a simple methodology when analysing the two independent dailies, namely the SN and Kaieteur News. He quotes extensively from all kinds of reports and books on the role of the media. These publications say the same thing which all media workers would at one time or the other have internalised. And that is the media must be fair, give both sides, do not print fictions, be responsible, check your facts etc
You read a text book on journalism on the guiding principles of the profession and you have read all.
Dr. Misir does not need to lecture any media operative in this country on what journalism is and that is because he is in no position to. When you are going to cite the basic tenets of journalism from the great texts, you have to apply these assessments across the board. Dr. Misir does not do that, will not do that and cannot do that. The reason is because he is the press liaison officer for President Jagdeo therefore he cannot comment on the very faults he finds in the private media that abound in the state media. Dr. Misir is going to send in umpteen letters in reply to his critics but his arguments will contain two dimensions only – the repetitive regurgitation of what the journalism textbooks say and the faults he sees in particular journalists, editors and columnists with the private media
Try as hard as you can, you are not going to get Misir to discuss the Chronicle, a paper for which he does frequent columns and has a say in its policy-making machinery.
There is no doubt in my mind that in response to this correspondence here, we are going to see famous quotes from recognised journalism experts and it will go on like this ad naseum. I cannot see what angle I could use to present an alternative thesis to Misir that will invoke his conscience and push him to examine the state media’s profane approach to journalism
He will bounce back and say, your columns print unverified information and you do not include the good things the Guyana Government is doing
So you will say to Misir but the state media of which you have a huge policy-making part does not give space to the nasty, terrible things the Government does. But you will get nowhere. For example, it was evanescently clear, as argued in a Kaieteur News editorial, which was the motive for Dr, Misir letter of August 22 to this newspaper, that the state media totally (I emphasise, totally) blocked out the revelations in a New York courtroom that the Guyana Government had an enduring relationship with a violent drug trafficker that the US needed to put in jail. For this, any government’s resignation should be demanded by the citizenry. Dr. Misir attacks the general thrust of the editorial but refuses to discuss the main point of the editorial and that is, Dr. Misir is in no position to tell the private media what is should print because his media, the Chronicle does not publish news that is newsworthy and should be carried, locks out anti-government views, and only offers news that deals with the State and Government
It hardly needs debate that such a media house, in this case, the Chronicle, does not fit the model of the textbooks that Misir is so zealously inclined to quote. I would like to politely say to Dr. Misir, he could save time by avoiding offering advice on what my columns should carry because I will not be a convert to his interpretation of journalism. It is deeply flawed. There is no way a normal mind will accept that it is wrong for a columnist to be anti-government but it is right for another columnist to be pro-government. Both are either right or both wrong. Which journalistic theory says that the private media must give both sides but is in right for a state-owned newspaper to carry government news only? In closing, I can assure Dr. Misir that the two emotions he attributed to me in his letter I did not embody. He wrote that I was startled by his observation on my columns. What for? There was not even an infinitesimal shriek from me. Secondly, he observed that “Freddie Kissoon can moan and groan as much as he wishes.” What is Dr. Misir talking about? I will never moan and groan about anything state media operatives say about me.
Frederick Kissoon
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