Weekly press briefings

Nov 27, 2018 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Post-Cabinet press briefings have become irregular. Cabinet, statutorily, normally meets every week, mainly on Tuesdays, and therefore it is to be expected that a post-Cabinet press briefing would be held every week.
This is clearly not the case. The irregularity of hosting Cabinet press briefings means that the media is being shortchanged for information about the deliberations of Cabinet; the government equally is losing an opportunity to outline and explain its decisions.
Cabinet press briefings should be held weekly. Roger Luncheon, when he was Cabinet Secretary, had ensured that there were weekly Cabinet press briefings to report to the media on the deliberations of Cabinet.
Luncheon seemed to enjoy these briefings, which were his only notable public appearances. His slow-talking style could be irritating, but he ensured that mistakes were limited by his careful choice of answers to questions from the media
The weekly Cabinet press briefings helped him, at the same time, to counter some of the criticisms being lobbed at his government. This is one of the benefits of holding weekly Cabinet press briefings.
There has been a lot of talk about the poor public relations of the government. And if the government accepts that it can be doing a better job at explaining its policies and highlighting its achievements, then at the minimum, it should demonstrate greater enthusiasm towards hosting regular briefings with the media.
It is not, and this will only add credibility to those who argue that the government is being selective with the release of information. Instead of using the press briefing to counter negative perceptions about the government, the government prefers not to host regular press briefings, despite there being a heavily staffed Department of Public Information and another overstaffed unit, which reports strictly on the President and his Ministry.
The latter loves to send out releases, which are quickly gobbled up by a gullible media. These releases leave more questions than answers.
The latest release is to the effect that the President, on the advice of his doctors, will be scaling down his public engagements – as is to be expected during his treatment – but will continue to work.
This is as ambiguous as reports on the President’s health can get. And the media are suckers who lap it all up without trying to find out just how the President intends to operate during his treatment and recuperation. Who is going to chair Cabinet, seeing that the President is supposed to do so? How much of a workload will the President be undertaking, and who will be taking up the slack caused by his reduced public engagements?
These and numerous other questions remain unanswered. Weekly Cabinet briefings could have been used to provide answers to these questions. But we have a media which is content with guessing rather than being sure.
The paucity of answers by the government does not help; neither does the confusion, which reins within the information sector. The splitting of the information portfolio undermines the role of the Prime Minister and places inordinate responsibility in the hands of junior underlings operating out of the Ministry of the Presidency.
The unit within the Ministry of the Presidency is satisfied with providing a day-to-day account of the engagements of top officials of that Ministry, without any attempt to respond to the barrage of criticisms and innuendos hurled at the ruling Coalition.
The Coalition government must do better. It must open itself to greater scrutiny. This is the only way it will get its message across, not by holding post-Cabinet press briefings far and in between.