An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last

Jul 23, 2008 Letters

Dear Editor,
Just in case everyone has not realised it, Capitol News stands firmly behind what was said in the letter published on July 8th 2008 and authored by Capitol News journalist Gordon Moseley.

Mr. Moseley has a “constitutional right” to say what he said, both as a journalist and a citizen. It was pointed, precise, probing and concise, but certainly not ‘disparaging and disrespectful’!

It is amazing that the President can “say what he likes” under the cloak of Constitutional Executive Immunity from charges of slander and libel. He can make remarks and add that “he doesn’t care if he is controversial”.

But no one else can make similar remarks, including the brilliant seniors and young among us.
Now his acolytes and ‘sycophants’ can decide what is disparaging and what is not! There are only two arms of the State with that power to pass laws and interpret them — the Legislature and the Judiciary, not the Executive.

On the occasion of the Sharma closure, I warned that the use and abuse of Presidential Immunity forebodes no good for Guyana. We are sliding down a slippery slope. If Sharma is deemed by the President to have offended the President, he is closed for four months. Hinckson answers the President, and he is clamped in Camp Street. Moseley rebuts the President’s offensive remarks, and he is locked out of the right to work at certain venues. All of this has happened within the past six months. As the song says “Outta Han’, De Man a Get Outta han!”

I recall Churchill’s admonition that, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” We must not appease the soi-disant arbiters of what should be said, and who should say it, and how. The supreme law of the land should prescribe that, not a wannabe “Burnham Doppelganger and his erstwhile retinue”.

Moseley’s letter said that he was fed up with the President’s and his Office’s constant attacks on the private media, especially Capitol News, not that he was fed up with the President or the Office of the President.

However, at the rate the two are going, he may one day be fed up with both.
Capitol News has made it very clear that our reports from Antigua were eminently fair, objective, balanced, comprehensive and timely. Capitol News believes that it is the President who ought to eat humble pie for his continuous disparaging remarks about the local media, while condescendingly allowing, a few years ago, a foreign entity — the BBC — unfettered access even to his Presidential security vehicles, his home and office.

The BBC then produced a series that it prophetically called “Trouble in Paradise”. And that’s where we are headed, unless, as a well known Guyanese politician said decades ago, “This confounded nonsense” stops.

Enrico Woolford
Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief
Capitol News

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