Do people laugh at us?

Aug 14, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A very prominent Guyanese opposition figure told me that he was invited by a group of people who live in a small Caribbean island to address them. At the meeting, each member had a booklet on him with his photograph. So he curiously asked them how they got that information. They were laughing. I don’t need to tell you the answer. It is of course, the Internet.
Today no one can hide his/her identity if he/she is a public figure. Your data is on the net. I met Alice Tupling from Poland when I studied at the University of Toronto. She worked as a librarian. She became a family friend. We lost contact twenty years ago
Then two years ago, I got an e-mail from Alice. She Googled me and found out that I was still in Guyana, teach at the University of Guyana and write for the Kaieteur News. Alice and I were reunited through the Internet.
A professor cannot fool you if he says he teaches at the University of Wyoming and publishes books on domestic violence. Before you offer him a job, you would Google him to see what his profile is at the University of Wyoming. Foreigners living in this country must be laughing at us over Vishnu Bisram.
We sent reporters to New York to cover the Robert Simels trial. We have four daily newspapers and five television newscasts. We have thousands of organizations with Internet connections yet we cannot do a search on Vishnu Bisram to get data on him and the organization that he says he is attached to.
It is not that Bisram has stated that he has just arrived. Bisram is proud to tell us; (1) his organization is more than twenty years old; (2) in those twenty years it has been conducting pools in Guyana and all over the Caribbean, (3) he is the chief professional pollster for his organization, NACTA, (4) he has been a teacher all his life in New York, (5), he conducts professional polls all over the world, yes all over the world.
People surely will laugh at us that we speak about this man’s polls and publishes his findings yet in a world where the Internet can tell you almost everything about the Caribbean, we can’t find stuff on a New York professional polling institute (mind you doing surveys for over 20 years) named NACTA and its “highly rated” polling expert, Vishu Bisram.
Yes people laugh at us. They laugh when they hear what this professional pollster openly wrote for the whole world to read. He cannot tell us where he works because he is afraid that people may want to get at him. He cannot tell us who his associates are because while polling for him, they were illegally away from their jobs and they may be fired.
He cannot tell us who commissions his surveys in Guyana. What do foreign workers in the Caricom Secretariat, the Embassies and international institutions say about us as a people when they read these things?
No wonder the US Embassy in Guyana did something to Guyana that perhaps no other US Embassy in other countries has done – it no longer wants to see copies of supporting documents. The reason being the Embassy was inundated with bogus stuff. We cannot ascertain the status of a man who announces that he has an organization that does important surveys all around the globe for important clients, how then can we detect the fake documents going around? Maybe the US Embassy was right.
I have written to Gordon Moseley, President of the Guyana Press Association (GPA). I have copied the letter to Adam Harris and Nigel Mc Kenzie of this news paper; Enrico Woolford of Capitol News; Julia Johnson of Prime News and Anand Persaud, Arnon Adams and Ana Benjamin of the Stabroek News.
My simple request is to ask GPA to take a definitive position on Mr. Vishnu Bisram. I have not asked the GPA to do what I want to. I have requested the GPA to stay within the guidelines of the sacred tenets of journalism and that is to verify that the news (not opinions; opinions are opinions) that they report on has in fact occurred.
My request to the GPA is to seek dialogue with Mr. Bisram (if they can locate him and his organization) to ascertain the true existence of his operations. Mr. Bisram then ought to outline his status so that he could be accepted as a genuine actor. If he fails to do so, I have asked the GPA to take a position. I believe that is fair.

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Do people laugh at us?

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