Tightening the Screws

Aug 08, 2011 Editorial

You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire.
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher
-Peter Gabriel, Biko
It has been said that genuine news is something somebody somewhere doesn’t want you to know: everything else is just PR. In our reporting of the news over the almost two decades that we have been in existence, we have come to appreciate the truth of that aphorism. There is hardly a week that goes by that we do not receive a call from some individual or organisation complaining that a report of ours had embarrassed them. But as a newspaper, we hold it as our sacred duty, in the common parlance, to “call it as we see it.”
We have always known that by taking this approach, and refusing to be a PR vehicle for any entrenched interest, there were risks involved – from governments, political parties, corporations or assorted “shady characters”. And we have paid the price: both when we were seen as “pro-government” and today as “anti”. But this is simply because we have stood firmly to our credo to report the news and just the news. But as the song quoted above about the South African freedom fighter, Stephen Biko proclaimed, the wind will only serve to enlarge the flame of our resolution to stick to the responsibilities that go with the credo: freedom of the press.
But let us make this clear – we are not saying that Guyana does not have freedom of the press. If this were not so then we would not see the lampooning and skewering of some of the “big ones”. But what we detect is an inexorable tightening of the screws against those who insist on maintaining an independent viewpoint in several insidious ways. And this is a very slippery slope. A former President of ours, who knew a thing or two about muzzling the press, once famously remarked that there are many ways to skin a cat and graphically went on to illustrate the gravamen of his remark: you can give it mange; you can wring its neck or you could skin it etc. We have seen the withdrawal of Government ads and now the libel cases. Coupled with the harassment of other media, one has to ask, “Where have we arrived? At the “skinning” stage?”
We want to remind those who appear to have forgotten, that the free press was born as part and parcel of the modern flowering of democracy. From all the evidence, it does not appear that the latter can take root and survive without the former. Power and its inevitable corrupting effect on those who are voted into office demand that the people in whose hands ultimate sovereignty lie, must be given adequate information to make informed decisions. This is what will make those decisions, “democratic”.
In 1993, the United Nations gave recognition to the pivotal role of a free press in the sustenance of good governance by declaring every May 3rd as “World Press Freedom Day”. It is in that same month that we also celebrate our independence from the yoke of foreign rule. But if our people are denied the multiplicity of views that is the hallmark of a vibrant democracy then we are dooming them to a more invidious yoke of oppression from the vacuum of information that would stifle their minds.
We understand that with all freedoms, including freedom of the press, comes responsibility: freedom of the press does not mean license to libel. But the laws to prevent such libel are to be used as a shield and not a sword. And the recent flurry of lawsuits and administrative flexing of muscle is nothing more than bullying attempts to stifle fair comment on those in the public gaze. This is not conducive to the expansion of our democratic freedoms. Let us do our duty to inform the people. It is the truth that will set all of us free.

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