Fighting the Ministry of Truth

Oct 09, 2011 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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Pull Quote: “While the ‘retroactively legalized’ Queens Atlantic sweetheart deal has been well documented, and while the sole-sourcing of Georgetown Public Hospital drugs from its subsidiary, New GPC, has been scandalously exposed, adequate investigative attention has not been drawn to the fact that Guyana Times and TVG are subsidiaries of a company that benefits from massive state patronage.”

 By Ruel Johnson

Sometime last year, I wrote an essay I titled ‘The Murder of Words” in which I made the point that the present political administration’s engagement with the literary arts constituted an underhanded attack on freedom expression.
I quoted social psychologist, Eric Hoffer, who stated that, “Stalin’s greatest crime was the murder of words”.  The implication being made by Hoffer was that despite the economic hardship, the assassinations, the enslavement, the corruption which the Soviet dictator subjected his people to, his outright stifling of freedom expression was what facilitated all of that.
What has over the past ten years been a war of attrition against a free media in Guyana – punctuated by the occasional open ambush (Stabroek News ad ban, Presidential tongue-lashing of Kaieteur News, the original CNS 6 ban, the banning of GPA Executive Gordon Moseley from Office of the President) – has now been transformed into a full-scale assault.
The following are the fronts on which we find ourselves fighting to retain our right to express ourselves in Guyana today –
The “Sharma” Ban – First of all, the Sharma Ban is not a ban on CN Sharma, nor is it a ban on Tony Vieira, the person responsible for the offending remark – the ban is on the television station CNS 6, a conduit for the free expression of views and the presentation of information.  Sharma is currently a wealthy and resourceful man and while one revenue stream has been affected, he is most likely still going to be a wealthy man in four months.  The people being impoverished by the CNS 6 suspension are the 30 employees who have been directly affected by the President’s decision and – in a more figurative sense – every single person who depended on that channel for the sort of information that it provided to the general public.
The State Media – “Our charts and graphs of the government owned and controlled media shows overwhelming political tendency towards the incumbent PPP/C during the course of our monitoring period, the MMU entered into the fray about the role of the state-owned media. Our analysis of the GTV Channel 11, Voice of Guyana and the Guyana Chronicle reinforces our considered view that the state-owned media should not mean state-controlled media.”
That was the conclusion on the State media ten years ago, presented in the GECOM MMU’s post-elections analysis on the media environment.  The situation is worse now, and hence the imperative to address this is far greater.  Not only have the restrictions increased, but the State media has been thoroughly deprofessionalised over the past ten years, with advancement being premised not on qualification and competence but the willingness to blindly propagate the PPP’s message.
Government-Surrogate Media – The GECOM report of ten years ago noted that “[private news programme] News Update displayed strong political tendencies toward the incumbent PPP/C.” Today, the Jagdeo administration has engineered, poorly if ambitiously, something that goes far beyond News Update’s biases of a decade ago, even as they continue today.
The establishment of the Guyana Times and Television Guyana can be used as a University of Guyana communications studies case study in the abuse of state funds in skewing the media environment.
While the ‘retroactively legalized’ Queens Atlantic sweetheart deal has been well documented, and while the sole-sourcing of Georgetown Public Hospital drugs from its subsidiary, New GPC, has been scandalously exposed, adequate investigative attention has not been drawn to the fact that Guyana Times and TVG are subsidiaries of a company that benefits from massive state patronage.
From the lucrative government print jobs being given to another QA subsidiary Global Printing to the newly, if dubiously established, Xclaim! Media (located in the QA compound) being shovel-fed government-funded graphic design and event management contracts, the Guyanese taxpayer is in fact paying for what would be otherwise unsustainable media ventures, established for the explicit purpose of propagandizing for the Jagdeo administration and now the PPP campaign, as they have been unapologetically doing.
The icing on the cake of this sort of underhanded legitimization of what is essentially a government/PPP media outlet was the recent well-funded launch of the Independent Media Association of Guyana (IMAG), the executives and current membership of which consists entirely of state and state-surrogate media outlets.  It is telling that IMAG has not so far pronounced on the CNS 6 ban.
New Media – perhaps the most insidious area of the Jagdeo administration/PPP government’s attempts to skew the free expression in Guyana is the establishing of a ‘covert’ mechanism, the central purposes of which are the online dissemination of government propaganda, and rabid personal attacks against the government’s critics.
I could mention the attacks and derision against people like Freddie Kissoon, Khemraj Ramjattan, Gerhard Ramsaroop, Christopher Ram and several others, stuff that would make Vieira’s commentary on CNS 6 sound like MLK’s “I Have A Dream Speech.”
Let me give a personal example, however.  Shortly after my being announced as Cultural Advisor to the Alliance For Change, a ‘thread’ was started, on an online political discussion forum, entitled “The Perverted Outpourings of the AFC Cultural Minister Ruel Johnson”.
The perverted outpourings consisted of censored but otherwise verbatim transcripts of my admittedly off-colour Facebook posts, and nothing about the issues I’ve raised with regard to the government’s incompetence as it relates to cultural policy.  The same posters, and others who defended the posts, regularly extol the government’s and the PPP’s greatness, always anonymously.  Were there not adequate documentary evidence of the PPP government’s complicity in this, it is notable that it has not publicly condemned persons posting what would otherwise be libelous material in its name.

The PPP Campaign and Media Freedom
The PPP’s Presidential Candidate Donald Ramotar, as is typical of his style with regard to answering hard questions about his party’s rule – whether by claiming ignorance with regard to the government’s links to Roger Khan, or studiously avoiding any direct debate with his political opponents – has so far refused to comment on the media environment, directly or indirectly.
Indeed, when I posted a question to the PPP’s Facebook Page with regard to Donald Ramotar’s campaign view of the CNS Sharma Ban, I was informed that President Jagdeo in his press conference last week addressed the issue on behalf of the Party.  When I informed them that, as far as I knew, Donald Ramotar was the PPP’s Presidential Candidate, and the President was speaking in his role as Minister of Information, I was assured of an answer.  As of the time of the writing of this column, I’m still waiting for it.
Let me give a representative example of the PPP’s engagement with fact and the media during this campaign.  NCN estimated 30,000 people at the PPP’s Albion rally in keeping with Regional Chairman’s Zulphikar Mustapha’s onstage assertion that there were 28,000 gathered. The Guyana Times and the Guyana Chronicle, by some miracle of coincidence both had front-page stories claiming the more conservative, but still unsourced, 20,000 people. In contrast, independent sources – Kaieteur News, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Police Force – have all given a peak estimate of 10,000.  It should be noted that while the Ramotar campaign has attacked both news outlets at the rally and before it, they have not subsequently contested this figure as being false.
The PPP is therefore saying to the electorate of Guyana, ‘While we don’t dispute the 10,000 estimate given by more objective sources, our Truth says that the numbers of the rally were somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 and the disparity doesn’t matter to us – that’s our belief and we’re sticking to it, and we expect you to believe it as well.’
In politics, there is spin, there is propaganda – and then there is outright lying. The only difference between the Burnham era and the Jagdeo era is that while the PNC’s primary tool of electoral manipulation was the rigging of the vote, the PPP has taken it one step further in its attempts at the rigging of reality.
Indeed, it is interesting that the President, as he has done at Albion and elsewhere, should remind his supporters of the excesses of the PNC dictatorship.  I personally think that they should, for those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.  The PPP’s supporters should be reminded that the economic decline of the 1980s was preceded by the clamping down of the free press in the 1970s and onwards, the primary end game of which was to aid in the manipulation of the electoral system as a means of keeping the incumbent in power.
What happened under Burnham is happening now, the major point of departure being that it is all the more blatant for being done by the very party which consistently reminds or warns its supporters of the erosion of freedoms under a demonized opposition.

The Role of GECOM
The Introduction to the Media Analysis report of the 2001 Media Monitoring Unit states,
“The timely presentation of news and information in the public media and accuracy, objectivity and balance in reporting events are essential dimensions in the practice of democracy, anywhere.  During periods of electioneering, the presentation of news and information must aim to accomplish a higher objective. Its purpose must be to inform voters about current events as well as the plans and programmes of political parties and candidates contesting elections so that voters can make informed choices on the day of Elections.”
We are told that the Media Monitoring Unit was relaunched in August, yet weeks before a national elections campaign season in which press freedom has become a hot button issue, there has not been a single report on the media environment.  At this rate, what the MMU is going to be pronouncing on is not a diagnosis of an ailing-free expression in Guyana, but a coroner’s report.
The reality of the situation is that a free and fair media is the only level playing field for electoral politics in any environment, and even more so in one which the incumbent has absolutely no moral or ethical qualms about using State resources in carrying out its on the ground campaigning.
GECOM cannot claim to have presided over an electoral process qualifiable as “Free and Fair” if the current situation with regard to the media is not addressed directly and condignly.

In Conclusion
At present, perhaps the only thing left for the People’s Progressive Party to do – given its predilections for both bloated government and blatant falsification – is to establish a Ministry of Truth, something not inconceivable considering that Bharrat Jagdeo, the current Minister of Information, has signaled his intention to continue ‘servicing’ Guyana, and Donald Ramotar (his presidential protégé) has long signaled that there will be a role for him under any Ramotar administration.
The opposition, the PPP members who have been marginalized during the moral meiosis that their party has undergone, civil society, the religious community, GECOM as a constitutionally established arbiter in the sustenance of democracy, and the people of Guyana in general, need to combat what is institutionalizing itself as an autocracy, and one which is establishing its dominance in textbook fashion, i.e., by attacking our freedom of expression, by murdering the words of anyone who would oppose them.
(The writer is Cultural Policy Advisor to the Alliance For Change, and a media consultant for the Ramjattan-Trotman 2011 campaign. Comments can be sent to ruel.johnson@gmail.com)

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