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Stephen King’s graveyard letter factory

Oct 20, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The work of GECOM’s Media Monitoring Unit is facing an insurmountable obstacle that GECOM and its Chairman will find impossible to handle and one suspects that it will just go on during the election campaign and GECOM will be impotent to intervene. Rickey Singh over in Barbados will ignore it of course if and when he writes about the Media Unit. I am referring to a section of the Media Code that exhorts newspapers editors to do away with fictional signatures. But what can the Media Monitors do about the Chronicle’s factory operated by GINA?
PPP stalwart, Ralph Ramkarran, said that he never heard about it when Christopher Ram pointed it out to him in a television interview earlier this year when he was contesting the presidential slot for the PPP. By now every Tom, Dick, Amir, Rickey and Kwame knows that the Government of Guyana operates the letter factory that feeds the Guyana Chronicle. It has been going on for ten years now. It began under Mr. Jagdeo’s watch and has blossomed into a fully grown mill, the kind one saw in the Stephen King movie, “Graveyard Shift.” The warehouse has grown larger because the Guyana Times has moved in.
I think Stephen King’s Guyanese mill will remain one of the most comical dimensions of the 2006 Government as that entity fades into history with the dawning of a new administration after November 29. How can any Cabinet Member, PPP leader and President Jagdeo not see the utter inanity of this ocean of nameless writers filled with a miasmic style that makes people laugh?
The asininity took a new turn recently when a Chinese name was used.
Earlier this year, the Norman Bates-like triumvirate that operates the factory (the short-sized academic that dyes his hair black every week; another short man that called a boy on the phone requesting certain bodily favours; and the ten-rate theatre actor that became a slave after he defected from the PNC and got a job through Mr. MBA) came up with the idea of putting the initials “Dr” to some of the letters to make them appear genuine.
Since the Chronicle signed up to the Media Code, the mill has been churning out its daily miasma of bogus names. How can the Monitoring Unit stop them? It can’t. Adherence to the code is voluntary. The Chronicle is not going to be deterred. But the monitors should do their work and pronounce on what they find. And it is not hard to detect the phantoms. This jumbie sojourn has been going on for ten years.
Each day five letters appear with different names. No one knows who these people are. No one has ever heard those names. These signatures are not on the list of voters or in the telephone directory. In a silly game of emulation, the Guyana Times has jumped into this masquerade.
No one takes Guyana Times and the Chronicle seriously (the whole country knows the PPP kings and the monarchs in Government read the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News before their eyes ever move toward the other two that we can say “also ran.” It is like “Mitta” Sharma.
The kings and queens, princes and princesses strengthen the signals of NCN. State television can reach even the borders with our neighbours but more people watch the channel of “Mitta” Sharma. Closing down Sharma was a huge desire because the station covers the whole of Essequibo and goes up to Mahaica.
Now brace yourself for some fantastic news that you didn’t know about but it was out there since 2006. Don’t take my word for it; just check it out on GECOM’s website. In the 2006 election, the combined opposition won more votes than the PPP between Better Hope and Mahaica.
Don’t forget all the contestants put together in 2006 collected 153,000 votes to the PPP’s 182,000. The PPP won by 30, 000.
This explains the uncontrollable urge to knock out “Mitta” Sharma. Why do the kings and princes in government bother with Channel 6 when they have the ubiquitous NCN? The answer is more people look at Channel 6 than NCN, and Channels 28, 65 and 69.  Let’s get back to bogus letters. The independent dailies should not encourage the phantoms. It is not difficult to detect them.
The procedure to ascertain the real identity of letter-writers is to ask them for an address, phone number and work place. And then do the checking. In the case of overseas people, it should be the same. Leave the graveyard factory where it belongs – at the Chronicle.

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