Keep the pen away from some people

May 27, 2012 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Last week, I continued to be unimpressed with what passes for reporting. In the first instance, some of the people who pen their names to articles they write should never have been allowed near to a newspaper. One of them just happens to be Parvati Persaud-Edwards.
This is a woman who would call me for advice on just about every possible thing under the sun. When she had problems with the people at the Chronicle she called me. She called me to complain about Vic Insanally when she worked there; she complained about the treatment she got from the government when she thought that her daughter should get a plot of land.
But it must be that her pique only lasts until someone calls her and tells her that the president or some senior government official needed a facelift.  I read a few pieces that she wrote complaining about the people who would have taken a stick to the government and concluded that she was not a reporter, but someone who could string a few words together with a view to making a sentence.
Late last week it was my turn to attract a few words from her pen, and the issue reinforced my view that she was either incapable of understanding the spoken word, or deaf, or delusionary or simply stupid, and the latter is not a word I use lightly when I refer to people.
The headline screamed at me; “Lies of Opposition Cabal exposed – Adam Harris apologises to the Finance Minister for lies”. I was surprised because it never happened. And to imagine that the source of her conclusion was broadcast repeatedly on public television and viewed by hundreds was cause for concern.  No one else heard that apology. I would have been ashamed to hold myself before the nation. But not Ms Persaud-Edwards. Blissful in her ignorance, I heard that when her editor Mark Ramotar told her that I had called, she repeated that she heard the apology for lying. It must have been a moment of her madness.
I want to believe that what she concluded was an apology for lying was in fact an apology for raising an issue that was discussed by the Finance Minister off camera. Really, listening to the words uttered by moderator Michael Gordon and myself, I simply could not comprehend Parvati’s conclusion.
Suffice it to say that I am not one who would contemplate legal action against any media. I remember a one-time editor of the Mirror, Earl Bousquet, writing that had the government been vindictive, I would have been in jail for theft. He had concluded that I had stolen while I was Editor-in-Chief of the Chronicle.  When I confronted him, despite Senior Counsel Rex McKay urging me to take legal action and to say nothing to him, all Bousquet could do was to grin sheepishly and to tell me that it was a case of politics.
If the PPP administration is of the view that people should be vilified in the name of politics, then I would be less inclined to believe that such a political party should lead this country.
I heard the same thing when I spoke with Editor Mark Ramotar. He said a few things that are worth mentioning. But first I must state that as an editor, I would question my reporters about the veracity of their statement.
Ramotar said that he did approach Parvati and she told him that she heard the apology and the reason for the apology. Well, what can I say? I cannot dispute what someone says he or she hears. People have heard the dead talking to them. I once met a man who said that he hears God talking to him. Parvati must be in that category.
And we come to the next phase of the situation. Ramotar said that the political situation has tied his hands, preventing him from offering me an apology or from even running a correction. I sympathise with him.
I have said nothing to Parvati because she may hear me saying something that I never said. And besides, she does not have the ability to comprehend the spoken word, so I would be wasting my time. But the managers of the Chronicle must be ashamed. How can a newspaper have an incompetent appealing to readers? Perhaps this explains why the readership is so small—confined largely to Government Ministries and departments.
Moses Nagamootoo once had some scathing words for this woman because of some drivel that she wrote.
For his part, the Finance Minister gets angry when he is accused of doing something that he has not done. I felt the brunt of his tongue when I published or caused to be published that he had signed a document when in fact he did not. He said nothing when Parvati wrote what she did. Perhaps he considered the writings of a fool something to ignore.
But then again, he perhaps concluded that I could see the situation for what it was, and take the appropriate action.

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