The KN and SN need a policy on anonymous signatures

Nov 25, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I write in relation to an editorial note of the Stabroek News in which it replied to Mr. Vishnu Bisram’s contention (Thursday, Nov 21) that the SN questioned his academic and teaching status based on my insistence. The paper correctly pointed out that I never made any request to it on the issue. I did in letters to both the SN and KN questioned the employment and academic standing of Mr. Bisram and I stick with my position.
I will not respond directly to Mr. Bisram who I think is a pretender that the SN and KN have allowed too much latitude without demanding answers from him about his status in the US. I figured the reason for this is because both papers take the position that a letter writer is entitled to his/her views outside of bad taste and libel. I did pen a missive to both paper’s questioning this policy. I argued that if a letter-writer signs as a medical doctor with a clinic in High Street, Kingston, and there is no such clinic, the policy of the media should be to erase the publication of the clinic’s name because it is misleading.
I have long contended that the two independent dailies (KN and SN0 should not publish letters by persons who hide under false names but write on everything under the sun and attack public figures. The names M. Maxwell and Neil Adams come to mind. The KN and SN should leave that sordid behaviour to the Chronicle and Guyana Times newspapers that wallow in that depravity. Take M. Maxwell. He/she writes almost daily in both KN and SN. He/she takes me up on matters on which he disagrees but is barefaced enough to ignore my request to provide proof that he is a real person. I will not respond to him/her again until he/she clarifies his/her identity.
There is only one circumstance in which a person should be allowed by the media to publish a correspondence without an identity. It should be on a specific item whose disclosure is in the public’s interest and there is a risk to the person’s safety. But KN and SN should not encourage the Maxwells and Adams to laugh at us here in Guyana by getting away with their cowardice.
For this reason, I advanced the point that each time Mr. Bisram mentioned that he did a poll for Nacta, that should be edited out unless Mr. Bisram can prove to the media that there is a polling organization named Nacta and he is its polling expert. Over a ten year period, Mr. Bisram has failed to do so even though there is a long editorial note in which SN stated that in a conversation with Sunday editor, Ana Benjamin, Mr. Bisram was advised to provide evidence of some aspects of the affiliations he claims to have.
I will not respond to anything Mr. Bisram writes about me because I have no respect for his so-called scholarship. But if the editors requests I can supply copies of more than ten letters over a long period of time in which Mr. Bisram copiously described all the polls he did for Nacta over the years, the months and the years he did them and the long list of countries he did them in. This is over a ten year period and the layout includes every month in the calendar year. Any school boy would know that such a person cannot be a school teacher when over a ten year period he has spent the calendar year perambulating the world. It is either he is indeed a school teacher and he doesn’t do polling around the globe or he is not a teacher but travels the around the globe. But it can’t be both.
In my files I have volumes of letters in the press from Bisram that states the time he spend around the world doing polls. When I questioned his school teacher status, two persons replied on his behalf but none of them provided proof of his teaching status. Anand Boodram chose to defend Bisram by calling me a madman who needs to see a psychiatrist. And Ravi Dev. Dev came closer to acknowledging that Bisram was not full time employed by asserting that Bisram made his money in real estate.
In relation to his workplace, he wrote a missive saying that he was afraid to name his place of employment because in his previous job, someone tried to paint a nasty picture of him to his employer. I have his published mail on that score. Over the past ten years, he has published voluminous letters of universities he has been to, professors who taught him, and qualifications he received. But he never is specific about which year he graduated in, at which university in which degree programme.
He is smart enough to evade such details because such information can easily be tracked down. If you completed your B.A. in English in 1988 at City University of New York (CUNY) at Binghamton, then that information is very simple to acquire. Mr. Bisram is going to reply to presentation of mine here but like how he operated over the past years, he is not going to provide details of his degrees, years of graduation and types of universities. He is going to avoid any details of Nacta and will not give any specific details of his current work place.
This is my last correspondence on Mr. Bisram. It is my opinion that media houses know that this man is not a professional pollster and that he does conduct surveys in Guyana. My only regret is that the newspapers should not allow him to state in his letters that his fictional polls are done through an organization in New York named Nacta. That should be edited out from his letters. He has the right to publish his correspondence in the newspapers stating that he did this and that survey. That is his right that the newspapers should not deny him
Frederick Kissoon

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