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A PRESS CONFERENCE OR A POLITICAL EXCHANGE?

Mar 10, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The role of reporters is to obtain information which they feel is of public interest and to transmit that information to the public. The views of the opposition party are a matter of public interest and therefore reporters have an obligation to inform the public how the opposition party feels about the matter.
The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) held a press conference this past week to give its views on the riots and the deaths of seventeen inmates at the Georgetown Prisons. The press conference was rebroadcast on radio.
There were stunning developments in that press conference and it had nothing to do with what the PPP said. In fact, it was predictable that the PPP would have taken the line it took. It was predictable that the PPP would have held the government responsible for the tragedy. It was predictable that the PPP would have called for the firing of the Minister of Public Security. Politicians will be politicians. When the shoe was on the other foot in relation to the tragedy in Linden in 2012, there were similar calls.
The questioning of the propositions of the PPP is of course part of the practice of journalism. Journalists would want to put alternative propositions and to see gauge the reaction to this. They are, in this respect, not being the devil’s advocate. They are simply doing something that journalists do which is to adopt the role of the John Public and to find out what would be some of the questions in John Public’s mind and put them to the person on whom they are reporting.
It was to be expected therefore that the journalists at that press conference hosted by the PPP would have asked the General Secretary of the PPP, who was hosting the press conference, how he would respond to the criticism that the riot at the prison was because of the inheritance his party left when it was in office. That was a fairly legitimate line to take.
Unfortunately – and the Guyana Press Association should take note of this fact – the questions posed at that press conference tended to be more like a defence of the government than of the media trying to clarify the PPP’s position and to obtain the response of the PPP to the issue as to whether that party should assume responsibility for leaving behind an insecure prison system. The press conference turned out to be like a political exchange.
This was recognized by the host of the press conference who described the line of questioning by some media operatives as attempting to justify the government’s stance. The questions went on and on about the state of the prisons under the PPP.  There was little attempt to ask the PPP to justify why it was blaming the government and why it was calling for the action. There were a lot of questions about incidents that happened in the prison system when the PPP was in power.
The conference went overboard. It has to be a source of concern when this is happening in this day and age in the media and especially in Guyana when a press conference can descend into a political exchange to the extent that this one did.

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