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Packaged news

Mar 28, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

With all the hype about ‘fake news’, you would believe that this is the greatest threat to freedom of information. Yet, the peddling of false news is as old as the profession of journalism itself, and does not constitute the greatest threats which journalism faces.
That threat comes from what is known as ‘packaged’ news. This trend of governments packaging the news that it wanted the public to receive actually took place under the guise of what is known as development support communication.
Development support communication was well-intentioned. It was intended to be multi-sectorial process for the sharing of information. But it ended up being hijacked by governments in developing countries who had control of the principal means of mass communication.
The governments ended up creating information services units which became propaganda outfits which drifted away from the sharing of information to one in which it pushed its own twisted version of the truth.
Instead of communication which supported development, there was communication which supported the government. In other words, it was propaganda. Development support communication became hijacked and used to burnish the images of unpopular governments. Instead of being used to help citizens understand government policy, that is, a tool of information it became a political tool.
A number of state information agencies in Guyana became victims of that process in the late 1980s and 1990s. Government information services have never recovered from that process. This is why today agencies such as GINA and other information outfits run by the government are still considered as propaganda units. They emerged out of the tradition of packaged news.
The new APNU+AFC inherited a number of such agencies from the previous administration. Instead of dismantling these units, they have converted them into doing the same thing as was done under the PPPC, only this time the units are serving the incumbent government. Information for public consumption is being packaged.
It would not have been that bad had it not been for the fact that many private media houses have developed over the years, a habit of simply relying on these government information units to provide them with news which is then regurgitated in the private press.
The private media are no longer chasing around presidents and ministers. They no longer have to devote staff to cover Government events or events which government ministers and officials attend. They can be sure that the information units within the government will send them a release at the conclusion of these events. It is all packaged news.
The public is shortchanged since the only perspective that finds its way out of the Government Information Service is the version which the government wants to get out and lots of what the government puts out is really of little or no interest to the public.
All the public is being told by most of the releases from these government information units is that so and so minister attended so and so event and said so and so.
The people are bystanders in this whole process. The news is about what was said and little about how it was received, including critical reception. The people are subtracted from the packaged news.
If you take people out of the news, it is really not news at all. The basics of news reporting are about the people, the person and the story behind that person. In packaged news it is about a minister, the official and what the minister or official said.
Packaged news does a disservice to the people. It provides selective information. You will hardly find coming out of any government information unit, comments which are critical of the government.
In most cases, the information is incompetently assembled. It is provided as a hand down. This cheapens its news worthiness. The public has little time for these official features. They view them all as government propaganda. They are a waste of public resources.
This is why media houses should reduce their reliance on new release from government information units. They should treat it as wrapped news. The media houses should demand greater access to government officials rather than more releases.

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