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Apr 12, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The President of Guyana is correct. The Minister of Communities was only expressing an opinion in his letter to the Editor of the Guyana Chronicle which was critical of the perceived prominence given to a story about oil rather than the swearing in of the Mayor and Deputy Mayors.
Not many people will agree of course with the Minister’s judgment on this issue. Developments in Guyana’s oil and gas industry are of far more importance than the swearing in of Mayors and Deputy Mayors.
Local government elections have changed nothing in this country. Local democracy is no different today than it was two years ago. The swearing in of the Mayors and Deputy Mayors could hardly be objectively compared to the news about oil.
But the Minister is entitled to his opinion. He certainly felt strong enough about the matter to pen a letter to the editor. He is entitled to that right.
The media corps in Guyana is very touchy. Reporters have this attitude that somehow they are God’s gift to Guyana. They, generally, do not take criticisms well.
The Guyana Press Association overreacted to the Minister’s letter. The press body accused the Minister of trying to dictate media content. That is far from so. The Minister’s letter was innocuous. It was not intimidating. The letter did not constitute interference in the media
The Minister was merely expressing an opinion. The Guyana Chronicle treated it as a letter like any of the other letters written by a citizen. The Guyana Press Association should stop making an issue of a non-issue.
The fact that it is a Minister and he was critical of the importance which the newspaper attaches to a story should not be cause of concern. The GPA should not be worried.
While it is true that Ministers have hardly, if ever, written letters complaining about the importance attached to stories, it is not as if the Minister was trying to dictate anything. He was complaining about the prominence that was given to one new item in relation to the other. The Minister has expressed and opinion and was in no way attempting to instruct the media.
The Guyana Press Association should be more concerned with the structures which are being erected by government to manage the news. These developments have implications for the future of journalism in Guyana.
Journalists pursue news. They do not wait on press and news releases. The government is establishing a massive press bureaucracy and is packaging news and sending this out to the various media houses that are only too willing, and some may say lazy enough, to accept these releases and to republish them as news items.
The executive arm of the state has established a number of media units which are competing for personnel with both the state and private media. The government has been able to lure away persons from both the state and private media because of the high salaries that the government is paying these persons. This is unhealthy competition. The Guyana Press Association should be concerned about the size of the media bureaucracy within the government, a development that will hemorrhage personnel from the state-owned and private media.
The government can afford to pay top salaries, including high salaries to relatively inexperienced persons. The government does not have to rely on circulation and advertisement. It can simply pay its media staff salaries from the amount voted to the various ministries.
The Guyana Press Association may not want to dictate the employment policies of some these media units within the government but they should at least request that there be greater transparency in employment practices since hand-picked persons affects the professionalism of the profession especially when political considerations are involved.
A major concern right now is the fact that a great many media houses that are concerned with ensuring the independence of the media are the very ones who have become dependent on press releases and new releases from government press agencies. They are simply regurgitating news releases out by the government.
The opposition is also in the same line of work. They are sending out releases. But they but they are also holding weekly press conferences in which the government is being lambasted.
The massive PR and media bureaucracy of the government is ineffective. The government is taking a hammering. It has a massive communication and media network which is absorbing millions of taxpayers’ dollars each week but yet has been unable to effectively counter the arguments being made by the opposition.
And that is a fact, not an opinion.

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