A scene from “The Post” reminds me of my days at Stabroek News

Feb 08, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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 The British Prime Minister on Tuesday described journalism “a huge force for good… good quality journalism provides us with the information and analysis we need to inform our viewpoints and conduct a genuine discussion.”
But you cannot have quality journalism if you do not have quality journalists. Guyana needs more committed, interested journalists. There is too much mediocrity in Guyanese journalism and  it undermines what the UK Prime Minister says is citizens’ ability to better inform themselves and better understand what goes on in their country.
I find it unbelievable that not one journalist has picked up on a public statement that Minister Raphael Trotman said at a campaign meeting during the 2016 local government elections. Trotman told the crowds that when the 2015 election results were known, David Granger called him and told him “Raphael, this is Nassau” referring to a conversation both men had at the airport in the Bahamas years ago.
Exactly what is Nassau has not been revealed and no journalist has explored the issue to inform the Guyanese people so they can better understand the country’s political currents.
I find it equally incredible that since the 2015 election results not one journalist has sought to interview the two WPA co-leaders –Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas – about all the controversies swirling around the WPA and exactly what they hope to achieve now that the WPA participates in state power. This is a truly amazing, incomprehensible country that has no match anywhere else in the world.
Within the past two years, two fantastic movies on journalism have been shown that if watched by Guyanese journalists, then it had to make them better professionals. The first is “Spotlight” which won the Academy Award for best film of 2016. It describes the superb journey in investigative journalism of the Boston Globe to expose paedophilia in the Catholic Church.
The second one is “The Post” about the Washington Post’s bravery in defying President Nixon’s dangerous threat should they publish the Pentagon Papers.
I took my family on Monday evening to see the late night showing of The Post at the Giftland Mall. Sadly, there were only nine persons in the entire cinema – me, wife and daughter and three couples including the daughter of a famous, practising politician. The Post is superb but the film is complex in that it has hidden sub-themes that are not easily visible.
You have to make sure you do not go away thinking it is just about the courage to print a story that will get a newspaper in hot water.
One of these sub-themes is that wealthy newspapers owners and eminent journalists are happy to be close friends with ruling politicians and bourgeois society where such intertwining relationships contradict the sacred principles of independent journalism. There was a scene in which Ben Bradlee, the celebrated journalist and editor-in-chief, accused Kathleen Graham, the owner and publisher, of not wanting to print the Pentagon Papers because the Secretary of Defence was her personal friend.
Graham’s response was devastatingly candid. She reminded Bradlee that he hobnobbed with President John F Kennedy in very personal ways. Bradlee’s reply was jejune and lacked conviction. He said he once told Kennedy that his friendship with him came second to his role as a journalist.
Another underlying theme is that newspapers have their not so principled reasons for confronting the power of the state. Graham eventually agreed to print the Pentagon documents because she felt that her friend, the Defence Secretary, deceived her by not telling the American people that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, a position the government knew and accepted yet young people like her son was sent to fight in the war.
The question the viewer has to ask in trying to understand Graham’s position is whether she would have made her decision if her son was not endangered by an unwinnable war.
There is a scene in the movie that reminded me of my times as the Stabroek News weekly columnist. An exigent situation had developed and Bradlee had to see Graham. He went to her home and she was having her birthday party. She took him aside to discuss the urgency.
As Bradlee was leaving, he said to her, “Happy Birthday!” I think the director, Steven Spielberg, wanted the viewer to know that Bradlee wasn’t invited. Each year, David DeCaires celebrated his birthday at a house on the Essequibo River but the senior staff was never invited. As a popular columnist I was not even allowed to speak to him much less enter his office. He was the Kathleen Graham of Guyana.

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