The empty rhetoric of guardianship

Aug 20, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The Guyana Press Association’s latest press statement reads less like the cry and more like a whimper of a watchdog. Its words are soft, evasive, and marinated in the generalities.

The statement appears more designed to calm tempers rather than to confront abuses. It says the GPA is “deeply concerned about recent attempts to censor and intimidate local journalists,” but declines to say by specifically whom, against whom, or under what circumstances. A communiqué of fog, it announces the existence of smoke yet refuses to acknowledge the fire.

The trouble with such pronouncements is not that they are untrue, but that they are so antiseptically vague as to be meaningless. It is a formula of bureaucratic evasion: concern without detail, complaint without consequence, outrage that never rises above a polite shrug.

The GPA says it is “asking that our journalists and their work be respected during this election season.” This is not a demand; it is a plea, the rhetorical equivalent of a whisper from the back of the room. One might imagine that an association charged with defending the press would see its role less as a mediator of polite appeals and more as a custodian of names, dates, and facts. Yet no names are given, no cases cited, no examples supplied. The accusation of “intimidation” floats like a balloon, untethered from reality, disconnected from the lived experiences of those reporters who endure not only verbal abuse but also denial of access, bureaucratic stonewalling, and the creeping threat of retaliation.

The US State Department’s most recent Human Rights Report on Guyana states: “Some members of the media reported they faced discrimination and hostile personal verbal attacks in response to public inquiries.” Further, it documents, that persons claimed their work impeded by the simple and pernicious refusal of government officials to answer questions or provide information. A state’s silence is no less a weapon than its slander. To withhold information is to choke the lifeblood of reporting. But the Human Rights Report is also defective because it too fails to dabble in specifics

Where the GPA should have sharpened its teeth, it has filed them down. Why not point directly to the government’s habitual tactic of ignoring requests for comment, a tactic so common it has become a species of censorship in itself? Why not cite the recent instances when reporters were insulted at press conferences? Why not hold up for public inspection the hostility that politicians—both government and opposition—have directed at media workers, often reducing them to the role of stage props?

The GPA says it is “concerned about threats to journalists pursuing certain stories among those linked to corruption.” Which stories? Which journalists? What threats? Without answers, the line reads like the prose of a timid stenographer, terrified that the act of transcription might provoke reprisal. Journalism depends on specificity, on the naming of things. To abstract the abuses of power into a haze of euphemism is to engage in a kind of complicity.

The organisation’s invocation of professional ideals—“objective, transparent, and balanced”—rings hollow when unaccompanied by the courage to defend those who uphold those ideals in hostile terrain. Balance, in the hands of the fainthearted, becomes a synonym for neutrality; and neutrality, in the face of intimidation, is surrender.

We must recall that the history of press freedom is not written by the guardians of decorum but by those willing to incur the wrath of power. The publishers of seditious pamphlets in revolutionary America did not ask George III politely to respect their objectivity. The editors of underground newspapers in apartheid South Africa did not issue delicately phrased reminders about balance. They named their tormentors and suffered the consequences.

The GPA’s caution might be defended as prudence in a small and polarised society, where naming names can invite personal danger. But prudence without principle is cowardice. When the association substitutes vague appeal for forthright condemnation, it reduces itself to irrelevance. It becomes not the defender of journalists but their undertaker, issuing bland eulogies while the profession is strangled in slow motion. The real service the GPA could render is to speak with the clarity its members are too often denied. To say: here is the minister who shouted down the reporter, here is the opposition party operative who threatened reprisal, here is the newsroom denied access to documents, here is the pattern of abuse that degrades the public’s right to know. To refuse this clarity is to abandon the very premise of journalism: that truth lies not in vague impressions but in verified detail.

A democracy without a free press is an empty shell. A press without defenders who will call things by their proper names is a corpse. The GPA may congratulate itself on reminding its members to be “objective, transparent, and balanced.” But what good are such virtues when the space to exercise them is shrinking by the day, and when the association entrusted to defend that space issues statements so careful, so guarded, so self-neutered, that they accomplish nothing at all?

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• guardianship, Guyana Press Association, Peeping Tom, rhetoric

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