The farce of managed curiosity

Sep 18, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party/Civic government has turned its imaginative energies to a novel experiment in media control. It now proposes to impose not only restrictions on the scope of questions that may be asked of the President at his press conferences but also which journalists are invited to these events.

In this scheme, invitations to presidential press conferences are delivered like embossed summonses to a colonial ball. These invitations are bestowed not upon media houses but upon individual reporters deemed suitable by the court functionaries who staff the Office of the President.

The practice, one suspects, is borrowed from the White House. In Washington, journalists are accredited to cover presidential press briefings as if they were nuclear facilities—vetted through layers of security checks designed to assure the Republic that no errant correspondent will smuggle a bomb under his notebook. The Secret Service requires background checks, fingerprints, and assurances of good behaviour. There, the rationale is obvious. A president surrounded by enemies foreign and domestic must fear not only the next hostile question but the next unhinged zealot.

But Guyana is not Washington, and President Irfaan Ali does not live under the threat of harm. Our press conferences are not high-risk spectacles requiring body armor and retinal scans.

The old practice—where media houses decided which journalist to send—served not only security needs but also practical ones. A media house may have specific journalists for specific sectors or issues. It is the editors’ prerogative to determine who to dispatch to a press conference and this choice may be informed by the topical issues of the moment or the issues which the media house may have an interest in at the time. That prerogative it seems is now being undermined by having certain reporters accredited, removing the discretion of the editors to decide who to send to presidential press conferences.

The absurdity deepens when the President’s press office addresses invitations not to editors but directly to reporters, bypassing the chain of editorial authority. The editor, whose job it is to decide what and how news should be covered, finds himself reduced to a spectator. The result is an erosion not merely of media freedom but of the very principle that journalism is accountable to its own standards and not to the whims of presidential aides.

Then comes the pièce de résistance: the restriction of one question per media house, with no follow-up. As though curiosity were a scarce natural resource that must be rationed to prevent depletion. As though the President were a fragile artifact who might shatter if probed more than once. The entire performance reduces the press conference to a ceremonial farce, a public ritual designed not to elicit information but a stage-managed affair.

The joke, of course, is that President Ali hardly needs such protection. He is, if nothing else, a man confident in his own loquacity. On several occasions, he has demonstrated a capacity to deflect, parry, or expound upon any question hurled his way. If the President can skillfully sidestep a question about the use of force by the Americans in Caribbean waters, he can certainly withstand a follow-up question about the cost of electricity. To shield him from inquiry is not to safeguard the President but to infantilise him.

Perhaps the problem lies not with the journalists or even with the President, but with the Byzantine machinery of the government’s own propaganda. Why, one might ask, does the President need his own press office when the Department of Public Information already exists as the government’s in-house megaphone? The duplication of effort suggests not efficiency but paranoia, a bureaucracy that multiplies itself to justify its existence.

And yet, for all this apparatus, the problem may be simpler still: the President talks too much. Every subject under the sun, from the price of rice on the world market to his ambitious plans for a e-identification card, must be refracted through his voice. Instead of limiting himself to one or two substantive issues, he spreads himself thin across a buffet of issues.

The result is a presidential press conference that resembles a variety show. Matters that should properly be explained by subject ministers—finance, security, health, education—are hoarded for the presidential lectern, leaving the ministers themselves to serve as decorative props.

If there is a remedy to this farce, it lies in pruning. Allow editors to send whichever journalist they deem fit; allow multiple questions and follow-ups so that curiosity can do the work democracy demands; allow ministers to speak for their own portfolios instead of burdening the President with the role of all-purpose oracle.

Above all, retire the fantasy that Guyana’s journalists must be invited as if they were guests at a royal court. They are not courtiers; they are chroniclers. Their allegiance is not to the President’s convenience but to the public’s right to know.

In its attempt to choreograph curiosity, the government reveals its insecurity. The great irony is that in shielding the President from the press, it only makes him appear weaker, less sure of himself, more in need of handlers.

The true measure of leadership is not the avoidance of difficult questions but the willingness to answer them, however imperfectly. A President who cannot withstand scrutiny is a President who cannot govern.

(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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• journalists, managed curiosity, media control, Peeping Tom, PPPC

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