Rediscovering the chase

Dec 09, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – The second anniversary of the fatal helicopter crash of December 2023 has arrived. But it does not come with the clarity and closure that one might expect from a nation still grieving the loss of five of its citizens.

Instead, what we have is the hushed unease of a house in which doors are kept closed, curtains drawn, and conversations conducted in the half-light of speculation.  Since the crash, there has long been murmurs that pilot error may have been to blame.

The government has since been inclined to treat the final report into the crash like a State secret. This could be out of respect for the families. Or it could be because of the demands of national security, two phrases which, when invoked by officialdom, function as the all-purpose disinfectant for any refusal to disclose.

Yet the newspapers, vexed by the continued absence of the final report into the crash, have begun to lament the silence. But in voicing their grievance, they unwittingly summon a far more troubling question: what exactly have they themselves been doing for the past two years?

One could be forgiven for imagining the media waiting daintily, hoping that the truth of the crash might one day flutter through the door unbidden. The editorial groans ring hollow when one recalls that there were survivors to the tragedy. These were human beings who saw, heard, and endured what the rest of us can only conjecture about. Yet in two years of national rumination, not a single report emerges of a journalist who bothered to track down these individuals, to ask them, or their colleagues and confidants in whom they surely confided, what happened that day in the sky. Instead, we hear the plaintive chorus about the government’s reluctance to publish, when the more indicting reality is that the press did not press.

This, of course, gestures toward a defect that is neither new nor confined to a single incident. There has been an astonishing decline of investigative journalism in Guyana. Our reporters, it seems, have misplaced the appetite for the chase. They have lost the instinct for the inconvenient question. They seem to have abandoned the willingness to rummage in other people’s secrets.

The newsrooms have become less a workshop of inquiry than an air-conditioned perch from which to recycle official statements and pluck stories out of social media platforms. One strains to imagine any of our self-styled media houses producing the kind of reporters who toppled the Nixon administration. Woodward and Bernstein, armed with a notebook, a telephone, and the obstinacy of men who refused to take “no comment” as the end of a story have become legends.

It is not that we did not have reporters who went the extra mile to get to a story. There was Fr. Andrew Morrisson who broke the story of the identity of man who gave Walter Rodney the devise that turned out to be a bomb. There was the reporter from Stabroek News that broke the story of the thallium sulphate killing sugar workers. There was Sharief Khan who tracked down the murder of Walter Rodney and even secured an interview with the man. Even the US authorities were able to find the employer of Gregory Smith and who was in Guyana connection that arranged for the job for Gregory Smith. So, what has happened to our journalists today? How come they are so averse to investigative journalism?

The shovel appears to have been misplaced. We are told—by journalists, no less—that the State has grown into a fortress. We are told that sources have dried up. We are told that leaks are rare, and that those few public servants who dare whisper the truth do so only in bathrooms or in the privacy of their own imaginations. But the iron gate of a reluctant bureaucracy is hardly a new obstacle to proper journalism.

If anything, it is the natural habitat of the investigative reporter, the very terrain in which the craft grows teeth. The fortress, after all, is not a reason to abandon the siege. It is the justification for one.

Yet our media workers seem increasingly content to play the role of stenographers, copying down the pronouncements of ministers like clerks transcribing the speeches to officials. They should be chasing down leads. But chasing requires movement. Instead, the newsroom desk has become a sedentary throne from which journalists wait for information to arrive already cooked, seasoned, and served with garnishes.

The industry congratulates itself for the swiftness with which a press release becomes an article, forgetting that speed is no substitute for substance. It is true that social media, with its instant gratifications and low barriers to entry, has disfigured the information economy. But it has also given newspapers the perfect excuse to retreat from long-form, deep-digging journalism, under the fatal assumption that no one wants it. Yet the duty of the press was never to gratify the crowd’s shortest attention span; it was to enlarge it. Citizens do not turn away from investigative journalism because they dislike it, but because they are no longer offered it.

How come no one has sought to fund Sue? How come no one has sought to interview that award-winning journalist that did an undercover investigative report into the Chinese in Guyana? She now works for CNN and must be a goldmine of information on corruption in Guyana.

What Guyana needs are journalists willing to leave the comfort of prepackaged narratives and chase the hot news. Stories that scorch the fingertips are the ones that matter. It is through such stories that reporters cease to be mere bylines and become names spoken in living rooms, debated in bars, and remembered in history.

But that will require an act of rediscovery: of curiosity, of courage, of the stubborn belief that truth, however elusive, is not owed—it is hunted. And until our media workers reacquaint themselves with the chase, the nation will continue to live in the soft shadow of unanswered questions, unchallenged power, and the silent, hovering suspicion that somewhere, just beyond the reach of the daily headlines, the truth remains waiting, neglected and unpursued.

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

---

• Chase, Helicopter crash, Peeping Tom, Rediscovering

---