Vexed Bermoothes

In a case similar to the PLP’s treatment of the Royal Gazette, Guyana’s Stabroek News was subjected to attacks from their own Government. All very familiar stuff.

Stabroek News Editor Anand Persaud describes the battle, and how advertising was restored after 17 months of intense international criticism of the Guyanese Government, as well as pressure from their local labour unions.

Before day’s end and after weeks of silence and subterfuge, GINA (the Government Information Agency) kicked into full gear and released a statement charging that Stabroek News had no monopoly on state advertising, no longer had the largest circulation of the private newspapers and based on what it nebulously described as ‘feedback’ was not as popular as the state-run Guyana Chronicle and the privately-owned Kaieteur News.

This was all news to Stabroek News. Never before had it been made aware that there was a government policy to apportion state advertising between the state paper and the putative highest selling private daily.

Moreover, if indeed this argument was to prevail where was the data to underpin it? Stabroek News was the only newspaper with audited figures. The rival newspaper, Kaieteur News was not known to have audited figures while the state paper was known to have very low circulation.

Further rubbishing the government’s argument was its continuing supply, in enviable quantities, of state ads to a private weekly newspaper closely connected to the ruling party.

How then could the government justify the pulling of ads to a 21-year-old newspaper which had established itself as a market leader and a source of unbiased, trusted and credible reporting?

How could it do this when it was a signatory to the hemispheric press freedom Declaration of Chapultepec which says in Principle Seven ‘the granting or withdrawal of government advertising may not be used to reward or punish the media or individual journalists’?

I recently read about an experiment where identical websites were set up to discuss a subject. The content of one was censored, one was unrestricted. For obvious reasons, the “free press” website very quickly attracted six times the traffic as the controlled version. Press freedom cannot be taken for granted and certainly cannot be left within the discretion of the Government. Do you really want to have your media controlled by Dr. Brown’s spin machine?