Fear, power, and an exposed press

Last Saturday’s dramatic turn of events at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, generated enough emotion to dominate my thoughts ever since - other massively significant issues notwithstanding.

Yes, I had considered elaborating on last week’s missive regarding deep, pervasive national fear and a patent inability to address its causes and effects: the disconnect between political messaging and reality, and the largely silent rejection - even among the faithful - of empty reassurance.

There has also been accumulating evidence to challenge the deterrent effects of more punitive fines and expanded traffic laws in the absence of meaningful enforcement. And, even so, to redirect behaviours to minimise risk. I promise to return to these sometime in the future.

But today, what is presumed to have been an attempted violent attack on the President of the USA, Donald Trump, has been dissected in numerous ways, the very least being its impact on and meaning for the numerous journalists in and out of that dinner hall.

In videos of the incident (few re-broadcast the opening moments), I kept my eyes on the woman in white who had been seated at the head table and was later seen crawling on her hands and knees as the President was hustled off by what seemed to be a dozen security personnel.

She turned out to be Weijia Jiang, CBS News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Crawling alone and seemingly not a concern of anyone else.

This episode forced me to recall that following the violence of July 27, 1990 in T&T, among the numerous emergent issues associated with the attempted coup d’etat, was the manner in which the role and interests of journalists and media were diminished or largely ignored.

Port of Spain, Trinidad under siege July,1990

For what it’s worth, I remember my own scramble to safety – on hands and knees like the lady in white – across the parliament floor as the shooting and shouting and screaming continued. I tell you, at that point, your instincts as a journalist play second fiddle to a will to survive.

Late journalist and former TTT hostage, Raoul Pantin, went to his grave a perpetual advocate for some form of redress not only for himself but for all journalists who were caught up in the deadly attacks almost 36 years ago. During the ensuing Commission of Enquiry between 2011 and 2013 there had been largely ignored mention.

Then came Saturday and attacker Cole Tomas Allen’s insanity. News reached us in Marseille, France where the Council of IFEX – the global network of free expression organisations – was meeting in the absence of Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Jodie Ginsberg.

Where, then, was Jodie? The following morning, she explained there had been “the disorientation of being pulled to the ground by a man sitting next to me and told to get under the table as Secret Service flooded into the room …”

She told of being hustled out of the building and into a side street “with no instructions of where to go or how to get back into the Hilton (where I was staying).”

“The part of my brain that deals daily with attacks on journalists can’t help but wonder … what if they (Trump and his senior colleagues) weren’t the target? What if journalists were the target?”

Then she reminded us that in that room there had been journalists “who have been kidnapped, wrongfully detained, and shot at. Journalists who have been violently arrested. Journalists who cover politics here in the United States who - along with their families - are subjected to daily death threats. Journalists who have been assaulted at protests and political rallies.”

This not only made me think about the journalists in other parts of the world where they are frequently targeted, killed, and maimed, but also of our own media professionals who confront different kinds of serious assaults and remain unacknowledged and generally defenceless. Cannon fodder at the mercy of propagandists, sycophants, and hostile politicians.

It is true that few things attract such a scenario more than poor quality reporting, but it is also a fact that the importance of favourable political imaging tends to outweigh the value of professional journalism.

And when this happens - like Jiang and her colleagues, like Raoul Pantin, Dominic Kalipersad, and others - journalists often find themselves exposed and alone. On hands and knees. At precisely the moments when their role matters most, there is too often no protection, no support, and no one truly there.

The fear factor

There is a constant call - amid the outrageous and macabre developments of recent days, month, and years - to avoid an irresistible urge to yield to fear and a sense of diminished hope on questions of social peace, cohesion, and calm.

For certain, the impact of fear can contribute to the undermining of the confidence and resilience required to advance any country’s development agenda.

But it is clearly inadvisable to suggest that fear can be seamlessly and elastically enjoined to statistical performance or gratuitous expressions of political assurance. Things just do not work that way.

You see, the minute fear is casually dismissed as baseless irrationality or described as being cynically contrived there are always realities guaranteed to smack you in the gut and stomp on your steel-tipped toes. Witness the last few days.

Last week in this space, in citing several instances that conspired to establish such a point, I concluded that pervasive recklessness – to put it mildly - had conspired to transform daily life here into a precarious, often deadly gamble.

Between then and now have come more killing; claiming in the process the lives of children, discovery of mass, apparently unlawful human burials, and the brutally audacious “security breach” (speak of euphemism) at the San Fernando Municipal Police Station. Among other things.

A subsequent newspaper photo-op featuring two government ministers, the commissioner of police, a coast guard officer, and other security personnel marching resolute and shoulder to shoulder must have tempted the caption: “Never fear. We are here.”

But I am yet to witness unreserved purchase of the goods on display.

Fear and panic, the commissioner had proposed just one week prior, are just as bad as crime itself. “Why aren’t people feeling that (the statistics)? Why isn’t anyone talking about that? Because fear has gripped this country for so long that we can’t even see when change is coming,” the commissioner said.

Guilty, as charged! We all seemed to respond. For credibility is earned not through selective application of favourable data – and one may wish to cite unreferenced, appallingly low criminal detection rates and bland efforts to determine and influence causative factors – but through the comfort of believing that somebody is in charge and people are taking joint responsibility through knowledge, resources, and individual capacity.

Such assets include truth-telling of the highest calibre. Who, for instance, really believes that the current, extended state of public emergency was constitutionally justifiable as a way to address grand, specific existential threats? Where is the progress report on this?

Even so, we are instead being told that all of this can be expected to generate concurrent (not just core) benefits. This has been an argument that has spanned at least 15 years, across the political divide.

Yet, the “updates” have grown to focus exclusively on statistical gains related to matters outside the purported threats for which there was extreme recourse. Instead, what was meant to be a very last resort on specific constitutional grounds has now become a readily available default for everything else. As asked right here last week: In the face of growing fear and a sense of futility, what do you do for an encore?

Additionally, I recall in the years following the murderous assault of July 1990 numerous admonitions, including from this writer, to resist the temptation to reduce all of this to the status of political row and advantage.

Blood, we are constantly being told, remains a stain on the hands of politicians and not necessarily smeared on the walls of civic institutions from school to community centre to places of worship.

“Solving crime” has since become more firmly entrenched as manifesto bullet points, verses, and chapters. Political opportunity has been grasped with both hands.

People have clamoured for “the good old days” of the heavy hand (or ropes) around our necks, and election campaigns with five-year cycles have responded accordingly.

Meanwhile, those under whose portfolios reside obligations to address such challenges would do well to spurn the temptation to announce victory on the battlefront even as the war continues.

Care’s Tragic Void

The news agenda has unfolded in such a way as to suggest levels of private and public recklessness sufficient to transform daily life here into a precarious, often deadly gamble.

It has long been suggested in this space that the absence of a duty of care is capable of undermining things such as heavy laws, harsh penalties, more policing, and other measures presumed to produce deterrent effects.

There is also no shortage of religion or divine magic to exert external influence. But I have long not upheld their potential usefulness beyond private comfort or delusion. And their organised manifestations are all demonstrably hopeless at deliverance.

Back on earth, the scope of traffic offences has by edict been widened and become more heavily punishable, even as deadly accidents and irresponsible behaviour on our roads occur in increments not any different to how things were before.

Road chaos, Trinidad 

After all, it’s the fault of mobile traffic lights, the cable barriers along the highway, the faded traffic lines, that pothole. It’s not the speed, the texting, the heavy tint, the sense of entitlement that size, a brand, and a model deliver.

The roadside fires burn and destroy. Wilfully and deliberately. The smoke gets in our nostrils and our lungs. The traffic stops. Pyromania justified by a senseless assertion of necessity. Spontaneous combustion, I once had to explain to one apologist, is not a thing on our terrain. And, for sure, there are the laws and regulations. Ask the sweaty, exhausted firemen.

Extraordinary measures to address violent crime have become normalised so that declared states of public emergency as a very last resort are now the stuff of routine, official default. Public bloodlust and a thirst for revenge are meanwhile deemed satisfiable extra-judicially and a right to kill as a protected first response. Yet, the violence and injury and death persist.

So, what are we to do? What do you do for an encore or as a further step when last resorts eventually run their course? Is there an option of despair? An absence of hope?

Citing contrasting instances in Singapore, El Salvador, and the Philippines tends to omit numerous socio-cultural antecedents and ignore pitfalls such as creative sterility, the absence of community solidarity, and the prevalence of bureaucratic rigidity.

It might be that the latter conditions, in the minds of some, represent the outcomes of sacrifices necessary to achieve social peace, safety, and stability. But I really do not know. Quite frankly, I do not think so.

There are meanwhile things regarded as indispensable by some that are not honoured as untouchable by others. The so-called “Carnival mentality”, an appreciation for and accommodation of “noise”, the spontaneity of the “lime”, sans humanité, the casual integration of difference.

Order is commanded to come into being rather than nurtured through the roots of standards, ethical conduct, and values. Scampish propaganda substitutes for truth and a façade of morality for proper conduct.

Today, through all this, little Angelica is dead. Who from among us has not been brought to the point of near inconsolable grief? The apparent absence of a duty of care tragically exemplified.

More laws? Change the rules … again? Jail somebody? I thought we answered those questions the last time something like this happened? When was it? Ten years ago? Last month as people floated on the ocean and stared quietly at a blue sky?

Ditto Skylar. Turn your head for 30 seconds and they are in the water! That’s why paid staff and other regular folk are keeping an eye out for one other. Three years ago, it was Damari. And the newspaper editorials and op-eds and letters and the phone calls to radio stations flowed.

So how can we help but conclude that this is not only about the rules, verdicts, and more brutal punishment? Where, in this, is a sense of responsibility to ourselves and to one another? The pandemic period ought to have painted a full enough picture – self-responsibility dismissed as vaccine/antidote alongside care for others.

Had there not been the music, and dance, and poetry, and art of our time, we could have all by now simply downed tools and helplessly faced the oncoming tides. Relented without reservation against the uncaring and the reckless.

That said, tearing the bandage off and revealing a raw, painful wound remains insufficient. There is an opportunity to explore the possibilities. Let’s talk about it.

Election Manna and Manima

A few years ago, I inspired a shaking head and a muted steups from one of our more experienced regional elections officials when I asked him about action to regulate election campaign and political party financing in the Caribbean.

At the time I did not have access to former PM Dr Keith Rowley’s tutorial on the word “manima” to depict a copious supply of intrigue and bacchanal. While politics as a source of abundant “manna” (financial nutrition) for combatants had already been deployed as a relevant metaphor.

How much more “manima”, therefore, can you get than when politicians accuse each other of being beneficiaries of mysterious, unaccounted “manna”?

Former T&T Prime Minister, Dr Keith Rowley

The context of my conversation with the official had been the dramatic intervention of British colonial authorities in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) in 2009 in the midst of an economic boom.

The UK re-imposed direct rule, suspended the government, and instituted a new constitution under which elections were held three years later.

Such action was deemed to be necessary when it became clear that corruption had reached intolerable levels and rendered activities such as elections virtually meaningless through the unrestrained purchase of political power and influence.

I was told that this had long become routine within most of our countries. But while there had been a lot of talk, nobody appeared serious about changing things. There is, after all, in the independent states, no omnipotent external entity capable of saying: “Where you feel you going?” as was the case in TCI.

The TCI model was later referenced in T&T in 2014 by then Chairman of the TCI Integrity Commission, Sir David Simmons of Barbados, as a guest of the T&T Transparency Institute (TTTI). He urged more nuanced application of the principles.

Not long after, between 2014 and 2015, a Joint Select Committee (JSC) of the T&T parliament convened to consider “a legislative framework to govern the financing of election campaigns.” Several “overarching considerations to guide the formulation of a legislative framework for Election Campaign Financing in Trinidad and Tobago” were identified.

They included: limits on private contributions, regulation of loans to parties and candidates, public funding of campaigns, and regulations on spending and third-party expenditure. There was also a requirement of disclosure, and provisions for oversight and monitoring, sanctions and appeals.

By 2015, T&T was back at the polls – everyone having apparently forgotten about the work of the JSC, and ignoring longstanding guidance, including Simmons’ appeal for urgency to avoid the trap of opaque financing arrangements, especially but not solely at election time.

For that election, which saw a change in government, the Commonwealth Observer Group (COG) had prominently noted that “the EBC (Elections and Boundaries Commission) is reflecting on proposals to regulate registration and campaign financing of political parties.”

Among the numerous efforts to guide the required change were calls by civil society organisations such as the Debates Commission, established by the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which lobbied for creation of “a legal framework” to govern campaign financing.

By 2020, also an election year, there emerged two lapsed attempts to pass a Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill. The first effort was launched in May that year and the other in October. Elections in August and ensuing developments, including the COVID-19 pandemic, put an end to all that.

Enter the general election of April 28, 2025, minus the guardrails proposed by international electoral bodies, the JSC of 2014/2015 and, to a significant degree, the Bills of 2020.

The COG of 2025 had to remind everyone that “while the electoral framework largely provides an adequate basis for the conduct of democratic elections, the COG has proposed a number of recommendations for electoral reforms for consideration by various stakeholders. These include a regulatory framework for political party campaign finance.”

The 2025 COG in Trinidad and Tobago

So, where do we find ourselves (again) today? There is manima over purported political manna … on both sides. This time, though, without a general election in sight, there is some breathing space to revisit the subject for which, at least prima facie, there appears to be bipartisan support.

The deliberations of 2014-2015, the Bills of 2020, the observations of neutral parties, and global and regional experience are there to provide sufficient direction for tabling of the details.

The work has been done. The warnings have been issued. The templates already exist. What is missing is not guidance but will.

 

Caricom’s information fortress

One week ago, to the day, there was a vigorous, spontaneous round-robin involving a cadre of Caribbean journalists who monitor the Caricom process as closely as we can.

This followed a social media post and subsequent press release indicating that “the required majority” of leaders had agreed to the re-appointment of Dr Carla Barnett as Secretary-General of Caricom.

Both journalists who covered the February 24-26 Heads of Government inter-Sessional Meeting in St Kitts and Nevis, and those who had followed from some distance away, were somewhere between shocked and surprised that such a development could have occurred under usually efficient noses.

Caricom leaders as they met in St Kitts and Nevis in February

There had been the regular snooping, leaking, press conferencing, and typically sluggish release of the conference communiqué which, this time, was noteworthy for its amazingly platitudinous summary of a dramatically explosive Opening Ceremony.

Yes, there was word making the rounds beforehand that an SG vacancy was approaching. There had been a strong view in some quarters that the region should look elsewhere for leadership out of Turkeyen, Georgetown. But that’s not for this summit, some thought.

The extent to which such information remained surreptitiously (and unbelievably) guarded - purportedly against even official delegations - has been explored by others. The press corps was clueless. There have since been some bold assertions, especially from T&T.

I had meanwhile been advising colleagues beforehand that the Marco Rubio visit was important, but there were numerous other things that demanded equally prominent interrogation. “Please don’t make this all about Rubio,” was my admonition on repeat.

But nooo. Behind the bureaucratic fortifications of the process, while everyone was looking the other way, has now emerged at least one supposedly unlisted agenda item. And it has provided, in the dismal imagination of at least one politician, a basis for hyperbolically concluding that “irreparable damage” has been sustained by the regional movement because of the development.

As an aside, prior to such a declaration of terminal injury, it would have been worthwhile to have scanned the global landscape and paid attention to other integration efforts to witness growing cognitive dissonance regarding issues of institutional sustainability.

Within the EU individually nuanced postures related to migration, fiscal policy, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump and other issues have generated disquiet and signaled harmful possibilities. Ten years ago came Brexit.

The African Union and ECOWAS have had to confront violent conflicts - often across mutual borders - stern economic challenges, hunger, drought, and contestations over natural resources including water.

The Asian nations, via ASEAN, have cohered amid deadly instability in countries such as Myanmar, South China Sea disputes, and new and longstanding conflicts within and across national frontiers.

Then, everywhere, we have the groping hands of geo-political alignments and re-alignments in the face of imperialistic overreach. Yet, integrated thought and action generally persist as decided points of first territorial contact. None of these integration movements has disappeared.

So now, what about the contested re-appointment of the Caricom Secretary-General bears the flavour of irreversibility/terminality?

Get over that and we can focus on the underlying conditions that have led to the current imbroglio/s. For, they have brought abrupt attention to simmering issues that have for too long remained the exclusive preserve of a bureaucratic fortress surrounded by political moats.

Such matters include, but are not restricted to, financing arrangements to facilitate the work of the Caricom Secretariat and related institutions. T&T’s agitated, nit-picking alarm on the matter suggests something remains amiss. And it is.

But these things are only available for propagandistic exploitation and intemperate outbursts because they reside in the realm of official secrecy - in the “classified” binders of officials and countries.

So, what had remained “behind the scenes” is now emerging in bits and manipulated pieces. The fact is, the cost of integration has increased, and the share of the bill, given changing economic circumstances in Member States, needs to be reformulated. T&T, as a major contributor, is understandably peeved – whatever its net financial gains.

Of course, we may wish to investigate the details of the rising costs. The Caricom Secretariat bill, I am told, has grown by close to 25% over recent years. Why? How? What? Who???

No doubt, everywhere, factors such as domestic and external conflict, declines in global development financing, and structural limitations – especially among small, vulnerable economies - have all contributed to difficulties in containing existing budgets.

But we deserve the details. We are the ones paying financially … and emotionally, each time we hear “the end is nigh!” or whenever the information fortress is somehow breached.

 

 

Playing with fire

Listen to it here: 

Today, there are sufficient experiential rebuttals of the longstanding Latin maxim “si vis pacem, para bellum” – “if you want peace, prepare for war” – to conclude that the net impact of a combative predisposition, particularly if you are weak and small, can be as inimical as the very violence being avoided.

This would probably not have been vociferously explored when the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) assembled in Havana, Cuba in January 2014 and issued the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.

Maybe when the grouping met in Bogotá on Saturday, the war-for-peace dictum might have featured. I am not sure what official guidance, if any, was provided to our low-level representatives there.

But such a thought – war’s complementary relationship with peace - would have certainly been in the background as this grouping of 33 sovereign states reiterated support for a Latin American/Caribbean Zone of Peace.

Indeed, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar was proud signatory to the initial declaration 12 years ago, which the CELAC summit asserted had been in harmony with the UN Charter - Articles 1, 2(4), and 2(7) pointing to peaceful relations; prohibition on force; and non-intervention.

T&T PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar signing the 2014
Zone of Peace Proclamation in Havana, Cuba

Maybe experts would also wish to cite the Treaty of Tlatelolco of 1967 to which Caribbean countries are party and which focuses on the movement and use of nuclear weapons in our waters. The same principles apply. But let’s focus for now on the post-Havana period.

Since then (perhaps even before), both the precise expression – “zone of peace” and words to that effect - have been adopted as standard language in declarations confirming the commitment of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) to orderly, typically consensus-based foreign policy.

This is alongside its firm and longstanding posture regarding border conflicts involving Guatemala and Belize, and Venezuela and Guyana toward which diplomacy has been the preferred approach.

By the way, over the years, these subjects of current international juridical consideration have never been neglected or forgotten. They have, in fact, been fixed into the templates for reporting on meetings of Caricom leaders.

There has been an assumption of collective ignorance in recent assertions that the region has been guilty of neglect and/or abandonment when it comes to such matters – Guyana/Venezuela in particular.

But back to the Zone of Peace – itself subject to bold misinterpretation and deliberate rhetorical manipulation.

Such an aspiration was never meant to be applied as a blanket metaphor applicable to domestic criminality and disquiet. International relations expert, Dr Nand Bardouille’s Handbook on Caribbean Community Foreign Relations and Statecraft is worthy of attention in this context.

“Fundamentally,” he says, “the (Caricom) bloc has a considerable stake in the region as a ‘Zone of Peace’. This is a long-standing refrain of the region’s leadership, who look to the past, citing the useful lessons it holds regarding hegemons who set in motion events with lasting ramifications for the region and its people.”

In the current season of insanity, we have nevertheless been treated to repudiation of a sound geo-political posture.

Now, witness what happens with the dictum of war to achieve peace when applied in the real world – and who becomes passive collateral damage. We recall the Cold War and, today, hostilities involving Iran, Israel, and the US are not as far away as we appear to believe.

There are grim signs on the wall – notwithstanding the promise of short-term financial gains owing to increases in energy prices.

Last weekend, on these pages, former Finance Minister Mariano Browne however argued that the prospects for a momentary boost have to be tempered against huge increases in tanker and insurance rates. This, he said, has the potential to “offset price increases for cargo leaving T&T.”

Former Caricom Asst. Secretary-General for Economic Integration, Innovation and Development, economist Joseph Cox, in the latest instalment of his Caribbean Business Review also notes: “The issue is no longer the price of oil. It's the price of moving the world.”

Economist Joseph Cox

His treatise on this is worthy of close attention. “The Caribbean,” he argues, “faces a double constraint. First, higher global prices. Second, reduced priority in the allocation of both cargo and shipping capacity.

“The COVID-19 pandemic made this clear. In a tight global market, the Caribbean is not a priority destination. It is the residual destination.”

There is nothing to suggest, either now or in the past, that geo-political sycophancy is capable of delivering needed insulation.

This country’s support for “si vis pacem, para bellum” is fast teaching us: “qui igne ludit, comburetur” - play with fire and you will be burned.

 

 

Climate mischief and our media

It is alarming that in 2026, questions are still being raised in the Caribbean about whether we need to pay critical attention to the scientifically confirmed climate crisis.

There is an important requirement not to lose sight of the urgency with which the matter is to be addressed, especially since some narratives are being skewed by compliant political agendas, brittle science, and the conscientious work of propagandists.

The role of disinformation is a central theme of today’s dispatch because the climate crisis remains among the more significant challenges of our time, especially when it comes to the framing of informed public policy responses.

The glee with which some observers highlight recent failures in regional media is telling. It reveals awareness of an opportunistic vacuum - a space where professional journalism, which offers the sternest challenge to mis and disinformation, is being undermined.

What ought to be reasoned analysis of a serious, already-evident challenge to countries such as ours, now resides alongside an easily identifiable buffet of anti-science and disinformation coincidental with belief systems of malignant convenience.

If we needed to, we could perfectly describe the menu. Name the issue, and you will find the same concoction of common ingredients, a recipe slavishly mimicked by our local sous chefs of disinformation

There is unfortunate evidence, though, that such a cocktail has found accommodating official palates. Since when have national commitments to a “just transition” toward a low-carbon environment been of needlessly onerous, questionable value? Yet, we have been detecting both passive and active political resistance in our region.

Countries like ours have, for years, found common cause in pressing for greater recognition of our unique circumstances. Right here, in the Caribbean in 1994 the epochal Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Barbados determined a framework for advancing our peculiar requirements.

And, yes, the process has not always benefited from a perfect ride. We have been jostled and bullied and fallen prey to empty promises and commitments. But this does not prescribe abstinence or absence.

Back to media. There have been quite independent efforts over the years to ensure the news agenda finds space for changing climate conditions – whether or not people believe in its anthropogenic triggers on which the vast majority of real scientists agree.

For, beyond increasingly marginal contentions, changed objective circumstances require informed journalistic attention when it comes to associated economic, socio-cultural, and political impacts.

Count on the fisherfolk to tell you of changing ocean trends, the farmers reliant on irrigation, the young people short on economic opportunity as they move from one population centre to the next.

This is not about panicking and shouting “Climate change!” at every unusual shower or futile fishing trip. Such hysteria is as unhelpful as shouting “We go dead!” over the microphone in a crowded Carnival fete.

This is a matter for rational observation and better capturing of and reporting on credible science and accompanying policy responses, some of which we are entitled to critically interrogate.

For instance, I perfectly understand the energy producers, such as Guyana and soon Suriname, with newfound abundant wealth being interested in advancing prior sluggish development through fortuitously abundant financial resources and saying: “Let’s slow down. Wait a moment here.”

The imperative of a “just transition” is certainly not only a matter for people, communities, and sectors, but is also a concern inherent in relations between states – small and large, weak and powerful.

We may also say that our Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) in all this – once they are known and understood by all -  should not overly overwhelm the socio-economic demands of new national circumstances and an increasingly more challenging global interface.

Today, Wednesday, Caribbean journalists assemble in a hybrid setting through Climate Analytics and the Media Institute of the Caribbean to explore some of these issues.

Addressing ignorance, disinformation, and mischief will hopefully form part of the discussions.

The challenge goes beyond disappearing scientific doubt and dissent and has a direct bearing on broader agendas related to power, control, and toxic recipes. Enlightened self-interest by media also constitutes part of the simmering brew.