Caribbean Journalism

Where is there a Daily Mail in the Caribbean?

2012-01-08T14:48:00.003-04:00

My cousin, Marcus Sheldon Gibbings, was stabbed to death in an apartment in Bermuda on October 26, 2006. The subsequent police investigation – if we were to be charitable enough to describe it as that – remains unsuccessful.

Marcus Gibbings

The murder was 16 years after the racist killing of 18 year old, Stephen Lawrence in Eltham in south-east London.

Two murders under two completely different circumstances. Marcus was 32 - a Trinidadian living and working in Bermuda. Lawrence was a student and the son of immigrant parents in the United Kingdom.

What united the two were that police investigations into the circumstances surrounding their murder were affected by the fact that officialdom viewed them essentially as socially-marginal individuals – Stephen, a young black male and Marcus, a Caribbean “foreigner”.

In both cases there were also adequately strong grounds for concluding that criminal cases could have been brought against clearly-identifiable suspects but nothing happened. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointed in singular directions in both instances.

There was also the added pressure of concerned parents. In Stephen’s case his parents tirelessly devoted their energies in lobbying for criminal charges to be brought against to persons which strong evidence pointed. In Marcus’s case, his father Richard has tried from a distance to keep the case “warm”.

The Bermuda Gazette in Bermuda has tried in its own way to also keep the story of Marcus’s murder alive. In the UK, the Daily Mail went much, much further, in 1997 publishing an amazing front-page story which identified five “murderers” – daring them to sue if the newspaper was mistaken or wrong.

On January 4, 2012 the court sentenced two men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, to 14 and 15 years in prison respectively.

In January 2012, Marcus’s killer remains at large. A free person. Is there a Daily Mail to do the unthinkable? Is there a sufficiently independent and intact legal and judicial system to enable such boldness?

Is the quality of intervention of a Daily Mail conceivable anywhere in the English-speaking Caribbean? Or do judges, politicians, the police and many regular citizens consider the press to be necessary though bothersome evils?

Just asking.

A Reporter’s Notebook - Haiti

2011-11-10T00:00:00.003-04:00

The view of Port au Prince at dusk from the barricaded premises of Le Chateau Phoenix in hilly Pétion-Ville offers dust and haze. Here is where formerly exiled Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier would have, in January, fixed his first extended gaze at the shattered city he fled 25 years ago.

The view of the mountain from down below, at the foot of the bumpy, pot-holed route is however not as clear as it is captive to the unimaginable filth and disorder of city streets which, 22 months ago, had become an open, steaming morgue.

An irascible American-born hotelier chain-smokes through his greetings and offers a room that quite possibly served as temporary home to the returning political heir who led the country for 15 years following the death of his father, “Papa Doc” François Duvalier, in 1971.

Today, “Baby Doc” prefers to keep a low profile. Several leading Haitians, including a former spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon have filed charges of corruption, kidnapping and torture against Duvalier. Michele Montas is one. She is a journalist who served under Ban until shortly before the 2010 earthquake. Montas is also the wife of slain Haitian broadcaster, Jean Dominique, whose April 2000 assassination remains curiously unpunished.

From Pétion-Ville you see the sun set over a colourless cityscape. Over the short wall near the Phoenix swimming pool, the shock of green to the left frames other well-endowed structures that line the narrow, bumpy route to the peak. Along the street you only know these buildings are there because large, sheeted metal gates painted rusty red, and sometimes green, announce a different presence. But from the hills, they jut out almost guiltily through the green.

Down the hill, the road is narrow and dusty and dry. There are people everywhere; baskets, bicycles, chickens, children in tow. Young, beautiful women, their hair brilliant and orderly, are selling used clothing, food, bandages and hairstyles. Men sell mobile phone credits, tyres, cigarettes and water. Children run precariously between the lawless motorbike taxis and reckless, colourful buses packed to the brim with arms and legs and market animals. A proud student holds on with one hand, his uniform clean and starched – college tie like a proud flag behind him as the bus speeds by.

An overflowing stream rushes down a narrow lane onto the main road and the ladies take their shoes off and shuffle to higher ground. “Politics,” says the driver as the water takes litter downstream to other streets.

There are mounds of 22-month old rubble and 10-second old trash on almost every street. Local wags wonder why the United Nations’ blue helmet troops don’t trade their guns for shovels and brooms. Why the plane-loads of evangelists don’t spend less time saving souls and more time saving lives by clearing the mess and perhaps previewing the heaven they know so much about. Port au Prince, all agree, is a public health nightmare actualised but neglected.

It is a four-hour, carefully-executed drive to Les Cayes. On the way, there are more tent cities near Leogane located at the epicenter of the 2010 quake. There are portions of the road that will tear your under-carriage to bits if you do not notice the sharp drops and deep fissures on an otherwise decent highway through south-western towns.

When darkness falls, the flambeaux come out as people walk and talk and eat and preach and contemplate the future. Oncoming lights are deceiving – one light might be an oncoming motorbike taxi, a converted flat-tray truck/bus or a heavy duty construction vehicle with a sleepy driver and defective head-lights.

Nobody knows the speed limits and nobody cares and a polite police roadblock is a check for documents; not lights or brakes or passenger restrictions. The Highway Code is the law of necessity. There are two road accidents on the way to Les Cayes. A motorbike rider is writing in pain on the road and is comforted by a crowd. A truck has run into a ditch and men with instant bags run toward the cargo.

Then comes the seaport city of Les Cayes. It is said that Simon Bolivar came here to recruit freedom fighters for his South American incursions. It is bustling with street vendors and sweltering midday cafes with fish and conch and fried goat with plantains and rice. At night, the flambeaux come out and the hum and laughter of life are alight.

Here, a Canadian volunteer veterinarian says his work to immunise animals is a virtual con-job by a clandestine Christian charity to win souls. “I did not know what I was in for, until I came and I was taken to this church …” he mutters over breakfast. In the hotel car park, there are vehicles from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Organisation for Migration and a white van that has come to pick him up to deliver rabies vaccines to horses and mules and donkeys.

Head due south-west and back along the coast headed north, you reach Port Salut where you will also find Pointe Sable – two kilometers of calm, blue water and white sand beach. There are no crowds this time of year … yet. The craft and food vendors take what business they can get. Straw hats and place-mats and wooden figures of kissing couples and women on donkeys. On the menu there is goat and fish and beef and pork and conch. It’s half the hotel price and comes with mild pepper sauce.

About an hour and a half from Les Cayes in the other direction, you can get to the cloud-crowned region of Salagnac that reaches an elevation of close to 1,000 metres. A red, treacherously unpaved bauxite-laden road leads to pine cone trees, a constant mist, a quaint mountain school, an agricultural research station and yam and carrot plantations.

Salagnac is where the contrasting pictures of Haiti are best recognised. The stuffy, sickening streets of Port au Prince, pretentious glory of Pétion-Ville, the gloom of the tents and “politics” of flooded streets are nowhere near the pristine foliage and gentle smiles of farmers’ children.

Tomorrow comes the drive back to Port au Prince, the hotel overlooking the haze, the constant hum and motion of people, blue helmets with big guns hustling to and fro, a chaotic airport where men with badges offer to help you jump the queue for a tip, endless employment-generating security checks and a flight among returning preachers counting souls.

REPORTING LABOUR ISSUES

2011-09-28T14:48:00.003-04:00

Remarks at the Opening Ceremony of “Communicating Rights at Work" – A Training Workshop for Media Professionals. Port of Spain – September 28, 2011

The ACM is delighted to be associated with this activity over the next three days. This workshop is an entirely fitting intervention by the ILO. It comes at a time when the region appears challenged by the need to balance political and economic expediency against the minimum requirements of universally-accepted rights and standards that span virtually the entire spectrum of human, social interaction.

On this occasion, we focus on international labour standards and how best media professionals are able to communicate workplace rights. In many respects, this subject does not represent neutral turf. Labour standards are by no means non-contentious, politically-blind obligations. They meet the classical criteria of the news agenda; presenting opportunities for following conflict, tracking money flows, reporting intrigue, defining inter-personal and group relations and identifying the fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of human potential.

For this reason, what participants are being offered over the next few days constitutes a bountiful package of raw story material waiting to be further elaborated on the news and features pages and broadcast productions of our various media enterprises.

And what stories they are.

We will explore the unfolding canvass of globalisation and how rights at work have become a cross-cutting, pervasive issue ignored at the peril of countries such as ours. The quest for social justice in the face of changing paradigms and a growing sense that poverty and hunger entangle the humanscape like lethal, creeping vines.

The tripartite formula, even as changing circumstances continually challenge the mathematics of relationships across the labour aisles and bring into clearer view the algebra that leads to cohesion and social peace. The role of media as interlocutors in the developmental dialogue – as intermediaries between the governed and those who govern.

Indeed, these are all stories that already reach our front pages and lead our newscasts in the garb of crime and violence, industrial conflict, political intrigue and the terms of our peoples’ engagement with the world around them.

We are fortunate that our alliance with the ILO has led us to this point. Our societies cry out for counsel on the maintenance of freedoms and rights. They urge us on to provide a basis for understanding and appreciating the value of minimum expectations in a world of change.

Understanding labour standards and their impact on tangible economic outputs can provide a much needed nexus between aspiration and achievement – how societies construct tangible evidence out of otherwise elusive, unseen values and standards and goals. How rights and freedoms are indispensable, indivisible features of human progress, however grave the present reality, however urgent the need to abrogate them appear.

In this regard, we would do well to get these stories right. It is our obligation. It is an important requirement which substantiates the case for specific, discrete rights and freedoms for a sector upon which modern democracies continue to rely.
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Improving Media Coverage of Immigration Issues

2011-09-19T20:32:00.002-04:00

Report of Caribbean Working Group on Coverage of Immigration Issues
Austin Forum – September 8-10, 2011

The Caribbean Group comprised: Wesley Gibbings, Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers Trinidad and Tobago (Moderator); Colette Les Pinasse, journalist, Haiti; Gotson Pierre, Alterpresse, Haiti, Maude Malengrez, FOKAL/OSF Haiti and Maria Soldevilla, Listin Diario, Republica Dominicana.

The subject of improving media coverage of immigration issues in the Caribbean was addressed by (i) identifying issues that required further journalistic investigation and (ii) proposing mechanisms to more efficiently achieve improved coverage.

Areas for Further Journalistic Investigation

The incidence of re-migration;
The processing, re-integration and treatment of criminal deportees;
The role of the Caribbean Diaspora in influencing politics and economic life;
Evolving means of moving money between borders in the form of financial remittances;
Closer examination of the incidence of intra-regional migration;
Work on assessing the impact of recent trends involving new groups of immigrants such as Asians and Africans into the Caribbean;
The integrity of institutional support for immigrants including the provision of vital services;
More diligent monitoring of immigration laws and their impact on emerging humanitarian concerns;
Examination of the impact of outward migration on children;
Avoidance of the use of stereotyping in the treatment of immigrants;
Attention should be paid to the “feminisation” of the immigration phenomenon;
The need to verify official immigration statistics;
Recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of immigrant engagement in the life of host countries;
The use of new technologies as immigrant communities communicate with their home countries and as their families and friends communicate with them;
The incidence of transient groups that move continually from one country to the next;
Language and cultural shifts as a consequence of immigration;
The incidence of “paperless” immigrants;
The economic impact of the splintering of families in the face of outward migrations;
Coverage of new money flows as a result of immigration

Mechanisms for Improved Coverage

Development of online platforms for the sharing of official immigration data within the region;
Establishment of a multi-media/multi-lingual repository for news stories and information on regional immigration;
The greater use of social networks that aid in the networking of Caribbean journalists for information sharing;
A mechanism to facilitate greater cross-border collaboration on media productions;
The use of journalistic exchanges among countries across the language groups in the Caribbean;
Greater collaboration among NGOs/academia/community media and mainstream media in the coverage of immigration issues;
Mechanisms for advocates to more efficiently influence media managers;
Development of more comprehensive databases for accessing sources of opinion and information on immigration;
Introduction of an annual Caribbean Forum to explore immigration and other relevant media issues;
Mechanisms to promote journalistic training.

A Death By Suicide

2011-09-08T01:43:00.006-04:00

Freedom of expression is not under threat in Trinidad and Tobago. It simply does not currently subsist as a right upon which we can rely in the face of the state of public emergency. If something does not exist, it cannot be described as being threatened.

The real tragedy, though, is the extent to which a people who rely so heavily on the fruits of our collective and individual expression to establish our bona fides in the world are now prepared to ignore its absence. Almost everything that means anything to Trinidad and Tobago has been founded upon the renegade, pioneering, irreverent, creative genius of our people.

Yet, freedom of expression and the regulatory means to achieve its lawful derogation reside in the basket of current restrictions with precious little publicly-stated discomfort. In fact, there are those who are insisting on more active pursuit of their punitive application. No dissent, one partisan commentator went so far to remark, must be entertained.

The impact of the suspension of free expression has also not been a passive, benign threat, as has been suggested by some, but an active factor in the prevailing climate of awkward and unpracticed vulgar defiance, self-censorship, silence and undue restraint fuelled by fear.

It is simply not true to say that only the criminals are affected by the state of emergency and that “freedom” can be a possible outcome of a derogation of freedoms. This is crooked thinking and a misuse of metaphor. Such an assertion is dangerous political sleight of hand often witnessed in established autocracies.

Indeed, even the ruling coalition has been minded to close its own doors to online expression. Its Facebook, Twitter and listserv dispatches have been shut down on the grounds of possible transgression. Could it be an inducement for others to do likewise?

Lurking agents of suppression meanwhile dutifully share casual online banter and ole-talk for further action and voices of even the most remote flavour of dissent are cast in the dungeons alongside criminal suspects, dreaded trade union activists and the political opposition.

Suddenly, freedom of the press is viewed as eminently dispensable even by some in the press; as long as the curfew permits and advertising flow, I suppose. Who from among us, in this masochistic fantasy, dare fly a flag of freedom?

Freedom of expression is not remotely equivalent to Trini freeness and license. It is a foundation upon which modern societies erect democratic structures to ensure that laws bring justice, creativity brings solutions and dialogue brings action. Much of this is captured in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which asserts the application of such a right not only with respect to those who impart information and ideas, but also those who seek and receive it.

Free and unfettered dialogue is also important in building social consensus without which societies cannot go meaningfully forward in peace. But how many more from among us are there who are satisfied that free speech is acceptable only when it is their own clearly partisan speech?

This is nothing new. Short-sightedness and blinkered sycophancy are longstanding, enduring features of our political life. The situation would not have been tolerated by current proponents had the political balance been different.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with the validity or invalidity of the current constitutional intervention – however unconvinced I remain about it. My advice from those far from the haze of the emergency is that this country may have a lot of explaining to do to its international partners regarding arbitrary use of emergency powers and the militarisation of civilian functions. Diplomatic good manners do not signify approval.

This also has nothing to do with the desirability of firm action to counteract extreme behaviour. I have heard no one attempt to defend the thugs, murderers and deviants who roam this land and no tears are to be shed by me for brutes and sub-humans who kill, rape and maim.

The problem is in the midst of the storm, independent spaces remain almost completely unoccupied – victimised by the black and white of political under-development and under-achievement. Witness the futility of debate on the emergency in parliament. We all knew the outcome and we all could have written the script for the proceedings in advance. Nobody listened to anybody else.

This is more than a crisis involving our rights and freedoms, I fear. It is a death by suicide.

A State of Emergency

2011-08-22T08:55:00.002-04:00

So it has come to this - a state of emergency to address the shortcomings of the police, judiciary, executive and people of Trinidad and Tobago. A solution to the violence and crime is thought to exist through the suspension of rights. The boots and guns are now in charge – a virtual takeover of the state by the state.

On the radio, the partisans present their respective, predictable cases. It is not a time for independence in the month of Independence. It is a time to be silent and to wish and hope that the boots don’t somehow come your own way.

In the background we hear the applause of the mob and the nervous, muted disapproval of the others. Should I or shouldn’t I? This is the chilling effect of prison bars and boots and guns and garbled official announcements – the silence of those with questions and the pronouncements of those with answers.

It has come to this. Who is really surprised?

A Caribbean Spring?

2011-06-17T18:33:00.005-04:00

Some thoughts at a seminar on the 10th Anniversary of the Inter-American Democratic Charter at UWI, St Augustine on June 17, 2011

To the surprise of many, press freedom advocates usually recoil defensively when the words “role” and “support” follow reference to the work of the mass media. This is so because there is a belief that active, explicit promotion of notions of development and the processes that drive it tends to lead to a path paved with many dangers that may undermine journalistic independence and free expression. This is especially so when we consider the increasingly fashionable suggestion that the best way to a version of development is through the suppression of the democratic process. Which would you prefer, the question has been asked, food or freedom?

Recent events have also raised difficult questions related not only to the true meaning of democracy but the precise nature of the modern media themselves. Are the new media of the Arab Spring the same as the old media we have known for all our years? Is the work of Wikileaks an act of intrepid journalism or the product of reckless, vindictive and lawless voyeurism?

Such questions are being actively engaged by many of us who propose that the fundamental tenets of free expression remain unambiguous and, in their juridical and other applications, indivisible. Such an approach finds as much space for the bloggers of Damascus as they do the duty editors in our newsrooms.

The Inter-American Democratic Charter we pay special attention today, assists in negotiating this somewhat difficult terrain. Article 4 defines five essential components or characteristics of the exercise of democracy - transparency in government activities, probity, responsible public administration on the part of governments, respect for social rights, and freedom of expression and of the press.

This, of course, is reinforced within the inter-American system through the OAS Charter itself, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and several leading judgments at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. They all guide us to the essential principle, expressed in the Democratic Charter, which subordinates state institutions in all their manifestations to civilian authority – or, put another way; which prescribes a process that places power in the hands of the people.

In the English-speaking Caribbean we do not - unlike most of our neighbours of the Americas - concern ourselves with any form of autocratic relapse, having escaped the phenomenon of military dictatorships of the recent past. But the ability to relocate the core axes of power remains a relevant concern.

For this reason, it is not inconceivable that our winters of discontent will someday lead to our own Caribbean spring. And where would this find the estates of power and influence? Practitioners of new media have displayed a striking ability to offer timely, unrestrained coordinates and traditional media are wrestling with ways to meaningfully join the dots.

It is the expectation that even as we embrace new ways of doing business, the fundamental principles of fairness, balance and accountability emerge as dominant features of the media landscape.

Article IV of the American Declaration reminds us of the right of communicators to investigate, to express opinions and to disseminate ideas through any medium, while Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly establishes freedom of expression as not only the right to communicate but also the right to seek and receive information and ideas.

Freedom of the press thus presents itself not only as the preserve of communicators, but also of those who seek such communication and those who wish to receive it. The media are therefore not only an instrument for the achievement or sustaining of democracy, but are themselves an integral function of the democratic process.

Seek out those countries in which uneasy conditions prevail between the governed and those who govern and you will find the role of the mediators of the relationship in jeopardy and under constant threat. It is as much true to contend that a free press is hard to find under conditions in which democracy does not thrive as it is to conclude that democracy is unlikely to prevail in the absence of free speech and a free press.

Approaching emerging policy interventions with a cool head

2011-05-26T09:09:00.000-04:00

The following was part of an address delivered to Dominican media workers in March 2009 as they faced the prospect of new telecommunications legislation that appeared to seep over into the delicate area of media content. As Caribbean societies frantically attempt to address pervasive crime and violence, social disorder, inequity and a lack of social justice, the temptation has been for officialdom to contemplate the withdrawal of freedoms - freedom of expression in particular.

I thought it fitting to sound an alert in Dominica as I have continued to do in the rest of the region:

It is important that consultations, both officially convened and organised by non-state actors, are becoming regular features of national law-making processes throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. This has not always been the case. Official edict has traditionally been viewed as a defining characteristic of governance in these former colonies. In some instances, that bad habit has been hard to kick.

It is therefore encouraging to learn that your government has chosen to initiate wide-ranging public discussion and debate on the scope and intent of this draft legislation. That a civic organisation has led off the process on its own, without official or other prompting, is an important sign that some fundamental tenets of the democratic process are features of public life in this country and that civil society is recognising a leadership role in the pursuit of development.

No one remotely interested in Dominican public affairs over the years can pretend to be surprised. Civic intervention has been a hallmark of your history and has, in the view of some, been among the fundamental pillars of the process of adaptation to new and more challenging times.

The ACM also views the formulation of the Bill at the sub-regional level as a triumph of the integration process (this is an OECS-initiated Bill) and the result of genuine concern that change requires a level of civic and official management to ensure it redounds to the benefit of all.

The Bill however comes at a time of acute challenges to the foundations of modern Caribbean society. Our societies are now more violent, less well, more vulnerable, characterised by an absence of social justice, more polarised and virtual sitting ducks in the face of international social and economic crises.

It has not been easy for some of us. In my country,

Trinidad and Tobago

, more than 90 young men have already been killed for the year. There are criminal gangs in our secondary schools and teenage pregnancies and STD infections are growing, not declining.

Our internal responses clearly require interventions that are as clinical as they are fervent. It is clear we need, as a region, to reconcile the practices of the past with the requirements of the future. By and large, our political and civic leadership appear to understand this well.

It is however necessary, in the view of my organisation, to ensure that that the greatest enabling factor, freedom, is preserved both as a developmental objective and as a pre-condition to the achievement of targets we set ourselves as we forge ahead.

This is the context I would wish to register as a starting point to the debate. When viewed this way, laws and rules and regulations are enabling and empowering interventions and not obstacles and shackles.

The Broadcasting Authority Bill should therefore seek to inject greater orderliness in the conduct of broadcasting enterprises in order that the goal of greater freedom and independence is achieved. This would be the yardstick I would use in measuring the potential impact of the proposed legislation.

Would the people of Dominica experience conditions more conducive to the exercise of free speech when the law is passed or would they experience a diminution of their freedoms?

In the midst of urgent interventions to counter social decline and chaos, is more information and greater exposure to competing views more or less helpful to the process?

It is significant that the Preamble to the Code of Conduct for Broadcasting Services in the Bill stipulates the founding principle of “the right to be informed and to freely receive and disseminate information.” This is important because it acknowledges the value of the free flow of information in both directions. It also implicitly promotes the view that freer conditions are superior to restrictive conditions.

In an ideal environment, the Code could have stopped right there – the rest left to professional prerogative and judgment. In fact, it can be said that much of what is expressed as broadcasting standards are basic tenets of good media practice.

(a) the observance of good taste and decency;

(b) the maintenance of law and order;

(d) the principle that when controversial issues of public importance are discussed, reasonable efforts are made, or reasonable opportunities are given, to present significant points of view, either in the same programme or in other programmes within the period of current interest.

It must however be noted that issues of good taste and decency; law and order; privacy and balance are subject to levels of interpretation that can challenge the acceptable practice of free expression. These, indeed, are areas of concern that are not easy to legislate and I would thread very carefully when it comes to these issues. The concept of privacy, for example, can be used as a check on legitimate attempts to monitor the behaviour of public officials.

Additionally, the issue of balance in the reporting of public issues becomes problematic in the face of official silence. What, in the face of this, do we add to the other side of the scale to represent the other view when issues arise? Is there the suggestion here that silence on one side of the scale can only be balanced against silence on the other?

Quite sensibly, the Bill proposes that fairness is achieved only by judging each case on its merits and not through application of a blanket formula. In my view, much of this ought to be the function of a regime of self-regulation administered by the media industry as a whole.

It is important in this respect that media owners and managers forge alliances to ensure that some of this resides in their own hands and are not the exclusive preserve of a state-sponsored entity.

There ought also to be alliances of consumers of media content to address issues not already actionable by choice – the right to change the channel or to turn the television or radio off.

So far, the representative organisation for media workers has led the way in promoting greater awareness of what is being offered, but there is a great need for the industry and its consumer base to become actively involved. But such involvement must be informed by sound information on the actual impacts of media on human behaviour (an area of social research we have studiously avoided) and a belief that more information, more opinions and a greater variety of sources is superior to the old monolithic models of information control.

We must also avoid the pitfall of seeking cure-all responses to challenges that are far more complex than the fabled linear contribution of media content to behaviour change; far more discomforting than the morning sermons of talk show hosts but far more entrenched in the way we have conducted our public and private lives in the Caribbean.

Could not the criminal violence be more effectively addressed by reversing the trend of social exclusion and more effective policing and prosecutions against those who need to feel when they do not wish to listen? Could it not be that what is viewed and heard in the home and in the communities between parents and adults plays a far more important role in shaping behaviour among children than what is seen on the television or listened to on the radio?

This is part of the humanscape to which this draft legislation belongs. We are witnessing the unfolding of a world of collapsing borders but in which new parameters are being defined that have the potential to reconfigure old boundaries.

How we set rules for ourselves will in large measure determine the terms of our engagement with the rest of the world.

The Press Freedom Challenge in the Caribbean

2011-05-03T13:38:00.000-04:00

World Press Freedom Day 2011 is special for more than one reason. Not only is it 20 years since the endorsement of the Windhoek Declaration in Namibia that gave birth to these observances all over the world, but this year also marks the 10^th anniversary of the inauguration of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM).

In many respects, the circumstances that led to the assembling of international journalists in the southern African state in 1991 were not much different from the imperatives that brought Caribbean journalists together in Bridgetown, Barbados in 2001. Neither can we discern many fundamental differences from the world we meet in the year 2011, with respect to the over-riding concern that freedom of expression faces stark challenges in the face of wider social, political and global military conflict.

There is the unfortunate tendency in this part of the world to assume a level of global insulation - that it is possible to erect some kind of impervious shield against approaching outbreaks of democracy and liberation. There is also the assumption that a defence of cultural relativism is sufficient to address hybrid versions of free societies that provide the right to choose political administrations but restrict the right to hold them up to wider and deeper inspection through the work of a free and unfettered press.

For this reason, World Press Freedom Day provides a worthwhile avenue to stress the indivisibility of the right enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – freedom of expression in all its manifestations. It is important to note what Article 19 actually says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Relate this now to the year 2011 and the theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day observances: “21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers.” It is clear the social and political requirements to achieve the ideals of free expression declared in 1948 remain absolutely pertinent to the challenges of 2011. In the Caribbean, there is particular relevance, especially within the context of our essentially authoritarian, post-colonial culture.

Regional telecommunications regulators whose political genetics predispose them to command and control, wish to explore new barriers to the new frontiers of smart phones, tablet PCs and a tireless, besieged worldwide web. Politicians insist on retention of criminal defamation statutes despite the evidence that they pose a danger to free speech and freedom of the press.

In this regard, we call on the government of Jamaica and all other Caribbean community countries to take action to erase the common law offences of criminal libel including blasphemous, obscene and seditious libel from their statute books. It is a position endorsed by a Joint Select Committee of the Jamaican parliament in 2008, following submission of the Justice Hugh Small Report that very year.

Though the media landscape in the Caribbean is undergoing a measure of change, such change is not being matched by a corresponding revolution in official mind-set. Despite repeated promises, the government of Guyana persists in its refusal to award new radio broadcasting licenses and has used state advertising revenues as a tool of media punishment and reward. The state media in Trinidad and Tobago still wrestle with the spectre of political control and there is evidence that a coercive broadcast content quota system will return, courtesy state regulators, to the front burner in due course.

The majority of Caribbean Community countries have also not passed access to information laws. The presence of such laws is a prerequisite to declaration of the bona fides of a Caribbean country as one committed to transparency and accountability. In instances where such laws exist, it is also important to ensure they are truly providing unfettered access to official information in the way originally intended.

We would further urge political figures to shun the inclination to blame media messengers in an attempt to vilify the media for stories unfavourable to them.

Finally, the ACM also finds cause to note the extent to which factors within the media industry itself are providing obstacles to the achievement of a truly free press. Poor media performance, oppressive industrial relations environments, endemic self-censorship, incompetent media leadership and a lack of professional commitment by media practitioners provide a tragic basis for erosion of free expression and a free press.

We note with concern that the loss of jobs in the news media industry can serve to weaken the fabric of press freedom and free expression. This is particularly disconcerting when we witness declarations of increased corporate profits even as poor financial performance has been cited as the reason for layoffs and cutbacks.

The ACM and its national affiliates and focal points are building a platform for media workers to undertake the work necessary to address some of these shortcomings. It has taken us 10 years to reach where we are.

We look forward to the day the regional media leadership takes up the challenge as well.

We note the work of the Media Association of Jamaica, the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers’ and Broadcasters’ Association and the fledgling Guyana Media Owners’ Association. Hopefully, like the media workers, the captains of the regional media industry will someday provide a united, cohesive front in the face of the new and old barriers to new and old frontiers, as they did in the past. In the ACM you will in fact meet a worthy ally. We wish for the people of the Caribbean to find in us some assurance that the freedoms we fought for in the past remain lived realities and do not slip from our grasp.

What do you mean "media convergence"?

2011-04-28T14:46:00.006-04:00

I think while a lot of fuss is being made and has been made about the issue of media convergence in the Caribbean, there is a need for it to be disaggregated according to the key constituencies – media enterprises, media workers and media consumers.

The main advantage of convergence to media owners and managers, based on precedents I know of, simply reflect the use of a smaller group of journalists to produce more content. The bottom line has been that for the price of, say, a radio newsroom, media owners and managers hope to use the banner of media convergence to receive more radio, television and even print content.

The advantage of all of this to media workers would include improved marketability within the context of this trend through the acquisition of a more intimate acquaintance of mass media across disciplinary platforms. Today, for example, more journalists are aware of or have worked across media disciplines throughout the Caribbean. Journalists who started out in the print media now do radio and television and vice versa.

However, the combination of enforced convergence in the newsroom and new technologies – smart phones, digital media, online media – means that journalists are now routinely expected to produce much more than they have in the past. In days past, the newspaper was put to bed and that was that. Today, for example, online versions of newspapers are updated at anytime.

Output has however increased in a situation not reflected by upgraded industrial relations practices. Trade unions, where they exist in the media (and media are under-represented by trade unions as a sector), are not in tune with recent developments and work contracts are routinely discussed in the absence of such a consideration.

Media consumers have benefited through the increase in productivity. However, because of the exploitative nature of the process, there has not been a corresponding increase in quality. More has not necessarily meant “better.”

We must however conclude that media convergence is not an aspiration, it is already a lived reality. But our media and other social institutions have not responded to engage questions related to its impact on media workers and general quality of content. This is the responsibility of all constituents to address for the sake of a free press and a free society.

Traditional Media Join the Dots

2011-03-20T09:01:00.002-04:00

New social media in the form of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are unfolding as important primary sources of news and information on life in Trinidad and Tobago.

They have played a vital role in unveiling important information on a number of recent, high-impact news stories. These have included issues such as the Reshmi Ramnarine assignment and developments linked to the work of the Tourism Development Company (TDC).

International media development experts are beginning to agree that while social media have been able to identify the “dots” on the social and political landscape, traditional, mainstream media are best placed to join those dots.

A discussion convened by the Washington-based Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) last week explored the issue.

The context of the discussion was the pervasive and effective use of social media during what James Deane of the BBC World Service Trust, described as “democratic outbursts” in North Africa and the Middle East.

Most speakers suggested that the “new” media can be used appropriately as content in mainstream media but that more needed to be done to establish the bona fides of the new platforms.

Luis Botello of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) for example said the challenge of social media usage resided in being able to sift through a growing mass of citizen-generated content.

His said his own organisation, which promotes journalistic development and press freedom globally, continued to ask hard questions about “who gets to be trained” in order to promote greater credible use of social media as a source of news and information.

Deane suggested it might well be a case where the benchmarks of performance by the bloggers and other social media users would be the extent to which there is “self discipline” and a “commitment to peace” on their part.

He said it was clear “we will need to go beyond what we have seen in the Middle East” since both repressive governments and organised criminal networks are equally capable of using the new media to their advantage as propaganda tools.

Veet Vivarta, Executive Secretary of the Brazilian News Agency for Children's Rights (ANDI), argued that whatever the new media brought to the table, “old style journalism” was still “a very important tool” in telling the stories of societies.

He pointed to the reliance of the “old tools” on values including accountability and transparency.

The debate is however tempered by the realisation that Deane’s “democratic outbursts” are essentially the product of social movements with tentacles that extend way beyond the reach of the new media.

It was a point stressed by A.S. Panneerselvan of Panos South Asia and India who said it was the “power of Tahrir Square” in

Egypt

that brought the Mubarak regime to its knees and not the influence of the new media. He said a lot of time was being spent on looking at something that was simply the expression of a much deeper-seated process taking place throughout the globe.

Gabriel Baglo of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) operations in Senegal said, for example, that “what is happening in North Africa today is what happened 20 years ago in the rest of Africa.”

He said it was important that the momentum of the movements in North Africa and the Middle East expand since there was a recognisable “democratic recession” throughout the African continent. A similar comment was made about democratic “roll backs” in some parts of Europe including countries such as

Hungary

There was general agreement that the facilitative role of the social media was becoming increasingly difficult to reverse since, in most instances, digital media are an integral part of the digital economy.

This made it difficult for repressive governments to tinker with free expression in the new media without hampering the greater use of online technology in the development process.

The general conclusion was that the social media are not only here to stay, but will continue to be an important source of potentially revolutionary change, reinforced and validated by old fashioned newspapers, television screens and radios.

* Originally published in the (Trinidad) Sunday Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2011/03/20/social-media-takes-place-alongside-old-media

Impending Closure of BBC Caribbean Service

2011-01-29T08:39:00.002-04:00

January 25, 2011 - The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) is saddened by the announcement by the British Broadcasting Corporation that its popular Caribbean Service is to be closed.

The ACM wishes to pay tribute to the West Indian men and women and their British counterparts who strove for more than 40 years, and more recently, in more than 15 years of unbroken service to present a balanced, comprehensive and intelligent picture of life in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Service has also been an invaluable source of insightful analyses and commentaries on the effect of world economics and politics on the region.

While the BBC has created several incarnations of the BBC Caribbean Service going back to the Second World War, the ACM honours the contribution of the late Hugh Crosskill, who as editor of the modern Caribbean Service shaped the unit into a significant source of regional radio news. We pay special tribute to the fine work of his long-standing successor, Debbie Ransome, a veteran journalist who increased the Caribbean Service's output and made it an essential part of radio listening diets across the region.

The Caribbean Service's journalists and producers deserve the highest commendation. They also deserve the unequivocal assurance that their names -household names for thousands of Caribbean people - will not be lost to egional broadcasting. The ACM believes that this is an opportunity for bold, collective ction by Caribbean media owners and managers to ensure that the careers of en and women who contributed significantly to regional information and nderstanding can continue.

It is in this regard that the ACM calls on the Caribbean Media Corporation and the Caribbean Broadcasting nion, whose mandates and functions mirror that of the Caribbean Service, to move immediately to create a viable alternative. The CMC, especially, which has inherited the Caribbean News Agency (CANA), a trusted and independent organisation that gave so many of the BBC Caribbean staff their start, must now seize the opportunity to ensure that the region does not skip a beat in making the transition from a London-based Caribbean news organisation to a Caribbean-based news agency.

While the ACM applauds the sterling work of its colleagues in London, it has long believed that only a truly Caribbean institution that is to the region what the BBC has been to the world can be a vital part of the communications mix in a Caribbean single economy and a Caribbean single marketplace of ideas.

The Caribbean needs a distinctive service of high quality news and information that is collected, distilled and explained by some of its veteran journalists, not a hodge-podge of duplicated copy from national media houses.

Let it not be said that in a moment of adversity, the Caribbean media failed to shed considerations of parochialism and profit to create a trustworthy source of Caribbean news and information.

It would be a sad commentary on the fruit of regional independence and integration and the greatest possible disservice to the people of this region if the Caribbean broadcast media, who do possess the resources, lack the will to do what the moment demands of them.

Organising Caribbean Journalists - The Journey

2011-01-09T11:51:00.000-04:00

After nine years of existence, the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers has defied the doubting Thomases (and there have been many) and has been able to engage the multi-faceted tasks of networking journalists, promoting professional development in the Caribbean media and holding fast to the principles of free expression and a free press.

This has not been an easy journey. For one, we have attempted to accomplish our tasks largely through the volunteer efforts of resourced-starved national associations and focal points and the vision of a group of elected individuals functioning at the regional level and who serve on our executive board.

This, though, is not exactly the right model. Our counterparts who form part of the Global Forum for Media Development and the International Freedom of Expressions Exchange are both professionally outfitted and also receive the regular support of international media development agencies. Perhaps in the Caribbean we have too successfully sold our image as a tropical paradise to many who continue to believe that the threats to our freedom are imagined, if not over-stated and that “we cool”.

However, because of the partnerships we have forged through international partners who are finally getting the message, the ACM has been able to complete assignments over the years that have included a journalism mentoring programme, more than 20 training workshops and projects, collaboration on the publication of a handbook on covering climate change and production of our handbook on covering elections in the Caribbean.

The ACM serves on the steering committees of the Latin American and Caribbean operations of IFEX and GFMD and sits on the IT Sub-Committee of CARICOM. We also have working relations with the International Press Institute, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression in the Americas.

Our agenda is transparent and obvious. It is what I often describe as the “freedom perspective” – meaning that we need to maintain constant vigil over freedoms and rights that cost us dearly through our experience of slavery, indentureship and colonialism. It is incredible that in a part of this globe characterised in the past by these phenomena on such a large scale, human rights NGOs are so sparse and, where they exist, are of questionable value in the context of the right to maintain hard-won freedoms – freedom of expression in particular.

Such a task has fallen to those of us who believe this is something worth fighting for, however much it challenges the fashionable instinct to opt for personal privilege over the collective good.

This, of course, is not altogether an altruistic aspiration. Media workers insist on press freedom so that media enterprises flourish and grow and create environments in which we thrive and achieve professional rewards and satisfaction.

Press freedom calls on those who wield economic and political power to account for their decisions and their actions. It not only pursues the facts, but relishes the truth. It is an important pillar upon which we can build our true independence.

This, perhaps, is not the season to dwell too much on these lofty, esoteric matters, but it is certainly the time for us to focus on where we go from here. It’s almost like that star more than 2,000 years ago when those who believed in something came up against those who did not believe. They fixed their gaze upon that star and never gave up.

It might be as we approach 2011, we are being called upon to re-dedicate ourselves to a cause that is not always popular - one that costs us money, time and, sometimes, friends.

Photo Blog

2010-12-25T23:39:00.002-04:00

Spent some down time today updating my Photo Blog. Some of it recent. But I do include some shots from 2003 in Fiji.

Many things to write about as we look back at 2010 and forward to 2011. Let's see how things go.

Finding Neruda

2010-12-14T17:29:00.001-04:00

Toes hurt. It is misleading to say Baquedano station takes you to this place. Lost in the translation are the long, summer streets of kissing school girls and boys with cold, oversized Escudo cervezas just right for the piss of mountain horses.

I have come here to Neruda’s blue wall along “Constitution” – what a name for the street on which he lived and wrote of rules to break under the heaving weight of love.

Mikhail on my mind as I pass the hippie murals. A “crapaud foot”, upper case tribute to the 35^th year since the poet’s passing and a red stony climb to the blue wall.

I had realised two streets before, near the drunken guy with the credit card thingy in his loose hand, that the hapless, tag-along Nikon over my shoulder was as cardless as the endangered thingy.

Hearts do stop and start again … faster.

Shit.

Here I was at the shrine. It is important that you not only touch and feel and smell, but capture with both hearts and take with you a piece of this place. Hold like arms to a newborn.

So, back again I go. Tomorrow, if it ever comes.

Voices Hoarse From Empty Laughter

2010-11-16T22:52:00.000-04:00

I live in a place where grandfathers and grandmothers relate stories told to them by their own grandfathers and grandmothers. In some cases, tales of torturous journeys across the deep dark waters of the Kala Pani are matched by memories of barrack yards cast with the sweat of slaves.

My own maternal grandfather would have, if we had asked him, reminisced about the parched, barefoot schoolyards of Guangzhou, his own engagement of the Kala Pani – and his midnight embrace, many years later, at Ramleela, with little Miss D’Hurieux whose parents told of masters past and present.

This is the place where stories are told. Houdini begat Atilla begat Kitchener begat Rudder and we know much more than we care to remember because they cared to sing and to make music for all time, through the haze of Sawdust Caesars scattered in the wind over time. As empire begat empire begat empire.

Today, it is a place where silence reigns while the fat go hungry and the thin grow angry. A place of plenty, but a place of little. A flag flies on the barren island in the din of empty, metal drums and voices hoarse from empty laughter.

This is the place I call my home. It used to be a place that was my home. Freedom has fled the frame and seeks the shade of the treacherous Manchioneel.

If today the silence grows and prospers and prevails, it would be because we have shut up and let it reign. We, grandparents, are not telling the story anymore. The scores are written for us and we whistle them to no one in particular in the wind.

This, again, is the time for poetry and poets and foolish old men and women with stories to tell. Men and women who have the right to remain silent but who dare not exercise it.

Outrage over Firing of Trinidad TV Show Host

2010-11-10T10:04:00.004-04:00

On Saturday November 6, the co-host of one of Trinidad and Tobago's more popular morning television talk programmes, Fazeer Mohammed, received a telephone call from the state-owned media network. The caller advised Mr Mohammed that his services were no longer needed at the station because of a "cost-cutting" exercise.

Problem is that on Thursday November 4, Mr Mohammed had been engaged in a heated on-air exchange with Foreign Minister, Dr Suruj Rambachan. During the interview, Dr Rambachan interrupted to ask the host if he had a problem with the fact that the recently-elected Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, was a woman.

Mr Mohammed, a practising Muslim, said his faith did not condone women in leadership positions within the religion.

His sacking is linked to the ensuing exchange, which can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT4fRxhnLes

On November 10, the Trinidad Express published this editorial:

Political interference?

In keeping with its apparently helpless compulsion to shoot itself in the foot, the People's Partnership administration has now wrought an unholy and toxic mess at the State-owned Caribbean New Media Group (CNMG). The firing of talk show host and sports commentator Fazeer Mohammed will not be received as the cost-cutting measure claimed by the company's interim chief executive officer, Ken Ali. Darkest fears will be entertained over what was in the mortar apart from the pestle.

Citizens calling talk shows yesterday, posting comments on the Express website, and discussing the issue elsewhere, have linked the performance of Foreign Affairs Minister Suruj Rambachan, who was a guest on the First Up show last Thursday, with Mr Mohammed's precipitate dismissal two days later. Mr Rambachan, surprisingly assuming the role of the show host he once was, questioned Mr Mohammed on whether, as a Muslim, he had a problem with women leaders.

Displaying more diplomacy than the Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr Mohammed replied that he did not believe in having women in religious leadership, but that he had no problem with a woman as a national leader.

CEO Ali claims that the decision to terminate Mr Mohammed had been made long before that interview. He and the Government will find this line a hard sell. Even if it is true, Minister Rambachan, by his attitude and words, has undermined the Government's free speech bona fides, and the ensuing action can have only destabilising effects at CNMG.

Neither does Mr Ali's claim that Mr Mohammed's firing was a "cost-cutting measure" fly very well. The most effective cuts in cost would be ones which made the CNMG profitable.

Mr Ali may not be aware that, in its former incarnations as Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) and the National Broadcasting Network (NBN), the company's books actually went into the black. That success was short-lived, however, in part because political interference by the United National Congress administration undermined viewership. Bending to political pressure always harms media houses which, like banks, must be seen as trustworthy in order to survive. This is so even for privately owned media, as the Guardian newspaper discovered in 1996, when it appeared to be kowtowing to government power.

The Partnership's wielding of the rod of political correction, in its dual capacity of government and proprietor, will further undermine CNMG's professional standing, and potentially cost the station viewers and therefore advertisers. It appears that the new administration, like that under Basdeo Panday, needs to appreciate that the State-owned entity cannot viably subsist as a Government mouthpiece or pawn. Its reason for being remains to serve the interests of all the people, not just People's Partnership partisans.

Keith Smith

2010-10-29T10:06:00.002-04:00

So many of us in the Caribbean media are holding our breaths and crossing our fingers as writer extraordinaire, editor-at-large and journalistic guru, Keith Smith of the Trinidad Express, lies in a hospital bed in Port of Spain fighting the biggest battle of/for his life. Hopefully, this struggle will also join his great journalistic repertoire sometime in the future.

The Blindness of New Love

2010-10-25T21:11:00.000-04:00

I remember the great Caribbean economist and thinker, Lloyd Best, expressing his political position by saying he could not describe himself as an unbiased commentator on most public issues because not only was he not a supporter of the political contestants at the time, he was against them all.

Best’s position soon became a part of my own statement of principle whenever prying acquaintances and even complete strangers attempted to wrangle a narrow partisan position out of me. For sure, this is not mere parroting of a teenage memory, but a view I have grown more and more to associate myself with over the years – especially given the level of contact with national and Caribbean politicians I have had as a journalist.

This is not to say that I have not often agreed with the national politicians. I agreed just as much with the late Prime Minister George Chambers regarding the need for urgent caution on matters of the national economy in 1981 (I was a Tapia candidate for the election that December), as I did with ANR Robinson on the same question in 1986 and with Patrick Manning in 1991 and, thereafter, with Brian Kuei Tung and with Mariano Brown and, now, Winston Dookeran. No mention of Basdeo Panday, because he never appeared to believe in or to be committed to anything on such questions.

How therefore could I have been “a PNM” in 1981? How could I have been “an NAR” in 1986 when the administration was soon branded by my column in the Express during that period as a “bourgeois revolt”? How could I have been “a UNC” when I participated in one of the most sustained campaigns for a free press we have ever witnessed in Trinidad and Tobago (credit for which has erroneously been assigned to retired publisher, Ken Gordon, by the way)? How could I now be “a UNC” or “a COP” when the signs of real political change seem so distant?

I however believe my journalism during the tenure of the respective political parties was as independent and as fair as is possible under authoritarian conditions – such as those under which we continue to endure in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Many colleagues cringe when I use the term “authoritarian culture” to describe the way we work in the Caribbean, but I insist that there need not be open ostracism, injury or death for there to be conditions that foster an absence of independent thought in favour of silence.

The most urgent political question of these times in the Caribbean therefore seems to be how do we break from the grasp of authoritarian politics and culture and seek true freedom and independence.

The former Education Minister under Chambers, Marilyn Gordon, struck my siblings’ names off a Balisier House Carnival band lineup, post-1981, Robinson’s Information hit-man summoned the “foreign correspondents” (I was a stringer for Prensa Latina back then) to discuss the slandering of the country overseas with a view to silencing us, Keith Rowley thought I was an agent of “the opposition” during 1991-1995 and Panday (to my utter bewilderment) branded me a “political dinosaur” sometime between 1995 and 2001.

Some were amazed that I functioned as a freelance television presenter and producer for the Government Information Division during the Panday era, was retained as Communication Coordinator for the Fifth Summit of the Americas under Manning and, since then, functioned as a Communication Advisor to a state regulatory agency, yet find time to write freely and openly about public affairs and the economy for various journalistic principals.

All of this comes readily to mind as we contemplate the prospects for the “People’s Partnership” administration in Trinidad and Tobago. It is difficult terrain to navigate, if only because of the disastrous path blazed by the previous regime, but it is an exercise we do not engage at our peril.

In many respects, though, the opinion-leaders to whom so many pay close attention are simply not engaging the task of casting a sharp and critical eye. Instead, there is either open adoration or barely-disguised hatred and quick resort to partisan labelling and open condemnation as, among other things, being “a PNM” or “a UNC” or “a COP.”

The fact is, I am not unbiased on this question, I am against all of them and what they, in essence, represent. This, indeed, constitutes an open declaration of political position and intent.

Satisfied?

So, what now?

What now, is that I continue to openly declare myself opposed to authoritarianism and the sycophancy and kow-towing to authority that follow. The subtle corruption of keeping the bosses politically satisfied, at all costs. The bright-eyed blindness of new love and the penance that flows in its absence.

Already, the various shades of such corruption are apparent. There are shadows behind the trees that grow longer with each passing day. More to come.

Condemning Violence Against the Media in Mexico and Elsewhere

2010-09-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

AUSTIN, Texas — Distinguished investigative journalists and members of media support organizations from 20 countries in the Americas and Europe strongly condemned the killings of journalists and attacks on media by organized crime, particularly in Mexico. They insisted that international organizations and governments in the Americas assume their responsibilities to guarantee the rights to life and information that are included in their constitutions.

The “Austin Declaration” was issued by participants of the 8th Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas, conducted Sept. 17–18, 2010, at the University of Texas at Austin. The annual gathering, which focused this year on coverage of drug trafficking and organized crime, was conducted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at UT Austin and the Open Society Foundations programs on media and Latin America.

The Austin Forum began Friday (Sept. 17) with the news of the shooting death of 21-year-old Mexican photography intern Luis Carlos Santiago, who worked for El Diario in Ciudad Juárez. His 18-year-old fellow intern, Carlos Manuel Sánchez, was injured in the attack.

"Since we started organizing this annual meeting in Austin of journalists and journalists organizations in 2003, this is the first time that the participants decided to issue a public declaration at the end of the meeting," said Professor Rosental Calmon Alves, director of the Knight Center. "And it is not surprising that something so extraordinary has happened, considering the gravity of the situation facing journalists in Mexico and other countries of the hemisphere, especially those who cover drug trafficking and organized crime, which were the themes of the Austin Forum this year."

"The declaration shows the international outrage at so many attacks on journalists and the news media of Mexico and other countries. It also shows the solidarity that all participants of the Austin Forum wanted to send to the journalists and their families, especially in the regions that are most affected, like Ciudad Juárez and other cities close to the border between Mexico and the United States," Alves said.

The Austin Declaration reads as follows :

“Renowned investigative journalists from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, who gathered at the University of Texas at Austin for the 8th Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas, organized by the Knight Center, declare their strongest condemnation of the killings of journalists, and attacks of any kind against the media, that are being unleashed by organized crime in Mexico, and that have been committed for years amid the negligence of the government.

“From Mexico to the Southern Cone, drug trafficking and organized crime have become the biggest threat against democratic society and life. In other countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia, the media and journalists are under fire. Freedom of expression and the right of citizens to be informed are in grave danger throughout the region. Confirming this has been the point of all the participants’ presentations at the Forum.

“The participants of the Austin Forum, from various media, declare their decision to take action, denouncing the impunity with which the bands of organized crime are operating, and insisting that international organizations and governments of the region – particularly Mexico – recognize the urgency of the moment and assume their responsibility to guarantee a minimum of two rights included in their constitutions. The rights to life and to information must be restored.

From Austin, we send this demonstration of our solidarity with all our colleagues in danger.

Sept. 18, 2010, Austin

• Juan Javier Zeballos, Asociación Nacional de la Prensa (Bolivia)

• Mauri König, Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo

• Mónica González, CIPER Chile

• Ginna Morelo Martínez, Consejo de Redacción y El Meridiano de Cordoba (Colombia)

• Álvaro Sierra, University for Peace, Costa Rica

• Giannina Segnini, La Nación, Costa Rica

• Mónica Almeida, El Universo, Ecuador

• Carlos Dada, El Faro, El Salvador

• Benoît Hervieu, Reporters Sans Frontiers Bureau Amériques, Francia

• Claudia Méndez Arriaza, El Periódico, Guatemala

• Gotson Pierre, AlterPresse, Haiti

• Byron Buckley, Association of Caribbean Media Workers y Press Association of Jamaica

• Marcela Turati, revista Proceso y red Periodistas de a Pie (México)

• Marco Lara Khlar, Insyde (México)

• María Teresa Ronderos, Verdad Abierta, Colombia

• Mike O’Connor, Committee to Protect Journalists

• Óscar Martínez, El Faro, El Salvador

• Samuel González, criminal justice consultant, México

• Carlos Chamorro, El Confidencial, Nicaragua

• Dilmar Rosas Garcia, Centro Latinoamericano de Periodismo, Panamá

• Osmar Gómez, Foro de Periodistas Paraguayos (FOPEP)

• Gustavo Gorriti, IDL Reporteros, Peru

• Luz María Helguero, Red de Periodistas de Provincias del Perú

• Ricardo Uceda, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Peru

• Tyler Bridges, journalist

• Paul Radu, Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism

• Ana Arana, Fundación MEPI, México

• Bruce Bagley, University of Miami

• Bruce Shapiro, Dart Center for Trauma & Journalism, United States

• Cecilia Alvear, National Association of Hispanic Journalists /Unity -Journalists of Color (U.S.)

• Judith Torrea, blog Ciudad Juárez : en la sombra del narcotráfico

• Luis Botello, International Center for Journalists

• Ricardo Trotti, Inter-American Press Association

• Steven Dudley, InSight / Organized Crime in the Americas

• Javier Mayorca, El Nacional, Venezuela

• Algirdas Lipstas, Open Society Foundations, Media Program

• David Holiday Open Society Foundations, Latin America Program

• David Sasaki, Open Society Foundations, Latin America Program

• Gordana Jankovic, Open Society Foundations, Media Program

• Miguel Castro, Open Society Foundations, Media Program

• Sandra Dunsmore, Open Society Foundations, Latin America Program

• Lise Olsen, Investigative Reporters & Editors and Houston Chronicle, United States

• Donna de Cesare, University of Texas at Austin

• Rosental Calmon Alves, University of Texas at Austin

• Kristel Mucino, Washington Office on Latin America y Transnational Institute

• Ricardo Sandoval Palos, International Consortium of Investigative Journalism/Center for Public Integrity (U.S.)

• Gabriel Michi, Forum del Periodismo Argentino (FOPEA)

• Dean Graber, University of Texas at Austin

• Summer Harlow, University of Texas at Austin

• Ingrid Bachmann, University of Texas at Austin

• Mónica Medel, University of Texas at Austin

• James Ian Tennant, University of Texas at Austin

• Joseph Vavrus, University of Texas at Austin

Independence, Diversity and Self-Confidence - Trinidad and Tobago

2010-09-01T13:24:00.003-04:00

We have been around long enough as an independent state to understand that the raising of our own flag on August 31, 1962 had value and potential in excess of political self-determination and a notion of economic choice.

For one, the ability to determine constitutional and legislative values and to command indigenous human and natural resources unfolded as both opportunity and as intrinsic challenge. Small states finding their way in the world, under crippling pre and post-colonial circumstances, have consistently been found to be haplessly subject to such conditions.

The offshore orientation of the economy is now widely acknowledged and accepted, and undoubted vulnerabilities on account of geography, limited capacity and a lack of self-confidence have taken intractable root. There is now little doubt that political independence has neither brought us true freedom nor has it led to a trough of sustainable prospects for a future as a sovereign state.

It is not that we have been hopeless at political negotiation or that we have been unable to prosper, in relative terms, through economic decision-making. In many respects, we have conducted our affairs at a high level of civility and we have covered much developmental ground. Our score card on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is impressive.

Up to this point, Eric Williams, CLR James, William Demas and Lloyd Best are absolutely indispensable if we were to understand some key paradoxes. There is an established pathway that leads us to an understanding of how and why we have failed to advance the gains of political independence yet thrived in important ways. Economic determinism, political under-achievement and cultural insufficiency feature prominently and are irresistible subjects to ponder even in the face of the statistical high-points.

The fact that cultural, political and economic institutions have under-performed is however difficult to deny. There is yet no grasp of the changing “peoplescape” and certainly no sense of an economic destiny over which we have an adequate measure of decisive control in the final analysis. The political parties and their vital organs, in the absence of official life-support, are moribund and particularly useless in pursuit of the broader, civic self-determination that separates free people from those who are not.

The resort to authoritarianism and paternalistic dependence and control remains impulsive and few are to be found who consistently patrol the boundaries of rights and freedoms. As a consequence, important questions of state-sanctioned killing, free expression and independent jurisprudence are subject to official “vaps” and sycophantic advocacy capable of 180 degree shifts. In this respect, political complexion has made no difference.

To move us forward, new levels of understanding are needed which concede that the Trinidad and Tobago of 2010 is not the same country we came up with in 1962. The challenge of managed diversity, to cite one important example, is certainly not the same.

In many respects, it makes sense that a Ministry of Multiculturalism exists. But there is yet no evidence that the relevant political and administrative managers and functionaries understand the true nature of the challenge. This government ministry, perhaps above all others, has the greatest potential to move the development of the country forward.

This has nothing to do with financial support for entertainers or official dicta that seek to regulate taste or repairs to the National Academy for the Performing Arts. It has to do with acquiring a proper understanding of the changing nature of our society and the value of the global interface to which we are now - and have always been - inextricably attached.

There are few greater manifestations of under-development than our failure to recognise this important point. Cultural policy cannot be founded on xenophobia nor can it be built on static notions of what comes together to constitute what some would wish to describe as a “national culture”. The current nonsense of proposed regulated media content, ostensibly to “protect” national cultural products, falls far short of a proper understanding of this.

The fact is the channels of so-called cultural imperialism have the potential to offer net gains if we choose to be more confident and more independent.

Because these points are not understood, the potential of some features of our economic diversity is not correspondingly recognised. How, for example, have some of our newest arrivals sustained what appears to be a glut of food establishments throughout the length and breadth of the country? How have others, from not so far away, been able to preserve artisanal skills which they deliver at lower cost and at a higher level of productivity?

There is, as well, the lost potential of our Caribbean engagement at the hands of our own parochialism and xenophobia. To what extent, for example, is the Caribbean paradigm envisaged when we define “national culture” and our wealth as a people? We do not understand the value of such a stock of assets at our peril.

Instead, we are finding it hard to accept the fact of our changing collective face. The durability of our political independence needs to be matched by a much higher level of self-confidence and a willingness to negotiate much wider spaces. Some individuals, manufacturers and banks understand this much better than players in other sectors.

In the end, our independence has to be pursued and achieved with a much higher understanding of who we really are and what we desire for ourselves.

(First published in the Trinidad Guardian - Tuesday August 31, 2010)

Word to New T&T Journalism Interns

2010-08-12T10:24:00.002-04:00

These remarks were made at the launch of a newspaper internship programme in Trinidad and Tobago on Wednesday August 11, 2010. Students between the ages of 16 and 19 were selected on the basis of their performance in a writing competition. They are being interned at the Trinidad Guardian:

I am very honoured to have been selected to say these few words to you as you accept the challenge of being introduced to one of the most important professions anyone can consider entering. Like other similarly old and enduring professions it has faced more than its fair share of infamy. But, at its core, its basic tenets strike at the most noble aspirations of human beings – the need to know and to understand changing realities, and in so doing claim and secure our future.

As a consequence of this important mandate, free societies vest in media enterprises and the journalists who operate within them, a variety of freedoms and rights derived from the broader, more universal freedom to express oneself. In Trinidad and Tobago, this manifests itself in the constitutional guarantee of a free press. We are the only Commonwealth Caribbean country with such a feature in its national constitution and some of us have had, over the years, to defend its continued presence there.

In return, there is the implicit agreement that we provide our society with the journalism it not only deserves but which it requires as we move from one stage of development to the next and as we confront some of the most difficult challenges we have ever had to face. It is a journalism that insists on the basis principles of fairness, balance, accuracy and a commitment to truthfulness.

Our people deserve the best journalism and we need to deliver it. I am not sure we are currently doing so.

But none of this is possible in an environment in which direct and indirect forms of censorship are officially applied, neither is it possible under conditions in which self-censorship is allowed to take root. Meeting the requirements of such a journalism is also impossible if the people assigned such responsibilities are not equipped with the basic intellectual and material tools to perform such a function.

This programme is an important start. We have with us today, some of the brightest and the best who have come forward. The panel of judges marveled at the high standards, as if we ever fell for the view that the current generation ought to be written off. Instead, we found there are scores of you who care, who seek to understand and who believe you can help convert this country into a different kind of place.

It was evident that some considerable reading is taking place, that some high level of interpretation of events is occurring and, most importantly, there is pursuit of an understanding of the realities. Through this, and through you, this entire exercise can and will benefit from the special perspectives you as young people bring. They are perspectives that bring the irreverence, skepticism and candour of youth and a way of looking at the problems of our society that cuts through the fluff and fog age and experience (as valuable as they are) sometimes bring.

There is another quality you can also bring to the profession that is, unfortunately, not in abundant supply nowadays. This is the attribute of humility. Because it is sometimes absent, the stupid, simple question is often omitted. Because it’s not there, opinion is sometimes more highly valued than information. Because there is so little humility, hubris and conflict predominate. The news, someone once said, is always more interesting, and certainly more important, than the journalists that cover it. That’s lesson number one.

So, we are here, ready and willing to make our first embrace of this noble profession. The time we have is short, so we get down to some work in a little while. Our sessions will be deep and intense. We will find time for some wholesome fun and, at the end of it all, I am hoping it would be as much a learning experience for me as it would be for you.

Facing our New Caribbean

2010-07-31T13:03:00.003-04:00

The CARICOM Single Market project runs a very serious risk of running terminally aground if both officialdom and the people of our Community continue to ignore a number of marked shortcomings in the manner in which we have engaged our development.

The first and most important phenomenon is associated with a chronic lack of self-confidence and the concomitant failure to be responsible for ourselves and our own future. This manifests itself in the ease with which we attribute to external factors some rather stark internal deficiencies.

The serious rise in violence and crime is not the fault of foreign television programming, neither is it an exclusive function of the influx of deportees driven out of the United States by an increasingly oppressive immigration regime. There is also no empirical support for the view that the rise in crime, in some of our previously peaceful communities, is the product of a situation in which CARICOM immigrants are becoming more visible – they have always been present.

We are, by and large, producing our own generations of criminals – thugs, deviants and misfits with no rightful place among law-abiding citizens. But because political survival so often relies on blaming someone else for one’s own shortcomings, Caribbean politicians are too easily relying on playing the card of xenophobia and outright bigotry.

The result has been an atmosphere of intolerance, fear and discrimination against those groups in our regional community that have found it fit to seek opportunities in countries within which there are vast similarities and with whom they share similar historical antecedents.

The politicians are not the only ones to blame. When a CARICOM immigration officer exercises an official prerogative to grant a CARICOM visitor a stay of three days when the region’s leaders have agreed to automatic granting of six-month stays – whatever the administrative injunction, that immigration officer is reflecting a pre-disposition that has to be more widely-shared within his or her own national community. By the way, similar attitudes do not, as a matter of course, apply to non-CARICOM visitors in many of our countries.

Another not unrelated factor is the fact that we, as a regional community, have not been managing our greatest strength, our diversity, very well.

This is reflected in both official and unofficial actions designed ostensibly to “protect” what we consider to be social and cultural mores, values and products. Language is one such element. The CARICOM Secretariat has come face-to-face with this through the advent of Suriname and Haiti membership of the Community. But our societies are experiencing grave cognitive dissonance in accepting the fact that not only does our regional community now speak English (as an official language), Bhojpuri, Hindi, Dutch, Sran Tongo, Kweole, Papiamento, Mandarin, Cantonese, Q’eqchi and French, but we need to add Spanish and Portuguese in the cases of previously-unlikely countries such as Guyana, Belize (not as unlikely) and Antigua & Barbuda.

So, what constitutes this “Caribbean culture” we need to “protect”? When short-sighted artistes and cultural entrepreneurs clamour for forced broadcast exposure for a narrow band of largely “traditional” Anglo/African entertainment products created within the small borders of individual territories there appears to a general misunderstanding of who “we” are. “We” are the multitudes of children of modern Chinese and Indian “indentures” (and sometimes slaves) all over the region, Guatemalan and Honduran economic refugees in Belize, Brazilian miners and traders in Guyana and Suriname, Cubans in Jamaica, and Dominicanos demanding ancestral space in Antigua and Barbuda.

Is our Single Market literature reflecting this diversity? When we speak of “we” are we speaking about all of us? Of course not!

Instead, we are practising the same official and unofficial bigotry as our North American neighbours when we continue to deny the existence of our new Caribbean. The Caribbean has to aim at becoming a net beneficiary of “cultural imperialism” by exploiting the wide open markets on North and South America. In the free market of expression, there is space for everyone, but our vision is not extending beyond our tiny, limited markets. This holds true not only for cultural industries and you will see evidence of this in many areas of manufacturing and services.

There is no new aboriginal population about to be decimated in this space, only an expanding universe of experience and opportunity. The Single Market process misunderstands this at its peril.

Remembering Dennis Pantin

2010-07-13T14:57:00.004-04:00

Growing up and confronting anew the challenges of our lives we generally meet two primary groups of influential people – those who guide our behaviour and the things we do, and those who provide us with the perspectives and wisdom we require to interpret the world around us.

The latter are not often readily recognised in the absence of focused contemplation. For example, the influence of my late grandfather, Samuel Gibbings, was not really fully appreciated until many years after his death when I started paying attention to the principle of “fairness” required of the proper practice of journalism. It was then I recalled his many, usually unscheduled, lectures from the head-master’s stage at Caroni Presbyterian School in Trinidad.

My father, Arthur ‘Cips’ Gibbings, brought clear, uncluttered perspectives on human behaviour and how well-developed inter-personal skills contribute toward the shaping of the bigger social picture.

Then came the teenage years and Lloyd Best – one of the leading Caribbean economists and thinkers of our time. I am used to saying that my father and Lloyd Best contributed more than half of what I know and understand about the world. The other half came in smaller but not insignificant doses. Some people account for more than a small slice of wisdom and understanding. Dennis Pantin was one of them. On Tuesday July 13, 2010, Dennis left us almost as suddenly as the news that he had been diagnosed earlier this year with intestinal cancer.

Dennis was not only the brother of renowned Caribbean journalist, Raoul Pantin, but was himself once a radio reporter and, latterly, an author and newspaper columnist on economic and political affairs. But many will remember him as Professor of Economics at the University of the West Indies and founding Coordinator of the Sustainable Economic Development Unit (SEDU) of the UWI. From there, Dennis brought the perspective of sustainable development to the public policy debate particularly from the standpoint of Caribbean economic development.

As a young reporter, I often consulted with Dennis (in lieu of similar consultations with an increasingly irascible and impatient but magnificent Lloyd Best) on economic issues I felt I did not have a proper grasp of. He, together with the deceased Frank Rampersad and Frank Barsotti and (very much alive) people such as Anthony Gonzales and Karl Theodore were among the most generous contributors to my development as a journalist who had an interest in economics and finance.

Dennis was also special because he was always plain-talking, well researched and always ready with anecdotal support for his many views on so many issues. Like me, he too dabbled in the politics of the Tapia House Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, he was the Diego Martin East candidate for Tapia. In 1981, I ran in Arouca. I think these backgrounds also helped strengthen a longstanding professional relationship that often ventured freely into discussions on politics, politicians and leading public personalities and events.

As his time approached earlier this year, I believe he must have experienced the creative tension that existed between the need to speak frankly and openly about the Trinidad and Tobago reality and the urge to explore, through his column, the memories he had accumulated throughout a rich and abundant life.

On February 28, 2010 – not long after initially learning of his illness – Dennis wrote the following column in the Trinidad Guardian:

Reflections of a February 26, 1970 Cub Reporter

Published: 28 Feb 2010

On the morning of February 26, 1970 (40 years ago last Friday) I was given my first “outside” assignment as a cub reporter at 610 Radio to cover a UWI student demonstration. “Dem university students playing the ass this morning, Pantin. Go out and cover it for us,” were the instructions—or close enough, anyway—from old school, hard-boiled chief News Editor, Jerome Rampersad (deceased). Not that he necessarily meant that literally –although you never knew with “Ram,” as he was affectionately known to all. In fact, his very covering of the story was an indication that he felt it was important. Moreover, as far as I am aware, no other reporter, cub or otherwise, was present at the demonstration’s start. I immediately grabbed my notebook and virtually ran from Abercromby Street to South Quay, where the first set of university students and other demonstrators were gathering at the Canadian High Commission offices.

The reason was to protest the Sir George William incident in Canada, where scores of students, including T&T and other West Indians, were arrested. (In last month’s T&T Review, Bukkha Rennie provides an insider view of what happened there and then). There were not that many demonstrators, as I recall, and the march proceeded to Independence Square, where they got to the steps of the Royal Bank of Canada. Then an incident occurred which, in my opinion, was the trigger for 1970, although it was a blaze simply awaiting a light to ignite, anyway. This occurred when the demonstrators were stopped at the steps and Dave Darbeau (as he was then: Khafra Kambon now) went up to an officer in khaki.

Absolutely radical thing

I did not hear the exchange, but the officer then shoved Khafra in his chest, and he fell back unto the other demonstrators, who then ran into the bank and did the absolutely radical thing of discarding savings and other deposit slips on the ground. By then, the temperature had, however, increased, with more police arriving and a curious lunchtime crowd gathering to observe what was happening. Soon, the march moved on to the Roman Catholic Cathedral, where some demonstrators entered and began to place placards on many statues of saints, etc adorning the church, but already in Lenten vestments, as it were. Shortly afterwards, Geddes Granger (Makandal Daaga) arrived, and the atmosphere got even more charged.

However, the march eventually dissipated that afternoon. It was the next day that the real action began, when some of the so-called leaders were arrested overnight and brought to court to face charges. Suddenly, the hundreds of demonstrators had turned into thousands. And the rest, they say, is history (captured in my brother Raoul’s own eyewitness account of 1970: “Black Power Day: a Reporter’s Account of 1970), although I am not sure this history is being taught in our police academies, given the recent treatment of the People’s Democracy march around the Red House.

Sensational gripping element

By the time the Cathedral entry occurred, however, the place began to swarm with more senior journalists, from both print and broadcast media. Later, I was to notice the long, lanky frame of a senior to me in Fatima, Lennox Grant, then an Express reporter, whose particular long-legged stride had been noticeable from those days.

By October of that year, we were both, together with Keith Smith, enrolled as first- year university students. When I did return quickly to 610 to report for the 12 noon newscast, Alfred Aguiton, another Fatima graduate in Raoul’s time, grabbed my story and taught me the most basic rule in journalism: start with the most sensational gripping element, and let every thing else follow. (I had begun with the South Quay start and slowly got to the Cathedral: which, of course, was the central sensational news.)

Unfinished ‘Revo’

The 1970 “Revolution” was, to be brutally honest, put down by the forces of reaction, although its own internal contradictions meant that, by itself, it was unlikely to be able to deliver without other support. What remains relevant are two of 1970’s key slogans: “Power to the people’ and “Indians and Africans unite.”

“Power to the people”

As I have argued previously in this column, I think the Constitution Reform Forum has updated and more structurally integrated these two slogans with maxims of its own, the first being: “From maximum leaders to maximum participation.” This breathes life into “power to the people” beyond punching fists in the air in Woodford Square after a speech by, well, a maximum leader. The second is from “Winner takes all to all Take Win,” which accepts that for a long time, racial securities will remain and can be best assuaged by giving people some degree of control over their own communities.

ACM Message on World Press Freedom Day

2010-05-04T06:23:00.001-04:00

The Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) observes World Press Freedom Day 2010 confident that our message of freedom of the press as the preserve of all citizens and not of a single privileged group or sector, including the media industry, is a position on which we find common universal cause.

Indeed, this right derives from the broader concept of free expression out of which virtually all other rights and freedoms flow or are maintained. If people cannot generate, seek and receive expression, human development in all its manifestations is jeopardised. Everywhere in the Caribbean there is the call for people to become responsible for themselves, to seek our own social and economic independence but how can this be achieved if we are not at first truly free to think and to speak and to express ourselves?

As United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reminded us on this occasion; around the world, there are governments and those wielding other forms of power who find many ways to obstruct free expression. We know this story very well. There are governments, special economic interests and misguided individuals and groups, firm in the belief that the case for freedom of the press should begin from a position of barriers ostensibly erected to somehow protect our societies from others and from ourselves.

The freedom perspective is the position the ACM has brought to the table of ideas and positions on this question of media and the work of journalists. Our leading role in the Global Forum for Media Development on which we serve as a representative of the Latin America and Caribbean region, our position on the Coordinating Committee of the Latin American and Caribbean Alliance of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange and our working relationship with the International Press Institute, Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters with Borders all point to deep entrenchment of the view that professional development among media operatives and the networking of journalists find roots and strength in the need to operate in an environment in which freedom prevails.

Secretary General Ban also notes in his World Press Freedom Day message that even as countries move to introduce laws that recognise the universal right to publicly-held information, very often they don’t translate into action. This, he attributes to what he calls a “culture of secrecy and a lack of accountability.”

This, indeed, is a persistent Caribbean reality. While we continue to advocate for the introduction of access to information laws in all our territories, we urge those jurisdictions in which they already exist to honour both the spirit and the letter of such an undertaking. There is also a corresponding injunction to encourage more pervasive use of such a facility and we encourage journalists to learn more about this important legislation and to make better use of it.

All of this however appears rather fanciful when we consider that in some of our countries in the Caribbean, the penalty for asking too many questions and challenging the status quo is physical, judicial or commercial death. I mention here the plight of our former Assistant General Secretary, Guy Delva of Haiti who, even in the face of great destruction, death and despair in his native land, faces the threat of assassination at the hands of persons he played a role in convicting for the killing of journalist, Jacques Roche in 2005.

We are also paying attention to a situation in the Cayman Islands that emerged only a few days ago. There, an edict from the judiciary pronounces on the question of identifying criminal defendants when no clear statute on the matter appears to exist as is the case of legislation on matters involving minors or those related to sexual offences in some Caribbean jurisdictions.

It is also suspected that rapidly declining state advertising contracts with the Kaieteur News in Guyana result from what has been a recurring charge of political bias on the part of the newspaper. In this regard, we recall the protracted advertising boycott of the Stabroek News between 2006 and 2007 that was later withdrawn. The head of our affiliate there, Mr Gordon Moseley, also remains banned from attending any event at the country’s State House and Office of the President.

Punishing those who attempt to freely express themselves or report the news also remains the norm rather than the exception in Cuba and on this occasion, we remember Orlando Zapata a prisoner of conscience who passed away in February following a hunger strike. We also keep in our minds those Cubans who continue to defy the tentacles of direct and indirect censorship and who continue to risk their own safety and liberty to keep the world informed. We make special mention of the bloggers who continue their work despite official controls and threats.

There is a lot of work to be done to bring our countries more in line with the basic objectives of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and a growing number of judicial precedents within the global and Inter-American systems. Now in our ninth year, the ACM remains committed to upholding such an aspiration. We join with our counterpart organisations throughout this hemisphere and elsewhere in recognizing the urgent importance of this event.

Owing Our People Better Journalism

2010-04-18T13:23:00.004-04:00

This dispatch is extracted from comments I made on Saturday April 17, 2010 as one of the judges of the IICA/CARDI Excellence in Agriculture Awards ceremony in Port of Spain, Trinidad:

Those who keep a close eye on these matters, and they ought to include some journalists, are acutely aware of the distinction between the concept of food security and general agricultural development. In too many instances, the link between story content and the notion of food security in coverage of such issues in the local press is remote at best. This betrays a basic misunderstanding of the conditions under which food security for a nation is pursued and achieved.

It is however true that some of the experts themselves quibble over some key details, and it is perfectly acceptable to explore, through journalistic means, the main points of departure. The arguments are worthy of coverage, but they aren't. It makes no sense to parrot the current orthodoxy without a level of skepticism.

As has been the case with so many other journalistic awards, not only here but throughout the Caribbean, there existed wide gaps in the quality of print versus broadcast submissions. Stories in the print media category, save for one highly impressive television entry, far exceeded submissions received in the radio and television categories.

It is quite apparent that more has not been merrier in the area of broadcast media in Trinidad and Tobago. This is particularly so in the field of radio broadcasting. I am no old-timer mourning any golden age, but merely a consumer of radio content who now has a far wider range of choices than ever before. I must say there is absolutely nothing here that remotely resembles the most humble offerings of respectable radio broadcasters even in some other Caribbean territories.

There is a lot of work to be done in every single area. In researching, interviewing, scripting, editing and presenting. Sadly, television is not much better. To touch on just one point, people need to remember that one of the most indispensable assets of a journalist is his or her sense of humility.

I am pulling no punches on these issues, because the organisation I lead – the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers – not only has a commitment to ensure journalistic standards improve, but that we operate in an environment in which the mass media are free. The connection, in our view, is a very direct one.

Poor journalistic practices very often invite oppressive official behaviour, almost as much as excellent journalism does – the difference being that it is much easier to defend a journalist under fire for good work than it is to defend a journalist guilty of sloppy or unprofessional behaviour. In that sense, we as journalists, are very often our own worst enemies.

It is virtually axiomatic that the greater commitment to professional excellence in journalism the greater the chance that countries in social and political peril escape the worst consequences. On the question of food security, our societies in the Caribbean are in mortal danger.

In this respect alone, we owe our people better journalism. We derive our rights and freedoms only on the basis of this compact with our societies – not that we pursue some fuzzy notion of development support journalism - but that we empower our people through information and knowledge to make the correct decisions about what is necessary to resolve the challenges of the day.

Free Expression in Latin America and the Caribbean

2010-04-04T13:58:00.003-04:00

A very important alignment of Latin American and Caribbean free expression voices has begun to unfold under the banner of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) which brings together organisations from all over the world committed to free speech, a free press and general freedom of expression.

It can be said that representative organisations of Latin America and the Caribbean have for long remained estranged cousins with little inclination to join hands in pursuit of goals such as the maintenance of human rights and our freedoms. The ambivalence has been exacerbated by the presence of states such as Cuba and Venezuela that have openly expressed and applied sanctions against free expression.

Mixed feelings on this aspect of the discussion occur because there have always been relatively close relations between these two countries and the English-speaking Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica were among the first countries of the world to officially recognise Cuba as a legitimate state run by a government which has as its supreme ambition the betterment of its people. Cuba has also been a generous benefactor in the form of educational scholarships and the ready availability of health care professionals in situations where other countries of the region have fallen dramatically short.

But, this does not reduce Cuba’s responsibility to honour commitment to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which specifically defines the parameters of this important freedom. People cannot and should not be imprisoned or harassed for expressing their views on matters of public affairs.

Persons on the so-called “left” of Caribbean public affairs are committing a grave error in not unequivocally condemning such an approach by Cuban officials, even as we all recognise the country’s contribution in the areas I have described.

Good feelings about programmes of direct and indirect financial aid from Venezuela to Caribbean countries under severe financial strain need also to be balanced against the designs of the authoritarian leader in Caracas. Too many in the Caribbean are prepared to provide blind cheerleader support for an anti-Americanism that has as its basis circumstances that have little to do with us.

For reasons such as these, Caribbean people need to spend more time attempting to understand what makes the countries of Latin America tick while we engage a similar exercise to come to terms with neighbours about whom we understand too little.

The participation of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) at the Annual Meeting of the IFEX Latin American and Caribbean Alliance in Lima, Peru on March 23-25, 2010 was one attempt to achieve the latter objective.

The ACM’s contribution to the meeting focused on defining New and Emerging Challenges to Freedom of Expression and Improving Collaboration on Free Expression Issues between Latin American and Caribbean groups.

The Association also contributed to and endorsed a conference statement which defined ten key challenges to freedom of expression in Latin America and the Caribbean. These included:

1. Illegitimate mechanisms of governmental control over the media that allow undue political interference. Political control is exercised via the discretionary granting of licenses or the regulation of broadcasting; through abuse in the distribution of State advertising to influence editorial lines; through the ownership or significant control of the media by political leaders or parties; as well as through procedures against independent media based on political motivations, including the defense of obsolete regulations - such as sedition laws or the requirement of "truthfulness" in the news – such policies are destined to criminalise the criticism of governments and public officials.

2. Criminal laws against defamation, such as contempt of court laws or those that criminalise libel and slander are often used to restrict freedom of expression. The abuse of such laws and the existence of excessively severe sanctions, such as imprisonment or suspended sentences, result in the loss of civil rights.

3. Violence against journalists remains a very serious threat to the freedom of expression; particularly against those journalists who cover social problems, including organised crime or drug trafficking; who criticise the authorities or others in positions of power; who cover violations of human rights or corruption; or who work in conflict zones. An increasing number of violent attacks on journalists remain unpunished and not enough resources are allocated to prevent them or to investigate them and seek justice when they do take place. This phenomenon often leads to journalists' self-censorship and therefore diminishes citizen access to information on matters of public interest.

4. Limits to the right to access information, despite having been widely acknowledged as a basic human right. Most of the region's States have not approved legislation to ensure full compliance.

5. Discrimination in the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, against historically disadvantaged groups (women, indigenous people, among other vulnerable groups and other minorities) who are still struggling for their views to be taken into account and to be able to access information that is relevant to them. Among the principal violations are obstacles to the creation of media outlets for these populations, and the minimal representation of their members in the newsrooms of the major media, including public outlets.

6. Economic pressures that threaten the media's capacity to cover matters of public interest, due to the increasing concentration of media ownership, with serious consequences for the diversity of sources and content. The strains on the advertising market and other commercial pressures have led the media to take cost-cutting measures that are detrimental to the coverage of local issues and to investigative journalism, and instead promote low-level intellectual entertainment. These factors increase the risk of only existing media outlets reaping the benefits of the transition to digital frequencies, thus preventing greater diversity and access to public interest media.

7. Lack of support for public and community-based stations, which can play an important social role, face increasingly frequent obstacles to public financing access and suffer the lack of specific legal recognition with appropriate criteria in fair and democratic conditions that guarantee their development and prevent discriminatory measures based on technical or sustainability based issues.

8. Using national security as a guise to restrict the freedom of expression, which has historically been used to impose unjustified restrictions on freedom of expression through overly broad definitions of what constitutes "apology" or "promotion" of terrorism or violence.

9. Governmental control of Internet use, to control or limit this outlet of free speech through the blocking of websites. Also, certain corporations that provide search, access, messaging and publishing services, among others, do not make enough efforts to respect the privacy rights of users to access the Internet without interference.

10. Restricted access to new information and communication technologies. Although most of the population still has limited or no access to the Internet, States in the region continue to maintain pricing structures that prevent the use of the Internet by the least privileged sectors and fail to extend connectivity to all their countries' territories, leaving rural users, in particular, with less information and diminished spaces for free expression.

The Caribbean context on the question of free expression was framed by a presentation on defining the Caribbean and exploring its socio-political antecedents. It was expressed that in the English-speaking Caribbean, defined as those countries that are member states of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), threats to free expression are often not readily evident, did not always include violence or the threat of violence, but are very much a feature of modern life in the region.

It was explained that, unlike many areas of Latin America, there is a long tradition of democracy and Caribbean societies are known to be open, with a free press that pre-dates the region’s achievement of political independence, beginning with some states in the 1960s.

State monopolies in the Caribbean broadcast sector started coming to an end in the 1980s but, in 2010, not all countries are currently at the same level. However, by and large, the state no longer dominates broadcast media in most countries.

In the Caricom countries there remains direct censorship in the form of official censorship of movies and some broadcasting content – mainly on grounds of decency, security and protection of the public interest. There was also censorship that came in the form of judicial edicts and the rulings of presiding officers in parliament. There also existed widespread self-censorship often influenced by commercial and political factors.

The ACM pointed out that criminal defamation and criminal speech are on the books of all English-speaking Caribbean countries and there have been recent examples of the use of these provisions in countries such as Grenada and Antigua and Barbuda. Civil defamation awards are often heavy and in Grenada, recently, one newspaper was forced to close its doors under the burden of a defamation award.

The challenges to free expression have come via the chilling effect not only of the presence of strong defamation laws, but the presence of social attitudes toward what constitutes “decency” and issues of good taste. There is also a sense that free expression should not harm children, offend religious practices or promote social discord.

In Jamaica, for example, the Broadcasting Commission has a no-play list of music. In Trinidad and Tobago, the Board of Film Censors has more than once banned movies and on more than one occasion, the police have stormed theatre stages for the use of obscene language. In many countries, broadcasters will not play music that appears to offend the ruling party.

State advertising and government fiscal prerogatives have been used in some countries to punish errant media, performers and other social groups.

Importantly, the ACM indicated, a vulnerability to natural disasters has led to temporary and permanent media closures and has created a level of vulnerability since state support can be selectively applied post-disaster.

The ACM also pointed to the fact that disparities in access to online media/mobile technologies continue to exist in some states. This meant that the freedom to seek and access expression was often not honoured. The Association also pointed to instances in which state officials have expressed a desire to impose restrictions on internet content and had, in at least one instance, been cited as a measure possible under telecommunications regulation.

Were we there, or did we arrive?

2010-02-13T10:58:00.002-04:00

One headline in the February 9, 2010 edition of the Cuban newspaper, Granma, caught my attention as I continued to look at the situation in Haiti and the challenge it poses to the Caribbean Community; both as a formal institution for the achievement of integration and as a community of people living in the same space who believe they ought to share a common future.

Granma headlines a story on Cuban assistance to Haiti in the wake of the January 12 earthquake with: “Cuba is not arriving, Cuba is already here.”

It is a fitting slogan in the context not only of Cuba’s longstanding philanthropic diplomacy in the Caribbean, but as a starting point in considering the Caricom “response” to the post-earthquake crisis. The USA, for certain, was already there, so were Canada and France and the United Nations. China and Spain and others also found themselves there long before arrangements for a Caricom photo-op were being considered – an opportunity scuttled by ineptitude.

But, what is the truth? Were we (Caricom) already there, or did we have to “arrive”?

In a sense, Caricom has long been in Haiti and Haiti has long been in Caricom. I am not talking about the country’s formal accession to Caricom in 2002 following provisional membership in 1998, but about the things that have joined Haiti to Jamaica, Cuba, The Bahamas, Turks and Caicos and other neighbours over many generations.

But, the question stands: Was Caricom, the institution, there for Haiti on January 12? And this does not mean the office occupied by St Lucian diplomat, Earl Huntley – a facility that was closed in 2004 “following the interruption of democratic governance” (when former President Jean Bertrand Aristide was voluntarily/involuntarily whisked away in the face of violent political clashes) and only re-opened in 2007 through the largesse of the Canadian government.

It can be said that the assembling of Caricom aviation officials for a workshop in Haiti the very day of the earthquake constituted a “Caricom” presence in the country. But, was Caricom there?

We have to be truthful. The answer is NO.

As I have argued over the years Caricom, as an institution, was never prepared for Haiti’s membership. The Caricom Secretariat struggled with issues of language, bureaucratic culture, political dynamic and geography for years, since the initial move to bring Haiti into the fold in the mid 1990s.

The countries of Caricom have also never fully come to terms with Haitian membership. Many Haitian officials (not, now, including those with diplomatic passports), journalists, artistes and business persons have faced the embarrassment and inconvenience of restrictive visa regimes for travel by Haitians within Caricom. Even when the experiment of a “single domestic space” for the Cricket World Cup was initiated in 2007, Haitians continued to be discriminated against by Caricom member countries.

It is true that the first time and only time I went to Haiti was in 1994 and I remember having to apply for a Haitian visa in Miami then. That requirement was eventually dropped around the time provisional membership was accorded the country in 1998. But, to date, not even those Caricom states not immediately affected by the inflow of Haitian economic refugees have budged with this restriction.

Yet, during visits to Guyana and Jamaica in the days following the earthquake, I witnessed a caring and generousity on the part of Caricom nationals that I must say I have only witnessed before through the efforts to put Grenada back on its feet following the impact of Hurricane Ivan back in 2004.

Yes, Caricom arrived in Haiti through the aid sent, journalistic assignments and the generous monetary contributions of citizens which in some instances exceeded the financial contributions of their countries. And yes, Caricom arrived via the Caribbean Disaster Management Agency and official visits by diplomats and bureaucrats. But, they were not there, they had to arrive.

The failure and inability of the official institution to adopt a leadership posture in even one aspect of the process of rescuing, healing, counseling and protecting the people of Haiti rendered it an irrelevance in the scheme of things.

This is not to blame anyone for anything. It is simply to state a fact.

Haiti, for instance, is due to chair the meeting of Caricom Heads in July. Let’s see.

Pan in Development

2010-02-08T18:20:00.000-04:00

I think it might have been some time in 87/88 when the current Trinidad Express Editor-at-Large Keith Smith and I were walking through Independence Square in Port of Spain that I came up with the theory that if Trinidad and Tobago were to abandon oil (we were not yet full swing into natural gas) and our feeble attempts at mass tourism and the 1980s version of (carbon-laden) heavy manufacturing we could have found a suitable developmental alternative in the form of the steelpan industry.

Keith responded with his customary grunt of approval/disapproval which sometimes translated into a smile that really meant: “Bullshit!” Then we turned to talk of politics and how Lloyd Best had been right about the NAR all along. The “bourgeois revolution” was how I described the administration in one “Debate” column.

Soon, the discussion caused me to forget and virtually abandon my steelpan theory.

Then came Best’s version of the same plan. He called it “school in pan” – a play on an official thrust then to put “pan in school”. The head of the country’s largest Hindu organisation had countered at some stage that if the steelpan were to be put in school, so should the dholak, dhantal and sitar.

I suppose he had a point if in all musical instruments we truly find keys to ourselves that do not reside in any other area of human effort; not even the writing of poetry.

But there cannot be any comparison between the playing of pan and the skills required to play the sitar. They are simply different instruments with different requirements for mastery. Which is better? The piano or the guitar?

What makes the two different in the context of Trinidad and Tobago is that the best steelpan players in the world and the best steelbands reside in the place of the instrument’s birth. There is little dispute that the winner of the annual Panorama steelband championship is, without much doubt, the leading steelband in the entire world.

Perhaps in time the baton will pass. It is already passing to some in the United States, Britain, Japan, Scandinavia and other parts of the world where people have recognised the beauty of this instrument. That is par for the course. Black Stalin was mistaken to believe that in legally owning the pan-stick and the pan itself, we could patent the ability to master an instrument.

Pan is also not, of course, the greatest musical instrument in the world. The musicians would explain how technically limited it really is and, therefore, how magnificent the Len Boogsie Sharpes and Robbie Greenidges and Ken Profession Philmores are as masters of the pan.

I suppose what Best meant was that steelbands brought to Trinidad and Tobago society a form of democracy and civility and education that had the potential to bring about the kind of transformation needed to take our country forward. It was thus much more than a question of taking pan to school, but the challenge of taking the school to pan.

I sincerely believe that if Best and I were the ones having that Independence Square chat over 20 years ago he too would have similarly grunted, but filed the thought and come back with it as an offer to promote the nation in pan.

If I remember correctly, I thought then it would have been possible to have downed tools at Pt Lisas and O’Meara and Pointe-a-Pierre and taken up our steelpans as export product, community developer and as a tool to move the country forward politically.

All of this came to mind on February 7 when I sat in the shambles the Ministry of Culture calls the “stands” at Queen’s Park Savannah where people are being asked to witness our greatest moments.

On the stage were both school and pan – Junior Panorama 2010. And I thought, as Mikhail and his colleagues played, that this wonderful experience that brings so much joy to our children was far more important than anything else the country has to offer to them. Much more, certainly, than the bullshit now being called “conference tourism” or the natural gas downstream industries that are proving to be as problematic as they are temporal. The gas, my friends, will run out.

Apologies for the melodrama. It happens every year around this time. And each year I am more convinced that few have truly understood the value of pan and what is possible because of it.

Guns, Gauze and Goodwill in Haiti

2010-01-25T10:17:00.000-04:00

I have been following the responses of some in the Caribbean region to the manner in which the Haiti rescue and recovery process has unfolded in Haiti over the past few days.

There have been several references to the issue of the impoverishment of the country as a result of reparation payments to France and the non-redemption of a series of international pledges - mostly from the United States.

Now comes the observation that the effort in Haiti has taken on an 'imperialistic' flavour with more guns than gauze - as colourfully rendered in one account widely circulated on the Net.

I am more than a little disappointed that many Caribbean commentators have chosen to ride that particular band-wagon. In my view, there is a hand to bite only because there is a hand that has brought food. This is not to suggest that the offer of food should come with the surrender of sovereignty, but that it is alarming that in the midst of immediate peril and pain, such considerations are finding their way into the public discourse in the Caribbean.

Following the devastation in Grenada in 2004, Trinidadian troops and an army of (TT) state-sponsored clean-up workers and volunteers 'stormed' (in a second wave) the island. In due course, Trinidad and Tobago was being described by several leading personalities in Grenada - in conversations with me - as 'the new imperialists. '

There were almost as many guns as there was gauze and galvanise and goodwill. What was however sometimes missing was graciousness.

Sometimes, in a crisis, I argue, these are all requirements of/for those left in despair and suffering. In the heat of battle, though, space is not often available for contemplation and reason.

There is no guarantee that had Caricom - not the people of Caricom ... the official movement - taken on immediate leadership of the rescue process in Haiti the menu would have been any different. The bread would have still been dropped from helicopters and hungry people taking any available food would have still been 'looters'.

It is clear that our supposed knowledge of the terrain and intimacy with the people of a Caricom ally has meant almost nothing in the current circumstance. This was not the case in Grenada.

This dynamic is not a function of imperialism. It is the product of us not taking responsibility for ourselves. Caricom, as an institution and maybe as a cohesive community, was never, ever prepared for Haiti.

Now for 2010

2010-01-10T12:15:00.000-04:00

Professional assignments have meant that it has taken some time for me to catch my bearings regarding the work that needs to be done in 2010 to continue promoting the notion that free societies are evidenced by social justice, equity and an absence of poverty and alienation. This, I suppose, is what people mean when they say they would prefer the freedom to speak their mind as a superior alternative to organised religion and partisan politics.

Everywhere we look in the Caribbean we witness the erosion of freedoms under the guise of development or the need to cope with the demands of growing chaos, social disorder and the violence that follows.

This year, we therefore probably need to keep a sharper eye out for national policy interventions in our countries that claim to promote social order but which at the same time take from us the right to speak, write and otherwise express ourselves freely.

A much clearer menu emerges: i. Broadcasting Policy; ii. Cultural Policy; iii. Trade Policy; iv. Media Policy. These are all traps and codes for censorship and official control.

Let's see what happens.

Returning Home

2009-12-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

I have perhaps spent too much time paying attention to the affairs of the wider Caribbean state and not enough on what has been happening in the country of my birth.

Much of this has been fueled by my conviction that the countries subscribing to the notion of a Caribbean Community should have long dropped their claims to individual self-determination in exchange for a broader notion of regional sovereignty. A single Caribbean country. A United States of the Caribbean - all five million of us, with Haiti and Suriname awaiting their respective turns.

Since 1994, I have been employed by institutions in St Lucia, Jamaica and Guyana and have undertaken various professional assignments or participated in conferences and workshops in almost every other English, Spanish, French and Dutch-speaking state in the Caribbean Basin.

In the process, I have come to know Kingston as well as I know Kingstown and Georgetown as well as I know Port of Spain. Moving around Castries is as easy for me as it is to weave through the narrow streets of St John’s or St George’s or Basseterre.

I am yet to identify any substantial distinction in the ethos of these places and their people. What is the difference between Gouyave and Anse la Raye? Is the conch in Nassau sweeter than the lambi St Vincent?

Some cultural antecedents vary through historical accident. The spell-check in the average Guyanese version of Word will not, for instance, include the word ‘parang’ and it takes forever to bury the dead in Jamaica even as Muslims in Trinidad and Guyana measure the time in hours. At one time St Lucian Hindus sent corpses overseas for cremation while in Trinidad and Guyana funeral pyres have been found for ages near waterways and beaches from where the ashes of the dead reach for other shores.

These are stories told by poets and musicians everywhere in these small islands and deceptively large mainland territories where people are joined, almost mystically, by both the past and by the present.

My own journey probably started with the poems of Derek Walcott in my youth followed by a visit with cousins in Barbados in 1979 and family in St Lucia a little later. Then, in the mid 80s, I met the vast rivers of Guyana I only knew through Wilson Harris and earlier Port Royal in Jamaica when I honeymooned with Celia in 1981 in the land of her birth.

But it can however probably be said that I only truly sailed away from Trinidad in 1994 when I took up the challenge of a job at the Caricom Secretariat in Guyana for one year. Since then, my concern about the state of our humanity has not revolved exclusively around the managed chaos of this wildly tossed human salad sprinkled recklessly across two small islands that seem, at times, like a million raindrops on an otherwise sunny day.

I grew to believe that by resolving the pain of all, the agony of the constituent parts would end.

It is the kind of mistake the old socialists made and that capitalism perhaps denies for all the wrong reasons.

Now comes the roguish behaviour and impunity of the Trinidad and Tobago government. On Friday December 18, trade unionist David Abdulah was carted away by the police during a peaceful march against the grossly unjust introduction of a new regime of land and property taxes. There has only been a whisper about its potential unconstitutional character, but the political strategists are perhaps awaiting a date in court.

Friday’s development needs to be placed alongside the new habit of using the Privileges Committee of the country’s parliament to silence dissent. Three journalists and a Senator have recently been referred to the Committee in an attempt to muzzle information and opinion of urgent public importance. In one case, the Committee proposed a ban on journalist, Andre Bagoo.

There is little to distinguish this behaviour from that displayed by the current parliamentary opposition, the UNC, which, while in office, proposed the most sweeping challenges to free expression the country has witnessed since the achievement of independence in 1962.

These two obvious wrongs do not result in something that is right, though the hypocrisy of some dissenters is painfully obvious to all independent observers. The question of moral authority in such matters also arises when it comes to the involvement of people who served in the UNC administration of 1995. I have neither forgiven them nor plan to forget what happened.

But the immediate question at hand remains the slow but definite descent into autocracy. David’s arrest, though not as traumatic as broadcaster Inshan Ishmael’s seizure and detention in 2007 under anti-terrorism laws, marks an important turning point in relations between the state and the people and emphasizes the unjust nature of what is being proposed and how it is to be introduced.

Some of us are concerned but not entirely surprised it has come to this. The culture of political intolerance is deep-seated and challenged only by the myth of a happy-go-lucky, freedom loving society.

The more I think about it, the more I think about truly returning home.

The ACM Story

2009-12-09T09:54:00.000-04:00

It is now eight years since a group of journalists from all over the English-speaking Caribbean got together under a PAHO banner in Barbados and decided to launch the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM). The name was actually the idea of Terry Ally who thought we should simply play with the name of our predecessor organisation - the Caribbean Association of Media Workers (Camwork) so as to maintain some kind of connection with the group that had gone defunct.

We have ended up with a rather clumsy construction that has many new-comers use the acronym ACMW. We have in fact started using 'MediaWorkers' as one word and maintained the capital 'W'. A bit inconvenient and irregular, but we survive.

Some of our international friends have even asked about the term 'media workers' and why we don't simply say Association of Caribbean Journalists (ACJ) and done wid dat ...

I however think we need to maintain our description as an organisation of 'media workers' to keep the notion of a wider, more flexible arrangement for membership. This, in my view, makes perfect sense as we look at how the media are being re-arranged and reconfigured in the new digital age.

But, more about all of that another time. In a few days, we meet for the fifth time as an organisation and I am very proud of that fact. We have done this without the kind of significant resources Camwork once benefited from. We do not have a single significant financial benefactor and have been able to meet on a fairly regular basis through creative engagements with friends and institutional partners.

I look forward to Grenada over the next few days and our Fifth Biennial General Assembly. Will keep you informed.

Returning to the Charter of Civil Society

2009-11-30T12:36:00.000-04:00

One of the more remarkable features of the two summits hosted in Trinidad and Tobago this year - (The Fifth Summit of the Americas April 17-19 and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – November 27-29) – was the almost complete absence of frank discussions on the question of existing threats to human rights, especially within attending states.

In April, for example, a significant media clampdown in Venezuela and similar threats in adjoining client states of the Bolivarian empire as being tailored by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, were completely ignored. Talk about the re-admission of Cuba to the ranks of the Organisation of American States also proceeded boldly without reference to the continued harassment of journalists and bloggers there.

In this context, it was absolutely not expected that anyone would therefore utter a single word about emerging difficulties in some of the English-speaking Caribbean states where journalists do not face the same severe restrictions or harassment, but where bad signals concerning the diminution of our freedoms are being observed.

Then, in November, CHOGM 2009 came and went without any indication that freedom-loving leaders, in even the most obtuse fashion, raised the issue of disturbing trends on the African sub-continent, in South-East Asia and in Fiji in the South Pacific where the military clampdown on free speech continues.

For the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) blindness to such transgressions is nothing new. We sat around the Caricom table for years even as Guyana sank into darkness and pain. Maurice Bishop’s reckless adventurism in Grenada was often at the expense of free speech and press freedom. Elsewhere, the state grip on broadcast media was used as a way of suppressing dissenting views and broadcasting bans on leading protagonists were par for the course in Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere; in earlier years now apparently being craved by insecure politicians in the 21st Century.

Now, in the midst of a re-examination of the Caricom process, the Charter of Civil Society – designed in 1997 as an instrument for guiding the nature of the development process in the Caribbean – has disappeared from the discussion.

Article 8 of the Charter says:

Freedom of Expression and Access to Information

1. Every person shall have the right to the enjoyment of freedom of expression including the right to:
(a) hold opinions and to receive and communicate ideas and information without interference and freely to send or receive communications by correspondence or other means;
(b) seek, distribute or disseminate to other persons and the public information, opinions, and ideas in any form whatever.

As Caribbean leaders run for protective cover under the umbrella of media laws and defective Access to Information legislation, to what extent has there been public recourse to this 12 year old undertaking?

Let’s put the Charter of Civil Society back on the stove. It is not even on anyone’s back-burner. Let’s remind the leaders of the commitments they once claimed would help bring not only the freedom of economic independence, but the liberty of modern nations.

Caricom Pre-Collapse

2009-11-10T21:49:00.001-04:00

One of the most amazing things about the imminent collapse of the Caricom project is the continued state of denial of people who should know better. Hardly a skeptical journalistic brow appeared to have been raised at the recent announcement by Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson that claims of imminent Caricom doom were being "grossly exaggerated."

Who better than nervous Caricom travelers at the Immigration booths to testify that a narrowing xenophobic eye remains trained on the Caricom logo that now meaninglessly adorns our passports?

Official trade statistics remain steadfastly focused on systemic intra-regional imbalances but blind to far more extensive anomalies between our individual states and North America and Europe. Not too long ago, one Central Bank Governor, jealously eyeing Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaican jars on grocery shelves, had been moved to declare virtual 'foul' even as the other shelves of everything else were quite in order and par for the course.

"Caricom," declared former Barbadian diplomat Peter Laurie,"has exhausted itself." I actually met Laurie several times on the Caricom circuit during his many years of work with the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Barbados. I had heard him argue the Caricom case far more forcefully than almost every single current Caricom head.

"Caricom leaders have absolutely no interest in regional integration other than what petty benefits each can gouge out of it," Amb. Laurie writes. "Most of them, except for the cheapskates and freeloaders, are slowly realising that they get out less than they put in. Caricom is no longer a win-win situation,but a zero-sum game."

What could have prompted Amb. Laurie to so decry what he once supported so passionately? He does not really explain, except to argue that Caribbean people had outgrown the Caricom project.

I do not entirely agree with him on the latter point. I believe Caricom people remain mired in the filth of colonial style authoritarianism just as solidly as their leaders. Where, today, is there a strong, independent and credible human rights organisation comprising competent, committed and fearless advocates - with perhaps the exception of Jamaica and Guyana?

How many Caribbean people believe that the media should be shackled by a regime of censorship? That journalists and their media houses should become subject to the authoritarian reins of Big Brother institutions to punish and reward accordingly?

There are few Caribbean people who hold a different view, unless their preferred political party is in opposition and do not support, during that period in opposition, notions of state censorship of the media.

I will wager that in the vast majority of Caricom states, the people who occupy political space would eventually attempt to muzzle the media if they were in power. Who in power, in this space, has not - the efforts of Bruce Golding in Jamaica on the question of defamation notwithstanding?

What does this have to do with the success or failure of the Caricom project?

Well, if the founding ideals of the integration movement, as eloquently captured in the now largely forgotten Charter of Civil Society for Caricom, continue to be ignored, the best integration architecture is guaranteed to crumble and eventually disappear.

I do not agree with Mr Laurie that international trade and liberal arrangements for the movement of goods and services pose the greatest threat to Caricom. I believe the irrelevance of the current movement emerges strongest from a failure to recognise that our greatest strengths reside in the freedoms we appear so willing to trade for bright, shiny but meaningless trinkets.

No Plans to License says CARICOM SG

2009-10-28T11:44:00.001-04:00

During a telephone conversation with the Caricom Secretary-General Edwin Carrington today, I was informed by the Secretary-General that the licensing of journalists has never been raised at any meeting of any official organ of the Caribbean Community.

He said he knew nothing about such a proposal and that any suggestion that the licensing of journalists was envisaged by the Secretariat "is not true."

I told him that a statement on the issue was made by Timothy Odle of the Caricom Secretariat at a workshop in St Lucia on October 13 at which the heads of several media organisations and institutions were present, including the ACM, CBU and CARIMAC. Media representatives from about 10 Caricom Member States were also present. I am aware that the presentation was also recorded.

Mr Carrington has given the assurance that such a measure has never been contemplated by either the Community or the Secretariat.

He said any proposal to set standards and to better facilitate the free movement of media workers in the region had to be generated by the media themselves.

I am relieved to hear this from the Caricom Secretary-General. Hopefully, this means the end of any such soundings from the regional secretariat and that it is never contemplated by any Caricom Member State in the future.

Licensing of Journalists - Feedback

2009-10-24T17:13:00.000-04:00

A story in the Trinidad Newsday of October 24 quotes Attorney General, John Jeremie, as saying the proposal to license journalists would be "ridiculous" if it were in fact true and not an "urban myth".

I suppose having only weeks ago returned to the post he could not have been briefed on every single thing. But this is a good sign that at least in one CARICOM country the proposal offered by regional technocrats will not reach very far.

There has also been very supportive feedback from some leading Caribbean personalities.

Here's hoping this battle ends soon.

Licensing of Journalists

2009-10-16T18:29:00.000-04:00

A few misguided people at the CARICOM Secretariat will try soon to get Caribbean governments to agree to model legislation that will have the effect of imposing a licensing regime on journalists and other media workers.

The move is actually part of an attempt to 'regularise' the status of professionals in a wide range of disciplines in the context of the CSME in the mistaken belief that this will somehow improve the 'marketability' of Caribbean professionals.

Apart from this premise being absolute nonsense, there is the dangerous suggestion that the licensing of journalists will help lift standards, especially if minimum training and other conditions are met.

The Model legislation is entitled the 'Model Professional Services Bill'.

The subject was raised by a CARICOM official in a rather routine manner at a CSME workshop in St Lucia on October 12.

I immediately advised that this matter is not subject to negotiation and that it will have to be contested and withdrawn as a proposal with any impact on media workers.

It is a well-established fact that the licensing of journalists constitutes an outright threat to freedom of the press and other rights. There is also useful judicial opinion on this through the Costa Rica case of 1985 and several other matters that reached the US and other courts.

The ACM is moving quickly to nip this in the bud. We are inviting a senior CARICOM official to discuss this matter with us at the forthcoming Conference and Fifth Biennial General Meeting in Grenada on December 10-12, 2009. Hopefully, the outcome will be a very clear message to have this withdrawn as a proposal to CARICOM Member States.

This is dangerous territory and I am urging everyone use the tools at our disposal to publicise this issue and to act decisively to ensure the model Bill, especially as it relates to media workers, does not reach anywhere near our parliaments.

The Media and Elections in the Caribbean

2009-09-29T17:00:00.000-04:00

Delivered in Mexico City - September 29, 2009

It is now generally recognised that the mass media play an important role in ensuring that the conduct of elections and their outcomes are legitimised and enjoy broad public support. Poor media behaviour or deficient media outputs at election time almost always lead to disaffection and turmoil and questions regarding the validity of the process. A well-informed, vigilant media however ensure that high levels of transparency and accountability prevail.

Electoral systems in the English-speaking Caribbean have traditionally recognised the value of this phenomenon, setting both general and media-specific guidelines regarding the conduct of polls. It is important that the independent work of the media is recognised and that efforts are made to ensure that its outputs reflect reality. It is among the more important roles of electoral management boards to facilitate this process.

It is also the role of the state and the wider community to maintain conditions that facilitate the unfettered work of the press. Not only must there be access of the press to information on the progress of the electoral process, but there must be unhindered access by all political elements to the media, including the state media.

State-owned media too often operate along partisan lines, depriving opposition elements of access to both paid and earned media. Private media also correspondingly respond too frequently to the lure of advertising income and pay little attention to the equitable allocation of advertising time across the political spectrum.

It is important that electoral boards encourage conditions that facilitate such access, however distant such an aspiration might be from the core mandates of such bodies. In Guyana, for the elections of 2006, the Elections Commission there successfully led the development of a Code of Conduct that pronounced strongly on the need for balance, fairness and equity in media coverage of the election.

The work of the mass media in covering elections in the English-speaking Caribbean has also over recent years taken on a level of importance that would position it as one of the more important features of the electoral process. Among other things, it is noteworthy that the liberalising of the broadcast media landscape over the past 20 years has followed closely on the heels of a wave of political change that placed longstanding opposition forces in power.

As we have noted in the ACM’s Elections Handbook for Caribbean Journalists, durable political organisations in Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, Guyana and The Bahamas were placed in unaccustomed positions as opposition parties during the period. The late Sir John Compton’s United Workers’ Party (UWP) of St Lucia had ruled for 14 consecutive years from 1982 to 1996. Eric Williams led People’s National Movement (PNM) administrations between 1956 and 1981 when he died; Guyana’s Forbes Burnham also died in office after serving as prime minister, then president of the country, between 1964 and 1985.

The late Sir Lynden Pindling of The Bahamas (Progressive Liberal Party) was prime minister for 23 consecutive years between 1969 and 1992; and the Antigua Labour Party ran Antigua and Barbuda for 28 years between 1976 and 2004.

Between 2006 and 2008 regime changes also occurred in Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, The Bahamas, and Grenada.

In almost all instances, broadcast media systems had moved from state monopolies to vastly expanded private media landscapes. In some cases, the liberalising of the broadcast media sector arose out of the view that the political parties that had now come to office had been victimised by restricted access to radio and television. Almost everywhere, the liberalising of the broadcast media occurred without regard for the important pre-requisites of an appropriate regulatory environment and an enlightened approach to the treatment of media content.

Today, the debate in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica is the extent to which self-regulation is preferred over official regulation and censorship. In most other countries of the English-speaking Caribbean the question often arises, to a large degree, in the context of state dissatisfaction with media content.

An increasingly hard look is therefore being taken at media performance at important times, especially during the holding of elections. There has always been the perception of a somewhat linear impact between media content and the outcomes of elections. So, political parties and civil society have been paying keen attention to time and space allotted for both paid and earned coverage of political parties and their activities at election time.

In Guyana, for example, a Media Monitoring Unit was established in 2006 and was able to measure column inches and broadcast time while conducting qualitative research into media performance during the election held that year. It has been suggested that the relative peace of that election, following a tumultuous poll in 2001, was at least in part attributable to mass media behaviour during the period of campaigning, guided by the work of a Panel of Media Referees who administered a widely-supported Code of Media Conduct.

Clearly, the work of the media in election campaigns is as infuriatingly imperfect as it is absolutely necessary to ensure the success of such exercises. By the same token, we continue to be challenged by a pervasive official predisposition to consider the media to be a necessary evil at election time.

The truth is the media offer the best opportunity to portray the free and transparent nature of elections. If elections are considered to be free and transparent, and citizens have confidence in their execution, their results are, more or less, held to be representative of the will of the electorate. A government installed under such conditions will more likely than not enjoy the support and confidence needed to promote social cohesion and peace.

If, however, elections are not conducted in a manner that provides for the free exchange of ideas and solutions among candidates, their parties and the population; and if the process of voting and declaring results is not transparent, the outcome can and will impact negatively on the ability of the eventual victor to govern.

The common factor is all of this is an unfettered flow of information, analysis and opinion. Notwithstanding the logistical and regulatory imperatives, a successful election is one that is conducted in a transparent and open way, and brings an electorate to the ballot box with a proper grasp of the issues and proposed remedies that characterise the countries in which they live.

There must also be real choice among candidates and parties. They must be permitted to campaign openly and without hindrance and the rules of the game must be known and respected by all.

The practice of journalism has the potential to reinforce the pre-requisites of properly run elections. The basic journalistic tenets of accuracy, impartiality and sound judgment are important assets within the framework of democratic elections. Good election reporting, then, simply means good journalism.

Perhaps more than ever before, a spotlight of critical scrutiny is falling upon journalists covering elections. Changes in the social, cultural and political environment in the Caribbean have brought into sharper focus the media’s role in the reporting of election campaigns. For election campaigns themselves have been gaining a new and even dramatic historical significance.

Thankfully, election results in the English-speaking Caribbean have generally been widely accepted. There have, of course been the exceptions. Doubts and partisan claims regarding the integrity of the electoral process have led to post-election disturbances in Grenada, Guyana and St Kitts and Nevis. Unstable political conditions also followed the 18-18 election deadlock in Trinidad and Tobago in 2001.

Relationship with Electoral Management Boards

Journalists typically consider the relationship they develop with electoral management boards to be almost as valuable as the connections they establish with contesting parties. Though the activities of the political parties constitute the backbone of electoral coverage, dispatches from electoral boards in the Caribbean are generally accepted as authoritative and credible and are used in a routine manner.

It is perhaps a shortcoming of journalists that a greater degree of scrutiny is not usually applied to information generated by these bodies. It is also not generally recognised that the responsibilities of electoral boards are capable of generating far more critical information on the conduct of elections than is otherwise recognised.

The range of story possibilities includes functions such as:

• The delimitation of boundaries
• Voter registration
• The registration of political parties
• Nomination of candidates for elections
• Training of electoral staff
• The conduct of polling
• Vote counting and declaration of the Counting of the final results

It is probably true to say that the work programmes of electoral boards constitute a blueprint for the news agenda for elections. Most of the news and information generated for an election are associated with the processes that apply between the setting of boundaries and the final count and declaration. The boards as the implementing agency for these processes are the single most important sources of credible information. If an electoral board is considered to be compromised in any way, the entire elections process loses credibility and the support of the press.

In most instances, electoral boards employ media liaisons to maintain contact with the press. This is a most important function that is ignored at the peril of the relevant body. The role of these professionals should be considered to be facilitative and not obstructive. Too often, media liaisons attached to quasi-state institutions, consider their role to be to ensure there is arms-length exposure to the press. It is important that transparency is maintained throughout all processes associated with the work of the board.

Observer Missions

Over recent years, regional and international observer missions have become rather standard players in elections throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. They have added a new dimension to coverage of elections. In addition to electoral boards, these missions in most instances are sources of information on the voting process.

The presence of high-profile international personalities, chosen because of their expertise, knowledge and independence, also provides an opportunity to enhance the credibility of boards by providing a presumably independent source of information validation.

The mandates of observer missions also provide a cue to journalists on areas of attention and possible coverage. Though some areas appear routine, they play an important part in the smooth and efficient conduct of elections. They include:

• Locations of polling stations
• Seating arrangements at polling stations
• Accuracy of the list of electors at polling stations
• Distances travelled by voters to polling stations in rural areas
• Time voters waited to cast their votes
• State of readiness of polling stations
• Availability or otherwise of adequate supplies of ballot papers, sealing wax, etc.
• Security of ballot papers prior to the elections
• Steps taken (if any) to ensure the secrecy of the ballot paper
• Performance of election officers at the polling stations visited
• Procedure followed at the opening of the polls
• Adequacy or otherwise of polling stations’ facilities
• Comments of contesting party agents on the electoral arrangements
• Procedure for the use of indelible ink
• Incidence of loss of voters’ cards
• Procedures in place to ensure proper security of ballot papers, ballot boxes and official seals
• General environment at the polling stations visited
• Intimidation of voters by security officers and/or others

Public Opinion Surveys

A debate exists whether public opinion polls play a role in determining the outcomes of elections. The media now routinely include publication of survey results as part of their election coverage. It is important that media houses apply more rigorous standards when it comes to their acceptance of survey results and their eventual decision to publish such surveys.

In many instances, as well, newspapers commission their own surveys. It would be important to accompany these surveys with a level of public awareness and education on the value of such exercises so that media audiences are in a position to make their own assessment of their acceptability.

Media Monitoring

The value of media monitoring and refereeing cannot be underestimated. This ensures that media coverage plays a role in validating electoral processes and outcomes and uncovering transgressions when they occur.

The Guyana experiment of 2006 provides us with a model that has the potential to improve relations between electoral boards and the media, heighten public awareness of the work required to execute and election and produce more acceptable levels of media performance at election time.

Why Media Self-Regulation in Guyana

2009-09-17T20:32:00.000-04:00

Georgetown, Guyana – September 11, 2009

The growing demand for media self-regulation in the Caribbean has, over recent years, been largely motivated by the need to obviate the need for further overt state regulation. Somewhere in the already densely-wooded terrain of official censorship, regulation and legislation has emerged over the past 15 years or so, a dreaded Dementor – known by Harry Potter for its ability to sap the soul and happiness of those gone astray – drawing the fiery line between freedom of the press and its presumed responsibilities.

This is, indeed, a dense jungle cultivated over many years of colonial rule and an authoritarian culture that has followed and flourished at the hands of leaders who appear to have dropped the baton of leadership and have instead chosen the whip of authority.

It is difficult, in this context, to make a clear distinction between what is being proposed by state actors (not by us) as voluntary media self-regulation, and the application of regulations, laws and conventions that impose a range of checks on free expression – under whose banner resides freedom of the press.

The Legal and Regulatory Framework

First, let’s see what already exists as official regulation and law and what prevails as open restrictions on free expression – freedom of expression being not only the right to express oneself, but the right to seek and receive the expression of others.

In our countries, there are laws and regulations that impose restrictions and accompanying penalties with respect to: sedition, state secrecy, defamation, obscenity, incitement, privacy and intellectual property, and restrictions that have to do with media coverage of parliament, elections and the law courts. There are also regulations that govern the actual conduct of media enterprises through the right of establishment and prior censorship.

In Guyana, you have a Publication and Newspapers Act, Cinematograph and Video Act, Defamation Act (1959), a Summary Jurisdiction Act that deals with what is described as ‘indecent advertisement’ and ‘profane language’ and a Racial Hostility Act which speaks of the publication of material that can be described as willful excitement of hostility or ill-will against persons on the basis of their race.

What is evident from this cursory glimpse of the regulatory environment within which the Guyana media operate is that there is no shortage of official regulation. This is not a statement of either support for or opposition to what exists. Much of this is standard fare in other Caribbean jurisdictions and, in some instances, there is a level of legislative enlightenment not evident elsewhere in the region. For example, some of the shortcomings of the 1964 Racial Hostility Act are eloquently addressed in the Prevention of Discrimination Act of 1997. The corresponding legislation in my own country, the Equal Opportunity Act, intrudes far more gratuitously into the arena of free speech.

However, this presentation is not to pronounce on the existing regulatory framework regarding the work of the media in this country, except to say it is both abundant and pervasive.

As a consequence, the notion of co-regulation as a formula for addressing perceived shortcomings in the performance of the Guyana media is not only a conceptual anomaly but inherently redundant as a model for taking this challenge further. State policing of media is already well entrenched in a wide variety of areas. In fact, the outlook is for further official incursion with the imminent introduction of broadcasting regulations which should end the state monopoly on the operation of radio enterprises but which at the same time will certainly include prior restraints on some content.

The Media Compact

To add to the brew, sections of the national community aggrieved by perceived media shortcomings or transgressions are inclined to demand a greater say in the designing of the regulatory infrastructure. In many respects, this is justifiable if we assume that the protection of media rights is predicated on a notion of the media’s ability to contribute to the public good, employing the assumption that a free press is inalienable in the pursuit of democracy, transparency and public accountability. For this reason, a self-regulatory mechanism must include provisions for public feedback and a process for responding to such feedback.

This has often led to the conclusion that an abdication of this role signifies a surrender of the right to exist as free and independent entities. But it is not as simple as that. Media responsibility is impossible without press freedom. But being “responsible” is constantly promoted as a pre-condition to being free.

It has become fashionable nowadays to adorn censorship with the crown of media responsibility. This, of course, is an authoritarian trap fueled in part nowadays by growing feelings of public insecurity and the fear that the new wireless technologies signify a loss of official control. The concept of cultural relativism has also re-entered the picture at a time when the conclusions of the New World Information and Communication Order have long lost their legitimacy.

In short, we are talking about the argument that the nature of a country or community’s censorship arrangements is dependent upon its cultural antecedents. It is the kind of argument that has been used to support everything from female genital mutilation in some communities to the existence of child brides and substance abuse in others. “This or that is okay, depending on where you are,” the argument goes.

There is also the fact of our various social crises. Where in the Caribbean is there not the plague of violence and crime? Where has the economic crisis not accentuated systemic inequity and social justice? Where have the media not been accused of complicity in all of the above? Where have our societies not attempted to shift blame to external factors? And what have been the proposed solutions?

I recently reminded our colleagues in Jamaica that we cannot censor ourselves out of our current situation. Our condition is a classic instance of needing to build a capacity to recognise the truth – a truth that has the potential to set us free.

So, we come to today’s question of getting our act together as journalists and as media enterprises.

If self-regulation is not to become self-mutilation it cannot and must not signify engaging in self-censorship. For it to be meaningful and effective, media self-regulation has to represent the will of media enterprises and their key functionaries – journalists in particular – to commit to applying a variety of voluntary editorial guidelines.

Media Accountability

Any such arrangement must also meet the basic requirement of media accountability – a veritable social payback on account of the special dispensation under which the media claim unique rights. Media accountability represents a pact with our audiences with the potential to promote higher standards while fostering greater public confidence and trust.

This relationship is based on the premise that free and independent media constitute the best guarantee of open, democratic, transparent and accountable governance. As a consequence, people are empowered to make public and private decisions on the basis of reliable, unfettered information, analysis and opinion.

The success of this arrangement relies heavily on mass media systems being committed to high professional standards through adherence to codes of professional ethics and application of media accountability systems that promote open scrutiny of the work of the media by consumers of media products.

This can take different forms and, in the case of Guyana, an effective media accountability system can have said to have applied during the general elections of 2001 and 2006. To quote from the ACM’s Election Handbook for Caribbean Journalists:

Media organisations had signed on to their own Code of Conduct, and had recruited two senior journalists, Harry Mayers from Barbados and the late Dwight Whylie from Jamaica to serve as Independent Media Monitors and as a Refereeing Panel.

In the judgment of Mayers and Whylie, that 2001 experiment failed. They concluded: "The self-regulation which the Media Code of Conduct represents failed dismally during the election campaign. It was ignored or violated far more than it was complied with."
Guyana did not, however, give up on media self-regulation.

As the 2006 elections approached, Guyanese media people came together again to draw up what they hoped would be an improved model of self-regulation.
In a historic January 2006 exercise, 39 media leaders and representatives signed their adherence to a Code of Conduct. Extensively debated beforehand, the document was formally titled, “Code of Conduct for the Media for Reporting and Coverage of Guyana Elections 2006 for Owners, Publishers, Editors and Journalists, including Associated Guidelines.”

Suffice it to say, the more elaborate arrangements in place for 2006 were assessed as having worked successfully and produced a working model for broader application in the wider Caribbean.

One of the more important aspects of the project was the ability of both media professionals and the public to take their grouses about coverage of the election to the Independent Referees recruited from Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica.

A more permanent mechanism will have to produce independent referees from within Guyanese society and there would probably be the need for the various media enterprises to designate their own in-house juries to entertain and respond to complaints from media consumers. It calls for a level of maturity and candour in excess of the 2006 project and a mechanism that transcends the daily competition for readers, listeners and viewers.

Actual in-house mechanisms can begin with acceptance of clear, unambiguous guidelines for professional behaviour and a system of enforcement that may or may not reside within work contracts or other interventions that enforce a variety of penalties.

Among the major objectives of these mechanisms would be to ensure that errors are corrected and that content which violates rights or accepted community standards is sanctioned internally instead of in the court or through other undesirable means such as advertising and sales boycotts and the like.

Industry-wide mechanisms can include media ombudsmen jointly employed by the media industry with a “name and shame” mandate such as applies with the Media Complaints Council of Trinidad and Tobago.

The Media Complaints Council of Trinidad and Tobago

It might be said that MCC was born in sin in 1997 when the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPA) attempted to head-off threatened state sanctions by hastily establishing a mechanism that would keep an increasingly agitated government at bay. The Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT), which represents media workers, refused to be a part of what it described as being a half-baked attempt at keeping the government at arms length from the media industry.

It was that very year the Basdeo Panday administration published a Green Paper on media reform which had as its objective the development of what was suspiciously described as a “free and independent media” that accepted responsibility for the promotion of national unity and economic and social progress. Under such a regime, the external image of the country would be suitably tidy to facilitate new investments, tourism and a better business environment.

The MCC was also established under the banner of media accountability with a reporting mechanism in place to entertain what the government at that time described as overwhelming public dissatisfaction with the performance of the press. Through the financial support of TTPBA members, the MCC has been able to perform this function and has even established a toll-free hotline.

Council Chairman, former Senate President, Michael Williams, has however repeatedly noted an extremely low number of complaints – most of which are generated by political activists and repeat complainants. This is despite frequent advertisements in the press, the presence of the hotline and generally magnanimous responses to complaints by media houses.

The only other experiments of this kind in the English-speaking Caribbean have not survived. The Caribbean Press Council (CPC) was born of the Caribbean Publishers and Broadcasters Association in the 1980s and folded quietly in 1990. In 2003, an Eastern Caribbean Press Council (ECPC) was launched, studiously ignoring the presence of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) which was inaugurated in 2001 with a mandate to promote press freedom in the region. The ECPC now appears to have followed the path of the CPC.

A Prospective Model

In these experiments may well be found a home-grown model upon which similar efforts elsewhere can be founded. There will be, importantly, the opportunity to learn from some significant mistakes:

1. Voluntary self-regulation by the media should not be in response to the prospect of forcible official interventions. Self-regulation mechanisms should arise from an understanding of the requirement to function at acceptably high professional standards and to be accountable to media consumers from whose interests arises the inalienable right to function freely and independently;

2. Self-financing avenues, seeded by media industry investments, can mean the difference between a project that is sustainable and one that is not. Corporate and state financial support should not be direct;

3. National media worker organisations, insofar as they are institutional protagonists of press freedom and freedom of expression, must be embraced and form an integral part of the resource infrastructure of the mechanism;

4. The state media should come to the table as equal partners with private media;

5. Public awareness and education on the work of the media and why they need to be free and independent should be among the functions of national media industry and media worker organisations;

6. An attempt should be made to engage the support/endorsement of a majority of media enterprises.

The Role of the State

Countries that express an interest in media self-regulation should be aware that the larger context required for such a pursuit to be successful must exist. The state should not be engaged in administering, either in whole or in part, any aspect of media self-regulation mechanisms. However, the state can play a facilitative role by ensuring that the legislative and regulatory environment is conducive to greater press freedom.

To some degree, there already exists in Guyana and other countries of the Caribbean the constitutional basis for this to occur. Section 146 (1) of the constitution of Guyana states: “Except with his own consent, no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of his freedom of expression, that is to say, freedom to hold opinions without interference, freedom to receive ideas and information without interference, freedom to communicate ideas and information without interference and freedom from interference with his correspondence.”

In Trinidad and Tobago there is a guarantee of freedom of thought and expression. There is also a specific guarantee of freedom of the press. Over the years there have been attempts to assert its superfluous nature, given the existence of freedom of thought and expression.

Most other Commonwealth Caribbean countries, like Guyana, have maintained the formulation employed in their independence constitutions and include freedom of expression, with standard limitations related to defence, public safety, public order, public morality, public health, privacy and the protection of reputations.

Another area in which the state can foster an environment conducive to high professional standards in the media is through the passage of access to information laws. We should however be reminded that there are good examples of these laws and accompanying regulations as well as bad examples. Beware of that list of exempted persons and institutions and the ease with which it can be amended.

There ought to also be protection for whistle-blowers and journalists with information acquired from confidential sources against demands for disclosure. In addition, laws and regulations related to the establishment of media enterprises should be uniformly applied and transparently administered.

The state, in many of our countries including Guyana, is often also a significant employer of journalistic resources. There should be contractual and other guarantees to ensure that these media workers are not subject to arbitrary behaviour especially as they relate to the vagaries of partisan politics. The state media are owned by the country, not by the party in power.

The Role of Journalists

The professionals most directly affected by the absence of an environment of freedom and independence in the media are the journalists – the broadcasters, reporters, photo-journalists and technicians that pull everything together.

Journalists are also relied upon, under conditions of media self-regulation, to exercise their rights in an ethical manner. They can do so by recognizing and observing a commitment to the truth; being loyal to the citizens they serve; practicing the journalism of verification; maintaining independence from those they cover; serving as an independent monitor of power; providing a platform for public criticism and compromise; striving to make news and information interesting and relevant; keeping news comprehensive and proportional; be willing to exercise personal conscience.

Journalists also need to get themselves organised and to unite in defence of press freedom and freedom of expression. This has to cut across competitive commercial lines. An attack on one journalist or media enterprise must be interpreted as an attack on all. Only through solidarity will the objective of free and independent media be realized.

2009-08-24T21:45:00.000-04:00

I had the privilege of meeting the extraordinary Mexican journalist, Lydia Cacho, at the IFEX meeting in Oslo last June.

Earlier this month, she wrote the following piece for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Cacho, a top Mexican reporter, describes a life under threat

Lydia Cacho (CPJ)

A month ago I sat next to a cop, turned on my computer, and opened my blog. The threats were there: "My dear lydia cacho get ready to be found soon with your throat slit, your pretty head will be left outside your apartment if you think you are so brave bye."

A series of similar threats and insults prompted the officer to recommend I leave Mexico. The young policeman is one of my sources and, at least for me, one of the few people in the country who can be trusted. Instead I gave him a description of the armed men who had been watching my house, of their cars, and of the license plates that, according to authorities, don't match the vehicles. The evidence is indisputable and yet I am left helpless.

Over a long 18 months, 17 other journalists have been threatened in my country. Quietly, I go over my security routines every morning, hoping only that I will not be the one to stain the numbers with blood this month. Many of my colleagues do the same thing. The best reporters in the country live every day as if they were covering the war in Iraq. But unlike foreign correspondents that go back to a safe home to tell their horror anecdotes, to talk about what happens to other people, here we record the reality of a country that has normalized violence to the point of showing off a merciless war that has cost the lives of more than 10,000 people. One Sunday, nine people were found beheaded in Tijuana, near the border with the United States. Beheadings have become a ritual for drug cartels.

I wonder which of the powerful individuals I have named in my investigations into organized crime is the author of the threats against me. Or who paid the hired gun who is threatening to behead me. I am fully aware that it is not the businessmen and politicians who have avoided prosecution and have become my enemies. They are not street crooks. They are child traffickers and users of child pornography, millionaires with tight links to the Mexican Supreme Court, who are legally untouchable. They filed a defamation suit against me, and I won the trial. I sued them for corruption and torture, and they bought off the justice system.

I don't believe in heroism. I have used all the legal resources at my reach to defend my right to investigate and reveal my country's reality. As I write these lines, I am protected in my own city, at a colleague's house. My home, for the moment, is not safe. While writing a book on global networks of human traffickers, I talk to the lawyers who are taking my case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Mexican government has denied me the right to justice, and authorities are the ones who have put me in real danger. Impunity is a criminal's best ally.

A few days ago, around midnight, my neighbor called me on the phone to warn me that, once again, a car was parked outside my apartment. A man was prowling and had walked up to my door. No one dared go outside to check if he was armed. Nobody calls the police anymore. We don't know if they are accomplices, and no one takes the time to find out.

As Barack Obama and Felipe Calderón enjoyed a typical Mexican meal this week, they both celebrated freedom in Mexico and "the protection of human rights." In the meantime, thousands of Mexican soldiers go into homes without warrants, hundreds of women and men are jailed without trial or evidence against them, 365 journalists have been intimidated, and 142 have been subject to attacks and torture.

All we have left are the international bodies, the Inter-American Commission's precautionary measures, and eventual trials in the court itself. To stay alive without fleeing the country, when there is no justice in our own land, there is nothing left but to stand up for the whole world to see us, to remind friends and foes that freedom is not gained by kneeling or in silence.

Cacho is a prominent Mexican journalist and human rights activist based in Cancún. Among many honors, she received the 2008 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

Covering Elections in the Caribbean

2009-07-05T09:21:00.000-04:00

On July 3, the Election Handbook for Caribbean Journalists, published by the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM), was launched in Jamaica. It was the first in a series of launches, some of them to be accompanied by training in the coverage of elections.

Here are some of the remarks I made on the occasion:

I bring greetings from the ACM network of journalists and their representative organisations in the Caribbean region on the very significant occasion of the launch of the Jamaica Press Institute. There are also few better qualified persons to deliver the Institute’s inaugural lecture than Claude Robinson and I pay tribute to him this evening as an icon of Caribbean media practice and as a leading light in the ongoing work of crafting a Caribbean media aesthetic and frontier.

But this is hardly the brave new world our forebears thought would accompany notions of equity and freedom and political independence. Instead, the decay and decline Huxley envisioned in his novel of the same name more closely fall into alignment with present day reality.

At the core is a people seemingly gone astray and lost. Around the outer crust the declining superstructure of First and Second and Third and Fourth Estate. If there was ever a time for us to re-create ourselves it is now. If there was ever a time to take a new mark at the wicket and survey the field it is now. Caribbean society resides in the kind of pre-collapse civilizations greater than ours found difficult to negotiate.

Somewhere in all this is a brave new journalism waiting to enter the arena and to influence the kind of change needed to rescue us from ourselves. It is a journalism unfettered by the past, however valuable many of its antecedents. It is a journalism that promises to bring the brashness and irreverence of the iPod generation together with a grasp of our reality that transcends otherwise simplistic formulations that have led to a diminution of our rights and freedoms.

We cannot censor ourselves out of our current situation. Our current condition is a classic instance of needing to build a capacity to recognise the truth – a truth that has the potential to set us free.

This is the context within which the ACM approaches our mandate to network, train and advocate on behalf of Caribbean journalists and media people. It is an approach to addressing our present condition that recognises, in this particular instance, the ineluctable connection between democracy and the practice of journalism.

We also introduce our Election Handbook for Caribbean Journalists in the knowledge that the independent work of journalists in covering elections can serve as a catalyst for promoting the democratic conduct and outcomes of such exercises.

As you would recognise, especially from very recent experience here in Jamaica, the coverage of elections is much more than reporting on campaigns and the counting of ballots. Adequate coverage of elections is very much a part of the process that instills confidence in democracy and spans a much wider variety of political interaction than we sometimes care to believe.

It is our hope that this Handbook will prove useful in attempts to improve on our coverage of elections in the region. It is by no means an entirely adequate resource, nor is it the only of its kind. But is the only one that I know of that has been produced by journalists for journalists.

DROWNING OUT THE LOOMING STORM

2009-06-04T04:38:00.000-04:00

Journalists, writers and activists in the Caribbean confront a creeping but determined wave of silence as the tide of social and economic instability and decline advances. New-born, almost still-born nations have walked before they have learned to creep in the stark absence of ancient cultural habits that often, though not always, strengthen democratic instincts and systems.

Mexican journalist and writer, Lydia Cacho, was raped in 1999 in an attempt to intimidate her out of writing about the exploitation of women and children in Mexico. She was later arrested and charged following her fictional treatise on the sexual exploitation of children entitled ‘Demons of Eden’.

She now tours the region and the world speaking out on the need for journalists and writers everywhere to hold their ground. Addressing the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression in Oslo on June 3, Cacho recognized that among the obstacles to achieving the ideal of unfettered journalism was unenlightened media ownership and management.

Thoughts then ran to my home in Trinidad and how Newsday had conspired with our cultural predisposition to shut out a voice with which we often disagreed – that of Kevin Baldeosingh. They came for the columnists, I thought, and no one spoke out because it was not they who had been silenced.

As German theologian, Martin Niemoller, who faced imprisonment and the threat of execution during the Nazi regime, declared for eternity: we remained silent on the crimes until it was our time “and there was no one else to speak out for me.”

The Global Forum brought together a diverse and sometimes unlikely variety of people, all prepared to speak out on each other’s and our behalf.

Malalai Joya (once known as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan”) is currently in exile, often in hiding in accommodating countries that are not her own, because she spoke out on behalf of the people of her country as an elected member of parliament. It would have been easy to have been misled by her slight frame and gentle manner, had she not opened the Forum with a stinging assault on countries that preach democracy and openness but who remain silent in the face of massive, murderous treachery and pain.

Ethiopian journalist, Serkalem Fasil, who was apparently denied a European visa and could not attend the Forum, sent a note describing her ordeal as a pregnant prisoner denied proper health care and attention while serving a prison sentence in 2005 for publishing articles critical of her government. She, too, spoke of the international condemnation that followed and how those who spoke out on her behalf, however far away, saved her and her prison baby.

Then there was freed Guantanamo prisoner, al Jazeera journalist, Sami el Haj of Qatar who turned to poetry behind the barbed-wire fences and who now heads the Human Rights Desk of the international news network – a job he holds so he can bring attention to human rights abuses around the world. He spent six years in prison without ever being charged for any crime.

So many of these people could have gone back home and changed jobs and perhaps turned the other way.

Like poet and academic, Jack Mapanje, of Malawi who still isn’t sure why he was sent to jail without charge and without sentencing for three and a half years. Today, he lectures in the United Kingdom on the literature produced by prisoners and speaks out on injustice everywhere.

It took Oslo to remind me of the importance of keeping the struggle going in order to halt the rising tide of silence. I thought of the panic attack of censors in Jamaica, the broadcast legislation in the OECS, the broadcasting code of Trinidad and Tobago and the “exiles” of Caribbean media who now use their blogs and websites to speak freely when newspapers and journals shut them out.

It is true, no one has been shot or detained or killed. But the backlash has been swift and the intention has been to silence. There are those in exile who have gone nowhere. Their souls remain hidden in computer hard-drives and copybook pages and sometimes nowhere else but in their hearts and minds.

It is a lie that our calypso and reggae and dancehall and rum-shop candour express our freedom. They simply drown out the looming storm that awaits us all.

A LITTLE CONFESSION

2009-05-22T21:58:00.000-04:00

Confession.

I have lifted this entire entry from the blog produced by Barbados-based writer B.C. Pires (bcraw.com) who cut and paste the entire piece from a column written by novelist/journalist Kevin Baldeosingh but which was not printed by its intended publishers.

These two gentlemen are Trinidadian satirists whose work has, at different times under different circumstances, been clinically excised from the pages of newspapers in Trinidad and Tobago in order that Church and State remain unshaken and at peace. Perhaps B.C. and Kevin are lucky. In some countries, they have you shot or hacked to death in the street or in your car as you park outside your home.

Twenty years ago, the access of local audiences to their work would have been virtually severed. Today, their readership need not disappear at all.

Hopefully, the thousands and thousands and thousands of you who read this blog will now help grow Kevin’s readership in ways the Trinidad Newsday could not achieve.

One more confession. I have not asked Kevin whether I can reproduce his column in this space, so read it quickly before this post suddenly disappears.

God and Constitution

By Kevin Baldeosingh

First, let me apologise to readers for the non-appearance of my column over the past two Fridays. I don’t know if it was technical glitches, but some people might well believe God was punishing me for exposing a plagiarist priest. Of course, anyone who believes that also believes in a God who does not favour truth and transparency. Which brings me to the preamble of our Constitution.  

“Whereas the People of Trinidad and Tobago (a) have affirmed that the Nation of Trinidad and Tobago is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God,” it begins: which instantly exiles people like me, who acknowledge no such thing. Indeed, this phrase formed no part of the original Independence Constitution but was inserted, as Dr Eric Williams said in an address to Parliament on May 11, 1962, because of the urging by religious organisations that there “should be in some appropriate place a preamble in the Constitution which would include a suitable reference to Almighty God.”  

Now mentioning God is one thing, but it escapes me how asserting that all the people of T&T believe in a Supreme Being can constitute a “suitable reference”. After all, even in 1960, over 4,000 persons (or just 0.5 percent of the populace) said they followed no religion or did not state their religion in the national census. The 2000 census has just over one percent of the populace not stating a religion. That’s at least 15,000 persons who are not acknowledged by the Constitution (although a 1993 survey by Patrick Johnstone puts the percentage of non-religious persons in T&T at nine percent, which is over 100,000 persons). So, if some religious fundamentalist claimed that atheists have no rights under the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago, he would have an arguable case. These rights, remember, include equality before the law, privacy, and freedom of thought. And since all these are transgressed even for believing citizens, it would theoretically  be easy for the State to oppress non-religious persons.  

Now, admittedly, this is unlikely to occur in any formal fashion. But the Constitution’s preamble, which is reproduced in the Draft Constitution, goes to the heart of the question of what principles should inform such a foundational document. On the one hand, since the vast majority of citizens would not disagree that they acknowledge the “supremacy of God” (in word, if not always in deed), it can be argued that the Constitution rightly reflects the prevailing norms of the society, as insisted by the nine organisations which got this phrase inserted into the preamble 47 years ago. On the other hand, the protection of minorities is generally considered a crucial guarantee in modern constitutions, and the preamble contradicts, even if it does not actually undermine, the rights enshrined in Clause 4 (h) and (i) – freedom of conscience, and freedom of thought and expression. (The legal question, if it ever arose, would hinge on whether the rights take precedence over the preamble or vice-versa.)  

America’s founding fathers faced this very issue when drawing up their constitution, with Thomas Jefferson being the most insistent that there should be “a wall of separation between Church and State.” In holding fast to this position, Jefferson and his colleagues were not necessarily reflecting common opinion. Indeed, his political opponents utilised accusations of atheism in order to demonise him, indicating that such an attack had a constituency. Nonetheless, the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution bans Congress from passing any law “respecting an establishment of religion”, or any which would “prohibit the free exercise” of religion. And, perhaps even more significantly, the U.S. Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public Trust.” It must be noted, however, that in respect to this issue the founding fathers essentially failed: America has the highest proportion of believers of all developed nations, and atheists are considered by most Americans to be more unfit for public office than Muslims or homosexuals. But, in another sense, this proves Jefferson’s wisdom, for perhaps the constitutional guarantees have prevented religious conflicts that would have sundered the fledgling federation.  

The inclusion of the supremacy of God phrase in our own Constitution creates a conflict for strictly ethical non-believers, for if such an individual is appointed to the Parliament they must swear to uphold the Constitution. Yet the oath itself acknowledges non-belief, since it allows the phrase “I affirm” rather than swearing on a holy book. Still, why should our Constitution create any conflict at all, especially when non-believers are likely to be more educated and ethical than born-again politicians?

World Press Freedom Day 2009

2009-05-03T15:07:00.000-04:00

The Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) extends its greetings to media colleagues throughout the international community and the Caribbean on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day 2009.

This year’s observances meet our region in a state of crisis in several critical areas of public life. Growing violence and crime, economic instability, environmental threats and a decline in social and political cohesion have left the Caribbean open to questions regarding its continued viability as a region of relative peace and stability.

The search for solutions to the growing threats has led to important interventions at the level of integrating regional resources, negotiating and securing geo-political compacts, and actions at national levels to address issues of social injustice and economic imbalances. These have not been easy tasks to engage and our media have played a role in fostering greater public understanding of the nature of the challenges being confronted.

The ACM has consequently been engaged in collaborative attempts to instill greater awareness among journalists of critical areas of human development. We have collaborated on the development of a handbook on Climate Change for journalists, contributed to regional discussions on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, human and humanitarian rights and, very soon, we plan to launch an Elections Handbook for Caribbean Journalists written and edited entirely by a team of Caribbean journalists.

The ACM also currently sits on the CARICOM Information, Communication and Technology Steering Committee where we have consistently argued in favour of an information and communication environment characterized by the right of citizens to communicate and to express themselves freely.

It is our view that free expression and greater access to information provide our citizens with important tools to make the critical decisions that shape their lives and the existence of their societies.

This is the philosophy we take to discussion tables throughout the Caribbean. It has informed our approach to proposed broadcasting legislation among countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). It has brought us in conflict with the telecommunications authorities in Trinidad and Tobago where censorship is being viewed as an antidote for social decline. It is a view that has led to the concern that the banning of songs by official censors in Jamaica makes room for other forms of attack on free expression.

It is also this philosophy that guides our opposition to the continued radio broadcasting monopoly by the state in Guyana and has led to visits to several countries over recent years to discuss areas of conflict between journalists and the authorities.

United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, has also noted the growing tendency to extend the hand of official sanction to the “new media” available via the Internet. This is an issue we continue to keep a close eye on, especially as regional regulators have left critical windows open for later intrusion into this area.

It is however also true that we have supported calls for the lifting of professional and ethical standards among Caribbean journalists and for the retooling of our newsrooms to guarantee better quality outputs. This provides the greatest assurance that consumers of media are provided with accurate, relevant and reliable news and information to employ in private and public decision-making. Media owners and managers must make the necessary investments to ensure this goal is achievable.

In pursuit of these ends, we have launched a Young Journalists Mentoring Programme which is an attempt to pair the new and young and bright with experienced, trained and competent journalists. This ambitious programme is challenged by territorial distance, a lack of finance and the fact of its own novelty, but during the course of the current year we propose to re-ignite the flame lit in 2008.

Our online and direct training programmes have over recent years spanned several countries and we are thankful for alliances with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean Area, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the Caribbean Institute for Media and Communication and the International Center for Journalists as these institutions continue to support our initiatives in the area of professional development.

Worldwide, journalists continue to be attacked, injured and killed in the line of duty. We do not routinely face these dangers. But we are always mindful of the growing potential for conflict, out of which can spring greater dangers for the journalists of our region. Our colleagues in Haiti continue to be challenged by such danger and Guyana has experienced its share of it.

On such questions, we continue to collaborate with important partners such as the International News Safety Institute (INSI) and, in 2008, we were admitted as members of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and as interim members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX).

Hopefully, we will be admitted to full membership of IFEX in June. This will provide us with important access to the resources of this global network, but it also places a greater obligation on us to monitor abuses of free expression and to report on them at the national level.

Finally, we are happy to report that the ACM has now established a permanent secretariat in Trinidad and Tobago. This has been a longstanding ambition of our organisation. It is our hope that this facility will assist us greatly as we move toward the professionalizing our work as a press freedom and media development institution in this part of the world.

Our national affiliates and focal points throughout the Caribbean have their work cut out for them this year and we offer them our unreserved support.

Wesley Gibbings
President
Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM)

May 3, 2009

Coping Through Censorship?

2009-03-12T18:36:00.000-04:00

I was invited by the Media Workers Association of Dominica (MWAD) to address journalists there on the issue of proposed broadcasting legislation on March 9.

The draft law has been in circulation for some time now, but the Government of Dominica has accelerated the process of taking it to parliament by signaling an intention to produce a White Paper for discussion and also to convene public consultations.

There is serious concern by some media workers and others in civil society that the proposed law is an attempt to muzzle political opposition. Here was my contribution to the debate:

I wish to commend MWAD for taking the initiative to organise this consultation on the Broadcasting Authority Bill ahead of further consultations to take place at the behest of the Government of Dominica.

It is important that consultations, both officially convened and organised by non-state actors, are becoming regular features of national law-making processes throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. This has not always been the case. Official edict has traditionally been viewed as a defining characteristic of governance in these former colonies. In some instances, that bad habit has been hard to kick.

It is therefore encouraging to learn that your government has chosen to initiate wide-ranging public discussion and debate on the scope and intent of this draft legislation. That a civic organisation has led off the process on its own, without official or other prompting, is an important sign that some fundamental tenets of the democratic process are features of public life in this country and that civil society is recognising a leadership role in the pursuit of development.

No one remotely interested in Dominican public affairs over the years can pretend to be surprised. Civic intervention has been a hallmark of your history and has, in the view of some, been among the fundamental pillars of the process of adaptation to new and more challenging times.

The ACM also views the formulation of the Bill at the sub-regional level as a triumph of the integration process (this is an OECS-initiated Bill) and the result of genuine concern that change requires a level of civic and official management to ensure it redounds to the benefit of all.

The Bill however comes at a time of acute challenges to the foundations of modern Caribbean society. Our societies are now more violent, less well, more vulnerable, characterised by an absence of social justice, more polarised and virtual sitting ducks in the face of international social and economic crises.

It has not been easy for some of us. In my country, Trinidad and Tobago, more than 90 young men have already been killed for the year. There are criminal gangs in our secondary schools and teenage pregnancies and STD infections are growing, not declining.

Our internal responses clearly require interventions that are as clinical as they are fervent. It is clear we need, as a region, to reconcile the practices of the past with the requirements of the future. By and large, our political and civic leadership appear to understand this well.

It is however necessary, in the view of my organisation, to ensure that that the greatest enabling factor, freedom, is preserved both as a developmental objective and as a pre-condition to the achievement of targets we set ourselves as we forge ahead.

This is the context I would wish to register as a starting point to the debate. When viewed this way, laws and rules and regulations are enabling and empowering interventions and not obstacles and shackles.

The Broadcasting Authority Bill should therefore seek to inject greater orderliness in the conduct of broadcasting enterprises in order that the goal of greater freedom and independence is achieved. This would be the yardstick I would use in measuring the potential impact of the proposed legislation.

Would the people of Dominica experience conditions more conducive to the exercise of free speech when the law is passed or would they experience a diminution of their freedoms?

In the midst of urgent interventions to counter social decline and chaos, is more information and greater exposure to competing views more or less helpful to the process?

It is significant that the Preamble to the Code of Conduct for Broadcasting Services in the Bill stipulates the founding principle of “the right to be informed and to freely receive and disseminate information.” This is important because it acknowledges the value of the free flow of information in both directions. It also implicitly promotes the view that freer conditions are superior to restrictive conditions.

In an ideal environment, the Code could have stopped right there – the rest left to professional prerogative and judgment. In fact, it can be said that much of what is expressed as broadcasting standards are basic tenets of good media practice.

(a) the observance of good taste and decency;
(b) the maintenance of law and order;
(c) the privacy of the individual;
(d) the principle that when controversial issues of public importance are discussed, reasonable efforts are made, or reasonable opportunities are given, to present significant points of view, either in the same programme or in other programmes within the period of current interest.

It must however be noted that issues of good taste and decency; law and order; privacy and balance are subject to levels of interpretation that can challenge the acceptable practice of free expression. These, indeed, are areas of concern that are not easy to legislate and I would thread very carefully when it comes to these issues. The concept of privacy, for example, can be used as a check on legitimate attempts to monitor the behaviour of public officials.

Additionally, the issue of balance in the reporting of public issues becomes problematic in the face of official silence. What, in the face of this, do we add to the other side of the scale to represent the other view when issues arise? Is there the suggestion here that silence on one side of the scale can only be balanced against silence on the other?

Quite sensibly, the Bill proposes that fairness is achieved only by judging each case on its merits and not through application of a blanket formula. In my view, much of this ought to be the function of a regime of self-regulation administered by the media industry as a whole.

It is important in this respect that media owners and managers forge alliances to ensure that some of this resides in their own hands and are not the exclusive preserve of a state-sponsored entity.

There ought also to be alliances of consumers of media content to address issues not already actionable by choice – the right to change the channel or to turn the television or radio off.

So far, the representative organisation for media workers has led the way in promoting greater awareness of what is being offered, but there is a great need for the industry and its consumer base to become actively involved. But such involvement must be informed by sound information on the actual impacts of media on human behaviour (an area of social research we have studiously avoided) and a belief that more information, more opinions and a greater variety of sources is superior to the old monolithic models of information control.

We must also avoid the pitfall of seeking cure-all responses to challenges that are far more complex than the fabled linear contribution of media content to behaviour change; far more discomforting than the morning sermons of talk show hosts but far more entrenched in the way we have conducted our public and private lives in the Caribbean.

Could not the criminal violence be more effectively addressed by reversing the trend of social exclusion and more effective policing and prosecutions against those who need to feel when they do not wish to listen? Could it not be that what is viewed and heard in the home and in the communities between parents and adults plays a far more important role in shaping behaviour among children than what is seen on the television or listened to on the radio?

This is part of the humanscape to which this draft legislation belongs. We are witnessing the unfolding of a world of collapsing borders but in which new parameters are being defined that have the potential to reconfigure old boundaries.

How we set rules for ourselves will in large measure determine the terms of our engagement with the rest of the world.

More Carnival Trash

2009-03-01T09:22:00.001-04:00

It was the usual garbage for Trinidad and Tobago Carnival 2009. Fun garbage, creative garbage, artistic garbage, music garbage. But garbage all the same.

Don’t get me wrong. Carnival is essentially about having fun and people appeared to have had a good, safe time in 2009. Women took over, as usual, and for a change felt safe and had fun on the country’s streets. There is no such thing as being “too fat” or “too ugly” to have fun. I am not among those who feign outrage at the sight of chunky, scantily clad women having fun and being proud of themselves.

What irks me most about Carnival is the pretence that its outputs are something of creative value that must be in some way, by official edict, honoured. Hence the call for broadcast content quotas to force the playing on radio of the tonnes of garbage heaped on listeners by untalented calypsonians and soca singers.

It is true that about 5% of what is produced has some creative value, but the vast majority of it is forgettable nonsense, in my view. I will continue to rail against efforts to shove garbage down our throats through content quota regulations.

Most of what was presented by way of soca and calypso will not be remembered a year from now. The Mighty Chalkdust won the Calypso King competition with what passes for satire in calypso these days. An infantile play on the word (Calder) “Hart” along the lines we once heard only at intra-mural college competitions somehow convinced the judges and the crowd that this was something worthy of a substantial financial prize.

Then there was the so-called Road March which was won by Faye-Ann Lyons singing (?) a song that repeated the line “hands inna de air” no fewer than 100 times. More rubbish substantially rewarded is difficult to imagine.

Then there was ‘the mas’. There was no improvement here over recent years. Brian Mac Farlane won with something that vaguely resembles mas’ I saw 40 years ago at small-time Carnival in Tunapuna. It was, admittedly, a different story for the King and Queen of Carnival prizes which he won with genuinely creative work. The rest was recycled, obscure, geographically inauthentic garbage.

As usual, the only thing worthy of any lasting memory were the performances of steelbands at the Panorama competitions. Because of my son, Mikhail, I followed the Junior Panorama competition this year. There is hope that pan – the best thing we do as Trinidadians and Tobagonians – will continue to play a role as music, as community consolidator and as a valuable asset to the country.

The Bishop Anstey/Trinity College East Under 13 band came second while the Under 16 slipped to third after winning the competition last year. There was such joy in the presentations that I promised to continue following the competition in the coming years.

Then there were the competitions in the single-pan, small, medium and large categories. This year, I followed the prospects of Curepe Polyphonics in the single pan category. They placed low down. Sforzata in the medium size bands. They won. And, of course Exodus in the large band category.

There is no doubt that the Port of Spain oriented judges and crowds possess an inherent prejudice against Exodus. I sat in the stands and listened to drunk and well-fed Pan Trinbago ushers and other paid assistants talk about Exodus as if they were complete outsiders. Of course, these folks ought to have been working, but they chose instead to talk right through selected performances at the top of their drunken voices.

Pan Trinbago has proven, once again, by their complete disregard for patrons, to be the worst thing for pan!

The Panorama faithful are also being cheated by the absence of a proper facility to host the annual competition. It should also be the place to go anytime of the year to listen to good pan.

I am impressed by the work of the new and upcoming steelpan arrangers and look forward to their emergence over the old and tired veterans in the coming years. Silver Stars, this year’s Panorama winners deserved the trophy and $1 million prize. Well done!

The ACM on the Move

2009-02-04T11:33:00.000-04:00

One of the more painful things for me within recent years has been the denial by some that the modest organisation launched by a handful of us in Barbados in 2001 has blossomed into an authoritative, credible and responsible organisation of Caribbean journalists.

We have at various times been described as "an email organisation", "irresponsible" and a "paper organisation." by colleagues who continue to nurse the wounds of a previous experiment that died when international largesse and freeness dried up.

To our credit, all the eggs of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers have not resided in the same basket and we have been able to distribute the risks associated with running an organisation such as this evenly throughout the global media development community.

We are already responsible for two major journalistic publications: "The Looming Storm - State of the Caribbean Media Report 2005" and the "Climate Change Handbook for Caribbean Journalists." Soon, we will launch our "Handbook for Election Coverage".

We have initiated and hosted courses, workshops and a pilot mentoring programme and intervened effectively in free press issues throughout the Caribbean.

Here is a little update on my own activities as President of the ACM.

St Vincent and the Grenadines

On the invitation of the ACM’s Focal Point in St Vincent and the Grenadines, Theresa Daniel, I visited St Vincent on January 24 against the backdrop of the police detention of Jeff Trotman of The Vincentian newspaper on December 21, 2008 and talk of the formation of a new national association of journalists.

I was able to secure a meeting with Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on the morning of January 24 and we discussed both the Trotman incident and government relations with the media in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

At the end of the meeting, I was satisfied that a serious effort was made to investigate the circumstances surrounding Trotman’s detention and that an appropriate expression of “regret” in writing had been prepared and financial compensation offered. Up to that time, the response of the Attorney General to Mr Trotman via his attorney was still being considered.

Other issues discussed included the role and modus of radio talk programmes, the existence of criminal libel and levels of professionalism in the national media.

I later addressed a meeting of senior journalists in Kingstown. It was a very impressive turnout of print and broadcast journalists. I explained the role of the ACM in relation to national associations and urged them to move expeditiously to establish their own organisation.

A steering committee, on which Theresa Daniel would serve as advisor, was nominated and timelines for follow-up discussions and activities were determined. I offered ACM assistance in this process.

I also offered to consult with our international partners to see whether some kind of professional development activity can be convened in St Vincent. We agreed that an activity linked to journalistic safety and reporting under difficult circumstances should be arranged.

Since that meeting, I have consulted with Luisa Rangel, a media trainer associated with the International News Safety Institute (who is also a member of this listserv and a longstanding friend of the ACM). She has indicated that there is a very real possibility of hosting such an activity in St Vincent and she has started looking into the matter.

I think our colleagues in St Vincent and the Grenadines need our collective support as they make the bold move to establish a strong and vibrant representative organisation for journalists and media workers in the country.

Barbados

On the invitation of the Interim Committee of the Barbados Association of Journalists and the ACM’s Focal Point, Julius Gittens, I visited Barbados on January 25-26.

On January 25, I attended a general meeting of the BAJ. It was very well attended and attention was generally paid to two main issues: (i) regularising the affairs of the organisation and (ii) the proposed increase in state registration fees for freelance journalists.

On the first point, I am confident that Amanda Lynch-Foster (interim President) and Julius Gittens (interim Vice President) and their team will do what is necessary to re-build the BAJ and to take it to a level of strength it did not have before.

On the point of registration fees, it is my view that this provision runs counter to the freedom of expression guarantees of the constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights. I have forwarded some of the articles on this subject to the folks at IFEX for interpretation.

The Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression has also appointed someone to pay attention specifically to Caribbean issues. He will also be brought into the picture soon.

Thank you, Amanda and Julius, for your hospitality. On the morning of January 26, Julius and I also appeared on the CBC morning television programme to discuss the registration issue.

Trinidad and Tobago

The Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago convened a meeting of senior journalists and editors on January 21 in an attempt to assess the training needs of journalists. The discussions were very useful.

I am concerned though that the current focus on journalistic standards in TT stems directly from the recent incident involving the Prime Minister’s inappropriate visit to a radio station to complain about the behaviour of two broadcasters.

However, the issue of raising professional standards has been a longstanding concern of the Media Association and those present shared the view that training was one way of addressing the shortcomings.

The meeting was also called on the prompting of the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPBA) which comprises media owners and managers, and which has sought guidance from MATT on the precise training needs of journalists.

Dominica

Draft broadcasting legislation is again on the table in Dominica and the ACM has been approached by the Media Workers Association of Dominica (MWAD) to assist in analysing and shaping a response to the proposed law.

We have been successful in getting IFEX support for this exercise and Article 19 has also expressed an interest in participating in an activity in Dominica to carefully examine the legislation in the context of a free expression guarantee in the country’s constitution and via international covenants.

We are currently making arrangements for such a workshop and a date is expected to be finalised soon.

Render your verdict on the ACM now.

Even More Stupidity in the T&T Parliament

2009-01-07T14:05:00.000-04:00

Parliament is not a favourite news location for many Trinidad and Tobago journalists. Hours and hours of talk and talk and talk need to be translated into less garbled language. Parliamentarians phone and write editors complaining about absent concepts, ideas and sound bites. The Press Gallery is small and cramped. The narrow staircase leading to the Press Gallery has claimed several journalistic ankles and the absence of nearby telephones and a proper working press area has tempted reporters to break the rule regarding the use of mobile phones in the parliament chamber.

Some years ago, the United National Congress dominated parliament, under the late House Speaker Hector McLean, banned the use of recording equipment by the print media. Some of us tried to lead an argument against this unenlightened, idiotic instruction and resorted to ignoring it with impunity later on. I think, over time, parliamentary officials have resigned themselves to the fact that a foolish rule is a foolish rule and almost everyone now uses electronic recording devices in the chamber without much of a fuss. So I hope, at least.

I have been off the parliament beat for years now. My last assignments in parliament were in the late 90s when I freelanced in parliament mainly for the Trinidad Guardian and, a little later, covered a few assignments for one or two radio stations.

But a large part of my journalistic heart resides in that old parliament facility in the Red House. I was among the journalists caught in the cross-fire of July 27, 1990 when a murderous band of hooligans attempted to take over the country (and held parliamentarians, journalists and a few innocent bystanders hostage for five days both in parliament and at the state television station).

Fortunately, I was able to escape to safety, leaving behind an old Marantz recorder owned by my then employers, NBS Radio 610.

Since then, I have kept tabs on parliament and its goings-on. I have observed opposition MPs suddenly become government front-benchers. I have seen some folks become comfortable in jackets and ties. I have observed changes in speaking style. How some MPs have matured. How others have regressed. How some remain hopeless as representatives of people at the highest level.

Now comes the latest round of idiocy in the form of a regulation on the use of laptop computers in the parliament chamber. The new rule dictates that only two persons at a time are permitted to have their laptops open – the person on his or her legs and the person next in line to speak.

This absurd and contentious ruling stems from last year’s suspension of Opposition Leader, Basdeo Panday, for contemptuous and disrespectful behaviour against the Speaker of the House, Barendra Sinanan. This was the culmination of an exchange over Panday’s use of a laptop during parliamentary proceedings. The suspension, it is my understanding, was not because of the laptop use but because of Panday’s outburst in response to the Speaker’s instructions about the use of his laptop. But that is another story I am not prepared to deal with.

The Speaker was later quoted as saying in response to questions about the laptop rule: “What would prevent 41 members from using laptops during the sitting? One doesn’t know if they are looking at pornography or chatting on-line.”

Has anyone, reading this blog, heard more rubbish in their lives?

Well, it seems that a parliamentary committee (no one has cared to release the names of the members) agree with the Speaker that the little boys and girls of the House of Representatives and Senate will not be able to resist the temptation to log on to their favourite porn sites if they are allowed to use their laptops in parliament.

Maybe, they are afraid that members will be busy having cyber-sex on MSN Live or Yahoo Messenger while the Prime Minister is pronouncing on serious matters.

The fact that other parliaments around the world, including, (at one time) the US House and the Australian parliament, have had similar restrictions are no reason why we should follow suit on the grounds declared by the Speaker.

Did members of the parliamentary committee consider an eminently sensible paper written by Australian Senator Kate Lundy entitled: “Cyberdemocracy and the Future of the Australian Senate” in which she questioned the absolutely foolish restriction on the use of new technology in the Australian Senate?

On the question of the possibly disruptive nature of laptops and other devices in parliament, Lundy wrote: “The possibility that online services would cause disruption and diversion was a factor in the US Congress’ decision to prohibit the use of such services on the floor. It was argued that it would be `discourteous' to a politician making a speech if other members were glued to their computer monitors, answering emails or researching legislation.

“According to the US Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House (21 November 1997), ‘If electronic devices are permitted in the chamber, lawmakers may be so engrossed in their “electronic office” that they are unlikely either to be “hearing” or “studying” the viewpoints of their colleagues.’

“On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent similar ‘distractions’ of members and senators conducting their own work while in the chamber. Noise is not a valid argument for banning computers from parliament.

“Anyone familiar with the level of ‘activity’ in either the House of Representatives or the Senate would be hard-pressed to argue that either computers or electronic voting devices would disrupt proceedings any more than is the current situation. In some respects, electronic technology might result in a ‘quietening down’ of parliament, as members would be able to work during normally inactive periods.”

I second the motion.

In fact, a little cyber-sex on the side might work well to lower the political temperature on the Floor and present us with more smiling faces in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

But seriously, how long again before this absurd rule is changed? How long again before the Speaker realises that the twiddling of thumbs in the House are Blackberry busy fingers reaching the world?

How long again before we have a real parliament?

The Confusion of the Caribbean Left

2008-12-20T14:56:00.000-04:00

Can the rough equivalent of the Greek riots occur in the Caribbean?

Of course! In some ways, mindless, uncoordinated revolt and its cynical manipulation by short-sighted politicians has been with us for some time now.

There is no doubt that the “popular” uprisings in Trinidad in 1970 and the bloody electoral encounters of Jamaica in the 1980s brought together such forces with varying degrees of broader social progress (or regression). I might even add the adventurism of Maurice Bishop and his crew between 1979 and 1983 contained important elements of this phenomenon.

There is absolutely no doubt that public opinion is decisively not in favour of the current government in Greece (though the ruling party won parliamentary elections last year ... by a slim majority).

Recent austerity measures, reports of corruption and nepotism, rising unemployment and the razor-thin parliamentary majority (down to one seat now) have conspired against the government in a substantial manner.

It is not good enough to make the kind of naive students' union assertions I have been hearing in this and several other contexts including the current waves of official thuggery in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. I even heard the opposition leader in Greece (he addressed the Global Forum for Media Development I attended in early December) speak of the street violence as being reflective or the product of "the violence of unemployment."

This kind of metaphorical contortion has been used conveniently by dictators everywhere and is a dangerous linguistic tool that can come back to bite you in the backside. Remember Maurice Bishop? This was certainly a road to Hell paved with good intentions and lots of fancy words. Who is to say Coard et al weren't 'defending' some revolution?

Yes, I saw the older hands in Athens, but they weren't the ones burning and looting, they had someone else do the dirty work for them. Some of my colleagues asked several youngsters what exactly was their cause and all that was regurgitated was the kind of ready-made orthodoxy your some analyses have been spewing uncritically and almost mindlessly.

Europe, as is the case almost everywhere else, needs socialism to address its problems. But they have to find a way to do it that is far less naive and, as a consequence, dangerous.

Caribbean ‘left-wing’ endorsement of everything that sounds ‘progressive’ wherever they are heard is not helping the cause of socialism in the region. The failure of our ‘left’ to roundly condemn thuggery in Venezuela, heartlessness in Zimbabwe and youthful vandalism in Athens will come back to haunt us in time to come.

The Olympics and Censorship

2008-08-03T21:36:00.000-04:00

Just thought that this piece by an Aussie columnist captures some of my thoughts on the management of the Beijing Olympics and how international sporting organisations have no qualms in compromising basic principles of governance in favour of the almighty dollar. Read 'ICC' Cricket World Cup 2006 for IOC Beijing Olympics 2008.

Who lied to whom on press freedom?

Jacquelin Magnay

August 1, 2008

THE cosy deal between two of the world's most powerful bodies — the Chinese Communist Party and the International Olympic Committee — to strip away media freedoms reflects badly on both.

While restrictions on internet access are annoying for 10,000-plus of the world's media gathering for the Games, they signify much more than a simple frustration. Unfettered internet access was held up as a prime reflection of China's commitment to "open up" to the rest of the world. Instead, it has shown the reluctance of China's political masters to allow its citizens exposure to global opinion.

We now know that when Beijing bid for the 2008 Games seven years ago promising a new China, they lied. As I write, more than 150 websites are blocked including BBC China and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, journalists are being harassed and areas such as Tiananmen Square are tightly restricted.

The tenor of the Games started to change a couple of months ago. A few reporters considered "undesirable" to the Chinese authorities were refused entry to the country. Then came the riots in Tibet. The Communist Party abruptly imposed a new layer of bureaucracy on Beijing Games organisers soon after the global demonstrations involving the torch relay.

Executives with Beijing businesses were refused visas and the city emptied of non-locals.
It was then that the International Olympic Committee realised it had lost control of the Games. One of its most senior members, Kevan Gosper, became a pawn.

For months, indeed years, Gosper has been saying that the internet would be freely available and there would be no restrictions imposed on the foreign media. And Gosper should know — he heads the IOC's press commission.

But, critically, he is also the vice-chairman of the IOC Co-ordination Commission for the Beijing Olympics. For seven years, Gosper has been the second most senior IOC official in Beijing.
Hein Verbruggen, the Belgian IOC member and former head of the international cycling union, was the co-ordination commission chairman. It is difficult to believe that a move to restrict press freedom was not signed off by another Belgian, IOC president Jacques Rogge.

Gosper is convincing when he insists that he didn't know of the deal and he had not deliberately misled the global press. Other press commission members also swear they have been completely misled on the issue.

Gosper says: "I am disappointed, but we are dealing with a communist country that has censorship." These are the Beijing Games indeed.

Getting the Youngsters Prepared

2008-05-30T12:53:00.000-04:00

Ten young Caribbean journalists are benefiting from the skill and experience of leading regional practitioners under a mentoring programme being executed by the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM), under the banner of the Caribbean Network of Young Journalists (CNYJ).

The journalists were ‘paired’ at an orientation workshop hosted by the ACM in Trinidad on May 23-24, 2008.

The pilot project, funded in part by the United Nations Educational Scientific Organisation (UNESCO), will span a period of 12 months. It brings journalists from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago in ongoing contact with each other.

Mentors and their “associates” have been paired across national borders. During the workshop, they explored various means of collaboration and discussed issues such as current journalistic standards in the Caribbean and ways deficiencies can be addressed.

Renowned Trinidad and Tobago journalist/author, Raoul Pantin, also spoke on his career as a journalist. The young associates were given complimentary copies of his autobiographical account as a hostage during the 1990 coup d’etat in Trinidad entitled ‘Days of Terror’ published earlier this year.

Project Manager of the ACM/CNYJ Mentoring Programme, Clare Forrester, said she was “delighted to be a part of this dynamic initiative designed to help sharpen the tools and techniques of young journalists.”

“Unquestionably, this kind of mentoring training can make a huge difference to the credibility of information reported in the media,” she said.

Work has also begun on an Elections Handbook for Caribbean Journalists which, ACM President Wesley Gibbings said, “has the potential to increase the capacity of young journalists to improve the coverage of elections by leaps and bounds.”

Work on the handbook is being led by veteran Trinidad and Tobago journalist/media trainer, Lennox Grant. Other members of the handbook team are Jamaican journalist/media law lecturer, Vernon Daley, Puerto Rican law professor, Sheila Velez Martinez and Gibbings.

Assistance in researching the handbook is being received from the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean (UNIC) office for the Caribbean in Port of Spain. The editorial team met with UNIC Director, Angelica Hunt, on May 23.

Gibbings said the handbook will “reside alongside our climate change handbook as an example of how the ACM has been able to intervene meaningfully in the process of improving the quality of journalism in the Caribbean.”

He said multi-media technologies will be employed in making the handbook more accessible to all Caribbean journalists and to ensure that “in every Caribbean newsroom there will be an ACM Elections handbook.”

Forrester added: “The ACM should be encouraged, applauded and supported by all who are committed to a healthy and credible media climate so crucially important to sustaining a democratic environment and the long-term development of the countries in our region.”

Why World Press Freedom Day is Important

2008-05-05T21:14:00.001-04:00

Observance of World Press Freedom Day 2008 establishes the critical link between the untrammelled ability of people to express themselves and to freely access official information, and their empowerment as citizens.

Some of us correspondingly contend that a principal measure of the power of the people is the extent to which the flow of information, news, opinion and analysis is facilitated by an environment that enables free expression and access to information.

The Caribbean region is, through this injunction, challenged by socio-political antecedents to contemplate a process which would have the impact of effectively transferring responsibility for the future from the grasp of a few to the hands of the people.

It is also a time when crime and violence, economic instability, natural disasters, political conflict and changing global circumstances presage continued uncertainty. The urgency to find solutions and to mitigate impacts is apparent, often in unbridled fashion.

The practice of journalism is unique as a professional function reliant on the view that more, not less, free expression and openness is desirable as a pre-condition for social progress, transparency and participatory democracy. This uniqueness is characterised by the manner in which the media serve as a bridge between civil society and the state.

The ACM also concurs with the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, that press freedom and freedom of information, are “the founding principles for good governance, development and peace.”
It is true that professional imperfections militate against achievement of the broader social goals but a penalty of silence is unacceptable as a form of redress against perceived harm.

For reasons such as this, the ACM stands alert to interventions that have the impact of restricting, rather than facilitating free expression. Acts of official censorship, prior restraint and self-censorship in the media are condemned as inimical to the broader cause of progress and growth.

The absence of effective Access to Information laws in some jurisdictions also pronounces unfavourably on the degree to which people are empowered to impact on the decision-making process in a way that affects their everyday lives.

Official regulations that seek to bring order to chaotic telecommunications environments are best advised by the view that content restrictions, beyond widely-accepted rules that protect a person’s privacy and character and the security of the state, are not supported by the principles of free expression, as defined by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, among other hemispheric and international instruments.

The ACM is committed to raising awareness among media professionals on the value of press freedom as a function of freedom of expression with all its attendant benefits to humanity.

We believe professional standards should rise to meet the requirements of such freedom and that a concerted effort to network Caribbean media professionals, improve standards, instil high ethical standards and to insist on adherence to the principle of press freedom is the responsibility of an organisation such as ours.

On World Press Freedom Day 2008, we re-dedicate ourselves to the task of shaping our profession in a manner that best serves the interests of a region in social and economic transition, challenged by changing global circumstances, impaired by a colonial legacy but committed to building a better future.

REVERSAL OF STABROEK NEWS BAN

2008-04-09T12:43:00.000-04:00

It is encouraging that the Guyana government has heeded informed national, regional and international opinion on the Stabroek News issue.

The challenge of the advertising boycott highlighted the multi-dimensional nature of press freedom and the conditions that either promote or endanger its development.

It is a cause best supported by constant vigil and dispassionate examination and analysis. At its very core lies the welfare and well-being of Caribbean people at a time of social crisis. It is thus a cause for everyone to embrace, not just journalists and other media workers.

The principles that guide the placement of official advertising are well established.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in its Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression, states clearly that, “the arbitrary and discriminatory placement of official advertising … with the intent to put pressure on and punish or reward and provide privileges to social communicators and communications media because of the opinions they express threaten freedom of expression” and must be explicitly prohibited by law.

STABROEK NEWS STORY

Govt resumes advertising with Stabroek News

April 9, 2008

The state through the Government Information Agency (GINA) has resumed advertising with Stabroek News, placing its first order in 17 months yesterday morning.

Stabroek News’ Advertising Manager Patricia Cumbermack said GINA Media Coordinator Karen Persaud telephoned her yesterday morning to make arrangements to start purchasing advertising space in this newspaper once again. No reason for the decision was given to Cumbermack.The first order was for an eight inches by three columns advertisement for the Com-munity Services Enhance-ment Project which is administered by the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development.

Asked for a comment, Editor-in-Chief David de Caires said that a very senior government official had rung him on Friday and indicated that Stabroek News would begin receiving ads from ministries and other agencies starting this week.

“No reason was given for the change in policy,” he said. Nevertheless, he welcomed the change in the government’s position.

Government, through GINA, first withdrew ads from 29 ministries and state agencies in November 2006 citing economic considerations. It placed ads with the country’s two other dailies, the state-owned Guyana Chronicle and the privately owned Kaieteur News as well as the weekly Mirror, which is aligned to the ruling party.

Following this move other government and state-owned entities, which previously advertised independently of GINA also withdrew ads, including the Guyana Defence Force, the Guyana Police Force, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Office of the Auditor General, the Guyana Sugar Corporation, the Guyana Power and Light and the regional administrations.

Stabroek News objected to this move, contending that the withdrawal of the ads was because of the newspaper’s editorial stance on issues of governance. This newspaper sought to have the ads re-instated but to no avail.

The withdrawal of the ads was widely condemned locally by a number of entities and individuals including the Guyana Press Association, opposition political parties, the Guyana Trades Union Congress, the Guyana Human Rights Association, the Private Sector Commission and the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association.

The Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) and regional media houses, as well as international media organisations, including the Inter-American Press Asso-ciation, the Commonwealth Press Union, the International Press Institute, and Reporters Without Borders had asked the government to restore the ads to this newspaper.

The cut-off also saw Stabroek News’ employees picketing a meeting of the Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Georgetown last year. Last month, the Inter-American Press Association wrote to Caricom Secretary General Edwin Carrington asking for the cut-off to be placed on the agenda of the meeting of Caricom Heads in Trinidad last Saturday.

Efforts by a regional mediating team to end the boycott via an offer to craft a mechanism for the distribution of state advertising also failed.

Bartica Dreams

2008-03-07T20:57:00.000-04:00

On February 17, 2008, a well-armed group of thugs stormed the small river town of Bartica along the Essequibo River in Guyana and killed 12 people, including three police officers.

This followed the killing of 11 men, women and children in the town of Lusignan on January 26, 2008.

The brutal and senseless nature of the cold-blooded murders stunned the entire Caribbean region.

About 12 years ago, I had travelled up the Essequibo on an overloaded boat with Duke (now Justice) Pollard, and old man Thompson of Barbados to spend a weekend at Bartica. I always speak of the stark contrast between daytime Bartica and night-time Bartica. The killings there brought this out:

Bartica Dreams

River city once came alive
from Friday dusk to Sunday dusk

Tonight they sleep
while dust,
no, sprinkled gold,
flees the open pyre

We once tied our fears
like infected animals
to the backyard mango tree
and shot them in the head

Tonight they run free
with noisy hoofs -
Pus and blood
painting the loose and fickle clay

Missing you, river city, is not the best way
to describe our pain
Plucked from Heaven
is more like it

We are taken from each other
Souls en route to different futures now

They stole our sleep
Between Mash and Mash
From dusk to dusk
They stole our dreams

What mischief of Paradise has this been
that our love is torn from us by guns?
By muzzles to our heads
By deafening hatreds?

The boatman waits for us to board
But we never came
And he never left
Is this Bartica Dream our endless nightmare?

GRAPHIC MEDIA CONTENT

2008-01-28T09:11:00.000-04:00

At about 2.00 a.m. on Saturday January 26, 11 persons, including five children, were murdered as they slept at their homes in the rural district of Lusignan in Guyana. The murderers are still at large.

The following day, the Kaieteur News newspaper carried extensive coverage of the story which included interviews with the families of the victims and testimonies from those who were injured who had escaped with their lives.

The newspaper also published graphic photographs of the bodies of those slain. One shot showed the intestines of a child spilling out onto the bed on which he lay.

There has been lively debate on the listserv of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) on the issue. Here are my views, followed by the submission of Barbadian journalist, Julius Gittens.

Wesley Gibbings:

This is a very interesting discussion that we perhaps need to bring around the table next time we (ACM) meet as a group.

In the meantime, it would be interesting to receive views from those among us who have served as newsroom leaders and who would have had to confront the issue of how to treat graphic content in our television newscasts and newspapers.

My own view is that in newspapers, photographs and copy come together in a cohesive fashion to tell a story. Photographs fill informational gaps and ensure
the entire story is told. In some instances, it might be the other way around and, perhaps, we are not seeing enough journalistic photo essays. We certainly
have the quality photo-journalists around to do so.

Strict adherence to a notion of “good taste” apart – and we always have the option to determine what constitutes “good taste” as news organisations – we probably need to ask the questions: What does photographic content add to the story that has not already been told in the main body of the text? Do the photographs also provide further proof of an assertion in the story?

There are also decisions to be made about photographic treatment and whether it is necessary, in the context of what is already known and proven, to publish one angle of the shot and not another.

As well, unlike television where there might be some advance warning, the newspaper reader does not have the option not to view the pictures

In my view, if these questions/issues were not considered by the editor of the Kaieteur News, today’s front page would not have been the product of thoughtful, professional journalism.

In the United States, there is a growing body of literature on this subject in the context of the invasion of Iraq. We need to start recording our own well-considered thoughts in books and blogs and listservs like this on an area that poses episodic but important challenges to our understanding of how Caribbean journalism is practised.

Meanwhile, would I, as a newspaper editor, have carried the photographs published in the Kaieteur News?

No!

This now is the submission of Julius Gittens:

This may very well do no one any good either.

One of the insightful, and troubling, aspects of today's newspaper journalism is its portability. Thanks to Internet, we can react with shock, horror and revulsion in our far-flung capitals. Then we go watch the Oscar-nominated No Country for Old Men, which was rewarded with a Golden Globe (an award by Hollywood's foreign press corps). Violence means nothing to us when we are removed from it. I recall being singular in feeling the revulsion and pain by Visnews images of death in the Iran-Iraq and Russo-Afghan Wars of the 1980s but marvel at the entire globe's disgust over Al-Jazeera video of one American G.I. being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. We can now behave like we've never left home or become unofficial citizens of somebody else's country because we can read their all papers, hear all their radio stations and see all their tv stations online, 24-7.

Can the editors and publishers of the Kaieteur News say that such violence means nothing to them, that's it's just a juicy story? Not one of us who write to express our pain of seeing the pictures has a better close-up view of a Guyana that is slowly drowning in a tide of ethnic bloodletting: five of their colleagues were lined up and executed. Kaieteur News reporters have been threatened, not with badge-of-honour death threats, but with promises that the journalists have no illusions about.

So I'm afraid we might very well have to toss out the knee-jerk response that the Kaieteur News folks just wanna sell papers.

Until just the other day, Lusignan qualified for that quintessential tabloid listing as 'sleepy hamlet'. The kids spend most of their spare time practising golf swings with the odd shared seven-iron, when they're not working as caddies at the nearby course, the only one in the nation. Golf has a way of breeding a rather polite, even needlessly deferential lot. They could have been running around with one or two used Kalashnikovs but no, sorry, nothing more lethal than a 3-iron. Plain-speaking, persistent, keen, genteel. Kids.

So in a very local sense, could it be the Kaieteur News folk did what they thought they had to do - reach their readers, fellow Guyanese, for whom the shedding of blood in Buxton or Eccles is, as it is for us, distance learning?

I cannot so easily condemn the Kaieteur News folks, knowing full well the enormous grief and suffering I might go through if the carnage was of my own kin. Or just maybe, as I've known in my own practice to happen, maybe the relatives might order up or keep copies of this edition, just so they could show their friends and foes what bullets at near supersonic speed do to human beings, especially their own flesh and blood.

The violence in Guyana is a complex story. Our understanding of it and the reasons why a bunch of journalists felt they had to violate somebody's breakfast to help others understand it perhaps also needs to be complex.

So, would I as an editor of the Kaieteur News run those photos? I don't know. I don't live in the Guyana of January 2008. Would I try every conceivable way of meeting the public's need or right to know? Hell yes.

Julius P.A. Gittens, MA
PO Box W1167
St John's ANTIGUA, West Indies
See Art of JPA Gittens at www.geocities. com/juliusgittens

Days of Wrath by Raoul Pantin

2008-01-14T22:55:00.000-04:00

Raoul Pantin of Trinidad and Tobago remains one of the outstanding journalists of our time. There are few real countries, if any, that would dare allow someone like Raoul to stand on the periphery of a crumbling professional media infrastructure, at a time when it needs all hands on deck.

It might be there is a greater, divine logic behind his newsroom absence or, perhaps, a higher calling in the form of more complete literary achievements such as the writing of books and plays and, hopefully, some poetry.

Heaven knows the routine slaughter of the Muse in the course of a news day, the unending triumph of the ‘W’s over metaphor. A “flick of the wrist” the editor often declared through the haze of forbidden cigarette smoke that should have rightly clouded Independence Square.

At the Express, and later at CCN radio and television, we shared poetry to pass the time between the verbal incontinence of parliament and the fiction of social justice that filled the spaces between the latest shoe sale and list of defaulting mortgagers.

Today, the need to grow the flock of readers is matched only by the absolute requirement to cultivate a withering crop of writers.

That Raoul has completed this particular work of journalism suggests there is some room for hope in what my favourite West Indian poet, Martin Carter, describes as this dark time.

All round the land brown beetles crawl about
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow
This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious
Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass
It is the man of death, my love, the stranger invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.

The days of wrath and of darkness are, perhaps, still upon us. Raoul’s testimony as journalist extraordinaire is thus as necessary as the shining sun that emerges from its hiding place in the sky.

New Year, Old Challenges

2008-01-01T09:20:00.000-04:00

NEW YEAR’S STATEMENT – ASSOCIATION OF CARIBBEAN MEDIAWORKERS (ACM) PRESIDENT, WESLEY GIBBINGS

December 31 – Let me extend best wishes for a productive, safe and enjoyable 2008.

This network of journalists and media workers became six years old in November. Evidence that we fill a real void in the sphere of Caribbean media has come not only via the regional and international recognition we have achieved, but also through the sense of community we have been able to build.

For example, when we met in Trinidad, under the leadership of Dale Enoch, for our various meetings on December 4-6, there was a level of camaraderie and friendship our institutional partners in that exercise found inspiring and exemplary.

The thing is, we are in fact building a community of professionals along lines that defy the undoubted requirement to formalise and to install firmer organisational structures.

Though the latter imperative becomes the focus of our attention over the next two years, we would do well to continue deepening and widening the process of developing this community across borders.

Today, colleagues from Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, Haiti, Suriname, Jamaica, Grenada and Antigua & Barbuda sit on our executive committee – a design, unlike suggestions to the contrary, not contrived by any notion of territorial equity.

We have also done our work largely on our own with some help from friends who have demanded nothing more than the fact that we stay together.

Our engagement has not been time-bound by contract or project funding and there has been no single, exclusive financial benefactor. This means we have remained independent and free.

Our executive members have all contributed voluntarily to the work of the organisation – even though so many of us are freelancers with no fixed source of income.

Bert Wilkinson, Peter Richards, Deby Nash, Jerry George (SVG) and Michael Bascombe come to mind as they have all contributed selflessly to the cause as freelance journalists serving on our executive committee.

Bert, for example, had served on every single executive committee between 2001 and 2007, when he decided not to seek re-election at our last Biennial Assembly. His work in leading a one-person mission to Haiti in 2002 was a high-point of our early activities and is favourably remembered by colleagues there. His experience and skill as a journalist were also assets he brought to the process. Thank you, Bert.

We have aligned ourselves with the Rory Peck Foundation, based in the United Kingdom, which looks exclusively at welfare and safety issues associated with the work of freelance journalists. In 2004, for the first time ever, the ACM was able to convince the Foundation that natural disasters should be considered a source of professional distress for freelance journalists and the Foundation offered assistance in the case of Grenadian journalists affected by Hurricane Ivan.

The point was reinforced in Jordan when I attended the first Global Forum for Media Development in October 2005 and, together with Jean Claude Louis of Haiti, urged participants to consider that vulnerability to natural disaster is as urgent a matter for the small-island and low-lying coastal regions of the Caribbean as are the threats of political and criminal violence that specifically target media enterprises and journalists.

For example, the effects of the 2004 hurricane season severely disabled mass media operations in Haiti and Grenada and dislocated journalists and other media workers. Media-specific international aid resources should therefore extend beyond the current inclination to focus only on violence against media workers.

The coming year will see an ACM that is much more focused on matters of internal organisation and consolidation. We plan to become legally incorporated, establish a small secretariat in Trinidad, re-design and configure our web presence, regularise the processes for the acquisition of regional media passes, apply for formal membership of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX), which monitors free expression issues globally, and re-visit our constitution and code of ethics.

Several projects are also currently in the making. They include two online courses on Digital Media and Investigative Journalism. The Digital Media course should, in collaboration with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, be ready for offer by March. The long-awaited Investigative Journalism course should commence by July/August, we hope. These follow two highly successful exercises in 2005 and 2006 and a third, limited offering in 2005 in Spanish.

We are also compiling our State of the Caribbean Media Report II (2005-2007) and are currently awaiting submissions from Barbados and Jamaica. It is hoped that a draft will be prepared for submission at a workshop on Media and Governance hosted by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington DC on January 15, 2008.

Our Mentoring Programme for Young Caribbean Journalists is being developed and is being put up for project funding and should be launched early in the new year. Prospective mentors have been notified and we will soon begin pre-screening for a cadre of protégés for a pilot of this important project.

We are also developing a project to produce an Elections Handbook for Caribbean Journalists. The idea has already received favourable feedback from prospective benefactors and a team is being assembled to manage the research and production processes.

On the invitation of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), we recently submitted a prospectus for the staging of a regional media workshop on West Indies cricket designed for journalists who do not cover sport.

This forms part of our overall campaign to maintain contact with a variety of regional institutions and to establish our bona fides as a representative regional organisation. Such recognition is already extended by the CARICOM Secretariat and regional and international organisations active in the Caribbean. Some of these include: OAS, PAHO, ILO, UNESCO, UNIC, UNDP, IICA, CARDI, CTO and CEHI.

Similar initiatives are now envisaged for the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and CONCACAF.

In the meantime, we do not plan to take our eyes off the challenge of threats to freedom of the press.

We note with concern recent regulatory developments in Antigua and Barbuda - to be replicated, we understand, throughout the OECS - which have the potential to impose new levels of censorship in the broadcast media. The challenge of Trinidad and Tobago’s proposed broadcasting code is not dissimilar.

In Guyana, the continuing state advertising boycott of the Stabroek News is being viewed in the context of official action to stifle dissent and to punish recalcitrant media. Its impact on the practice of journalism in Guyana is yet to be fully examined, but the prospect of substantial reductions in advertising revenue will no doubt have the potential to steer media coverage along more conservative editorial lines.

In Jamaica, we need to keep an eye on proposed revisions to defamation legislation being considered by a multi-sectoral team which includes the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ). This is a move in the right direction but one that needs to be delicately negotiated to ensure that ad hoc reform of one branch of media law is not accepted as absolute acceptance of all other regulatory conditions affecting media. In the process, as well, we would expect that the Government of Jamaica also use the opportunity to remove criminal defamation from its statute books. This would set a highly positive precedent throughout the Caribbean and the Commonwealth as a whole.

Throughout the region, we also look forward to more consistent application of the freedom of movement provision of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which specifically grants such rights to media workers. The expulsion of Vernon Khelawan and Lennox Linton from Antigua and Barbuda earlier in 2007 provided evidence of a lack of commitment to the principles under which such a provision was embraced both by international treaty and domestic legislation.

CARICOM Skilled National Certificates as they relate to media workers are not being consistently recognised in the region. There are now media workers with skills certificates from more than one country. Certainly, this was not the original intention. To insist that media workers apply for certificates from their adopted countries, IN ADDITION TO certificates granted by their home countries is absolutely inconsistent with the original design of the free movement provisions of the Treaty.

I am amazed that more journalists have not taken this up as a valid story. It is a travesty and amounts to official sleight of hand to re-introduce the notion of a work permit. CARICOM countries need to decide whether they want this or not. The ACM did not participate as a member of the Advisory Council to the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on the CSME with this in mind and the current procedure does NOT have our blessings.

In collaboration with the International News Safety Institute (INSI), the ACM will work with SOS Journalistes-Haiti on the hosting of a workshop on journalistic safety early in 2008.

I also want to pay special tribute to our Assistant General Secretary, Guy Delva, whose work as head of the Independent Commission for Supporting Investigations into Murders of Journalists (CIAPEAJ) is already producing favourable results in Haiti.

Our work is cut out for us in 2008. Thank you for your support. Thank you, Dale, for an ACM that remains strong and united.

Fighting Ignorance and Bigotry

2007-12-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

Mainly as a result of negative publicity received via the internet, Cayman Islands Health Minister Anthony Eden has issued an apology for atrocities committed against Jamaican, Shellesha Woodstock, who was ushered out of the country even after there were signs that she was giving birth. She eventually gave birth to a girl child on a Cayman Islands flight to Kingston.

The unholy haste to get the “foreigner” out of their country cost the tiny British colony in the Caribbean some brownie points from prospective tourists and investors after the ensuing bad press. That is the ONLY reason for the apology, make no mistake about it.

“The conclusion of an independent clinical auditors’ report is that Ms Woodstock did not receive optimal medical care or the support she needed in accessing medical resources,” Eden is quoted by Cayman Net News as saying.

As previously mentioned in this blog, the Cayman Islands is one of the few countries in the world with the kind of oppressive immigration laws it now has. It is impossible for a child born of non-national parents in Cayman to automatically become a citizen of the country. Jamaicans and other Caribbean nationals are also openly discriminated against, leading some years ago to the imposition of visa restrictions against Jamaicans – a move quickly countered by the Jamaican government which imposed its own visa regime.

Apology notwithstanding, my question stands: What the hell is Cayman doing as an Associate Member of CARICOM?

While this happens, there is a steely silence on the issue in the Jamaican press, save for one lame editorial in the Gleaner which noted the apology “with a sense of relief, then, not victory, that we note the Cayman government has conceded to an error that led to the birth of Lateisha Julene Clarke on a flight from Cayman to Jamaica on October 2, 2007.”

Relief? What is there to be relieved about? Not long after the Woodstock incident, an attempt was made to similarly get rid of a woman about to deliver twins by hustling her back to Jamaica. The children DIED. What followed was an obscenely irrelevant debate over the adequacy of health insurance for the woman.

When this small-island-big-ego nonsense reaches deadly proportions then it is time to shout at the top of our Caribbean voices: “STOP IT!”

The countries of CARICOM need to make serious decisions about these rogue nations and territories hanging around the regional corridor. Every single country that has visa regimes to block Guyanese and Jamaican visitors should be asked the question: What the hell do you want with CARICOM?

Then we need to turn to the question of Haiti and why the discrimination against them, even by countries not threatened by the undoubted stresses of a refugee situation.

Why is it still necessary, for instance, for Haitians to get a visa before entering Trinidad and Tobago? Is this prudent action to promote greater security or plain, old-fashioned ignorance and bigotry?

Do we condone this as a region? Or do we express "relief" that something worse did not happen than the mere birth of a child in the aisle of an aircraft 20,000 feet off the ground?

At Last ...

2007-12-08T16:55:00.000-04:00

The half-hearted response of Jamaica to atrocities committed against its citizens in the Cayman Islands is continuing with a rather curious Jamaica Gleaner editorial on December 8, 2007.

I sincerely hope the Caribbean Community is looking on closely, at least more closely that Jamaican authorities and my media colleagues.

For what it's worth, the Gleaner editorial is keeping the issue alive ... somewhat.

EDITORIAL - Acknowledging an error
published: Saturday | December 8, 2007

In international affairs, even between countries as physically close and with a shared history as The Cayman Islands and Jamaica, an outright admission of error can be very hard to come by.

It is with a sense of relief, then, not victory, that we note the Cayman government has conceded to an error that led to the birth of Lateisha Julene Clarke on a flight from Cayman to Jamaica on October 2, 2007.

Her mother, 19-year-old Shellesha Woodstock, was giving birth for the first time.

As was reported in The Gleaner, yesterday, The Cayman Islands' "Minister of Health, Anthony Eden, conceded that errors made by the staff of The Cayman Islands' Health Service Authority (HSA) led to Ms. Woodstock giving birth on a Cayman Airways flight en route to Jamaica. Ms. Woodstock did not receive optimal medical care or support she needed in accessing medical resources. It is noted that these failures in clinical care occurred despite the fact that the facilities, staff and operating procedures are generally more than adequate to handle a case such as the one presented."

At the risk of being repetitious, this is a dramatic turnaround from the HSA's initial position, as reported in The Gleaner on Monday, October 8. It was stated then that "fitness to travel was issued after a thorough medical examination confirming that the patient was not in active labour. As a point of interest, ruptured membrane in early pregnancy is not a contra-indication for air travel. The risks and options were explained to the family who chose to travel off-island to deliver the baby and requested a medical certificate allowing clearance by the airline as being fit to travel."

The horse may have already gone through the gate (or, in this case, the baby), but the fact that there is an acknowledgement of error means that should similar circumstances arise, there is a precedent to which those in a position to make the decision can look for guidance.

Although the child, born prematurely, is thankfully in decent health, in this case there is injury of more than the physical kind to take into consideration. Ms. Woodstock's dignity must have suffered a bruising, as she gave birth to her daughter on the floor of an aeroplane, high in the sky. Those could not have been the circumstances under which she envisioned bringing new life into the world.

There is a matter that has not quite been resolved, though, that of the Lateisha Julene Clarke's nationality. At the last report, in early November, the Jamaican authorities had been leaning towards nationality in the land of wood and water, this after the child initially had no nation, both Jamaica and Cayman effectively rejecting her.

Still, it is so regretful that the situation had to arise in the first place.

Guest Contribution - Julius Gittens

2007-11-30T11:57:00.000-04:00

My Barbadian colleague, Julius Gittens, and I do not agree on many things. We argue endlessly about most everything. However, I have to give Jack his jacket regarding the appalling performance of the Caribbean media - radio in particular - following the earthquake of November 29.

I therefore give you (drum roll, please) Julius Gittens - my quarrelsome, argumentative, (most times wrong) friend and comrade ...

SHAKE, RATTLE… AND ROLLING NEWS IN THE CARIBBEAN

For once, the Caribbean was integrated. Three o'clock, November 29th, 2007.

Following radio news coverage on Thursday's earthquake produced some fissures and wobbling of its own.

Most newsrooms, luckily, had access to the Internet. But where did we go? Not to the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Unit but to the US Geological Survey. No follow up. Not a call to anyone at UWI Seismic Unit, certainly not by any radio or television reporter in Barbados, where I was, or in a few other places I was monitoring.

The coverage seemed to suffer in other countries where the journalists' lack of media experience was a greater issue than whether they'd been through an earthquake. I was appalled that in Antigua, for example, which has had far more experiences of earthquakes, it was treated as a little five-minute report inside a regular show of music and chatter ( N.B. Having been live and continuous on radio through a quake and a flood there in 2001, I know how much the community appreciated - and expected - our presence).

Then there's what I call The CXC Essay Approach. Young journalists rip off the Internet for as much text as they can find, throw in one or two clips from officialdom and wait for the next news bulletin. One journalist in a newsroom I called told me some other journalist was "on it". Everybody needs to be "on it", covering different angles and checking different sources, then coming and telling what they know and have gathered to the audience.

And where was Martinique, the island off whose coast this quake started? No where. After all, they're French, right? What need of us to reach RFO's Marie-Claude Celeste or Caroline Popovic who could have led us to the right people, or speak themselves?

All in all, a less-than-earth-shattering exercise in live continuous news coverage, especially by radio, in too many cases.

To those of you who went the extra mile, and responded to the needs of the communities you serve by staying on the air throughout fielding calls, making calls and imparting emergency information, I say well done. Let's do better next time. Much better.

1. NOTE THE TIME WHEN S___T HAPPENS. It was on the stroke of three where I was, yet a radio station in Barbados was talking about minutes BEFORE three. Check the time, as you reach to make that cell phone call to a loved one. Maybe it's an old hack's reflex. Make it yours.

2. SEND REPORTERS OUT! Too many stations think the best place is right at the office in such an environment, just so they can call the authorities - emergency managers, police, hospital, fire etc. GO WHERE THEY ARE. GO WHERE PEOPLE ARE. Talk to the people on the street about their experiences. Or at least go and describe them BEING on the street, scampering out of buildings. You won't have any traffic problems going into town. Journalists, like firemen, are people who run to trouble as people run from it.

3. MAKE HISTORICAL REFERENCES. A good use of the UWISEISMIC (www.uwiseismic.com) and USGS ( http://earthquake.usgs.gov) is noting major events in history, whether they happened in Antigua or not. UWI scientists, NOT the Americans, noted the historical significance of yesterday's event.

4. EXPLAIN EVENTS. Whether by dint of your own research (NOT Wikipedia) or by talking to English-speaking scientists (good luck), explain events and the region's vulnerability. I heard a leading Barbadian broadcaster, inductee of the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame saying that as far as he knew, "Barbados is not in the hurric... er... earthquake ... er .. belt." Really? Explain, for example, why the magnitude of a quake is not an indicator of destructive capacity alone, as if the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. The depth of the quake is a significant issue. How big, yes, but how deep? Mr Hall-of-Famer is yet to tell us. Don't give me a reason to switch off the radio and switch on the Net. Be comprehensive, explain and repeat.

5. RADIO IS COMMUNITY. BE THE COMMUNITY. What was the first thing that people did when the earth moved? Ok, the next thing? They turned on the radio. Not the TV, the radio. They want reassurance, information, help, whether buildings toppled or if they just felt someone moved the car. Be there for them by staying on the air as long as possible, punctuating the news you are gathering with their eyewitness accounts. NOBODY hears that wonderful five-minute report you did 30 minutes to an hour later. It might be as shaky a broadcast as the tremors, but be there and STAY there. You don't have to be a 24-hour news channel to do live continuous NEWS.

6. IF IT'S A LITTLE SHAKE HERE, IT'S APOCALYPSE NOW SOMEWHERE ELSE. Ok, so you felt something. You can't be the official gauge for either a nation or a region. We are inter-connected thanks to the Earth's tasty crust. So whether your prime ministers aren't speaking to each other, WE need to be speaking to our fellow Caribbean nations and bringing our colleagues on the air. A ripple here may be a major event somewhere else. Also make the connection between what people do and disaster. An earthquake is a hazard, an event, not a disaster. A disaster happens when people die or are injured or are displaced by what we do - like build crappy buildings in crappy areas. Make the connection. Kudos to you who did. Too many did not.

7. PLAN FOR NEXT TIME. And there will be a next time. It might be an earthquake. It might a freak storm. It might be a mass casualty event, like a bus or plane crash (God forbid). It's funny; if a geriatric governor general or an ailing prime minister finally meets his/her maker, we are on the radio like white on rice. But when sudden weather or earth movements roll, how prepared are we to go on the air, link up with the community and feed them information? There are newsrooms that work only to the next newscast. Those days are long gone, friends. The deadline is now, not six o'clock.

8. RECAP. REPEAT. RE-TELL. Don't get off the air because you've spent an hour and you think that's enough. That's why our listeners switch us off and go watch CNN to learn what's happening in their backyard. Thanks to such simple, cheap software like Cool Edit, we can record off the air and turn a clip around in seconds. We can turn around a vital live interview we did with the emergency chief and repeat it, until new information becomes available. We can simply repeat the basic details that will form the basis of our major news programme. In other words, we are writing the story as it happened and telling it and re-telling it. I did not hear too many instances of information being repeated.

9. HOW NET-SAVVY ARE YOU? REALLY? If you have Internet access, consider assigning a web-savvy reporter to monitor the web, for solid information, bloggers, message boards etc. Make sure that the reporter knows where to go for authentic, authoritative information. Don't quote some website in Kansas because it was first on the Google search list.

This is not the benefit of hindsight. Those who know me well know that I've been urging stations to adopt a rolling news plan, either for significant events or significant periods of the day. Give the raving lunatic talk show host a rest and let the newsroom take over next time.

Let's get news directors, seniors and juniors together to write a rolling news plan. Radio won't kill the newsroom star. It might just make one - and keep us informed when we need it most.

Let's not kid ourselves. Really ask ourselves if yesterday was broadcast journalism's finest hour. Search ourselves not just for the answer but the solution.

--
Julius P.A. Gittens, MA
Media Consultant/Producer/Journalist

#2 Bannatyne Gardens,
Christ Church
Barbados, West Indies
BB17030

Mobile: 246-242-6870
Home: 246-437-0263

Making Sense of Noise and Hubris

2007-11-24T10:27:00.000-04:00

Public relations advisors to the Jamaica Labour Party can be excused if they express some discomfort over the candour of their party’s General Secretary and Minister of Industry and Trade, Karl Samuda.

The spin doctors like keeping matters of strategy on the down-low, just in case. Just in case …

However, at a November 22 discussion on political advertising in 2007, hosted by the Mona School of Business, Samuda seemed to tell all about the party’s plan during the recent general election campaign to, among other things, clinically isolate People’s National Party leader, Portia Simpson-Miller, from the flock and then proceed to slit her political throat.

The strategy appeared to work.

“Timing was everything,” he said to a gathering of political pundits, a group of PNP partisans, pollsters, journalists, students, lecturers and other not so innocent bystanders.

I wondered then whether post-election Trinidad and Tobago had not meanwhile been preparing for similar introspection and open discussion on the conduct of the November 5 elections. I rather doubted it then and continue to do so.

By the way, none of the T&T party strategies of 2007 appeared to match the sophistication of the JLP campaign so that there would be no cohesive plan to reflect on in the first place.

The Congress of the People with all its MBAs and MPhils never thought that both Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday could have been extracted from their flocks for special treatment.

Panday, for one, is a far easier target than Portia. The PNM campaign which projected the “leadership” of Patrick Manning stretched his neck way out onto the chopping block. But the axe never fell at the hands of a highly vulnerable UNC, with its eyes on the Opposition benches and nothing else, and a faltering COP armed mostly with Excel spreadsheets and competently designed Microsoft Project files that told them they would win convincingly.

But who is leading the effort to collectively look back and reflect? To disaggregate the political advertising and attempt to make sense of what actually happened?

Who is measuring the contribution of state-funded media advertising to total advertising spend?

Will the media industry get together to discuss the ethical dilemma it confronted when media houses were invited to share in dubious partisan largesse? If it does not do so, media owners and managers will have great difficulty explaining to reporters that they cannot accept free phones or lunches in exchange for favourable stories.

An effort by John La Guerre and Selwyn Ryan of the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies back in 1996 sought to explore some of these issues following the election of 1995 (in the process granting me space in a subsequent UWI publication to write about Journalism and the Political Process during the General Election.).

Even so, the political parties had then sent low-level functionaries who clearly did not sit with the strategists who designed the respective campaigns. By contrast, in Jamaica last week, Samuda was there, together with Sharon Haye-Webster who was at the forefront of election planning for the PNP.

I am not sure a similar attempt is being made in time to analyse and record the ins and outs of campaign 2007 in Trinidad and Tobago. We have long moved away from reason on such matters. Radio and television noise and hubris undoubtedly prevail. But that is hardly an “analysis” of what happened.

This is not to say post-election “cas cas” has disappeared in Jamaica or that the “ro ro” of St Lucian elections almost a year later is done or that bacchanal is not about to reign in Grenada when they go to the polls next year. That’s par for the course.

But the Jamaicans certainly led the way last week in conscientiously trying to get to the bottom of pertinent issues excavated by a long, contentious election campaign.

I was not entirely impressed with the research presented by the Mona School of Business as it attempted to describe the nature and impact of political advertising during the campaign and I was very uncomfortable with the remote but distinct suggestion that such information be used to advise some kind of official policy on political advertising.

If as societies we need to intervene officially in such matters, we certainly need to be equipped with far better qualitative outputs than were presented at last week’s seminar. Otherwise, political advertising would lose the protection of free speech it needs to be effective.

But, who cares, really?

Jamaican Babies in Cayman

2007-11-11T11:50:00.000-04:00

I have decided to stray a bit from the issue of press freedom in the Caribbean to draw attention to a tiny British colony in the Caribbean – the Cayman Islands.

I have been following developments in the territory more closely since the advent of Cayman NetNews and its attempt to function as an independent media enterprise in the midst of what appears to be an environment not conducive to such freedoms.

On October 2, 2007, a Jamaican woman called Shellesha Woodstock gave birth to a baby girl on board Cayman Airways Flight #600 en route to Jamaica as Caymanian authorities hustled, frantically, to ensure that the child was not born on Cayman soil.

Details of the attempt to get the woman out of Grand Cayman ought to have alerted human rights advocates to gross violations of the rights of the woman and her unborn child. But there have been few lines in the Jamaican press highlighting the issue and even fewer in the Caymanian media asking serious questions about the circumstances leading to what amounts to the ‘expulsion’ of Ms Woodstock in an advanced state of pregnancy.

Now comes news that yet another Jamaican woman, unidentified by officials, gave birth in the midst of desperate attempts to ensure that her twins were not born on Caymanian soil.

Caymanian health official, Lizzette Yearwood, is quoted in Cayman NetNews as saying the measure was necessary because “the level of expertise needed for the babies’ care is not locally available.”

One would therefore assume there has been a constant flow of Caymanian women to Jamaica seeking such care for their newborn. I would like to see the statistics. Surely, the same level of care sought for the Jamaican woman and her twins should be extended to Caymanian women.

Is it just me? Or is something very, very wrong with this picture?

How far can small-island parochialism go? How uncaring? How deadly can it become?

Those with a little knowledge of the Cayman Islands would know that it is Jamaicans who have helped, more than any other group including indigenous Caymanians, to develop the tiny British colony through their work in a wide range of fields – not the least being those jobs native Caymanians resisted doing in the early years.

Today, Jamaicans need a visa to enter Caymanian territory. In an inspired move, the former P.J. Patterson administration imposed Jamaica’s own visa regime on Caymanians wishing to visit the island.

It was unfortunate that the situation had to come to the stage of tit-for-tat diplomacy, but perfectly understandable that discrimination was met with firm action.

The same has not been true in the case of discriminatory immigration policies in Turks and Caicos, British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, where Jamaicans and Guyanese are not welcome.

How these countries remain evenly remotely associated with CARICOM is beyond me. Discriminatory immigration policies targeting Jamaicans and Guyanese deserve expulsion from the CARICOM circle.

To be fair to the Cayman Islands, they aren’t interested anyway, though they became an Associated CARICOM state in 1991. But what the hell are they all doing as part of the CARICOM process?

In any event, the Cayman Islands are one of the few countries in the world in which place of birth does not automatically signify citizenship or nationality.

The actions of the Caymanian authorities ought to be highlighted at the next CARICOM Inter-Sessional meeting of Heads with a view to securing the abolition of the current visa regime against Jamaicans. Same story for Turks and Caicos, BVI and Anguilla.

While I am on this subject I also want to ask the question: Why do Haitians still require visas to enter most CARICOM countries?

If we did not want Haitians among us, why were they invited to join CARICOM in the first place?

It is high time we get these anomalies out of the way. We are already seeing, courtesy the Cayman Islands, how callous and potentially deadly regional fiddling with an important issue can become.

Let us not let Guy down

2007-11-01T20:45:00.000-04:00

New threats against Guy Delva in Haiti reinforce the fact that the situation remains dangerously tense in a country that has recently been through extremely difficult times.

Guy has been one of the most optimistic people about Haiti I have ever met. His work with SOS Journalistes and, before that, AJH, proves his credentials as a proud and committed Haitian journalist.

As a member of the regional journalistic community, through his affiliation with the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers, he has helped us understand the challenges journalists face in Haiti.

I firmly believe the rest of CARICOM can do much, much more to assert itself as part of the solution in that country. The presence of a CARICOM Office there cannot, by itself, make a difference. The region has been there before and done that … to absolutely no effect. It has been a waste of time and money.

It has been a matter of years now since I wrote the CARICOM Secretary-General offering the services of a cadre of Caribbean journalists, many of them with language competencies, to work with regional officials on a way forward for Haitian journalism.

Our colleagues in Haiti, Guy included, have looked on in anticipation for far too long now.

It is utterly frustrating to some of us that the regional secretariat with a stated commitment to facilitating the flow of information amongst Caribbean people is yet to be convinced of the value of such an alliance.

It is true that we sometimes stand against the political stakeholders – as we certainly do at this time against the act of vengeance against Stabroek News in Guyana by the Jagdeo administration and as we have in several other Caribbean countries.

But this is no time for pettiness with regard to Haiti.

I met and spoke at length with Guy recently. His optimism and willingness to make a difference must not be in vain. Let us not let Guy and his people down.