Priorities, lies, and journalism

Rather inappropriately in my view, while receiving service at a supermarket counter last week, I was asked if I was the guy “who writes in the newspapers.” Following my hesitant confirmation, I was then asked: “why don’t you people write the truth?”

I had only days before suggested at a media workshop that journalists were among the professional groups that people love to hate – if only because our journalism so frequently presents things people would prefer not to confront or asserts things with which they do not agree.

True, there is malpractice as well, but for the most part I think colleagues leave their homes in the morning with an intention to do a decent job. Political partisanship and entrenched belief systems do play roles both in what is produced and even more so in how people interpret the work we do. So, there is also that challenge.

Additionally, one of the problems you have when you live in a place, like here, where everything is a priority is deciding on what is most important at any particular time when you are called upon to draw attention to the things that should urgently concern us all.

So, often, implicit and explicit bias dictates both what is offered for consideration and how that is interpreted by consumers of content.

It’s as much a peril for newsroom journalists as it is for newspaper columnists and other contributors of media content – that “not telling the truth” is as much a charge related to omission as it has to do with acts of inclusion.

Then, when a decision is made, it is important to convince both yourself and others that there is sufficient justification for suggesting, for example, that the fact of climate change (its anthropogenic nature being the sole source of worthwhile contestation) is as important a subject in the public domain as the management of water supplies in your community.

Additionally, what is there to say that a single mosquito that can end your life is less important than the possibility of collateral damage occasioned by political shenanigans in the US, UK, or Venezuela?

That the unattended pothole in your neighbourhood that cost you a tyre and a rim, is of less immediate significance to you than the impunity of a state accused of genocide and unlawful occupation of the territory of others?

Or that the failure of the policing of criminal behaviour ought to be of greater priority than ameliorative/restorative measures that may serve as effective pre-emptive strikes on causative factors?

Such matters are among the challenges of conscientious people who not only populate news and op-ed pages but all other citizens and their leaders - as presumably guided and informed by people who are supposed to know more about them than the rest of us.

Against such a backdrop, I believe it is increasingly important to be able to sift the assertions of charlatans (of which there are numerous), outrageous liars, and the outright ignorant through a sieve of verification. It is clearly important to focus on the responsibilities of the consumers of such content.

For this reason, I have become quite an advocate of what UNESCO has been promoting for years now in the form of “media and information literacy.” In a sense, it is among the supreme imperatives of the principle of self-responsibility – the often-elusive notion that people have a role to play in determining their own personal and communal destinies.

This “demand side” approach to critically assessing news, information, and entertainment, is clearly the single most impactful response to the current blitz of mis and disinformation. It is the “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware) of the so-called information age.

I personally favour such an approach, since the more compelling lure of censorship remains the preferred option in too many instances. And when you add to this the fact that personal beliefs and convictions determine levels of “truthfulness” or “lies” what you are left with are rather oppressive conditions under which all ideas are left to contend, but only at the hands of people with clear views on what they hold as their “truth.”

So, yes, some of us are among those “who write in the papers” and there is often mis and disinformation to address. There are now some key players emerging on other, new platforms. To the extent that they consider themselves bound by similar professional values, they too play important roles.

There are many over the years who have contended that we are better off with such public communicators than without them. I happen to agree.

The clearer picture

The lead-in for a July 2 online GML story reads as follows: “Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley says provisions are being made to allow children from islands ravaged by Hurricane Beryl entry into Trinidad and Tobago to reside with relatives here.”

In under one hour, on the T&T Guardian Facebook page alone, there were over one hundred comments on the story. A link to further details was provided.

There are colleagues of mine who strongly advise against paying too much attention to the “comments section” of social media posts even by the local news organisation with which I am associated. They claim to care about my mental well-being.

“Don’t do it,” is the typically sharp admonition. But you know what? I believe that the interactivity of online media has helped further democratise the mass media landscape, brought previously marginalised and buried feelings to the fore, and should therefore never be ignored.

Despite the proven existence of anonymised and disguised partisan trolls, and the persistence of the barely literate, I think it important to capture the many flavours of public opinion and expression this way.

It is however important, as my friends have advised, to recognise that we engage such a process at our peril – especially on questions that have the potential to expose the worst in people.

“This man really making no sense at all our own people suffering and cannot get our own kids in school always saying no space I am tired of this man making bad decisions for our cou(n)try,” was among the earliest comments following the post on the children of the Grenadines.

Sometimes, with time on your hands, you check the social media footprint of such commentators to determine their bona fides and to get behind what motivates some people. The above quote was provided by someone who urges regular reference to the Bible.

“By 2030 you would have to get a backhoe to break down that voter bank,” another chimed in. This one appeared to have been a made-up profile with 245 rather suspicious “friends.”

By the time you check and cross-reference and scour lists of interests and “friends” it is possible to produce a  rough profile of the people and the circumstances motivating their interest in different subjects. There is probably already generative AI that can do the sorting for you without all the human fuss.

This was not the case back in 1991 when it was proposed by then PM ANR Robinson that T&T should have hosted fleeing Haitians following political turmoil there. All we had to go on at that time were placards and angry demonstrators pronouncing on the threat of “AIDS” and some kind of refugee “invasion” with the potential to tilt political balance, entirely on ethnic grounds.

The technology had not yet been developed to properly unravel identities especially among letter-writer pseudonyms in the press and anonymous radio talk show callers – though placards often betrayed dramatic similarities in design and language usage, and you worked out who, rather quietly, wasn’t really minding that a fuss had been generated over X or Y issue.

By 2017, and the offer to host Dominican children for six months following the passage of Hurricane Maria, social media was already in full swing. So, people who monitor these things closely were pretty much able to catch the gist of the arguments and to recognise common threads of interest where they existed.

It is however often the case that disparate, unconnected voices may potentially capture highly pervasive sentiments – however similar the language and arguments. For example, and even more recently, the “close de borders” crew shared common emotions with a variety of elements opposed to even the loosest application of humanitarian law when it came to distressed, asylum-seeking Venezuelans.

However, what I also look for are the key responses of people from among our “responsible” elites - politicians, academics, business, and other opinion-leaders. I check to see whether they approve or disapprove of disturbing public responses and behaviours.

For example, in the most recent instance of the children of the Grenadines, I have been keeping an eye out for rods of connection. You know: “I understand your point, but how can accommodating children in the face of such a crisis ever change the political dynamic, or reduce opportunities for our own children? Stop it! Stop it!”

But, vigilance over things virtual is meaningless without also keeping an eye on what is actually happening/what is being said in the real world. That is how you begin getting a clearer picture of the reality. It’s not always a pleasant sight, I tell you.

Of grief and fêtes

Let me be today’s wet blanket at a time when so many are declaring the redemptive qualities of fetes and revelry in the face of both imminent and actual tragedy and pain.

There is, admittedly, some 1990 T&T and Saint Lucia 2010 PTSD on my part. These were two completely different encounters with death and destruction marked by so-called emotional “safety valves” of different varieties.

I am willing to risk being part of a tiny minority of Caribbean folk not committed to the view that socio-economic and socio-psychological imperatives can provide a level of re-assurance that life may continue “as normal” even after the most atrocious assaults on lives and the quality of life in our tiny states.

In 1990, it amazed me that there had been some boastfulness associated with the fact that people had organised “curfew fetes” and danced long nights away even as bodies lay rotting in some facilities and on the streets of Port of Spain.

Then when Tomas struck Saint Lucia in 2010 and the mountainside came crashing down on Livity Arts Studio and other nearby structures, and bodies were still being excavated from muddy piles, and there was water in hotel swimming pools and none in Castries homes, the Caribbean Tourism Organisation announced that the island was “back in business.”

The string of angry emails to the organisation perhaps cost me some friends and (most likely) participation in future forums with my usual messages of caution about the net value of tourism as a stable, long-term solution to poverty and need.

Colleagues and friends and complete strangers from Caribbean countries (of which I have more than passing knowledge) hate when I meddle in “their” business this way, so I cleave to a few marginal voices expressing caution and care to secure a degree of validation.

For example, accomplished Jamaican journalist and attorney, Dionne Jackson-Miller, took some heavy blows on social media when she attempted to explain why some Jamaicans seemingly avoided the advice of disaster officials on the question of hunkering down at home. She hit an important nail smack on the head.

“So, a lot of people got REALLY upset when I posted that it's easier to talk about staying home when you live in a comfortable home!!!”, was her retort when faced with the accusation that she was implicitly encouraging slackness. She need not have explained more than she eventually did. My own response was that while there were clear dangers associated with the act of ignoring officialdom, there must also be space for some of us to “recognise our own privilege.”

It generated some additional queasiness when Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announced on Friday that “Jamaica is open for business and, once again, the resilience of the Jamaican people is on full display … We are grateful that there has been no wide-scale impact to our general tourism infrastructure and our tourism industry is fully operational.”

Some clever social media user juxtaposed photographs of communities picking up heart-breaking pieces following Beryl, and the idyllic promotions of a tourism industry that cannot afford to miss a single revenue step.

Like Saint Lucia in 2010, there is space for a measure of (even contrived) “balance.” If tourism fails, the ability to recover from the annual assaults is substantially reduced. So, we resort to a kind of bi-polarity descriptive of completely different realities within a single space.

In St Vincent and the Grenadines where, if you don’t try to be strong nowadays you would shed tears every single day, post-Beryl, a scaled-down Vincymas proceeded over the weekend and up to yesterday. Here, again, is territory with which I am familiar. But they don’t like you in their business.

One person told me that the same way some people turn to prayer and religious devotion to cope, so too there are people who believe that dancing their sorrows away can help.

I hear this – loud and clear. But I think that these things underpin a significant psycho-social shortcoming. It might be that this is because I am not prone to superstition, and do not easily subscribe to a notion of  socio-cultural “safety valves” of the party kind.

In the meantime, there is also a new generation of cranks sharing voicenotes and social media posts on “geo-engineering,” the mythical connection between earthquakes and hurricanes, and general challenges (in some instances aligned to political preference) to clear scientific evidence that explains more intense weather events.

How is this different from the music cranked high while people pick up the pieces from broken lives? It’s yet another fete in the face of grief and suffering.

Our Survival Project

In case we were ever inclined to forget, Hurricane Beryl announced the dramatic start of a predictable, annual scramble for Caribbean survival much earlier than has been recorded in an exceptionally long time.

This diminishes (or perhaps reinforces), through immediacy, the broader metaphor of fragile socio-economic persistence because at stake are lives and livelihoods and other assets that assure viability in the face of extreme vulnerability.

Time to painfully recall the admonition of a young Kittitian student in Jamaica angrily moved by my suggestion that there objectively exists no real reason why some countries of our region consider themselves sufficiently impregnable to declare a notion of sovereignty.

Every single year, you see, we are confronted by the threat of devastation and the need to rebuild ahead of another interminable round of potential destruction. In some instances, elsewhere, human conduct in the form of violence and political instability exists as ultimately manageable traits.

We can end wars, intervene in conflicts, stand in solidarity against atrocities and help bring perpetrators to justice, even across borders. We can learn to negotiate and to understand each other better and punish those who thrive on violence and disruption. However hopeless may currently appear the plights of Palestinians, the Sudanese, Rohingya there have been paths traced by Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia which indicated resolutions … of sorts.

There are also episodic naturally occurring events that defy precise prediction, and we know some of them well right here – earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Shortly before midnight Sunday, there was a Magnitude 3.7 earthquake off Trinidad’s northwest tip barely noticed as we scoured online resources for word on Beryl.

In St Vincent, the folks of the village of Fancy who faced volcanic ash in 2021 now feared surging tides as the winds and rain raged.

Yet here we are, as usual, as expected, as officially declared, in “hurricane season.” It flows from our tongues in the midst of cricket commentary, defiant fetes, and political exchanges.

Over the weekend, a long relocated relative quipped about T&T and hurricanes that “they threaten but always avoid” as if to suggest that avoidance reduces direct and indirect victimisation and involvement. Devastation in Carriacou is our issue in T&T, in the same way a volcanic eruption in St Vincent clearly was, and so will any number of weather events yet unleashed off the west coast of Africa wherever they land in our neighbourhood … or right here.

The statement ought to also invoke an implication of collective responsibility – the stuff of which the regional survival project aka “Caricom” was meant to address.

What, therefore, is there to suggest the centrality of this question in our formal processes? Acknowledgement of the growing climate crisis has helped close some ranks.

The fact that while we occupy different vessels we sail on the same ocean or that in many respects we share cabin space on a small brittle vessel negotiating hostile waves. We can orient the narrative in different directions, but it almost always describes susceptibility to extreme outcomes.

How, in the face of this therefore, is a psychology of “invincibility” - as prescribed by my friend and colleague, Tony Fraser, with respect to cricket – a realistic possibility; and not simply self-delusion of the highest order?

This is not to dismiss the prospects for confidence and self-belief – for which we are well known in select areas of public life – but to acknowledge some stark realities including our deficiencies. And here, in my view, is where the skills of adaptation and change and mitigation of risks are left to be developed and honed.

The suggestion that perils “threaten but always avoid” T&T may further weaken the determination we employ to engage our own survival project and the wider regional rescue.

Maybe Beryl has opened an opportunity to reformulate the Caricom agenda not by supplanting existing areas of concern but by attaching stronger awareness of their survival implications.

We have several months left in this long season, and next year it will return. We cannot, as island and coastal states, relocate. The scientists also say, at the current rate, things will worsen.

When the postponed Caricom Heads of Government Meeting, initially due this week in Grenada, eventually convenes it might be useful to ensure this common thread of responsibility to ourselves is inserted.

The agenda needs to reflect such urgency through all issues requiring thought and action, and 12 months a year.

Refocusing Caricom

By this time next week, the winning team from the ICC T20 World Cup would have already left for home, a multinational security mission dominated by Kenyan forces arrived in Haiti, and Caricom leaders readied for another summit in Grenada.

The meeting commemorates 50 years of political independence for Grenada which, 35 years ago, also witnessed the signing of the Grand Anse Declaration on deepening the integration movement.

These developments are highlighted here because they each bear unique messages related to Caricom’s survival project.

The first is that while cricket as played in some, not all, Caricom member states contains instructive elements that can help guide integration efforts, it is hardly a subject worthy of the kind of attention and resources it has been formally receiving.

We can start talking real business if/when we decide to send a Caricom team of athletes to the Summer Olympics or a single Caribbean contingent to the FIFA World Cup – two areas of sporting endeavour in which all member states have displayed levels of deep interest and high excellence.

Countries of the United Kingdom have been participating in the Olympics as a single team since 1908. This, of course, would be an impossibility when it comes to football.

I have dealt with this here before and also wondered what it must be like to sit around a Caricom table as a delegate from Belize, Bahamas, Haiti, or Suriname and listen to talk of the “good old days” of Worrell and Walcott and Weekes.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I will never say anything bad about Clive Lloyd who receives an Order of the Caribbean Community (OCC) in Grenada next week, but I just worry, on behalf of some members of the fraternity, about the priorities often on the table.

Then comes Haiti and continuing instability there. There has been some idiocy on public display by several commentators regarding Caricom’s role in the latest round of crises in this member country that needed to be confidently and forcefully attended to by the regional leadership.

To associate Caricom participation in the search for solutions to the problems of Haiti as an external, surrogate intervention on behalf of others is to fail to understand the nature of our collective relationship. It also betrays a special kind of condescension when it comes to our small countries and the integration movement that drives collective actions.

Whether or not you believe we should have ever performed the initial act of “widening” to embrace Haiti in 2002 is now an irrelevant concern. I believe, especially in the face of the current situation, Caricom’s role has been seminal.

For one, it served to blunt the notion of outright invasion by invitation – a compulsion heavily rooted in sentiments on the ground throughout Haiti.

Next, there are continuing 50th anniversary Caricom celebrations and Grenada’s own half century of independence. The Grand Anse Declaration of 1989 represented, at that time, the single most important development in the history of Caricom since its launch in 1973. The founding of the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2005 was the next.

None of this is expected to make sense to anyone fixated on a national destiny marked by denial of geographical and historical antecedents. There are, indeed, passengers on board the Caricom ship who’d rather not be there. Jamaica’s Bruce Golding Report noted structural flaws and, in the process, proposed a series of ultimatums regarding future participation in the Single Market.

Should the latter occur, this would take Jamaica to the status of The Bahamas which has habitually cherry-picked its obligations. Added to this, a majority of member states have chosen to forego the opportunities presented by the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ, even as they are bound by its powers related to Caricom Treaty obligations.

The experiences of integration movements around the world do not significantly differ. Have a closer look at developments within the African Union, the European Union, the ASEAN grouping and others. We could certainly have done more but have actually not done that badly.

The Caricom Secretariat, though, would do well to modernise its operations. Its public communication functions are particularly weak and there are operational features in other areas that can benefit from the more appropriate employment of new approaches and technologies.

I am aware that study after study has been conducted into these areas of weakness, but it is time that the better recommendations are adopted.

The bureaucrats may well find that in pursuit of the key agenda items including food and nutrition security, the climate crisis, and foreign policy, upgraded internal processes would serve the regional project well. This is not only a matter of achieving focus but employing different lenses to deliver clear direction.

 

Organised labour - the risk of irrelevance

As with every other sector, our labour movement lags dramatically behind in its consideration of the pace of technological change and its dramatic impacts on the world of work. In this, our unions do not stand alone, but it is tragic that they do.

I listen carefully to their leaders and spokespersons for the slightest clues that the concepts of collective bargaining, social protections, and a durable social compact through the concept of multipartism are being critically examined in the face of the changed technological tide. I have heard nothing particularly inspiring regarding such a dynamic.

I have perhaps now overused this space to remark on the sluggish embrace of technological opportunity – from simple digitisation to digitalisation to more advanced employment of artificial intelligence to generate greater efficiencies, improve government capacity, and enhance the quality of life of all citizens.

There are people studying net impacts and there are divided juries. But this is clearly not an advancing evil to be resisted – as we are currently witnessing via appalling public service backwardness. It is not on any political platform in any meaningful way, and few are the civil society organisations realistically engaging the phenomenon.

So, this is not to continue the hammering of trade unions as is the wont of ideologues, politicians, and business leaders. The labour movement actually offers space for creative engagement of these issues, since it intrinsically and by its very nature engages elements of our society often shut out from the national discourse.

Its preoccupation with the achievement of social justice adds an important dimension in the conduct of public policy. For, whatever the challenges and opportunities of different times, the interests of people must be paramount.

Yet, have any of the activists, even as they recognise Labour Day today, looked at the impact of technology on growing informality in the labour market? The fact that, especially post-pandemic, there are growing numbers of people who are exploring options for remote work and for the independent deployment of generative AI and other new tools in enhancing output.

That, despite our own Caribbean lethargy on this question, the modern workplace in many places is being remodelled and retooled to deliver more, at a faster rate, and at lower cost. That the consequences are not all necessarily detrimental when it comes to absolute employment numbers – though there are clear shifts from the formal to the informal. One key question for labour unions is the degree to which the new reality provides safeguards against exploitation and assures a level of social protection.

In the latter regard, state programmes such as our National Insurance Scheme must adapt to be able to capture the growing numbers of “self-employed” and others that escape the net of formality, tax compliance, and the protection of their diverse service providers.

So, it should be expected that our unions would by now be actively studying the actuarial implications of an expanded safety net and the strengthening of measures to secure the interests of participants in a new economy.

All of this means that the declining number of organised workers – now at around 25% of the labour market – must begin pressing for much more from the organisations to which their dues are directed. It also means that the remaining 75% will be able to locate a centre of informed and equipped influence to advance the cause of their social participation and protection.

To whom is the informal sector turning for the assurance that they are not forgotten in the process of national planning? What are the processes to ensure that in the transition from the formal to the informal or from entry into the new, emerging economy, people are not left alone to languish in the event of failure?

There is much work to be done. Our labour unions played key roles in our early history to transform a legacy of exploitation into one in which workers participated meaningfully in national life. As a labour reporter and union member in the 1980s I also recall the transitioning to centres of learning and enlightened discourse on changing workplace circumstances.

Yes, the leaders of those times past are unlikely to survive the current period. The messaging is different. The demands have changed in ways we never imagined. The call now is not to political independence and genuine emancipation, but to master new tools to take us forward to a future in which we are in far more control of our destiny that we ever were. Anything else condemns the forces that be to irrelevance. That’s an actual risk of these times.

Finding flags to fly

Nothing like a big sporting event to ignite emotions typically associated with the flying of one’s own national flag and tearfully rendering the national anthem.

For some, like my nephew “B” and people I am sure you know, the latter exercise includes notes not reflected in the official music score. That is probably because the anthem was written with phenoms like Ella Andall in mind! Lesser mortals change keys when we reach “here every creed and race.”

But it does not always require authentic credentials to stimulate this level of sentimentality when it comes to sport. I remember for instance, back in 1989, almost being ejected from Radio 610 when people thought the “red” shirt I wore on the day of the decisive (and losing) T&T vs USA World Cup Football qualifier had not been red enough.

I simply had not found time to procure a cheap T–shirt on Frederick Street and I rather liked the one I had – which I did not stop wearing until only a few years ago.

There were on-air colleagues claiming the occasion was the most significant in the country’s history! A public holiday was declared even before a single boot touched a ball. Flags and red cloth sold and sold and sold. I was, apparently, the only person on the face of the portion of earth occupied by T&T that did not have a shirt the correct shade of red.

Wayne Brown wrote that the whole affair closely aligned with what we recognise as ultra-nationalist “fascism” of the type that in later years led to serious calls for the flying of national flags at all homes. A whole government minister was given the brief to pursue the “patriotism” agenda.

Wayne and I tried discussing what was happening over lunch one day. But it was a silent affair with lots of head shaking, grunts, and groans. Two people known for talking your head off … beaten into disgruntled silence.

In more recent times, with no Wayne Brown in sight, came the CPL and the fake names and brands. I warned right here in this space that inciting nationalist fervour over pickup sides from everywhere would take us nowhere. I rooted for the “T&T Amazon Warriors” on purpose to make the point.

Yet, a real T&T flag was trampled in Guyana, and we realised there would come a time when the sentiment would harden and threaten a sense of fraternity between close communities. Oil eventually came and tore the masks off … and took some flesh in the process.

Then you realise that the Manchester United folks of Diego Martin were doing the same to the Gunners of St Joseph. Black eyes among friends. A few broken teeth. Flags and buntings waved in scorn at each other. What, then, becomes of red, black, and white? Who of the TKR has not cheered for the KKR? Where, by the way, is this “Trinbago” of which they speak?

The indomitable Fazeer Mohammed also advised last weekend about the power of money in professional sport. How international sport has integrated genuine feelings of loyalty to spin vast financial surpluses through contrived scheduling. The composing of tournaments in such a manner as to attract eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Nothing wrong with any of this, of course. It has always been that allegiance based on nationality has had the potential to convert competitions into wars with illusory stakes that imperil pride.

It must eventually be that the Man United crest will be as recognisable as a KKR gold and purple Viking helmet or as the birds of T&T’s Coat of Arms.

Then comes the West Indies. Not the one with the blue background with four horizontal stripes of black, white, and gold of 1958 when the West Indian Federation was born. Not even the one with the yellow stars and coconut tree adjoining a grey mass along a green ocean of the pre-1999 WICB generation. But the one with the yellow sun, three cricket stumps and leaning coconut tree registered by CWI Inc.

Yes, that one. The one with the anthem (a genius offering from David Rudder) that precious few in Haiti, Belize, The Bahamas, or Suriname know or understand. I can imagine the Caricom meetings at which cricketing nostalgia reigns and the puzzled and bemused looks around some corners of the table.

Yet, there are passions to match the hurts and triumphs of the EPL, the IPL, and even the CPL. Flags to fly over the ICC and FIFA. Anthems to be sung. Money to be made. This evening at the game I wear my own shade of maroon.