Selwyn Ryan and the Google connection

Many journalists of years past, and who are still around, know that long before Google and Yahoo! search engines there were people to whom they could have turned for quick advice and reliable information on selected subjects.

True, they also relied heavily on the newspaper clippings of their respective libraries, which were facilities of varying degrees of sophistication, orderliness, and timely delivery. But the human touch was often faster and offered nuances and other gaps AI cannot now offer.

There were newsroom old-stagers whose recall was respected even at short notice, and external expert resources always ready to take your call. This often reinforced the clippings search.

At one time in the Express newsroom, we had David Chase, David Renwick, and Leonard Robertson. One phone call away, on matters of history, politics, and general public affairs, was columnist/academic Dr Selwyn Ryan, among others.

Last Sunday, I remembered when I had written a front-page article and was subsequently confronted by a furious editor-in-chief (Owen Baptiste) in typical irascible, blood-vessel-busting style about something reported by me as fact, but which one of his pals had called to suggest was wholly inaccurate.

It had something to do with the federal elections of 1958 which I was certain I had read somewhere and rather casually inserted as part of the story. Calling Dr Ryan rescued me from what would have otherwise been an editor’s savagery.

My late mother-in-law, Marianne Ramesar, worked alongside him at the ISER (now SALISES), UWI and, like Ryan, was of the view that no narrative on development and all its processes is complete in the absence of verifiable data and statistics. In my view, by the way, her own work as a historian is grossly undervalued

Today, I am part of a regional media development institute that is attempting to erect as a key pillar of journalistic pedagogy a notion of data-driven newsgathering. It is a painful challenge in societies that rely heavily on intuition, guesswork and vaps.

For instance, I have been concerned about the popular myth of substantial, decisive imported Vincentian and Grenadian votes in the late 50s and early 60s to bolster political support at elections. Data employed at the core of journalistic enquiry makes for a powerful narrative. That’s the plan. It’s not only for university researchers. This was a Selwyn Ryan lesson.

The years passed and all of this came to mind a few months after the 1995 general election that brought a UNC-dominated government to office, following a post-election agreement with the NAR. This is often inaccurately described as when the UNC first “won” a general election.

I was, rather surprisingly (as a non-academic), invited to speak at a UWI seminar on the impact of media coverage of that election on its eventual outcome. I called the paper Journalism and the Political Process.

The frightfully rigorous interrogation that followed reinforced the fact that this man, who had been our newspaper Google, had earned our admiration because of the respectful regard extended to us as clearly imperfect professionals.

Confidence in its soundness and acknowledgement of the paper’s weaknesses came from Prof. Ryan’s public and private responses to what he had heard. This is what true teachers do. The UWI has referred to him as “a brilliant research empiricist.” I think I understand why.

The seminar proceedings were subsequently published in a book simply called The General Elections of 1995 in Trinidad and Tobago. My chapter is there.

The phone call consultations with Prof. Ryan had actually continued long after the Express. He had endured - as head of the elections survey team of St Augustine Research Associates (SARA) - the recurring, outrageous claim that his research methodology was implicitly serving to stimulate ethnic dynamics.

Idle chatter over this had morphed, over the years, into vulgar slurs on his character and his commitment to country. Anyone who has read any of his insightful texts on ethnicity, race, nationalism, and politics would be hard-pressed to arrive at some of the conclusions that entered the public domain – many of them from the political platform.

I am yet to read Ryan Recalls, but I am certain that he either directly or indirectly addresses the claims that arose.

Yes, we have Ukraine and Russia. Oil prices and pandemic measures. Vulturous politics and charlatanistic adventurism. Much of that was within my sight. But, today, this space belongs to our pre-Google search engine and generous intellectual benefactor to a generation of T&T journalists. Thank you, sir.