Landing the narrative

Sufficient to disclaim a once prominent charge (even from within) of a “single-story” agenda, our media have recently offered up a menu so diverse that observers with a genuine interest in exploring the more prominent highlights, now too often consider themselves hapless practitioners of negligent omission.

Latterly, the media industry itself – whatever the preoccupation with eluding our own front pages – has occupied the maze of confusions. The subject of survival did not have to reside in the column of sudden development, having long been the focus of critical, methodical scrutiny both from within and without.

For example, the largely ignored 2016 Caribbean media viability report of the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) on Jamaican media, provided substantial guidance on most objective circumstances characteristic of the T&T Newsday crash, even in the face of eminently dismissible post-facto claims and assertions.

“What has happened to Newsday is not an isolated anomaly but part of a wider pattern of vulnerability and, increasingly, contraction,” the MIC (of which I am Vice President) said.

The last print copy of the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday

I have also seen submissions on the subject from media folks such as Julian Rogers and Joannah Bharose that more closely align with MIC’s deployment of research and informed analysis.

These dispatches also serve as counterpoints to the claim that media audiences are best served by naïve providers, paid and unpaid propagandists, and zealots who do not consider themselves bound by professional journalistic imperatives including (weighted) “balance” and pursuit of the truth.

Meanwhile, and not unrelatedly, we have an ongoing discourse on geopolitical realities that has been implanted through dangerously intimate engagement. Subject as it is to partisan fervour, there is certain to be confusion and discord, instead of reasoned debate and the pursuit of consensus.

“Sovereignty” is meanwhile selectively determined as factor and non-factor depending on the time of day or day of the week. So too, whom to love and whom to despise. Who is friend and who is foe. It all seems to depend on fickle political preference.

Then, right there on this endless menu, is the national economy. Through this you find rare consensus on untrammelled descent. Even when not so defined, witness the desperate ad hoc fervour to address a dire strait. Punishment and displacement defined as economic reward. Borrow, tax, and rearrange. What, indeed, is the plan?

This sits alongside inelastic relations between proclaimed lawlessness and authoritarian coercion, and a debasing of judicious prerogative in favour of inflexible retribution. It’s easy to get there once favourable crime statistics trump the pervasive presence of fear and when violent revenge is preferred over justice.

Not to be outdone, along came Monday’s Tobago House of Assembly elections – a cruel deadline prohibiting its upgrade to the point of exclusivity in today’s offering.

It was difficult through three short days there to suggest a forecast, save for the habitual durability of the status quo in the absence of visible, frenetic activism.

It would have been interesting to have explored the main factors behind the TPP’s sweeping victory. But by now you would have already had your fill of it.

There remain two promising things to add to today’s examination of the information maze: proposed amendments to the Maternity Protection Act (let’s leave the Retrenchment and Severance Benefits Act - RSBA - for now) and the conduct of this year’s steelband competitions.

The RSBA requires sole attention. I remember covering its early application in 1986 and the turbulent period in industrial relations history reminiscent, by some, of the watershed era of the 1930s. More on that another time.

The enlightened amendments to the MPA need further elaboration and analysis. The suggested changes appear, prima facie, to be in accordance with modern thinking on maternal and family rights – the latter concept fully resonant with a number of conventions establishing “family life” as a bedrock of civilised existence. I am hoping more specifics come to light as we proceed with this.

I did mention two “promising things.” The other is, of course, the fact that ongoing steelband competitions are reinforcing my view that pan is the single greatest and best thing we do. There is nothing else that comes close.

For the umpteenth time, it’s not just the music delivered. Here we have a model for social organisation and an avenue for generation of economic value that is tragically underestimated.

If you doubt me, head over to any panyard near where you live or work. Don’t judge only from the competitions – though Sunday’s Junior Panorama Finals should not be missed. When you’ve done that, then talk. Meanwhile, we have a crowded maze to negotiate.