REVERSAL OF STABROEK NEWS BAN

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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.