Do Caribbean governments want to jail journalists for doing their job?

Facts, Fiction and
Simplistic Interpretations

By Earl Bousquet

Trinidad & Tobago Prime Minister Patrick Manning on Monday (May 3) addressed a gathering of journalists from Commonwealth and Caribbean states at a meeting organized by the Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA) to mark World Press Freedom Day.

            During his keynote address, the T&T PM said all was not well with the media in his country. He accused his country’s press of engaging in biased and slanderous reporting and lamented that in the process, “many lives are put at considerable disadvantage, almost destroyed through careless, reckless and irresponsible work” on the part of some journalists. In most cases, he added, those who are negatively affected “have no redress – and that is not democracy.

The PM urged that media organizations in his country – and in the region at large – needed to “get their act together”, improve professional standards and adopt their own codes of practice. He said it was “not enough to insist only on the right of journalists and related practitioners to freedom of the press and freedom of expression” as there was an equal “responsibility to insist on standards.”

“To my mind, the real challenge in Trinidad & Tobago at this time might not be that of press freedom as much as that of quality,” Mr. Manning said.  He challenged the CJA to do what it can to bring about “a radical and progressive transformation” in the quality of journalism in the country and insisted that “journalists have a responsibility to set a high standard and codes of practice.

He noted in cases where the media doesn’t set its own standards, “governments, even in the most democratic countries, are forced to introduce measures to bring about some measure of control.” 

Sound advice on World Press Freedom Day, I’d say, coming from someone in the best position to tell the local media how the government it has to live with feels about it.

However, Mr. Manning’s remarks about the state of the media in his own country drew immediate opposition and condemnation from the President of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) Mr. Wesley Gibbings.

(Mr. Gibbings, a media consultant, is a Trinidadian with St. Lucian roots, who normally sees the region’s governments as being some kind of threat to the media. This time he accuses the St. Lucia government of wanting to jail journalists for doing their work.

The ACM President offered the view that, unlike what PM Manning said, it was the press that was under attack across the Caribbean. He referred to the outcome of a court case involving Grenadian (newspaper editor) George Worme, in which he faced up to two years in jail if he loses an appeal. (But noticeably, he gave no details about what the charges were and what the evidence was.)

Mr Gibbings also mounted his St. Lucia whipping horse. He said “the region’s media stood idly by as an amendment to the Criminal Code prescribing jail for acts of speaking and writing was passed last year” in the St. Lucia parliament.

Chiding the region’s press for not taking on their respective governments as forcefully as he would like to see, Mr. Gibbings said that in almost every instance of governments taking actions he considered negative to the press, “acts of silencing were met with almost complete silence by too many of us.”

Nice words, coming as they are from a head of a regional media organization. But how accurate are they?

Those who know Mr. Gibbings well enough were not surprised at his response to the Trinidad & Tobago PM. There’s the media culture that demands that he had to have a response to the T&T PM for the local media as soon as the session was over. But, in addition, he also has an often demonstrated ability to pluck facts and fiction out of the sky to flash a message here and there, every now and then, in the name of press freedom.

In keeping with the prevailing thinking on the part of many in the ACM’s leadership -- which holds that the press must never be seen as being “in bed with the government” – Mr. Gibbings would most likely have considered it an opportunity lost if he didn’t “hit back” on behalf of the local media and the regional press corps.

But what a pity Mr. Gibbings didn’t take time to look behind and below what Mr. Manning said, most of which – if not all -- is just plain and simple reality.

First of all, Mr. Manning’s remarks, as reported, were not about the entire Caribbean media but about the state of the media in his homeland. Secondly, his comments about the regional media were about the response of governments to what they consider to be infractions by the media. Thirdly (and very important too) Mr. Gibbings knows quite well that notwithstanding all the faults he could enumerate about governments in relation to the regional press, never in recent memory has a journalist been jailed or killed for doing their work in the English-speaking Caribbean territories represented by the ACM.

The ACM President stands at the one of the opposite ends of the continuum in one aspect of the continuing debate on Press Freedom and Freedom of Expression. On the one side there are those who harbour notions that the press should definitely be muzzled; on the other hand there are those who feel and behave as if the press should never, ever be criticized.

Unfortunately, however, there is normally not much room for compromise between these two extreme positions, each of which is founded on a basic mistrust of the other. This fuels the continuing accusation/response cycle that only leads to a hardening of positions and constant deepening of the mistrust.

Mr. Gibbings’ reference to the amendment to the St. Lucia Criminal Code is a case in point. The language of the law is plain and simple. It says you cannot knowingly publish lies that can hurt the society. It doesn’t prescribe “jail for acts of speaking and writing” as Mr. Gibbings’ simplistic but heavily loaded interpretation would like the world to believe.

The fact is, apart from those here who have a vested interest in sharing such a vile interpretation of the government’s intent, I know of no one else outside St. Lucia who has seen the recent amendment to the Criminal Code Section 361 as representing a threat to press freedom, as against it being a deterrent to those who would use the journalism profession to deliberately spread lies with the intent or effect of harming the national interest. Yet, when the government explains this, the cynics among its critics simply ask it to “define what is the national interest.”

It is precisely this type of blind and dyslexic refusal to hear, listen, trust or try to understand anything that any Prime Minister or other government official says that is partly responsible for the sorry state of the media in our region today. It is also responsible for statements like that made by Brian Lara (himself an eternal victim of unfair press scrutiny) at the beginning of the two memorable matches here when, in response to the claim by some that “the press is a necessary evil” he said he preferred to see the press as “an unnecessary evil.”

For too long, those who still haven’t learned to trust their own have been perpetuating this myth that all governments and politicians are always out to control and muzzle the press, all of the time.

This myth of an eternal conspiracy on the part of any and all governments any and everywhere in the world is responsible for nurturing a cadre of reporters and journalists across the region today who have grown-up to be professional skeptics, constantly mistrusting anything said or written by anyone even remotely associated with government, especially when it comes to relations with the press. They go into a natural mode of aggressive or offensive reaction each and every time they hear a government official say anything about the media, good or bad.

This type of reaction has been around for a while and it has certainly had its effect in delaying or prolonging eventual agreement and implementation of regional initiatives that involve Caricom governments working with the press. I recall many years ago when CAMWORK was discussing the issuance of officially recognized regional press passes through national media associations, some in the leadership of the ACM today regarded it back then as “an effort to license journalists.” Today, the ACM is issuing the same passes ten years later.

The St. Lucia Media Workers Association (SLMWA) was an early victim of precisely this type of negative thinking about the relations between the media and governments in the country they live and operate in. Established in the early 1980s, the SLMWA mobilized and organized media workers to participate in regular progressive and representative activities that addressed their professional needs and concerns and promoted training as an essential component in the development of journalists and of the profession. The SLMWA organized training at home and abroad and was responsible for establishing a record with regard to its Communication Arts Programme (CAP). This course was taught by purely local professional personnel and was implemented in conjunction with the University of the West Indies (UWI), which incorporated graduates into the Jamaica-based Caribbean Institute of Media and Communications (CARIMAC). As a result of the success of that course, St. Lucia for a long time held the record as the Caricom territory with the most students at CARIMAC in any one year.

The SLMWA was the best thing ever to happen for the purpose of moving journalism and journalists ahead in St. Lucia. Alas, it died the minute it was taken over by those who felt it should be less concerned with professional issues and more concerned with “taking on the government.”

Thus began the process of introduction of this new dimension to the permanent divide in how governments see the press and how journalists see themselves. Today, some journalists see themselves as nothing more than self-anointed and self-appointed protectors of the people against the governments. In St. Lucia, some even see themselves as representing the Opposition in what they consider to be the absence of an effect political opposition. As such, some behave as if they have committed themselves to the removal of the elected government through a campaign of daily abuse and concentration on only what’s negative. And yet, the same people still see themselves as the shining lights of journalism – according to their own definition of what the role of a journalist should be in our society.

So then, with such people you just can’t win.

The time has come for the journalism corps across the region to wake up to the reality of the dearth of national representation and the virtual death of organized regional responses to the crying needs of the profession in the Caribbean today.

What the SLMWA achieved and the trail it blazed in its first decade simply hasn’t been maintained. Today, there is no longer any association to speak of. The ACM held its AGM here recently and no one represented St. Lucia officially. The ACM, as it stands now, is no more than what it was when it replaced CAMWORK – an umbrella group of largely dysfunctional national bodies that exist mostly on letterheads. Organisational, representational and institutional functioning is totally absent on the ground. The “leaders” of these “bodies” seem more interested in attending conferences abroad than attending to the professional needs of those they claim to represent.

Everywhere they exist and in whatever form, local journalists are dissatisfied with the state of affairs with their national media association. In St. Lucia they know they want something, but not what it is. It’s back to the drawing board with questions such as “who is a journalist” and “do we need an association, a union or a club” being asked by the new generation of reporters -- and PR operatives asking “why are we left out.”

The history and experience of the SLMWA and CAMWORK have shown that where there is lack of trust in government and refusal to work with it on the basis of mutual respect and shared objectives, it simply won’t work. Soon after the 1997 general elections, the new St. Lucia government made an unprecedented gesture as an indication of its genuine intentions when, for three consecutive years it offered a $10,000 allocation in the national budget to the SLMWA for training purposes. However, it was accused by a loud few of wanting to buy and capture the brains of local journalists. The employers in the private media, some of whom warned the media about “going to be with the government” have however failed to provide a brown cent for training of their editorial staff.

Today, as a result of this eternally suspicious and mistrustful attitude on the part of those with the loudest voices in the local media towards the government, there is now a tendency that has taken root in the society whereby members of the press corps personally attack and intimidate those of their ranks who work with government. This past Wednesday evening, a media worker employed with the government called an evening TV talk show to express her personal view on the host’s misinterpretation of what a government minister said. Just for being bold enough to disagree with the talk show host’s twisted and illogical interpretation, she was personally attacked and told she was “singing for her supper.”

Until and unless those with mutual positions of mistrust climb down from their high war horses, adopt a more sane and rational posture and consider a shared approach to the work that is to be done to restore the journalism profession to earlier standards of professional excellence, the region’s media corps will continue to hear more than it can see and the needs of practitioners will continue to cry out for hearing and attention.

It would therefore do the ACM better if it spent more time seeing and doing more to address the professional needs of the journalists of the Caribbean than its President does in trying to make the region’s governments look and sound like all they want to do is to jail journalists and reporters for writing and speaking.

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