Corruption of Journalism

There is hopefully a greater appreciation of our democracy now that those that are too young to remember the dictatorship that existed prior to 1992 are absorbing the heroic efforts to dismantle one in Egypt. But older folks would recall that in Guyana, in the creation of our dictatorship, there were several forces deployed relentlessly to destroy the institutions of democracy, even as they abused the freedoms guaranteed by that democracy. We take a look this week at the role of journalism and the press. There is the aphorism that those who forget the lessons of history will be doomed to repeat them. Let us be forewarned.

In our democratic (albeit colonial-ruled) 1960’s, the press was primarily privately owned, as it is today. A section of the press, aligned with the opposition of the day (which is still around), created a hysteria in the country by their daily vitriolic outpourings that the elected government of the day was “communist” and that the government was going to reduce the populace to slavery to serve their nefarious, obviously totalitarian, ends etc. History has shown that these “facts” were actually lies: some that pulled the strings actually apologised. But the damage had been done: twenty-eight years of destruction and decrepitude.

However, the danger that journalism might be used to subvert democracy by stoking the fears of ordinary people had been identified long before, in fact by a man that is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern journalism – the American Walter Lippmann. Lippmann had served in WWI as the US’ propaganda chief in Europe and observed from within how easily the minds of people can be swayed by a mixture of opinions on tenuous “facts”. Returning to peacetime America, he wrote a prescient text, “Liberty and the News”, which was re-released a few years ago because of its topicality in the modern world.

Lippmann identified what he defined as a “crisis in journalism” precipitated by the sheer explosion of information about a world that had become smaller because of increased communications. And that was almost a hundred years ago, before the internet. No one, he pointed out, could now keep track of what was going on around even his/her limited sphere. John Public now depended on the press to perform that function. But unlike most commentators that felt the danger lay in advertisers influencing the news, Lippmann believed that the greater menace originated in the smug assurance of some journalists of their omniscience, and their propensity to place their opinions ahead of facts. Worse yet there were some that manufactured their “facts”.

There is a confusion of what “liberty” under a democracy meant for journalism: not just to print whatever came to mind but according to Lippmann, “the effort to protect for public use access to a factual record”. This is a lesson that is lost in Guyana in Kaieteur News and Stabroek News: that veracity comes before “edification”. We have journalists that use “he seh,” “she seh,” and “dem Seh” to define businessmen as “corrupt”, the government as “a dictatorship” and the state as “fascist”. Only a few days ago, the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) came out and made public its findings on its investigations into alleged racist and inflammatory articles published by these two media entities. The authors of these articles were accused of ‘promoting racial insecurity,’ ‘advocating race-based politics,’ and ‘making vile accusations of racist behaviour against the government.’ The ERC said that it has found that some of the statements included in the articles were ‘unacceptable’ and has since urged media houses to find a way to deal with content that has the potential of promoting racial insecurity amongst the Guyanese populace.

It is our hope that all media houses in Guyana would understand that the media have an important role to play in society. The ERC has summed it up well by saying “as this country (Guyana) moves forward and attempts the continued process of race healing and of eliminating the scars of our collective history, the press has a duty, indeed an obligation to be part of this process.”

It is in this vein that we call upon the members of our newspaper fraternity to rein in these petty pen pushers that are destroying the good name of journalism, and insist that they strive to raise their own standards in this noble profession. Or would we rather repeat history?