Dear Editor,
The impression was that John Feeley could have spoken for days. About press freedom. About government’s relationship with journalists. About government’s reactions to press challenges. Mr. Feeley came with an encyclopedia and delivered encomia. To journalists who laid it all on the line. To media houses that fell. Because they stood up and stood out. Stabroek News, a media house that was victimized to its death, came in for mention.
John Feeley carries a weighty title: Director of the Center for Media Integrity of the Americas. He is doing well with it, shoulders its responsibilities well. A man that doesn’t pull punches. It was good that President Ali and Prime Minister Phillips were present. They get to hear a non-Guyanese voice, a differently American accented one, laying it all out. The call of journalists. “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Those have been made my duty. The president and prime minister should have squirmed internally. It’s a formula with relevance. The government has become too comfortable with weaponizing institutions, inciting supportive social media operators, attacking contrarians, and rejecting engagements and questions that discomfort. Ambassador Feeley covered much more territory than those shared here.
“Perhaps the best test of a government’s commitment to freedom of expression is not how it treats journalists who praise it; it is how it treats those journalists who might challenge it.” It would help to know what the two national leaders in the audience thought of that monster. Of challenge. Of those honoured for their commitment to fearless journalism. Of the duty of governments and leaders to recognize the role of a reporter, how democracy is enhanced. Not by the canned and controlled, but by the candid and the credible. And, by the comprehensive that has as its first obligation informing the people. It was helpful that Ambassador Feeley spoke at Liliendaal, Guyana and not Lima, Peru.
Because what’s going on with the independent media and the government here is no secret. It’s too much to stay a secret, and for all the wrong reasons. Both President Ali and Prime Minister Phillips should have felt many eyes boring into the back of their heads. Over the PPP Government engagements with its scurrilous games. Where President Ali has compiled a distasteful record of saying the great things he has in mind for freedoms, only for him to turn around and bail himself out from what he said. What’s in black and white.
In his usual water-on-a-duck’s back manner, President Ali stood before the microphones and performed. A better performer than he, Guyanese are still to see. A leader without the faintest idea of the demands of words once they are delivered. What’s fostered, and what must be fulfilled. “A journalist knows when a politician is avoiding a question.” President Ali has become the embodiment of what he presented (avoidance). Among the four challenges facing the Caribbean media, as identified by President Ali, was ‘misinformation and declining trust.’ Personally speaking, the PPP Government has been a leader with misinformation. President Ali himself had spoken brightly of what he had in mind to address misinformation, only for his people to be among the foremost purveyors of misinformation. Or, to borrow J. Edgar Hoover’s label for muckraking journalist, Jack Anderson, “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.” With his own people involved in misinformation, President Ali apparently lost heart on misinformation.
A democratically minded leader, one genuinely committed to free speech and a free press at their best, would be the main party that disabuses misinformation peddlers from their reprehensible activity. It should rise to the level of a purge, a crusade, when the purveyors and peddlers are in the bosom of the PPP Government. Ambassador Feeley spoke straight, shot from the hip. President Ali shared what he hoped others would think of as straight, and shot his usual blanks.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
Discussion