The President of the Association of Caribbean Media (ACM), Dale Enoch, is to meet with hemispheric press freedom organisations in Uruguay to discuss the continuing state advertising boycott of Stabroek News.
According to a release from the ACM, Enoch raised the matter at the general meeting of IFEX – The International Free Expression organisation – in Montevideo, Uruguay on Tuesday.
Enoch was a member of a group of prominent Caribbean media operatives, who met with President Bharrat Jagdeo earlier this year in an effort to have the ads restored but met with no success.
The ACM was invited to the Uruguay meeting following a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean groups in Austin, Texas last month where Enoch spoke on the continuing ads impasse during a session on ‘advocating for legal change’.
The panel included Rodolfo Barros of the Foro De Periodismo Argentina (FOPEA), who felt that the situation in Guyana requires clear guidelines regarding the placement of government advertising. He pointed to similar incidents in Argentina.
Robert Mahoney of the international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) agreed that there is a need for the Guyana government to make sure its actions are according to set guidelines and nothing else.
The Guyana situation sparked some debate during the hour-long discussion on legal challenges to media, the ACM said, with some suggesting that the Guyana problem should be put on the international media agenda and this could put pressure on the government to change its position and approach; one representative said similar situations have occurred in Romania; and some felt the Guyana government erred in handling the situation.
The government withdrew ads from the Stabroek News in November 2006 and after queries were made by this newspaper the government said there had been a drop in SN’s circulation and it was therefore switching ads to another private newspaper. It continues to advertise however with the privately-owned Mirror newspaper and the state-owned Guyana Chronicle both of which are known to have very low circulation.
The government is yet to provide data to substantiate its claims and has not responded to a request by Ignacio J. Alvarez, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the IACHR of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to provide the basis for its move.
On June 13, 2007, the Special Rapporteur’s Office wrote the Guyana Government requesting that the government provide information within 15 days in relation to the allocation of advertising. The government later said that it had not gotten the letter until late July but to date it still has not provided the information requested by the rapporteur.
In a press release issued after not getting a response from the Guyana Govern-ment, Alvarez called on the Guyana Government to review its withdrawal of ads from the Stabroek News and to ensure transparency in the allocation of official advertising. Stabroek News has maintained that the government’s withdrawal was due to its critical editorial stance on issues of governance. It has proposed that state advertising be apportioned on the basis of the paid, audited circulation of the newspapers and the target audience. The government’s move has been widely condemned by a number of local, regional and international media organizations, private sector bodies, trades unions, and the opposition political parties. They have also called for the reinstatement of the ads but the government has not budged.
The ACM president is to meet with some of the other organisations present for the meeting to discuss the matter further.
Meanwhile, IFEX has formally invited the ACM to become an affiliate of the global network which, among other things, operates an Action Alert Network (AAN) on free expression incidents worldwide.
