The government has sent a letter to Mr Ignacio J Alvarez, the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights setting out its position on the withdrawal of government advertisements from the Stabroek News.
In a letter dated December 18, 2007, signed by Minister of Foreign Affairs SR Insanally it is stated that the basis for the placement of the government’s advertisements in the media is linked to the public’s access and response to such advertisements. “Presently, the highest response to the Government’s advertisements emanates from the Kaieteur News (a privately-owned newspaper) and the Guyana Chronicle (the state-owned newspaper); two of the country’s leading newspapers. The Government is constantly seeking to maximize the impact of our advertisements from an economic standpoint,” the minister said.
The minister said that the withdrawal of the government’s advertisements from the Stabroek News was not an attack on press freedom in Guyana, as claimed by that newspaper. The Stabroek News, he said, no longer had the largest circulation. Therefore, the decision of the government to cease the placement of advertisements in the Stabroek News was based purely on economics and the need for impact maximization.
He said that the Stabroek News’s rights of freedom of expression had not been infringed and its capacity to produce its newspaper had been in no way affected as evidenced by the robustness of its content and the number of advertisements from other sources it produced per page per issue.
The minister said that there had been no attempt by the government to muzzle the newspaper from expressing its views. The newspaper had not encountered any administrative problems in relation to the importation of equipment and supplies. He contrasted this with “the period of administrative dictatorship in Guyana (1965-1992) under the former People’s National Congress regime where the Mirror, the newspaper belonging to the then opposition party, the People’s Progressive Party could not import paper, machinery etc., to allow it to function.”
The minister said that the editor and staff of the Stabroek News have access to state functions and functionaries in order to report on activities. The “byline” on the front page of each issue accusing the government of suppressing the press and misusing taxpayers’ money has continued unhindered by the state and its agencies.
The government told the Rapporteur it is satisfied that freedom of expression is intact and referred to other publications and private TV stations all of which operate “in an open and unhindered manner.” It says it remains fully committed to the Declaration of Chapultepec.
Responding to this letter, the editor-in-chief of Stabroek News, David de Caires, said he was surprised that after a delay of four months the government had added nothing to its widely discredited policy on the withdrawal of ads which it had announced in January this year after Stabroek News went public on the issue. He said that this was the only issue and the Stabroek News had not claimed other incursions on press freedom to which the minister had seen fit to respond.
De Caires repeated that the policy of giving ads to one privately owned newspaper and the state paper was an inherently flawed and discriminatory policy. The Caribbean Media Team had offered to craft a fair policy but this had been rejected.
All the international press freedom associations had called for a transparent policy and had rejected the existing policy. De Caires said that the whole of Guyana knew, including those putting it forward, that this cynically propagated policy was a mere fig leaf to cover the government’s decision to withdraw ads because of the critical editorial stance of the Stabroek News.
He noted that the paper had proposed from the beginning that the paid circulation of the three daily newspapers should be properly audited and that a reputable advertising agency be asked to advise which newspaper had the target audience for government ads. He said he did not believe that a better response had been obtained from advertisements in the Chronicle and Kaieteur News than from those placed in the Stabroek News and said that this was a mere invention as he did not believe any survey had been carried out. He further noted that government advertisements were frequently placed in the Sunday Mirror which had a minuscule circulation.
De Caires said that the withdrawal of state advertisements was explicitly recognized by Article 7 of the Declaration of Chapultepec as a press freedom issue in its own right, and that this abuse had indeed occurred on several occasions in this hemisphere and had been taken up by the Inter-American Press Association.
He reiterated the policy of excluding one newspaper from government advertisements was inherently flawed and unacceptable and had severely damaged the government’s democratic credentials in the region and further afield.
