Dear Editor,
I was very disappointed to read your article of 12 February 2008 captioned ‘Lall involved in another brawl’. From the tone and content of the articles carried by Stabroek News, which I have been reading since both I and your newspaper were growing up, I had come to believe that it was a serious newspaper with dignity, which was interested in writing well about events and ideas important to this country.
I did not expect in Stabroek News to see an article, written in an almost gleeful tone, engaging in the kind of gossip that us citizens with less responsibility to bear than national newspapers engage in from time to time at corner-shops and in court-corridors. If you hold yourself out to be a newspaper with dignity, your readers will hold you to a certain standard. I am sad to say that your article reporting on Mr Lall’s unfortunate incident fell far short of the standard which I had come to expect from you.
While you may justify the inclusion of your article by saying that it is newsworthy when a Minister of Government is assaulted, I would have expected that Stabroek News, and its editors, would have been more dignified than to give such prominence to a matter, which seems to be private in nature, where the reporting of it can only serve to embarrass Mr Lall for no justifiable reason on your part. That kind of article has its place and I had not expected Stabroek News to be that place.
Surely Mr Lall is entitled to go to Jerries and wherever else he pleases after he is finished working. And surely he is entitled to be left alone, as are your reporters and editors, once he is no longer conducting himself as a public figure. Which of us can prevent someone assaulting us in public? At Jerries a few years ago I saw a member of the media assaulted with a high-heeled shoe. But that incident remained where it belonged, as this one should have.
If Stabroek News believes that it should begin reporting matters of gossip to improve its sales then that is its choice.
But those of us who have come to expect more will be sorry.
Yours faithfully,
Kamal Ramkarran
Editor’s note
We do not normally investigate or report on the private lives of public officials. In this particular case, an earlier incident with Mr Lall had earned a reprimand from his own party and these public spectacles can bring the office into disrepute.